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If the horse of the Eocene age is inferior to the horse of to-day, it is because, on M. Brunetiere's principle, he is less horse-like. But who shall decide which is more like a horse, the original or the latter development? No species which is constituted by its own history can be said to have an end in itself, and can, therefore, have an excellence to which it shall attain.
M. Brunetiere says Zola's characters are not true to the French fact; that his peasants, working-men, citizens, soldiers are not French, whatever else they may be; but this is merely M. Brunetiere's word against Zola's word, and Zola had as good opportunities of knowing French life as Mr.
The fact takes its place unheralded in the reasoning. It is there because it has to be there, not because the writer wishes to make a display of his wonderful knowledge; and thus it happens that Ferdinand Brunetière's literary articles are perhaps the most instructive ones ever written in the French language. They are moreover admirably trustworthy.
Monsieur Brunetiere's erudition was immense, and the nights as well as the days he spent in acquiring his formidable knowledge may in his case have prevented more than a passing thought being given to the solicitation of love.
It would never come to this author's mind to hide a fact that goes against any of his theories. He feels so sure of being in the right that he is always willing to give his opponents all that they can possibly claim. Of late years, moreover, it must be acknowledged that Brunetière's mind has given signs of remarkable broadening.
No one can argue with him who does not first subject himself to the severest kind of training, go through a mass of tedious reading, become familiar with dates to the point of handling them as nimbly as a bank clerk handles the figures of a check list. And all this comes forward in Brunetière's articles in the most natural, we had almost said casual way.
The plain truth seems to be that conflict is one of the most dramatic elements in life, and that many dramas perhaps most do, as a matter of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to insist as do some of Brunetière's followers that the conflict must be between will and will.
But even this does not go without its good side. It gives to Brunetière's judgments a unity which is seldom if ever found in the works of those whose chief labors have been spent in the often ungrateful task of making a hurried public acquainted with the uninterrupted stream of literary production.
Jules Lemaître and Anatole France, for instance, who antagonize almost everything that he defends and defend almost everything that he antagonizes, and whose success has hardly been inferior to his. Neither is it due to any charm in his style. Brunetière's sentences are compact, indeed, strongly knit together, but decidedly heavy and at times even clumsy.
Fundamental, creative criticism like Sainte-Beuve's, Matthew Arnold's, Walter Pater's, like Dryden's, Brunetiere's, De Gourmont's, or Croce's will presumably come. The conditions, both of publication and of audience, are ripe for it now in the United States. But there is a good deal of spade work in the study of literature to be done first, and still more education of the reading American mind.
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