published, in 1772; I have already indicated that of the Abbe Maury,
who placed these sermons above everything else of that kind which the
French pulpit had produced; the other opinion, which was that of La
Harpe, and which I have known to be shared since by other sensible
men, was less enthusiastic and showed itself more sensitive to the
inequalities and to the discordances of tone. It would be possible to
justify both of these opinions, with the understanding that the first
should triumph in the end, and that the genius of Bossuet, there as
elsewhere, should keep the first rank. It is very true that, read
continuously, without any notice of the age of the writer, and of the
place and circumstances of their composition, some of these discourses
of Bossuet may offend or surprise minds that love to dwell upon the
more uniform and more exact continuity of Bourdaloue or of Massillon.
Victor Cousin is one among the somewhat numerous writers who, within the
bounds of this same paper on Bossuet, fall under the touch of
Sainte-Beauve's critical lance, that weapon borne ever in rest and ready
for any encounter:
A great writer of our days, M. Cousin ... has been disposed once more
to despoil Louis XIV. of his highest glory in order to carry it all
back to the epoch preceding. M. Cousin has a convenient method of
exaggerating and aggrandizing the objects of his admiration: he
degrades or depresses their surroundings. It is thus that, to exalt
Corneille, in whom he sees AEschylus, Sophocles, all the Greek tragic
poets united, he sacrifices and diminishes Racine; it is thus that, in
order the better to celebrate the epoch of Louis XIII. and of the
regency which followed, he depresses the reign of Louis XIV.
It is Sainte-Beuve's specialty--in aim, whether in achievement or
not--to be without the tendency thus charged upon M. Cousin, to violate
proportion in his criticism. The insinuating delicacy of his adverse, or
at least disparaging, critical judgment toward a distinguished
contemporary author is well exemplified in the following passage, in
which the critic, by his instinct as critic, is irresistibly drawn to
make a return to Cousin. The wise reader familiar with Mr. Matthew
Arnold will see how exactly the latter caught from his French master the
trick of method here displayed:
Ah, I cannot refrain from expressing another thought. When M. Cousin
speaks so at his ease of Louis XIV., of Louis XIII., and of Richelieu,
confidently attributing superiority to that which he prefers and which
he thinks resembles him, I am astonished that he has never once asked
himself this question: "What would have been the gain, what the loss
to my own talent, this talent which is daily compared with that of the
writers of the great age--what would have been gained or lost to that
admirable talent" (I forget that it is he that is speaking) "if I had
had to write or to discourse, were it but for a few years, in the very
presence of Louis XIV., that is to say, of that royal good sense,
calm, sober, and august? And that which I should have thus gained or
lost, in my vivacity and my eloquence, would it not have been
precisely that which it lacks in the way of gravity, of proportion, of
propriety, of perfect justice, and, consequently, of true authority?"
Lamartine does not escape still another light thrust from this dangerous
delicate lance, aimed yet again, with exquisite accuracy, through an
unquestionable joint in the victim's harness:
"These two rivals in eloquence," says M. de Lamartine, speaking of
Bossuet and of Bourdaloue, "were passionately compared. _To the shame
of the time_, the number of Bourdaloue's admirers surpassed in a short
time that of the enthusiastic devotees of Bossuet. The reason of this
preference for a cold argumentation above a sublime eloquence lies in
the nature of human things. The men of middling stature have more
resemblance to their age than the giants have to their contemporaries.
The orators who deal in argument are more easily comprehended by the
multitude than the orators who are fired with enthusiasm; one must
have wings to follow the lyric orator." ... This theory, invented
expressly to give the greatest glory to the _lyric orators_ and to the
giants, is here at fault. M. de Bausset, author of a work on Bossuet,
has remarked, on the contrary, as a kind of singularity, that it never
entered any man's head at that time to consider Bossuet and Bourdaloue
as subject of comparison, and to weigh in the balance their merit and
their genius, as was so often done in the case of Corneille and of
Racine; or, at least, if they were compared, it was but very seldom.
To the honor and not to the shame of the time, the public taste and
sentiment took note of the difference. Bossuet, in the higher sphere
of the episcopate, remained the oracle, the doctor, a modern Father of
the Church, the great orator, who appeared on funeral and majestic
occasions; who sometimes re-appeared in the pulpit at the monarch's
request, or to solemnize the assemblies of the clergy, leaving on each
occasion an overpowering and ineffaceable recollection of his
eloquence. Meanwhile Bourdaloue continued to be for the age the usual
preacher by eminence, the one who gave a connected course of lectures
on moral and practical Christianity, and who distributed the daily
bread in its most wholesome form to all the faithful. Bossuet has said
somewhere, in one of his sermons: "If it were not better suited to the
dignity of this pulpit to regard the maxims of the Gospel as
indubitable than to prove them by reasoning, how easily could I show
you," etc. There, where Bossuet would have suffered from stooping and
subjecting himself to too long a course of proof and to a continuous
argumentation, Bourdaloue, who had not the same impatience of genius,
was, beyond doubt, an apostolic workman who was more efficient in the
long run, and better fitted for his task by his constancy. The age in
which both appeared had the merit to make this distinction, and to
appreciate each of them without opposing one to the other; and to-day
those who glory in this opposition, and who so easily crush Bourdaloue
with Bossuet, the man of talent with the man of genius, because they
think they are conscious themselves of belonging to the family of
geniuses, too easily forget that this Christian eloquence was designed
to edify and to nourish still more than to please or to subdue.
The "bright consummate flower" of Bossuet's eloquence is to be found in
his Funeral Discourses. Of one of these, Sainte-Beuve, with a sudden
sympathetic swell of kindred eloquence in description, speaks, in a
passage with quotation from which we close our exemplifications of this
famous critic:
The death of the Queen of England came to offer him (1669) the
grandest and most majestic of themes. He needed the fall and the
restoration of thrones, the revolution of empires, all the varied
fortunes assembled in a single life, and weighing upon one and the
same head; the eagle needed the vast depth of the heavens, and, below,
all the abysses and the storms of the ocean.
It has been to us some satisfaction that the wrong of distortion by
reduction in scale done to the majestic figure of Bossuet in our own
treatment of him, and unavoidable there, could thus in a measure be
redressed by return to the subject in effective quotation from
Sainte-Beuve. Looking back on the extracts preceding, we feel that
enough is expressed, or suggested, in them, to justify us in saying,
There is Bossuet.
But at any rate we have great confidence in saying, There is
Sainte-Beuve.
3. BALZAC.
Honore de Balzac is one of the heroes of literature. He set himself
labors of Hercules in literary production, and he toiled at his tasks of
will with a tireless tenacity little less than sublime. The moral
spectacle of such courageous industry in Balzac, the present writer
admires, not the less, but the more, that the intellectual achievement
resulting seems to him not commensurately great. Balzac's long "toil and
endeavor" was not leavened and lightened and turned into play by that
"reflex of unimpeded energy" in him which a lofty philosopher has
defined happiness to be. He did his work hardly--with profuse sweat of
his brow. His mind did not answer to that definition of genius which
makes it a faculty of lighting its own fires. His fires Balzac lighted
with late hours, artificial illumination, strong stimulant drinks. He
burned himself out early in life--comparatively early, that is to say;
he died at fifty-one.
The moral triumph of Balzac we have but half suggested. Not only did he
lack the spontaneous joy of genius at work; he lacked also, for many
and many a doubtful year, the encouragement of recognition and success.
Book after book of his failed, and still he toiled on. The world was
fairly conquered at last. The reverse of Tulliver's experience happened
with Balzac. One man, in his case, proved "too many" for the world.
For his own part, he freely confesses, the present writer not only
admires; he wonders. Balzac's novels do not please him, either as
products of genius or as works of art. They please him solely as
monuments of victorious labor. They have to his mind exactly the quality
that was to have been expected from the history of their production.
They smell of oil, they smack of sweat. They are full of stimulated,
rather than stimulating, thought. So much as one passage in which
imagination played its magnificent play in easy and easily perfect
creation, one passage in which the words flowed of themselves, and did
not come each pumped with a several stroke of author's will, he cannot
remember ever to have found in Balzac. He wonders, therefore, and
helplessly wonders, that Balzac should be esteemed, as he is, and that
by some good judges, one of the greatest writers in the world.
What Balzac undertook was to write the whole "human tale of this wide
world"--that is, to represent in fiction all the manifold phases and
aspects of human life and character. He calls the entire series of his
novels "The Human Comedy." This title, we have seen it stated, was not
original with Balzac, but was adopted by him at the suggestion of a
friend who hit upon it as a kind of balance and contrast to Dante's
expression, "Divine Comedy." It is not quite a cynic conception of human
character and human destiny that Balzac intended thus to express. Still,
on the other hand, his view of human nature and human life cannot be
said to be genial. The disagreeable preponderates in his fiction--the
disagreeable one must call it, rather than the tragic. For true tragedy
there is not height enough. In reading Balzac, you breathe for the most
part an atmosphere of the not merely common, but--vulgar. Of course, the
novelist himself would have said, Very well, such is man, and such is
life. This one need not deny, but one can say, It was at least not
desirable that readers should be obliged to feel the novelist to be
himself vulgar, along with his characters. There is such a thing as
refined dealing with people not refined.
Realism was Balzac's aim, and realism was the rock on which Balzac
suffered double shipwreck. In seeking to be realistic, he became vulgar;
and in seeking to be realistic, he became unreal. For there is an air of
unreality diffused everywhere over the pages, meant to be realistic or
nothing, of this voluminous writer. Balzac evolved the personages of his
fiction out of his own consciousness. They are none of them human
beings, such as you meet in the real world. They are _simulacra_,
images, bodiless projections, of the author's own mind. They move over
his canvas like the specters thrown by the magic-lantern on its screen.
Balzac and Dickens are sometimes paralleled. There certainly is in a
number of particulars a superficial resemblance between them. Both
undertake to be realists. Both concern themselves chiefly with people of
the average sort--sort, perhaps, even tending toward the vulgar. Both
exaggerate to a degree that makes them at times almost caricaturists.
Both deal abundantly in minute detail of description. But the contrast
too between them is great. Balzac is far less spontaneous than Dickens.
You feel that Dickens improvises. You never feel this about Balzac. You
can hear Balzac drive his Pegasus with shout and with lash. Dickens's
Pegasus often flies with his bit between his teeth. Dickens was an
observer of men and of things--of books, a student never; there is
perhaps scarcely another instance in nineteenth-century literature of an
author who owed so little as did Dickens to study of books. From books,
on the other hand, Balzac purveyed a large share of his material.
Dickens writes as if unconscious that a race of men like the critics
existed. Balzac writes in view of the critics. These in fact seem to be
his audience quite as much as do the general public. Balzac, beginning
that novel of his from which we are presently to draw our sole brief
extract to exhibit his manner, enters, according to a fashion of his,
upon an elaborate unnecessary description of the house in which the
scene of his action is laid. But he prefaces thus:
Before describing this house, it may be well, in the interest of other
writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic preliminaries,
since they have raised a protest from certain ignorant and voracious
readers who want emotions without undergoing the generating process,
the flower without the seed, the child without gestation. Is Art
supposed to have higher powers than Nature?
Such a sentence as that--prefatory, but in the body of the text, and not
in a formal preface--would have been impossible to Dickens. In Balzac,
it is the most natural thing in the world. And it discloses the secret
of the character everywhere stamped on his production. He wrote as a
professional writer. He conformed to a law that he himself imposed upon
his genius, instead of leaving his genius free to be a law to itself. A
real realist, a realist, that is to say, such by nature, and not merely
by profession, a realist like De Foe, for example, could never have
committed the offense against art of disturbing thus that very illusion
of reality which he sought to produce, by exhibiting and defending the
method adopted by him to produce it. There could not be a case imposing
more obligation on the artist to conceal his art. But Balzac, instead,
forces upon his reader the thought of art by calling its very name.
Balzac paints with a big brush and puts on plenty of color. No one need
fear in reading him that he will miss delicate shades. There are none
such to miss. Balzac does not suggest. He speaks right out. Nay, he
insists. You shall by no means fail of understanding him.
But, over against everything that can thus justly be said in diminution
of his worth, there remain the unalterable facts, of Balzac's great
reputation, just now looming larger than ever, of his voluminous
literary achievement, of his population of imaginary personages
projected into the world of thought, by actual count more, we believe,
than two thousand poll. There is published a portly biographical
dictionary exclusively devoted to the characters of Balzac's fiction.
Paralyzed to choose, even to think of choosing, out of the enormous
volume of this writer's laborious production, a single page for
exemplifying his quality, we pitch desperately upon the conclusion of
that story of his called by the accomplished American translator of it,
Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, "The Alkahest," "The Search for the
Absolute" is the author's own title. This work, belonging in the endless
series of volumes dedicated to the display of the "comedy of human life"
in all its phases, is a novel which undertakes to illustrate the effect
on character and destiny of an exclusive supreme absorption in
scientific pursuits. The hero has at length reached the catastrophe of
his career. He is an old man who has wrecked fortune after fortune in
chemical quest of a scientific chimera, The Absolute. A monomaniac
before, he is paralytic now, and the last night of his life is slowly
passing. Balzac:
The old man made incredible efforts to shake off the bonds of his
paralysis; he tried to speak and moved his tongue, unable to make a
sound; his flaming eyes emitted thoughts; his drawn features expressed
an untold agony; his fingers writhed in desperation; the sweat stood
in drops upon his brow. In the morning, when his children came to his
bed-side and kissed him with an affection which the sense of coming
death made day by day more ardent and more eager, he showed none of
his usual satisfaction at these signs of their tenderness. Emmanuel
[the dying man's son-in-law], instigated by the doctor, hastened to
open the newspaper, to try if the usual reading might not relieve the
inward crisis in which Balthazar was evidently struggling. As he
unfolded the sheet he saw the words, "DISCOVERY OF THE ABSOLUTE,"
which startled him and he read a paragraph to Marguerite [the
daughter] concerning a sale made by a celebrated Polish mathematician
of the secret of the Absolute. Though Emmanuel read in a low voice,
and Marguerite signed to him to omit the passage, Balthazar heard it.
Suddenly the dying man raised himself by his wrists and cast on his
frightened children a look which struck like lightning; the hairs that
fringed the bald head stirred, the wrinkles quivered, the features
were illumined with spiritual fires, a breath passed across that face
and rendered it sublime; he raised a hand, clenched in fury, and
uttered with a piercing cry the famous words of Archimedes,
"EUREKA!"--"I have found."
He fell back upon his bed with the dull sound of an inert body, and
died, uttering an awful moan, his convulsed eyes expressing to the
last, when the doctor closed them, the regret of not bequeathing to
science the secret of an enigma whose veil was rent away--too late--by
the fleshless fingers of death.
The reader there has Balzac at his highest and best.
Those desirous of acquainting themselves with some integral work of this
author's will choose wisely if they choose any one of these four: "Pere
Goriot," "Cesar Birotteau," "Modeste Mignon," "The Alkahest" ("The
Search for the Absolute"). Mr. Saintsbury, a competent hand, edits a
series of translations from Balzac, including the novels just named,
together with everything else worth possessing from his industrious pen.
4. GEORGE SAND.
In virile quality, Madame de Stael seemed _rediviva_, or should we keep
the more familiar masculine gender, and say _redivivus_? in George Sand.
"It only happened that she was a woman," said some one, of the latter
personage; and indeed the chance that made her such seemed half on the
point of being reversed by the choice of the subject herself. For,
besides that she has her fame permanently under a pseudonym naturally
betokening a man as its owner, it is a fact that she did, at one time,
in order to greater freedom of the world, wear man's clothes and
otherwise play the man among her Parisian fellows. This episode in her
experience doubtless helped give her that great advantage over other
women, which her genius enabled her to use to effect so surpassing, in
describing the male human being such as he himself recognizes himself to
be.
The episode, however, was short, and George Sand is thought by her
admirers--and her admirers include some very grave and self-respecting
persons, the late Mr. Matthew Arnold being one example--never to have
parted with a certain paradoxical womanly reserve and delicacy which
ought logically to have been quite lost out of her nature through the
coarse and soiled contacts to which she herself willingly, and even
willfully, subjected it.
But, poor George Sand! Let us never, in judging her, forget how
ill-bestead a childhood was hers, and how unhappy a marriage was
provided for her warm and passionate youth. Her life began in protest,
and protest was the early strength of her genius and her endeavor. She
protested against things as they were, and, according to her light--a
light sadly confused with misguiding cross-lights from many quarters
besides her own eager self-will--fought, and pleaded, and wept,
aspiring, hoping, believing, for an ideal world in which love should be
law; or rather an ideal world in which law should have ceased, and love
should be all. From one of the last of her innumerable books, perhaps
from the very last, Mr. Matthew Arnold translates this expression, which
he repeats as summing up the motive of her work--"the sentiment of the
ideal life, which is none other than man's normal life as we shall one
day know it."
The word "love" does not occur in this expression, but that word and
that thought make the luminous legend over everything hers by the light
of which everything hers is to be read and interpreted.
Of course, George Sand's "love" is not the sentiment which the apostle
Paul sings in that prose canticle of his found in the thirteenth chapter
of First Corinthians. But neither is it the purely animal passion that
base souls might understand it. The peculiar affection natural between
the sexes it indeed includes, but it includes much more. It includes all
domestic, all social affections. In short, it is love in the largest
sense. The largest sense, but not the highest. For it is love, the
indulgence, the appetite; not love, the duty, the principle. George
Sand's gospel is that you may love and indulge yourself; Paul's gospel
is that you must love and deny yourself. Paul says love is the
fulfilling of the law; George Sand virtually says love is the annulling
of the law.
Because in many passionate and powerful novels, read everywhere in
Europe and not only in France, read also in America, George Sand has
preached this gospel of love as the virtual solvent of existing society,
Mr. Justin Macarthy pronounces the opinion that she is on the whole
incomparably the greatest force in literature of her generation. He
probably would attribute to her as a chief motor the portentous
movements in human society which we of to-day feel, like tides of the
sea, bearing us on, no one knows whither. It is no doubt true that
George Sand has contributed what mechanicians call a "moment," not
sufficiently considered, to make up the urgency that is pushing us all
in the direction toward uncalculated social solutions and social
reconstructions. This constitutes her a notable social force working by
literature; a force, however, that has already chiefly spent itself, or
that persists, so far as it does persist, translated indistinguishably
into other forms.
For George Sand is no longer read as she formerly was, her fashion
having already to a great extent passed away. It is a common testimony
that, as she wrote like one improvising, so her writing is to be read
once and not returned to. Her "Consuelo," in its time such a rage, and
still often spoken of as her masterpiece, is now even a little hard to
get through. You yawn, you feel like skipping, you do skip, and you
finally shut up the book wondering why such bright writing should make
such dull reading.
There occurred a sharp, decisive change, a change, however, not
consistently maintained, in George Sand's quality of production. From
producing novels of social ferment, she turned to producing the
quietest, most quieting, idyllic little stories in the world. There is a
long list of such. "La Petite Fadette," "Francois le Champi," "Les
Maitres Sonneurs," are among the best of them. From this last,
consummately well translated by our countrywoman, Miss Katharine
Prescott Wormeley, who has Messrs. Roberts Brothers for her publishers,
we shall offer a very short extract in specimen. But first a short
passage from one of her earlier books, in order that our readers may get
a sense of the change that she underwent, or rather--for no doubt the
change was voluntary and calculated on her part--the change that she
chose to make, in her manner. It is simply her two contrasted manners
that we aim to illustrate--not at all, in either case, the matter or
doctrine set forth. To illustrate this last we should have no room, had
we the inclination.
From "Lelia," we translate a passage descriptive of Alpine scenery, or
rather of the effect on the mind of Alpine scenery. After lighting upon
this passage for our choice we found that Mr. Saintsbury too, in his
"Specimens of French Literature," had made the same selection, at double
length, for his sole exemplification of George Sand. We are thus
confirmed in trusting that we shall show our author, if far too briefly,
still at her best: