LITERARY STUDIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 345 



against the over-personal temper of the romantic school, it was 

 neither sufficient nor capable of securing the adherence in practice 

 of its chief advocate. It exaggerates the local, the temporary, the 

 animal. It pretends to be scientific and impartial, but is in reality 

 deductive and magisterial. Still M. Taine has by his famous History 

 of English Literature taught literary historians to regard literature as 

 a social and historical phenomenon, and critics to use the objective 

 method as at least a component part of the system of appreciation. 



In his article on La Critique litteraire, in La Grande Encyclopedic, 

 M. Brunetiere states with clearness his view of the function of crit- 

 icism. It is threefold, (1) to explain, (2) to classify, (3) to judge. By 

 explanation is meant description, analysis, and comment. The critic 

 must explain the author, whose character is not always an analogue 

 of his book, but he must not stop with the author. Others have 

 helped write the book. The author's contemporaries are his col- 

 laborators. Other books have influenced him. He lives in a particular 

 moment or phase of the evolution of the genre to which his work 

 belongs. A part of the explanation, therefore, consists in placing 

 the work in its milieu, national and international. To perform the 

 work of classification criticism needs sound principles of three kinds: 

 (1) Scientific, analogous to those of natural history; (2) Moral, es- 

 tablishing an ethical hierarchy without identifying morals and art; 

 (3) /Esthetic, measuring the work of art by the absolute quantity 

 that it expresses. Furnished with these principles, criticism, as 

 a mode of classifying, would become scientific. Finally, criticism 

 is under obligation to pass judgment; for a work of art, while it is 

 a record to be explained and classified, is also a poem or statue better 

 or worse than some other poem or statue. Distinct from the object 

 of criticism is its function. According to Brunetiere the function of 

 criticism is to act on public opinion, on authors, and upon the general 

 direction of literature and art. By maintaining literary traditions 

 criticism perpetuates from age to age the literary consciousness of the 

 nation. 



In his Evolution des Genres dans I'histoire de la litter ature (1890) 

 this admirable scholar sketches the rise and development of the 

 spirit of modern criticism from its beginning in Italy in the period 

 of the Renaissance. It came into existence as the result of two 

 causes: (1) The rediscovery of the classics; (2) (following Burck- 

 hardt's Civilization in Italy') the growth of the sense of personality. 

 The first led to philological criticism of a pedantic kind, the second 

 to rivalry and envy, and so to criticism in the sense of fault-finding. 

 When criticism passed over into France, laying aside its pedantry 

 and its satire it became at first strictly literary, then in turn aesthetic, 

 philosophical, historical, and scientific. Of BrunetiSre's view of 

 literary growth as following the biological analogy I shall have 



