V. THE COMPOSITION OF A
CRITICISM
By Dr. Ernest Bernbaum
OF THE critical essays not discussed in the previous lectures the most important are those by Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Taine, and Mazzini. As their doctrines are quite obviously related to those expounded in the foregoing pages, it seems desirable to consider here the manner in which their opinions are expressed. The critical essays published in this series are classics, not merely because they contain significant doctrines about literature but also because they are in themselves literary works. They confer pleasure as well as profit. What distinguishes them from the journalistic book review on the one hand, and the pedantic study on the other, is their artistic composition. By what methods are their artistic effects produced?
A DOMINANT IDEA
The title of a work cited by Sainte-Beuve suggests what a literary criticism should not be. It runs as follows: "Michel de Montaigne, a collection of unedited or little-known facts about the author of the Essays, his book and other writings, about his family, his friends, his admirers, his detractors." Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and the other masters never present us with a "collection." They marshal their numerous facts into a system, and dominate them with a thought which, however complex, is coherent. Most of us arise from the perusal of an author with a chaotic throng of impressions. But in the mind of a true literary critic the chaos becomes order. Renan, in his "Poetry of the Celtic Races,"[1] "giving a voice to races that are no more," lets us hear not a confusion of tongues but an intelligible unity of national utterance—sad, gentle, and imaginative. Hugo,
- ↑ Harvard Classics, xxxii, 137.
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