342 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



and asserts that art should represent the whole truth, no matter 

 what kind of aesthetic emotion may result. 



(3) The Philosophical and Comparative Discipline of Cousin 

 (1792-1868). This thinker's Du vrai, du beau, et du bien was the 

 result of a reaction from the sensationalism of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury. His studies were first made in the wake of Reid and the Scotch 

 philosophers; but after a visit to Germany in 1817 he became a fol- 

 lower of the German idealists. Though, with Leveque and Jouffroy, 

 a member of the school of spiritualistes, and called an eclectic, he 

 was the most enthusiastic advocate in France of German philosophy. 

 His influence upon French poetics is not to be underestimated. Nor 

 is that of Michelet (1798-1874), whose philosophy, like Cousin's, 

 shows the influence of Herder and Hegel; nor that of Edgar Quinet, 

 the bosom friend of Michelet and a sympathizer in his aesthetic views. 

 3. The movement succeeding the early romantic is the Scientific- 

 Historical. This was headed by Villemain, who, in his Tableau de la 

 litterature au moyen age, in the Tableau de la litterature au XVIII e 

 siecle, and in his lectures, applied a method of inquiry which observed 

 the social, biographical, genetic, and comparative aspects of the 

 literary phenomenon. The resulting criticism was characterized by 

 impartiality, sanity, and a scientific decisiveness far in advance 

 of that produced by preceding critics. Villemain was seconded 

 by Saint-Marc Girardin and Sainte-Beuve, the latter probably 

 the greatest critic of the century. Sainte-Beuve incorporates the 

 romantic, historical, social, and psychological attempts of his 

 predecessors and contemporaries under a new method, at once 

 more logical, more scientific, and more imaginative than theirs 

 a method which has been justly called the naturalistic. 



In the double paper on Chateaubriand (Nouveaux Lundis, 21, 22 

 Juillet, 1862), Sainte-Beuve expounds in detail his method of literary 

 criticism. Starting with the author of the work, the critic studies 

 him zoologically, as it were, with reference to his race and habitat. 

 He traces his family history, seeking in the parents (especially the 

 mother), the brothers and sisters, and even the children, the secret 

 of his peculiar individuality. From the family he passes to "le 

 premier milieu," the group of friends and contemporaries who, like 

 a literary family, shared in the author's aims and ambitions. The 

 utterances of the author's enemies and admirers also furnish clues. 

 The result of this method of study, which places the author in his 

 environment of heredity and influence, is the discovery of some 

 characteristic by which, as a label, his peculiar talent may be 

 designated. 



Though Sainte-Beuve calls his method naturalistic, he does not 

 claim for it a place among the exact sciences. The day will indeed 

 come, he thinks, when the great families of genius and their principal 



