THE
CRITICISM OF JACQUES RIVIERE
181
periods-the work done before and after the First War-and it is
impossible not to be impressed by the way in which he matured
during
his
four years as a prisoner of war. His earliest critical essays
began to appear
in
periodicals in 1906-07 and are collected in
Etudes.
I do not want to underrate the charm and usefulness of this early
work. It is sensitive, enthusiastic and contains moments of consider–
able insight, but it is essentially the work of a young man. Riviere not
only employs the impressionist method; there is something very per–
sonal about his approach to his authors. He is not the detached
critic passing judgment on writers. He only writes about those authors
with whom he feels able to enter into a personal relationship. "He
only describes himself," he said of Baudelaire in 1910, "in order to
make accomplices. He only gives himself to us so that we shall give
ourselves to him."
It
is clearly the view of a young man who is very
anxious to become an "accomplice," "to get to know his own heart,"
as he puts
it
in the same essay, and who thinks that poetry is the
means of doing so. It remains true, however, that he does succeed
in
communicating his enthusiasm to us and in sharpening our own
perceptions. We can hardly reread the Baudelaire or the Gide essays
today without picking up once again the
Fleurs du mal
or
La Porte
etroite.
The two most substantial pieces of criticism that Riviere wrote
before the war are the essay on
"Le Roman d'Aventure"
and the
monograph on Rimbaud which appeared in the
Nouvelle Revue
Franfaise
in 1913 and 1914.
The Rimbaud is still the work of a young man who is seeking
a message from literature and there is a good deal of special pleading
at the close. Rimbaud, said Riviere,
((est separe de nous d'une
maniere constitutionnelle";
but it is less easy to agree when he argues
that though not a Christian at the time when he wrote, he is
((un
merveilleux introducteur au christianisme."
In spite of this, however,
it is in many ways Riviere's most sustained piece of practical criticism
and it is still one of the essential books on Rimbaud. The technical
criticism is altogether more convincing than anything to be found
in
the two essays on Baudelaire and Gide; the arguments are cogent
and, in a region where nearly everything is guesswork, Riviere's
highly ingenious guesses are as likely to be right as anyone else's.
He argues that in Rimbaud's work there is an attempt to de-
