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 cannot be therein introduced without lowering the ideal of man.  Between the naturalistic and the idealistic novel he unhesitatingly declares for the latter, and places George Sand far above the author of ‘L’Assommoir.’

But the great success of his labors cannot be said to have been due solely or even mainly to the principles he advocated.  Other critics have appeared since—­Messrs. Jules Lemaitre and Anatole France, for instance,—­who antagonize almost everything that he defends and defend almost everything that he antagonizes, and whose success has hardly been inferior to his.  Neither is it due to any charm in his style.  Brunetiere’s sentences are compact,—­indeed, strongly knit together,—­but decidedly heavy and at times even clumsy.  What he has to say he always says strongly, but not gracefully.  He has a remarkable appreciation of the value of the words of the French language, but his arrangement of them is seldom free from mannerisms.  What, then, has made him the foremost literary critic of the present day?  The answer is, knowledge and sincerity.  No writer of the present day, save perhaps Anatole France, is so accurately informed of every fact that bears upon literary history.  Every argument he brings forward is supported by an array of incontrovertible facts that is simply appalling.  No one can argue with him who does not first subject himself to the severest kind of training, go through a mass of tedious reading, become familiar with dates to the point of handling them as nimbly as a bank clerk handles the figures of a check list.  And all this comes forward in Brunetiere’s articles in the most natural, we had almost said casual way.  The fact takes its place unheralded in the reasoning.  It is there because it has to be there, not because the writer wishes to make a display of his wonderful knowledge; and thus it happens that Ferdinand Brunetiere’s literary articles are perhaps the most instructive ones ever written in the French language.  They are moreover admirably trustworthy.  It would never come to this author’s mind to hide a fact that goes against any of his theories.  He feels so sure of being in the right that he is always willing to give his opponents all that they can possibly claim.