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The Essay World of Émile Montégut

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Richard M. Chadbourne
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Extract

In 1865 Émile Montégut, literary critic best known for his long association with the Revue des deux mondes, contributed a major article in two parts to the Moniteur universel on the subject of one of its most distinguished collaborators, Théophile Gautier. In composing this article Montégut had been faced with a problem that might never have occurred to a less conscientious and original critic. His material, after long meditation, was well enough defined. Its content centered around the interpretation of Gautier as a dual nature, “âme gauloise” and “âme contemplative,” and revealed much that was most characteristic of its author as a critic: his concentration on contemporary writing, his interest in defining various forms of the Romantic imagination, his concern with dilettantism as both a strength and a weakness, his frankly personal approach to his subject, an approach based on the belief that in literary criticism there can be no “instrument unique” and that each critic should seek out those aspects of an author with which he has some affinity, hoping that the true meaning and unity of the work will emerge for the intelligent reader from a symphony of individual impressions on the part of numerous critics.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , March 1961 , pp. 98 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

1 Ideas of Good and Evil, 3rd ed. (London and Dublin, 1907), p. 238.

2 Nos morts contemporains, 2nd series (Paris, 1884), pp. 6–7. Place of publication for all subsequent titles is Paris unless otherwise stated. The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited works of Montégut: BF: En Bourbonnais et en Forez, 3rd ed. (1888); DR: Dramaturges et romanciers (1890); EL: Esquisses littéraires (1893); ELA: Essais sur la littérature anglaise (1883); EMA i: écrivains modernes de l'Angleterre, 1st series (1885); EM A, ii: Ecrivains modernes de l'Angleterre, 2nd series (1889); EM A, in: écrivains modernes de l'Angleterre, 3rd series (1892); EPA: Essais de philosophie américaine (1851); HLC: Heures de lecture d'un critique (1891); LOMH: Libres opinions morales et historiques (1888); NMC, i: Nos morts contemporains, 1st series (1883); NMC, ii: Nos morts contemporains, 2nd series (1884); MC: Mélanges critiques (1887); Ρ AI: Poètes et artistes de l'Italie (1881); PB: Les Pays-Bas, impressions de voyage et d'art, 2nd ed. (1884); SB: Souvenirs de Bourgogne (1874); TLFE: Types littéraires et fantaisies eslhétiaues (1882).

3 See A. Laborde-Milaà, Un essayiste, Émile Montégut, 1825–1895 (1922), jpp. 39–40, 291–294, and also Pierre-Alexis Muenier, Émile Montégut, étude biographique et critique d'après des documents inédits (1925), pp. 45, 313, 319. Though the most extensive treatments of Montégut to date, these deal (even the first, despite its title) largely with his life and thought, touching with disappointing sketchiness on his essay art and on what Laborde-Milaà calls his effort to “rendre à l'essai son élasticité native de forme et de fond” (p. 293). Hector Talvart's “Un grand essayiste oublié ou ignoré: Émile Montégut,” in Mélanges d'histoire littéraire et de bibliographie offerts a Jean Bonnerot (1954), pp. 479–486, is at times exaggerated in its praise of Montégut, especially in the statement (with no attempt to define the term) that he was “le seul grand essayiste du XIXe siècle.” And Sainte-Beuve? And Renan? This would confirm my suspicion that the French have only begun to explore their own essay.

4 Œuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (1951), p. 667.

5 “Émile Montégut and French Romanticism,” PMLA, lxxrv (Dec, 1959), 553–567. I referred erroneously in this article to Montégut's “Protestant background.” He was born into a Catholic family, though in his maturity he seems to have been only nominally a Catholic, with strong sympathies for Protestantism.

6 Charles S. Baldwin in “The Literary Influence of Sterne in France,” PMLA, xvii (1902), 221–236, refers very briefly and in laudatory terms to Montégut as an interpreter of Sterne. As for Diderot, I have found no evidence that he contributed to Montégut's thought on the essay.

7 “Thomas Carlyle. Sa vie et ses écrits,” Revue des deux mondes, ii (1849), 278, 281, 289. (Will be abbreviated: RDM). Article not collected in book form.

8 In this passage Montégut praises George Borrow for avoiding the “prose entortillée des écrivains modernes” such as Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, and Macaulay, a “prose d'artiste” too far removed from “le véritable langage humain.” What would he have thought of Mallarmé?

9 See the brief remarks in Frederic I. Carpenter, Emerson Handbook (New York, 1953), p. 242, and the more detailed discussion in Ruth Brown, “A French Interpreter of New England's Literature, 1846–1865,” New England Quarterly, xiii (1940), 305–321, and Reino Virtanen, “Émile Montégut as a Critic of American Literature,” PMLA, lxiii (Dec, 1948), 1265–75. Montégut's Essais de philosophie américaine is his translation of selected pieces from Emerson's Essays: First Series and Representative Men, with a long introduction and occasional notes of a historical, linguistic, and critical nature.

10 Cf. Logan Pearsall Smith on Emerson and other English-language aphorists: “The disconnected impressions which we derive from life form a kind of knowledge ‘in growth,‘ as Bacon called it: an over-early and peremptory attempt to digest this knowledge into a system tends, as he suggests, to falsify and distort it.” Reperusals and Re-Collections (New York, 1937), p. 103.

11 Laborde-Milaà, Un essayiste, p. 294.

12 One of the more striking references to Montaigne (apart from those to be found in his criticism of Emerson, whom he calls a “Montaigne puritain”) is the evocation of “Montaigne, qui traverse cette même société [de la Renaissance] d'un pas si prudent et comme s'il avait peur d'être écrasé par quelque colonne chancelante …” {LOME, 90). Such “prudence” may not have been altogether to Montégut's liking.

13 In his discussion of Michelet, Montégut proposes the essay and allied short prose forms as rivals of the novel, but he was also well aware of the novel's tendency in his time (a tendency he deplored as harmful to “l'art du récit”) to become “un poème en prose qui prend les formes les plus diverses, et qui aspire à remplacer tous les genres” {EL, 4445).

14 Nouveaux lundis, ix (1894), 258–259. An article entitled “Mlle Eugénie de Guérin et Madame de Gasparin” and dated 9 January 1865. The preceding article in the same volume, “Lettres d'Eugénie de Guérin,” 2 January 1865, also refers, though much more briefly, to Madame de Gasparin. Monté-gut's two articles on this author appeared in RDM, December 1859 and December 1861, and were collected in Esquisses littéraires.

15 Les horizons prochains, 5th ed. (1862), p. 3.

16 Vesper (1861), p. 5.

17 Nouveaux lundis, rx, 245.

18 Cf. Montégut's remarks on Dante, whose comparisons, of a different kind of greatness from Shakespeare's, in his opinion “ne laissent aucune latitude à la rêverie, et même . . . ne lui font aucun appel; c'est à l'attention qu'elles s'adressent, et elles la contraignent à se diriger sur le point qu'elles veulent éclairer, de manière à ne permettre à l'esprit aucune hésitation et aucune incertitude” ÇPAI, 215). It should be pointed out that this kind of reverie gives way occasionally in Madame de Gasparin to moralizing, especially in the form of too deliberately edifying dénouements.

19 Vesper, p. 119.

20 Nouveaux lundis, rx, 265, 273.

21 Montégut is actually referring here to the Marquise de Blocqueville's Soirées de la villa des jasmins (1874), “une série d'entretiens philosophiques,” which he reviewed together with her Prisme de l'âme (1863) and Rome (1865). Unable to obtain any works by this author I can only surmise from his article that she appealed to him for reasons similar to those which made him enjoy Madame de Gasparin's rêveries and Cherbuliez's causeries athéniennes, that is, a certain “musique” of noble ideas based on commonplace things (a music he never defines precisely), and perhaps also a pleasingly irregular prose structure. The edition I have used of Un cheval de Phidias is the second (1864), and some of the salient points in the author's criticism of conventional rhetoric may be found on pp. 55, 62–63, 68, 74, 117, 168169, 199, 257–258.

22 Charles Weir, Jr., in Columbia Dictionary of Modem European Literature, ed. Horatio Smith (New York, 1947), p. 551.

23 Muenier, Montégut, p. 45. According to Talvart {Melanges . . . offerts à Jean Bonnerot, p. 480) Montégut published 265 articles of which only 169 were collected in book form. The majority deal with literary criticism. Those bearing directly on political and social questions are few in number but often profound and sometimes prophetic. The most significant such essays (except for a few important ones still buried in the Revue des deux mondes) were collected in Libres opinions morales et historiques; they center around the criticism of contemporary man's willingness to relinquish the ideal of moral control over self, that is, the ideal of inner happiness, to the chimera of a material paradise on earth and a happiness externally guaranteed by the state. Montégut politique et moraliste is well worth separate studv.

24 The Common Reader, 1st series (New York, 1953), p. 216 (“The Modern Essay”).

25 George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste, m (New York, Edinburgh, and London, 1904), 445.

26 Revue politique et littéraire, xxxvii (1886), 618.

27 See “De la vie littéraire depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” RDM, 1 April 1851. Article not collected in book form.

28 Saintsbury uses this quotation as one of the epigraphs for Book ix of his History of Criticism and Literary Taste.

29 This comparison, as well as the one cited earlier making of Madame de Gasparin a kind of “abeille protestante,” may be reminiscences of a passage in Montaigne's “De l'institution des enfants” which reads as follows: “Les abeilles pillotent deçà delà les fleurs, mais elles en font après le miel, qui est tout leur; ce n'est plus thin ny marjolaine: ainsi les pieces empruntées d'autruy, il [l'enfant] les transformera et confonde, pour en faire un ouvrage tout sien: à sçavoir son jugement” (Essais, ed. Albert Thibaudet [1950], p. 184). I am grateful to Professor Donald M. Frame of Columbia University for pointing out to me the similarity of expression.

30 In his essay on the historian and critic Saint-René Taillandier, he refers directly to Sainte-Beuve as a too indulgent “psychologue” (as compared with the “moraliste” Saint-René Taillandier), and indirectly, I think, by defending “le peu de place que la partie biographique occupe dans ces pages; east que Saint-René Taillandier n'a pas d'autre histoire que celle même de ses travaux” (NMC, ii, 223, 250). A remark in “Du génie du Tasse” is applicable to most of his critical essays: “Nous écartons toute biographie, nous effaçons de notre mémoire tout souvenir historique, et pour avoir le secret de sa destinée nous ne nous adressons qu'à ses œuvres” (PAI, 61).

31 His effort to do justice to Béranger, for whom he had little respect (“le poète de la médiocrité non dorée,” “tout est égal au chansonnier, sauf l'égalité”) is characteristic; he begins: “les morts n'attendent plus de nous que la stricte équité, et l'équité est ce qui pèse le plus au cœur de l'homme. Demandez-lui de la colère, de l'indignation, de l'enthousiasme, de la pitié, tout ce que vous voudrez enfin, mais non de l'équité” (NMC, i, 3).

32 Œuvres complètes, p. 600.

33 Laborde-Milaà, Un essayiste, p. 367.

34 Cf. “Vieilles coutumes, vieilles gens,” in Madame de Gasparin's Vesper.

35 André Hallays has treated this section of Montégut's work briefly, pointing out his precursors and successors in this field and comparing him with Montaigne, though with little attention to formal aspects, in “Le voyage en France,” in Cent ans de vie française à la Revue des deux mondes, le livre du centenaire (1929), pp. 397–404. Les Pays-Bas, in the same vein but less novel in composition, will also be included in my discussion. The subject deserves fuller treatment than Hallays gave it or than I am able to give it here; enlarged to “Montégut voyageur,” it should also include the second part of Poètes et artistes de l'Italie entitled “L'art italien à Rome. Chapitres d'un voyage interrompu par la guerre de 1870.”

36 Quoted from Curiosités esthétiques in Lloyd J. Austin's L'univers poétique de Baudelaire (1956), p. 139.

37 Quoted from Journaux intimes in the same work, p. 149.

38 Among the curious echoes of Baudelaire's poetic universe in Montégut's essay world is the following: “Les couchers du soleil sur la mer n'ont pas en Hollande la pompe et la majesté qu'ils ont dans d'autres pays, mais ils ont une suavité élégiaque incomparable. Rien de plus triste et de plus doux: on dirait que le soleil va mourir. Il se dresse à l'horizon comme un agonisant dont l'oeil jette une dernière flamme, et il envoie à la mer son adieu enveloppé dans un sourire si languissant que le cœur en est attendri comme devant le spectacle d'une réelle agonie” (PB, 250). Or is Baudelaire sometimes echoing Montégut? Eugène-Melchior de Vogué, in his Devant le siècle (1896), p. 326, spoke of a “commerce intime” between the two in which “le poète devait, pour une bonne part, la substance de sa pensée à cet excitateur d'idées.” Muenier (Montégut, pp. 336–337) cites the testimony of Vogué and Jean Bourdeau that the two writers met frequently at the Café Tabouret, but he could find no other documentary support for a close relationship between them.

39 Revue politique et littéraire, xxxvn, 622.

40 RDM, cxxxn (1895), 956. Article reprinted in his Etudes critiques sur l'histoire de la littéraire française, 9th series (1924), pp. 170–174.

41 Revue générale, cxvi (1926), 587. Article reprinted in his Portraits d'âmes (1929), pp. 91–107.

42 Un essayiste, p. 165.

43 Revue générale, cxvi, 587.

44 Montégut, p. 167.

45 Montaigne, Essais, p. 995.

46 Devant le siècle, pp. 326, 330.

47 Nouveaux lundis, 3rd ed., n (1870), 383. Article dated 1862. Sainte-Beuve's remark applied to Renan; he unfortunately failed to honor Montégut with a lundi.

48 See Muenier, Montégut, pp. 55–56. Brunetière, in the article cited, also stresses Montégut's brilliance as a conversationalist, as does Marie-Louise Pailleron in her François Buloz et ses amis, les écrivains du Second Empire (1924), p. 154.

49 The Common Reader, 1st series, p. 218.

50 Michelet's Histoire de France, selections, ed. Douglas L. Buffum (New York, 1909), p. 24.

51 Quoted in Les fleurs du mal, ed. Ernest Reynaud (1958), p. 279.

52 Devant le siècle, p. 326; Revue générale, cxvi, 580.

53 The Permanent Goethe, ed. Thomas Mann (New York, 1948), p. 366.