He, too, feels his time—if he is by no means a Romantic before or at the birth of Romanticism, he is hardly more of a Voltairian. But he is first of all “against” everything and everybody—a child of Momus.[226] He is doubtful about Corneille and Molière; even Racine is not “perfect” for him. But his most characteristic passage is perhaps one which occurs at page 137, vol. ii., of his work cited below. It is a real _point de repère_, because it is one of the last authoritative expressions of a sentiment—no doubt not yet extinct, but for a long time kept to some extent in check—the French belief in the absolute superiority of French literature and the impossibility of a foreigner being a judge of it—the impertinence even of his attempting to judge it. Geoffroy rates Blair in the most approved pedagogic fashion for expressing the opinion—now probably entertained by the majority of Frenchmen themselves—that _Phèdre_ is a greater play than _Iphigénie_, and for assigning the reason that _Iphigénie_ is too French. He blames the Edinburgh professor roundly for “meddling with our authors”; the opinions are not disputable opinions merely—they are “errors”; Blair and Edinburgh “ought to be ashamed” of them; they show that the critic “knows nothing about the matter.” Similar things are, of course, said to-day in England as well as in France; but _they_ only show the temper of the particular critic, not the theory of prevailing criticism. Yet Geoffroy, if only from cross-grainedness, helped in the unsettling of the merely traditional view of literature: and so did service. [Sidenote: _Dussault._] His contemporary and fellow-worker on the _Débats_, Dussault, is of a different type.[227] He is much more amiable in his judgments—has, indeed, the credit of being a sort of maker of things pleasant all round; but he is in principle much more reactionary—he is perhaps the most so of this group of critics, till they were exacerbated by the Revolters, to whom he himself refers as _anarchistes littéraires_. He is a staunch Bolæan; and if he has to admit (as with the growth of literary history it was by his time almost impossible for any one not to admit) that the _Art Poétique_ is not complete, _c’est du moins bien écrit_. But he goes far beyond this elsewhere; and on the 26th of April, 1817— the very year when a certain _enfant sublime_ presented himself as a competitor for an Academic prize—he asks, undoubting of the fact, “Pourquoi la constitution du Parnasse est elle si solide et si durable?” That the disciples of the Greek and Latin Muses should have anything to learn by going to “Runes” and such like things is _nullement possible_. Fairy tales are “absurd.” Even the _avant-courriers_ of the French classic age meet with no mercy; and Balzac himself is credited merely with “bad taste.” [Sidenote: _Hoffman, Garat, &c._]