literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over
the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page.
"Poetry," says he, "is the essence of things, and we should be careful
not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods of
color. The task of poetry is not to say everything, but to make us
dream everything." And he cites a similar judgment of Fénélon: "The
poet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch but
what can be beautified." In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaks
of the youthful poems of Milton: "'Il Penseroso' is the masterpiece of
meditative and contemplative poetry; it is like a magnificent oratorio
in which prayer ascends slowly toward the Eternal. I make no
comparison; let us never take august names from their sphere. All that
is beautiful in Milton stands by itself; one feels the tranquil habit
of the upper regions, and continuity in power." In a paper on
the letters of Ducis, he proves that he apprehends the proportions of
Shakespeare. He asks: "Have we then got him at last? Is our stomach up
to him? Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (_cette
moelle de lion_)?" And again, in an article on the men of the
eighteenth century, he writes: "One may be born a sailor, but there is
nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a
battle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that,
and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare."
Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed
himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest
class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of
his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures
in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, how
catholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takes
pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency.
Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Molière, his words
flame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust in
his own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the
feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His native
favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not
overrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls "the
Frenchman par excellence," and of whom he is proud as the literary
sovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devoted
to Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, he
lauds this spiritually-minded thinker as one of the best of critics.
And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: "Voltaire is
sometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even
are impudent.--There are defects difficult to perceive, that have not
been classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them."
In a paper on Louise Labé, a poetess of the sixteenth century, he
reproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and then
adds: "These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that,
at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry." No German
or English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature,
and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not an
exaltation of French prose, it is a depression of French
poetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of which
possibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts to
an acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are not
capable of producing and embodying the highest poetry.
Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always mentions with deference. On Eckerman's
"Conversations with Goethe" he has a series of three papers, wherein
he deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honest
pride Goethe's admiration of some of the chief French writers, and his
acknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to the
French translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the following
note, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a high
tribute to our distinguished countrywoman: "The English translation is
by Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished so
unhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes this
translation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of the
subject and for justness of appreciation it leaves our preface far
behind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was a
person of true merit and of great intellectual vigor." A sympathetic
student of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him;
and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature of
Goethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that she
would have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe "literature," had
she lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friends
had nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of this
gifted, generous, noble-hearted woman.
One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the
multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a
hand that can shake hard,--and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteen
years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of
"Causeries du Lundi," a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not
short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight
pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thus
ever in the thick of the literary _mêlée_. Attractions and repulsions,
sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate;
the æsthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences
and friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris,
if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous
mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray
some of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the critical
pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is
wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality
is seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader will no doubt often
perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a
subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well
trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. His
perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious
dead who are embalmed in their own excellence. Besides devoting many
papers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates of
literature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them,--a
sign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness.
Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly taken
by the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition of
virtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes. In the general tone
there is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness. Of the
humane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take the
following as one of many instances. In the correspondence of Lamennais
there is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and his
later sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thus
feelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure: "Let us cast
a look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, from
youth to our latter years, there are none of these boundless
distances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which,
for being hidden, are none the less real and profound."
Writing weekly for the _feuilleton_ of a Paris daily journal, M.
Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is
always animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished,
he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When the
occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a
principle or of a comprehensive thought. "Admiration is a much finer
test of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than all
the art of satire." By the side of this may be placed a sentence he
cites from Grimm: "People who so easily admire bad things are
not in a state to enjoy good." How true and cheering is this: "There
is in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought with
her finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up,
smothers, or corrupts." Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says:
"What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and
perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful." When, to
give a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammatic
point, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where to
borrow just what is wanted. Speaking of embellished oratorical
diction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that was
discussed in his presence: "It is not enough to have fine sentences:
you must have something to put into them." Commenting on the
hyper-spirituality of M. Laprade, he says: "M. Laprade starts from the
_absolute notion of being_. For him the following is the principle of
Art,--'to manifest what we feel of the Absolute Being, of the
Infinite, of God, to make him known and felt by other men, such in its
generality is the end of Art.' Is this true, is it false? I know not:
at this elevation one always gets into the clouds. Like the most of
those who pride themselves on metaphysics, he contents himself
with words (_il se paye de mots_)." Here is a grand thought, that
flashes out of the upper air of poetry: "Humanity, that eternal child
that has never done growing."
M. Sainte-Beuve's irony, keen and delicate, is a sprightly medium of
truth: witness this passage on a new volume of M. Michelet:
"Narrative, properly so called, which never was his forte, is almost
entirely sacrificed. Seek here no historical highway, well laid,
solid, and continuous; the method adopted is absolute points of view;
you run with him on summits, peaks, on needles of granite, which he
selects at his pleasure to gets views from. The reader leaps from
steeple to steeple. M. Michelet seems to have proposed to himself an
impossible wager, which, however, he has won,--to write history with a
series of flashes." Could there be a more subtle, covert way of saying
of a man that he is hardened by self-esteem than the following on M.
Guizot: "The consciousness that he has of himself, and a natural
principle of pride, place him easily above the little susceptibilities
of self-love." M. Sainte-Beuve is not an admirer of Louis Philippe,
and among other sly hits gives him the following: "Louis
Philippe was too much like a _bourgeois_ himself to be long respected
by the _bourgeoisie_. Just as in former times the King of France was
only the first gentleman of the kingdom, he was nothing but the first
_bourgeois_ of the country." What witty satire on Lamartine he
introduces, with a recognition of popularity that, with one who takes
so much joy in applause as Lamartine does, is enough to take the
poison out of the sting: "Those who knew his verses by heart (and the
number who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not without
regret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, in
his prose. This prose is, in 'Les Confidences,' too often but the
paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the
last, paraphrases of his feelings." Amends are made to Lamartine on
another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says:
"Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and the
eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings.
That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of
wing." This is better as modesty than as criticism. Shakespeare,
Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as of
more gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyed
getting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of their
strongest as well as sweetest notes.
A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, just
as a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image of
herself. His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy in
things French. Through means of it he knows them through and through:
they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, his
intellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other side
the shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more or
less the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows.
Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Béranger, is
spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and
broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his
individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy,
that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M.
Michelet, to Madame de Staël and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe,
to Fénélon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau.
Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will be
impatient to ask, nothing but praise? Not much else. Commencing his
literary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from that
date to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits,
fill several thousand pages. Between his forty-fifth to his sixtieth
year he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousand
pages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects. This is
the period of his critical maturity, the period of the "Causeries du
Lundi," followed by the "Nouveaux Lundis." Many men write
voluminously, but most of these only write _about_ a subject, not
_into_ it. Only the few who can write into their subject add something
to literature. One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve. In his mind there
is vitality to animate his large acquirement, to make his many
chapters buoyant and stimulant. All through his writings is the
sparkle of original life.
But let us now cheer the reader who is impatient of much praise, and
at the same time perform the negative part of our task.
Well, then, to be bold, as befits a critic of the critic, we beard the
lion in his very den. We challenge a definition he gives of the
critic. In the seventh volume of the "Causeries," article
"Grimm," he says: "When Nature has endowed some one with this vivacity
of feeling, with this susceptibility to impression, and that the
creative imagination be wanting, this some one is a born critic, that
is to say, a lover and judge of the creations of others." Why did M.
Sainte-Beuve make Goethe sovereign in criticism? Why did he think
Milton peculiarly qualified to interpret Homer? From the deep
principle of like unto like; only spirit can know spirit. What were
the worth of a comment of John Locke on "Paradise Lost," except to
reveal the mental composition of John Locke? The critic should be what
Locke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form of
literature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, some
share of that whereby poetry is fledged, "creative imagination." He
may "want the accomplishment of verse," or the constructive faculty,
but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful he
must have. But do not the presence of "vivacity of feeling with
susceptibility to impression" imply the imaginative temperament? If
not, then we confidently assure M. Sainte-Beuve that had his
definition fitted himself, his "Causeries du Lundi" would never have
been rescued from the quick oblivion of the _feuilleton._
Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness,
which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue,--the love of
glory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon's passion for glory saved him in
his latter years from ennui, from "that languor of the soul which
follows the age of the passions." Where are to be found men more the
victims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not more
distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than
for insatiable greed of glory,--Byron and Chateaubriand? No form of
self-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving,
which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyond
its sway, on praise and admiration. These stimulants--withdrawn more
or less even from the most successful in latter years--leave a void
which becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust.
Instead of glory being "the potent motive-power in all great souls,"
as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moral
instinct, called by Milton,--
"That last infirmity of noble mind."
In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it as
hardly to be traceable in their careers. Love of glory was not the
spring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more than
Shakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington.
The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the French
nation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animal
vigor of the conqueror's mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that he
does not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon's moral nature, and
the consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor the
unmanning effects of his despotism. The words used to describe the
moral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be the
strokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset. In the
paper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the "rare good
sense" of Napoleon, of "his instinct of justice." But was it not a
compact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct of
justice, backed by a Titan's will, wielding a mighty intellect, that
enabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despot
and the merciless devastator? Again, can it be said of Napoleon that
he possessed good sense in a rare degree? Good sense is an instinctive
insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive
discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a
soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and
equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. The
moral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon's moral endowment was
but fractional. Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basis
of all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical,
or in its action one-sided; and even in such its presence must be
felt. In whatever reaches general human interests, whether as
practical act or imaginative creation, good sense must be, for their
prosperity, a primary ingredient. "The Tempest" and "Don Quixote"
shoot up into shining, imperishable beauty because their roots draw
their first nourishment from this hearty, inexhaustible substratum.
And let us say, that in M. Sainte-Beuve himself good sense is the
foundation of his eminent critical ability. He has been led, we
conceive, to attribute more of it to Napoleon than is his due by the
blinding splendor of Napoleon's military genius, through which, with
such swiftness and cumulative effect, he adapted means to ends on the
purely material plane.
When Murray applied to Lord Byron to write a book about the
life and manners of the upper class in Italy, Byron declined the
proposal from personal regards, and then added, that were he to write
such a book it would be misjudged in England; for, said he, "their
moral is not your moral." Such international misinterpretations and
exaggerations are instinctive and involuntary. A nation from its being
a nation, has a certain one-sidedness. To the Italian (even to one who
carries a stiletto) the English practice of boxing is a sheer
brutality; while to an Englishman (himself perhaps not a Joseph) the
_cavaliere servente_ is looked upon with reprobation tempered by
scorn. To this misjudgment from the foreign side and over-estimation
on the domestic, books, too, are liable; but to books as being more
abstract than usages, more ideal than manners, an absolute moral
standard can with less difficulty be applied. Applying it to Gil Blas,
is not M. Sainte-Beuve subject to arraignment when he speaks of this
and the other writings of Le Sage as being "the mirror of the world?"
Molière, too, is a satirist, and from his breadth a great one; and
surely the world he holds a mirror before is a much purer world than
that of Le Sage; and what of the Shakespearean world? The world of Le
Sage is a nether world. "Of Gil Blas it has been well said that the
book is moral like experience." The experience one may get in brothels
and "hells," in consorting with pimps and knaves, has in it lessons of
virtue and morality,--for those who can extract them; but even for
these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot
read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the
experience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the
paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high
as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment
of Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to
have been written in a _café_, by a player of dominoes, on coming out
of the comic theatre."
Without being over-diffident, we may feel our footing not perfectly
secure on French ground when we differ from a Frenchman; we are
therefore not sorry to catch M. Sainte-Beuve tripping on English
ground. In a review of the translation of the celebrated Letters of
Lord Chesterfield--whom he calls the La Rochefoucauld of England--he
refers to, and in part quotes, the passages in which Chesterfield
gives his son advice as to his _liaisons_; and he adds: "All
Chesterfield's morality, on this head, is resumed in a line of
Voltaire,--
"Il n'est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie."
It is these passages that make the grave Dr. Johnson blush: we only
smile at them." For ourselves, we blush with Johnson, not that the man
of the world should give to his youthful son, living at a corrupt
Continental court, counsel as to relations which were regarded as
inevitable in such a circle; but that the heart of the father should
not have poured (were it but parenthetically) through the pen of the
worldling some single sentence like this: "Writing to you, my son, as
an experienced man of the world to one inexperienced, I recommend the
good taste in such matters and the delicacy which become a gentleman;
but to his dear boy, your father says, avoid, if possible, such
_liaisons_; preserve your purity; nothing will give you such a return
throughout the whole of the future." But, a single sentence like this
would _vitiate_ the entire Chesterfieldian correspondence.
How fully and warmly M. Sainte-Beuve prizes moral worth may be learnt
from many passages. Not the least animated and cordial of his
papers is one on the Abbé Gerbet, in the sixth volume, a paper which
shows, as Gustave Planche said of him, that "he studies with his
heart, as women do;" and one in the second volume on Malesherbes, whom
he describes as being "separated, on the moral side, from the
Mirabeaus and the Condorcets not by a shade, but by an abyss," and
whom he sums up as "great magistrate, minister too sensitive and too
easily discouraged, heroic advocate, and sublime victim." Of this
noble, deeply dutiful, self-sacrificing Frenchman, this exemplar of
moral greatness, Lord Lansdowne wrote many years before the French
Revolution: "I have seen for the first time in my life what I did not
believe could exist, that is, a man _who is exempt from fear and from
hope_, and who nevertheless is full of life and warmth. Nothing can
disturb his peace; nothing is necessary to him, and he takes a lively
interest in all that is good."