FRENCH POP ART

During the past one hundred years, the century that began with Sainte-Beuve and ends with the so-called "structuralists" today, the image of the literary critic has undergone considerable change. What this image has become was however latent in Sainte-Beuve. In fact, what we understand today by literary criticism is largely the product of the nineteenth century. Before that time, criticism was a branch of rhetoric, and the critic resembled a certain type of schoolmaster who pointed out the beauties of a text that he felt his readers should know about, and, in the negative sense, pointed out all departures from the rules that the text illustrated. Before Sainte-Beuve, the French critic was the guardian of rules and the defender of good taste.

With the example of Sainte-Beuve, the critic became a writer, and literary criticism became an art of writing. Today the distinction that was made in the past between literary criticism and literary creation is somewhat outdated. In France, it was largely Sainte-Beuve who helped to bring this about and convince his audience that criticism is a particular art of literature. Since the writings of Baudelaire, one hundred years ago, the critic has grown into the stature of a writer and an artist who expresses himself fully and deeply. Behind a piece of critical writing, and even behind an individual judgment in that piece, it is possible to sense the whole of the critic's personality and the whole of his experience as a man.

During the course of the twentieth century especially--this was already evident in the latter part of the nineteenth century--critical writing and imaginative writing developed in similar ways and in close contact one with the other. Both the critic and the novelist came to rely more and more on such sciences as sociology, psychology, and semantics. It was Sainte-Beuve who first explained that the knowledge of the critic has to extend far beyond our knowledge of the text, that his knowledge has to include theology and philosophy as well as psychology and sociology. The critic has to know not only the work in question but the man who wrote the work, his habits of life, his family, his friends, the environment in which he lived, and the climate and the history of the age in which he lived. This preoccupation went so far in SainteBeuve, that is, went so far away from the text itself, that many writers today claim he is not a literary critic at all. It is true that he is looked upon today more as a great European writer (when one thinks of his impressive PortRoyal) than as a critic. But he emphasized the belief that criticism must be creative, and he was largely responsible for criticism being recognized as an art, as a branch of literature. His role was all important in the preparation of what is called today "the age of criticism," and even, more specifically, in the creation of what is called "the new criticism."

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Sainte-Beuve foresaw, as a few years later Walter Pater foresaw, the change that was to come for the critic. They were among the last of the cultivated critics who lived easily in contact with the past and were able to keep abreast of all the important publications of their day. But soon after their time the amount of publications that should concern the critic became overwhelming and has continued to grow more and more oppressively overwhelming. The type of Renaissance man who had time and leisure to know a good deal about every important subject of his day is no longer possible in our day.

Little wonder that by the end of the century and the beginning of the twentieth a new type of critic emerged who relied on the range of his own interests and on the depth and perceptiveness of his own impressions. Every critic is impressionistic to some extent, but extreme cases of impressionist criticism gave the category a bad connotation. This kind of critic was looked upon as a dilettante. It was inevitable that the next type of critic to succeed Sainte-Beuve and the impressionist was the specialist.

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