SNAP SHOTS
Middleton, George
Snap Shots Books, Art, Dream READERS of Meredith's letters will recall the tribute he paid to French critics when he placed them alone without a second. To many criticism was a science as well as...
...In Madame De Stael, for example, we find a breaking from classical ideals of criticism which judged by formal standards, but did not reveal the individual...
...But such snap-shot phrases do this serious volume an injustice...
...He gave the art of local color to historical criticism, and from his time we see "history ceasing to be abstract and colorless and becoming concrete and expressive...
...It is interesting then to study Professor Irving Babbitt's new volume The Masters of Modern French Criticism (Houghton, Mifflin & Co, Boston), which, in a broad way, is an analysis of the critics from Madame De Stael to Bergson, as they reflect the intellectual currents of the century...
...The author of The New Laokoon, "an essay on the confusion in the arts" has an easy style which renders accessible to a lay mind the inherent intricacies of this subject...
...Coupled to this is an obvious erudition which serves to illumine, by transcription, whatever would otherwise be vague...
...To many criticism was a science as well as an art...
...Bergson, who has the world agog today, is pleading for the rights of intuition as opposed to pure intellect...
...In-deed, Sainte-Beuve is easily the most interesting mind in the whole group considered...
...To this was added her sense of cosmopolitanism...
...Taine tried to make of all life a scientific expression and, of course, often fitted the facts to the theory...
...But in him lay a reaction from the romanticism of his decade and never can we go back to the sentimentalism of many of the romanticists...
...Professor Babbitt himself has taken rank as one of our best thinkers and he must be read in the original essence...
...I want merely to call attention to a stimulating book for those who wish to leave the world of events to adventure into the world of ideas...
...Sainte-Beuve and Taine, of course, mountain up in any book of this sort, and we are not surprised to find the author admitting a great admiration for the former...
...As Sainte-Beuve believed in the relative, Taine worshipped the general: particularizer and gen-eralizer these two men had a profound influence upon the time which in different ways they reflected...
...The author has a very profound analysis of the fascinating Renan, whose style, clothing scientific facts with a religious emotion, forced an audience, already tired of dogmatism, to pay homage...
...The scope of the book can merely be hinted in so limited a comment, but a suggestion of its valuable information may be gained by pointing out what a few of the critics stood for...
...Though a skeptic, a believer in "the essential vice" as the motive power to most action, his inherent belief that self-love in all its specious aspects, had a triumph in life, did not prevent him from admiring all that was good in scientific progress...
...Bruntiere, on the other hand, made his fight for pure judgment, as such, which was a reaction from the impressionism of a Renan and an Anatol France...
...Some one has called him "the wandering Jew of the intellectual world" for he was ever seeking the truth and came ultimately to have his greatest influence as "the doctor of relativity...
...Chateaubriand looked beyond the mere form of a work of art to the soul of it...
...Yet one cannot approach this book without the tribute of thorough concentration, so closely knit is the thought and context...
...He has preferred to avoid mere biographical detail, save where it will explain a mental characteristic, and he has thus placed the emphasis on the thought rather than the life of the critic...
Vol. 5 • February 1913 • No. 8
