habits? The psychologist or sociologist who tries to comprehend the product of genius in his airless formulæ, may possibly be doing a very useful work; but he must not imagine for a moment that his work has anything in particular to do with literature. Who can read the ingenious M. Hennequin, for instance, without being perfectly conscious that he is writing about something very interesting, very important, no doubt, but quite irrelevant to criticism? The scholar, as the word is used to-day, and the critic are not only speaking two different languages; they are talking about two different things. Literature is intelligible only in its own tongue; its essence escapes in translation. He who would criticise a poem must be himself a poet; and his criticism, to fit his subject, must be as elastic and pliant as a lady's glove.

Obviously there can be no science of literature, no "scientific criticism," until there is a science of life. But life is licentious. Let us acknowledge it courageously; whatever life may be absolutely, it is within the narrow limits of human consciousness irrational and unprognosticable, it is, as we say, lawless. And if in a work of art there exists an order, a regularity, a rhythm, it exists not in virtue of a law but in virtue of the arbitrary and unaccountable discriminations of an individual temperament. It is a matter of selection and arrangement in the

interests of a sentiment or impression, which is, in its turn, from the point of view of science, irrational and unprognosticable and lawless. For the principle as well as the substance of literature is the disturbing element of science, "the factor of error," which under the name of "personal equation" the latter seeks to eliminate as far as it can. In short, either one of these alternatives must be true: either science, in attempting to reduce literature to its tributary, is guilty of a gross absurdity, an egregious confusion of terms; or else in the general laxity of modern thought the idea of science, like almost all our other ideas, has undergone a deformation which makes it incapable of any precise application whatever.

But let us allow Anatole France to speak to this point for himself, as he has undertaken to do in a passage of whose literary brilliancy my translation, I am afraid, will convey but a very imperfect idea:

Esthetics rest on nothing really substantial; it is but a castle in the air. There has been an attempt made to support it upon ethics. But there is no such thing as an ethics—or a sociology, or yet a biology. The sciences have never been completed save in the head of M. Auguste Comte, whose work was only prophecy. When biology is finally constituted, that is to say in several million years, it may be possible to construct a sociology. That will be an affair of centuries; and then and then only will it be feasible to rear upon solid

foundations a science of æsthetics. But by that time our planet will be very old and nearing its term. The sun, whose spots disquiet us already and not without reason, will turn upon the earth a dusky, sooty face, half covered with opaque slag; and the sparse survivors of humanity, fled to the bottoms of the mines, will be less concerned to discuss the essence of the beautiful than to burn their last bits of coal among the shadows before they are overwhelmed in eternal ice.

This is just and admirable-mainly because it is free from that curious intellectual confusion which invests all attempts at "scientific criticism" so called. One may read it without that painful sense of befuddlement which is the most striking effect even of Brunetière's later writing, where the reader, who has been invited to a discussion of literature, as he supposes, finds himself set down before some lukewarm réchauffé of evolution, so loose and vague as to bear no recognisable relation even to anything whatever properly scientific. And yet, sensitively as M. France has felt this confusion, he has omitted to exhibit the principle on which the distinction rests. The case as between literature and science is precisely like that between consciousness and physiology. Physiology may supply the physical parallel of consciousness and in this sense may be said to explain it scientifically; while all the time the latter is so irreducible in terms of the former that if we were forced to rely upon such terms for our

knowledge of it, the human spirit would be, not merely unintelligible, but actually inconceivable. We ourselves alone know what is passing under our own thatch, and the disposition of that thatch gives no clue to the domestic passions it And so, just as the essential element of life eludes physiological notation, so naturally does the spirit of literature, which is the record, and the sufficient record, of that life, elude and will ever elude the analysis of science.

covers.

SAINTE-BEUVE

HE main aim of Sainte-Beuve's criticism is

neither judgment nor explanation in the ordinary sense. On the one hand he pretends neither to praise nor to blame; nor on the other hand does he seek to account for the phenomena with which he deals. He simply accepts and at most attempts to préciser them. Properly, therefore, his criticism is no more "scientific" than it is dogmatic. For him, as for Renan, truth is something elusive, fluctuating, multiform, indefinable. He has no love for the indeterminate or equivocal, for twilight or eclipse; but he despairs with a few inflexible formulæ to express "the divine and changing faces of incomprehensible Truth." He prefers with undulatory descriptive phrases to reproduce. the particular aspect immediately under his notice. Within these limits his ambition is to comprehend. And when he has analysed his subject, first on this side and then on that, in hopes to circumvent the truth, if he cannot define it, then he considers that his task has been accomplished. Like Renan, then, by virtue of his conception of knowledge as well as by the nature of his subject, he is an "artist";