从单柄眼镜到戒尺——论圣伯夫的批评方法

【摘要】：Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve is the representative of French critics in the 19th century. For the first time in the critic history, he broke out the French critic tradition in the spirit of which the author himself was neglected and his literary works belonged to historical documents. Sainte-Beuve attached great importance to the authors and reformed the critic method completely. He initiated the critic method of portrait and biography. He believed that critic was a method which corresponded to the author' s character. A book was an expression of an author' s character. The most important thing was to understand the author' s character and the development of his talent. In order to reveal the true "ego" of the author he dedicated himself to reading not only the author' s works but also his unpublished articles, letters and dairies. Encouraged by a theory of literary science, Sainte-Beuve tried to write the natural history of spirit by means of these materials concerning the authors and to find out a general law because he thought that the authors could be classified according to their spirit similarities. But he did not trust in the positivist absolutism. He just regarded the natural or psychological critic as an addition to the taste or history critic and emphasized that some kind of impressionism was necessary. In the second half of his critic career, he turned from pure observation and appreciation to judgement, in his words, "from a lawyer to a judge" . Thus there is no lack of moral preachment in his critic. Though he was criticized fiercely by Proust and other critics, he contributed a lot to the future literary critic.