Taste is the common sense of genius.  This is what will soon be demonstrated by another school of criticism, powerful, outspoken, well-informed,—­a school of the century which is beginning to put forth vigorous shoots under the dead and withered branches of the old school.  This youthful criticism, as serious as the other is frivolous, as learned as the other is ignorant, has already established organs that are listened to, and one is sometimes surprised to find, even in the least important sheets, excellent articles emanating from it.  Joining hands with all that is fearless and superior in letters, it will deliver us from two scourges:  tottering classicism, and false romanticism, which has the presumption to show itself at the feet of the true.  For modern genius already has its shadow, its copy, its parasite, its classic, which forms itself upon it, smears itself with its colours, assumes its livery, picks up its crumbs, and, like the sorcerer’s pupil, puts in play, with words retained by the memory, elements of theatrical action of which it has not the secret.  Thus it does idiotic things which its master many a time has much difficulty in making good.  But the thing that must be destroyed first of all is the old false taste.  Present-day literature must be cleansed of its rust.  In vain does the rust eat into it and tarnish it.  It is addressing a young, stern, vigorous generation, which does not understand it.  The train of the eighteenth century is still dragging in the nineteenth; but we, we young men who have seen Bonaparte, are not the ones who will carry it.

We are approaching, then, the moment when we shall see the new criticism prevail, firmly established upon a broad and deep foundation.  People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.  The sound judgment of all men will be ashamed of the criticism which broke Pierre Corneille on the wheel, gagged Jean Racine, and which ridiculously rehabilitated John Milton only by virtue of the epic code of Pere le Bossu.  People will consent to place themselves at the author’s standpoint, to view the subject with his eyes, in order to judge a work intelligently.  They will lay aside—­and it is M. de Chateaubriand who speaks—­“the paltry criticism of defects for the noble and fruitful criticism of beauties.”  It is time that all acute minds should grasp the thread that frequently connects what we, following our special whim, call “defects” with what we call “beauty.”  Defects—­at all events those which we call by that name—­are often the inborn, necessary, inevitable conditions of good qualities.

  Scit genius, natale comes qul temperat astrum.