ating the public mind. That a
man of real intellectual strength should then give his undivided
attention to pure literature seemed a most unlikely phenomenon; but all
had to acknowledge that the unlikely had happened, soon after Ferdinand
Brunetiere had become the regular literary critic of the Revue des
Deux Mondes.

Fortunately the new critic did not undertake to walk in the footsteps of
Sainte-Beuve. In the art of presenting to the reader the marrow of a
writer's work, of making the writer himself known by the description of
his surroundings, the narrative of his life, the study of the forces by
which he was influenced, the illustrious author of the 'Causeries du
Lundi' remains to this day without a rival or a continuator. Ferdinand
Brunetiere had a different conception of the duties of a literary
critic. The one fault with which thoughtful readers were apt to charge
Sainte-Beuve was, that he failed to pass judgment upon the works and
writers; and this failure was often, and not altogether unjustly,
ascribed to a certain weakness in his grasp of principles, a certain
faint-heartedness whenever it became necessary to take sides. Any one
who studies Brunetiere can easily see that from the start his chief
concern was to make it impossible for any one to charge him with the
same fault. He came in with a set of principles which he has since
upheld with remarkable steadfastness and courage. In an age when nearly
every one was turning to the future and advocating the doctrine and the
necessity of progress, when the chief fear of most men was that they
should appear too much afraid of change, Brunetiere proclaimed time and
again that there was no safety for any nation or set of men except in a
staunch adherence to tradition. He bade his readers turn their minds
away from the current literature of the day, and take hold of the
exemplars of excellence handed down to us by the great men of the past.
Together with tradition he upheld authority, and therefore preferred to
all others the period in which French literature and society had most
willingly submitted to authority, that is, the seventeenth century and
the reign of Louis XIV. When compelled to speak of the literature of the
day, he did it in no uncertain tones. His book 'The Naturalistic Novel'
consists of a series of articles in which he studies Zola and his
school, upholding the old doctrine that there are things in life which
must be kept out of the domain of art and c