LITERARY STUDIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 339 



science, I shall speak when we come to consider the common outcome 

 of the movements of the nineteenth century. 



C. In France 



1. The remote forefather of the modern spirit in French criticism 

 was Perrault, who in his Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes (1688- 

 1697) attacked that part of Boileau's doctrine which advocated 

 imitation of the classics as the best imitators of nature. Thus was 

 begun a controversy concerning the relative merits of classic and 

 contemporary literature which not only weakened faith in the infal- 

 libility of Boileau's principle, but resulted in a wide extension of the 

 field of criticism. With Perrault there gained currency the poetic 

 canon of naturalism and the critical method of relativity; the first 

 of which took form under the hand of Diderot, while the second 

 culminated on the one hand in the extreme individualism of Rous- 

 seau, and on the other in the comparative and historical methods 

 of Mme. de Stae'l, Villemain, Sainte-Beuve, and Taine. 



The immediate predecessors of the literary philology of the nine- 

 teenth century in France were Rousseau, Buffon, and the encyclo- 

 pedists of the eighteenth century. Rousseau's condemnation of 

 civilization in his Discours of 1750, on the ground that it corrupted 

 morals and natural freedom, must have awakened critics to the 

 advisability of studying art and poetry in their social relations. 

 Buff on 's Discours de Reception of 1753 developed an essentially 

 modern and philosophical argument for the intrinsic individuality of 

 style, purely romantic in tendency. Diderot, much of whose critical 

 work first appeared in Les Feuilles de Grimm, makes there, and in the 

 prefaces to his plays (Pere de famille and Le fils naturel), an effort 

 toward emancipation from the classical conventionalities. "Every- 

 where," as Professor Saintsbury has said, "there is to be perceived 

 the cardinal principle of sound criticism; that a book is to be judged, 

 not according to arbitrary rules laid down ex cathedra for the class 

 of books to which it is supposed to belong, but according to the 

 scheme of its author in the first place, and in the second to the general 

 laws of aesthetics; a science which, if the Germans named it, Diderot, 

 by their own confession, did much to create." He made the return to 

 nature in his poetics, and attempted to do so in his dramas giving 

 us not mere types, but actual characters. For the strictly defined 

 tragedy and comedy of the former epoch he substituted the play of 

 the bourgeoisie the drame or melodrama. This movement was, of 

 course, assisted by the vogue of Marivaux's comedie larmoyante, and 

 by sentimental novels, such as his Marianne. And the same move-* 

 ment was further advanced by J. J. Rousseau's advocacy, in his 

 Lettre a D'Alembert, in 1758, Sur les spectacles, in which he censures 

 the theatre of the day, with its sentimental and imaginative ad- 



