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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Eclairer et bruler a la fois est le
comble de la perfection
St. Bernard
The Goncourt Brothers tell of their visit, at two o'clock in the afternoon of 27 November 1862, to a sixth-floor apartment in the Rue Jacob where a voice rising as though from dream-like depths bade them enter a kind of “chambre de grisette, de couturière.” There, with an unlaced pair of men's boots on the floor and books heaped about everywhere, they were greeted from his bed by “un petit homme, maigre, maladif … un critique en mansarde, un homme d'un grand talent. C'est M. Montégut, l'écrivain de la REVUE DES DEUX MONDES.” He was thirty-seven then, having come from his native Limousin as a young man, already eccentric by virtue of his provincial education and Protestant background, to find his way into the Revue, where, except for brief service with other journals, he remained at his post of literary critic a long life, ending in December 1895.
1 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, mémoires de la vie littéraire, Edition définitive publiée sous la direction de l'Académie Goncourt (Paris, n.d.), ii, 57. In subsequent notes place of publication is Paris unless otherwise stated.
2 “Emile Montégut,” Revue des deux mondes, cxxxii (1895), 956, in an article reprinted in his Etudes critiques sur l'histoire de la littérature française (1924), ix, 170—174. See also Emile Faguet in Histoire de la littérature et de la langue française, ed. L. Petit de Julleville (1899), viii, 373–374; Victor Giraud, “Un critique d'hier: Emile Montégut, à propos de son centenaire,” Revue générale, cxvi (1926), 577–588, reprinted in his Portraits d'âmes (1929), pp. 91–107; George Saintsbury in his A History of Criticism and Literary Taste . . . (New York, Edinburgh, and London, 1904), iii, 444–447; Eugène-Melchior de Vogué, “Emile Montégut,” in his Devant le siècle (1896), pp. 323–332.
3 Goethe en France, 2nd ed. (1920), p. 222; La critique et l'histoire littéraires en France au dix-neuvième et au début du vingtième siècles, en collaboration avec H. S. Craig, Jr. (New York, 1945), p. 107.
4 In the recent survey, Neuf siècles de littérature française, ed. Emile Henriot (1958), p. 694, Robert Kemp refers to “Montégut si aigu” and to Taine as “un colosse aussi mal connu en ce siècle que Montégut.”
5 Arvède Barine, “M. Emile Montégut,” Revue politique et littéraire, xxxvii (1886), 622.
6 A. Laborde-Milaà, Un essayiste, Emile Montégut (1922), and Pierre-Alexis Muenier, Emile Montégut, étude biographique et critique d'après des documents inédits (1925), a thèse principale of the University of Paris, the thèse complémentaire being his Bibliographie méthodique et critique des œuvres d'Emile Montégut avec des documents inédits (1925). Muenier is generally superior to Laborde-Milaà on Montégut.
7 See, in Cent ans de vie française à la Revue des deux mondes, le livre du centenaire (1929), André Bellessort, “Emile Montégut,” pp. 231–238, and André Hallays, “Le voyage en France,” pp. 397–404. See also Ruth Brown, “A French Interpreter of New England's Literature, 1846–1865,” New England Quarterly, xm (1940), 305–321, and Reino Vir-tanen, “Emile Montégut as a Critic of American Literature,” PMLA, LXiii (1948), 1265–75. An important article on Montégut's English studies antedating these is J. W. Skinner, “Some Aspects of Emile Montégut,” Revue de littérature comparée, m (1923), 283–288. I have prepared the section on Montégut which will appear in Critical Bibliography of Nineteenth-Century French Literature under the general editorship of David C. Cabeen and the volume editorship of Albert J. George, and I plan to treat Montégut as an essayist in a separate paper.
8 Henri Peyre, Writers and Their Critics (Ithaca, 1944), p. 128.
9 Mélanges critiques (1887), p. 163. This work will hereafter be referred to in the text and abbreviated as MC. Other frequently cited works of Montégut (all published by Hachette) will be referred to as follows:
Dramaturges et romanciers (1890)
Esquisses littéraires (1893)
Essais sur la littérature anglaise (1883)
Nos morts contemporains, 1st series (1883)
Nos morts contemporains, 2nd series (1884)
Poètes et artistes de l'Italie (1881)
Types littéraires et fantaisies esthétiques (1882)
10 Muenier, Emile Montégut, pp. 95 ff., treats very sketchily the Romantic elements in Montégut's viewpoint and calls him (p. 317) without qualification “un critique romantique.”
11 Un essayiste, Emile Montégut, pp. 166, 133.
12 Les Pays-Bas, impressions de voyage et d'art, 2nd ed. (1884), p. 10.
13 See “De la vraie nature du bonheur” in Esquisses littéraires.
14 See Esquisses littéraires, p. 247, Poètes et artistes de l'Italie, p. 342, En Bourbonnais et en Forez, p. 151, and Les Pays Bas, pp. 24. 287–288.
15 See my Ernest Renan as an Essayist (Ithaca, 1957), pp. 5–9.
16 “Du génie français” in Libres opinions morales et historiques (1888).
17 “Du caractère anglais” in Essais sur la littérature anglaise (1883).
18 Heures de lecture d'un critique (1891), pp. 56, 63. In arguing for the poetic value of superstition in this essay on the 17th-century English antiquarian and dilettante, John Aubrey, Montégut is close to the view of Wordsworth as summarized in René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 (New Haven, 1955), ii, 143.
19 See also the essay on Pope in Heures de lecture d'un critique, where Classicism is seen as a French importation temporarily reigning until the native spirit reasserted itself in the Romantic movement.
20 See Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres computes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (1951), p. 667 (“Le doute, ou l'absence de foi et de naïveté, est un vice particulier à ce siècle, car personne n'obéit; et la naïveté, qui est la domination du tempérament dans la manière, est un privilège divin dont presque tous sont privés”); also Ernest Renan, “M. Augustin Thierry,” Essais de morale et de critique, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Henriette Psichari, ii, 87.
21 Theories discussed in Morris Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp; Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 1953), Chs. VII and VIII.
22 Les Pays-Bas, p. 90. The phrase occurs in the chapter on Rubens, in a striking passage characterizing “ce christianisme populaire [des Flandres] que nous nommons charnel, non pour lui attacher aucune idée d'infériorité, mais pour désigner son origine véritable, qui fut un mouvement de sensibilité blessée pour l'éternité.”
23 A description of the soul's function by Sir John Davies, as applied by Coleridge to the “poetic imagination”; see Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 175. A resemblance should also be pointed out between Montégut's “passive imagination” and Hazlitt's “faculty of intuition into the character of an object, the power of empathy … of identification with other beings” (as described by Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, n, 202).
24 Pierre-Georges Castex, Le conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (1951), p. 121. Actually M. Castex refers to an earlier article by Montégut, “Des fées et de leur littérature en France,” Revue des deux mondes, 1 April 1862, but overlooks entirely the long Nodier essay of June 1882 (Nos morts contemporains, 1st series) discussed here.
25 A theme later developed by René Lalou in his Vers une alchimie lyrique (1927) and Albert Béguin in his L'dme romantique et le rêve (1946). Although Montégut failed to appreciate Baudelaire the poet and touched rarely on the later Symbolists, it should not surprise us that as a translator of Emerson he occasionally suggests views of poetry akin to those of Symbolism; see, e.g., Essais de philosophie américaine (Charpentier, 1851), p. xxviii.
26 Faguet, in Histoire de la littérature et de la langue française, viii, 373–374.
27 En Bourbonnais et en Forez, pp. 105–106.
28 A History of Modem Criticism, ii, 144.
29 In Mélanges critiques and Libres opinions morales et historiques.
30 This and the quotations in the preceding paragraph are taken from Libres opinions morales et historiques, pp. 84–85.
31 See, e.g., Choses du nord et du midi (1886), p. 343, where he speaks of “certaines œuvres superbes de la littérature classique dont on reste étonné sans en avoir été ému.”
32 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, p. 772. This passage occurs in the “Salon de 1859,” his well-known defense of the imagination as “la reine des facultés.” The most significant of Montégut's views on this subject, on which this paper has in part been based, begin to occur as early as his first essay on Michelet (February 1857) and are developed in the years immediately following. The distinction between the “active” and “passive” imagination first occurs in the September 1864 essay on Tasso. As suggestive and original as some of these views may be, they are never quite so profound or incisive as those of Baudelaire (to which they bear a superficial resemblance) and never attribute to the imagination quite the exalted mystical power Baudelaire claimed for it.
33 This is close to Baudelaire's definition of the “rêve,” also in the “Salon de 1859,” as “la vision produite par une intense méditation, ou dans les cerveaux moins fertiles, par un excitant artificiel” (Œuvres complètes, p. 781), except that where Baudelaire's alternative means of producing vision is stimulants, Montégut's is religious or philosophical inspiration.
34 But when Montégut, elsewhere in the passage from which this phrase is taken, speaks of Romantic “dédain de la vérité” and “dégoÛt de la réalité” (p. 77), he may well mean the limited “vérité scientifique” and “réalité plate” of positivistic realism, condemned throughout the book, at least as sources of the highest art.
35 “Un illustre philosophe allemand [Kant? Fichte?] a établi que nous ne connaissons jamais les choses en elles-mêmes, mais subjectivement, si bien que ces objets extérieurs que nous croyons atteindre ne sont que des dédoublements de nous-mêmes” (NMC, n, 334, apropos of Eugénie de Guérin).
36 See “De l'homme éclairé” in Libres opinions morales et historiques. Erasmus, Michel de l'Hôpital, Bayle, and Locke are given as examples of such “enlightened men” who had “ni grande invention, ni grande initiative” but were exempt from “ces vices qui obscurcissent trop souvent les hautes intelligences,—l'âpreté de l'ambition, la passion et la vigueur excessive du caractère” (p. 254). Their like, Montégut adds, had not appeared since the end of the 18th century.
37 Laborde-Milaà, Un essayiste, Emile Montégut, p. 290.