FERDINAND

See also:

• FERDINAND BRUNETILRE (1849-1906)

BRUNETILRE (1849-1906)  , French critic and man of letters, was born at Toulon on the r9th of July 1849 . After attending a school at Marseilles, he studied in Paris at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand . Desiring to follow the profession of teaching, he entered for examination at the Ecole Normale Superieure, but failed, and the outbreak of war in 187o debarred him from a second attempt . He turned to private tuition and to literary criticism . After the publication of successful articles in the Revue Bleue, he became connected with the Revue des Deux Mondes, first as contributor, then as secretary and sub-editor, and finally, in 1893, as principal editor . In 1886 he was appointed professor of French language and literature at the Ecole Normale, a singular honour for one who had not passed through the academic mill; and later he presided with distinction over various conferences at the Sorbonne and elsewhere . He was decorated with the Legion of Honour in 1887, and became a member of the Academy in 1893 . The published works of M . Brunetiere consist largely of reprinted papers and lectures . They include six series of Etudes critiques (188o-1898) on French history and literature; Le Roman naturaliste (1883); Histoire et Litlerature, three series (1884-1886); Questions de critique (1888; second series, 189o) . The first volume of L'Evolution de genres clans t'histoire de la litterature, lectures in which a formal classification, founded on the Darwinian theory, is applied to the phenomena of literature, appeared in 189o; and his later works include a series of studies (2 vols., 1894) on the evolution of French lyrical poetry during the 19th century, a history of French classic literature begun in 1904, a monograph on Balzac (1906), and various pamphlets of a polemical nature dealing with questions of education, science and religion . Among these may be mentioned Discours academiques (1901), Discours de combat (1900, 1903), L'Action sociale du christianisme (1904), Sur les chemins de la croyance (1905) .

M . Brunetiere was an orthodox Roman

Catholic, and his political sympathies were in the main reactionary . He possessed two prime qualifications of a great critic, vast erudition and unflinching courage . He was never afraid to diverge from the established critical view, his mind was closely logical and intensely accurate, and he rarely made a trip in the wide field of study over which it ranged . The most honest, if not the most impartial, of magisterial writers, he had a hatred of the unreal, and a contempt for the trivial; nobody was more merciless towards those who affected effete and decadent literary forms, or maintained a vicious standard of art . On the other hand, his intolerance, his sledge-hammer methods of attack and a ,certain dry pedantry alienated the sympathies of many who recognized the remarkable qualities of his mind . The application of universal principles to every question of letters is a check to dilettante habits of thought, but it is apt to detain the critic in a somewhat narrow and dusty path . M.Brunetiere's influence, however, cannot be disputed, and it was in the main thoroughly sound and wholesome . He died on the 9th of December 1906 . His Manual of the History of French Literature was translated into English in 1898 by R . Derechef . Among critics of Brunetiere see J .

Lemaitre, Les Contemporains (1887, &c.), and J . Sargeret, Les Grands Convertis (1906) .