It is a hundred years since Sainte-Beuve was born in the Norman city
that looks over toward England, and more than a generation has passed
since his death just before the war with Germany.[4] Yesterday three
countries--France, Belgium, and Switzerland--were celebrating his
centenary with speeches and essays and dinners, and the singing of
hymns. At Lausanne, where he had given his lectures on _Port-Royal_, and
had undergone not a little chagrin for his pains, the University
unveiled a bronze medallion of his head,--a Sainte-Beuve disillusioned
and complex, writes a Parisian journalist, with immoderate forehead
radiating a cold serenity, while the lips are contracted into a smile at
once voluptuous and sarcastic, as it were an Erasmus grown fat, with a
reminiscence of Baudelaire in the ironic mask of the face. It is
evidently the "Pere Beuve" as we know him in the portraits, and it is
not hard to imagine the lips curling a little more sardonically at the
thought of the change that has come since he was a poverty-stricken
hack and his foibles were the ridicule of Paris.
Yet through all these honours I cannot help observing a strain of
reluctance, as so often happens with a critic who has made himself
feared by the rectitude of his judgments. There has, for one thing, been
a good deal of rather foolish scandal-mongering and raking up of old
anecdotes about his gross habits. Well, Sainte-Beuve was sensual. "Je
suis du peuple ainsi que mes amours," he was wont to hum over his work;
and when that work was finished, his secretary tells us how he used to
draw a hat down over his face (that face _dont le front demesurement
haut rayonne de serenite froide_), and go out on the street for any
chance liaison. There is something too much of these stories in what is
written of Sainte-Beuve to-day; and in the estimate of his intellectual
career too little emphasis is laid on what was stable in his opinions,
and too much emphasis on the changes of his religious and literary
creed. To be sure, these mutations of belief are commonly cited as his
preparation for the art of critic, and in a certain sense this is right.
But even then, if by critic is meant one who merely decides the value of
this or that book, the essential word is left unsaid. He was a critic,
and something more; he was, if any man may claim such a title, the
_maitre universel_ of the century, as, indeed, he has been called.
And the time of his life contributed as much to this position of Doctor
Universalis as did his own intelligence. France, during those years from
the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second Empire, was the
seething-pot of modern ideas, and the impression left by the history of
the period is not unlike that of watching the witch scenes in _Macbeth_.
The eighteenth century had been earnest, mad in part, but its intention
was comparatively single,--to tear down the fabric of authority, whether
political or religious, and allow human nature, which was fundamentally
good, though depraved by custom, to assert itself. And human nature did
assert itself pretty vigorously in the French Revolution, proving, one
might suppose, if it proved anything, that its foundation, like its
origin, is with the beasts. To the men who came afterward that
tremendous event stood like a great prism between themselves and the
preceding age; the pillar of light toward which they looked for guidance
was distorted by it and shattered into a thousand coloured rays. For
many of them, as for Sainte-Beuve, it meant that the old humanitarian
passion remained side by side with a profound distrust of the popular
heart; for all, the path of reform took the direction of some individual
caprice or ideal. There were democrats and monarchists and imperialists;
there was the rigid Catholic reaction led by Bonald and de Maistre, and
the liberal Catholicism of Lamennais; there was the socialism of
Saint-Simon, mixed with notions of a religious hierarchy, and other
schemes of socialism innumerable; while skepticism took every form of
condescension or antagonism. Literature also had its serious mission,
and the battle of the romanticists shook Paris almost as violently as a
political revolution. Through it all science was marching with steady
gaze, waiting for the hour when it should lay its cold hand on the heart
of society.
And with all these movements Sainte-Beuve was more or less intimately
concerned. As a boy he brought with him to Paris the pietistic
sentiments of his mother and an aunt on whom, his father being dead, his
training had devolved. Upon these sentiments he soon imposed the
philosophy of the eighteenth century, followed by a close study of the
Revolution. It is noteworthy that his first journalistic work on the
_Globe_ was a literary description of the places in Greece to which the
war for independence was calling attention, and the reviewing of various
memoirs of the French Revolution. From these influences he passed to the
_cenacle_ of Victor Hugo, and became one of the champions of the new
romantic school. Meanwhile literature was mingled with romance of
another sort, and the story of the critic's friendship for the haughty
poet and of his love for the poet's wife is of a kind almost
incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon mind. It may be said in passing that
the letters of Sainte-Beuve to M. and Mme. Hugo, which have only to-day
been recovered and published in the _Revue de Paris_, throw rather a
new light on this whole affair. They do not exculpate Sainte-Beuve, but
they at least free him from ridicule. His successful passion for Mme.
Hugo, with its abrupt close when Mme. Hugo's daughter came to her first
confession, and his tormented courtship of Mme. d'Arbouville in later
years, were the chief elements in that _education sentimentale_ which
made him so cunning in the secrets of the feminine breast.
But this is a digression. Personal and critical causes carried him out
of the camp of Victor Hugo into the ranks of the Saint-Simonians, whom
he followed for a while with a kind of half-detached enthusiasm.
Probably he was less attracted by the hopes of a mystically regenerated
society, with Enfantin as its supreme pontiff, than by the desire of
finding some rest for the imagination in this religion of universal
love. At least he perceived in the new brotherhood a relief from the
strained individualism of the romantic poets, and the same instinct, no
doubt, followed him from Saint-Simonism into the fold of Lamennais.
There at last he thought to see united the ideals of religion and
democracy, and some of the bitterest words he ever wrote were in memory
of the final defalcation of Lamennais, who, as Sainte-Beuve said, saved
himself but left his disciples stranded in the mire. Meanwhile this
particular disciple had met new friends in Switzerland, and through
their aid was brought at a critical moment to Lausanne to lecture on
_Port-Royal_. There he learned to know and respect Vinet, the
Protestant theologian and critic, who, with the help of his good friends
the Oliviers, undertook to convert the wily Parisian to Calvinism.
Saint-Beuve himself seems to have gone into the discussion quite
earnestly, but for one who knows the past experiences of that subtle
twister there is something almost ludicrous in the way these anxious
missionaries reported each accession and retrogression of his faith. He
came back to Paris a confirmed and satisfied doubter, willing to
sacrifice to the goddess Chance as the blind deity of this world,
convinced of materialism and of the essential baseness of human nature,
yet equally convinced that within man there rules some ultimate
principle of genius or individual authority which no rationalism can
explain, and above all things determined to keep his mind open to
whatever currents of truth may blow through our murky human atmosphere.
He ended where he began, in what may be called a subtilised and refined
philosophy of the eighteenth century, with a strain of melancholy quite
peculiar to the baffled experience of the nineteenth. His aim henceforth
was to apply to the study of mankind the analytical precision of
science, with a scientific method of grouping men into spiritual
families.
Much has been made of these varied twistings of Sainte-Beuve's, both for
his honour and dishonour. Certainly they enabled him to insinuate
himself into almost every kind of intelligence and report of each
author as if he were writing out a phase of his own character; they made
him in the end the spokesman of that eager and troubled age whose
ferment is to-day just reaching America. France scarcely holds the place
of intellectual supremacy once universally accorded her, yet to her
glory be it said that, if we look anywhere for a single man who summed
up within himself the life of the nineteenth century, we instinctively
turn to that country. And more and more it appears that to Sainte-Beuve
in particular that honour must accrue. His understanding was more
comprehensive than Taine's or Renan's, more subtle than that of the
former, more upright than that of the latter, more single toward the
truth and more accurate than that of either. He never, as did Taine,
allowed a preconceived idea to warp his arrangement of facts, nor did he
ever, at least in his mature years, allow his sentimentality, as did
Renan, to take the place of judgment. Both the past and the present are
reflected in his essays with equal clearness.
On the other hand, this versatility of experience has not seldom been
laid to lightness and inconsistency of character. I cannot see that the
charge holds good, unless it be directed also against the whole age
through which he passed. If any one thing has been made clear by the
publishing of Sainte-Beuve's letters and by the closer investigation of
his life, it is that he was in these earlier years a sincere seeker
after religion, and was only held back at the last moment by some
invincible impotence of faith from joining himself finally with this or
that sect. And he was thus an image of the times. What else is the
meaning of all those abortive attempts to amalgamate religion with the
humanitarianism left over from the eighteenth century, but a searching
for faith where the spiritual eye had been blinded? I should suppose
that Sainte-Beuve's refusal in the end to speak the irrevocable word of
adhesion indicated rather the clearness of his self-knowledge than any
lightness of procedure. Nor is his inconsistency, whether religious or
literary, quite so great as it is sometimes held up to be. The
inheritance of the eighteenth century was strong upon him, while at the
same time he had a craving for the inner life of the spirit. Naturally
he felt a powerful attraction in the preaching of such men as
Saint-Simon and Lamennais, who boasted to combine these two tendencies;
but the mummery of Saint-Simonism and the instability of Mennaisianism,
when it came to the test, too soon exposed the lack of spiritual
substance in both. With this revelation came a growing distrust of human
nature, caused by the political degeneracy of France, and by a kind of
revulsion he threw himself upon the Jansenism which contained the
spirituality the other creeds missed, and which based itself frankly on
the total depravity of mankind. He was too much a child of the age to
breathe in that thin air, and fell back on all that remained to
him,--inquisitive doubt and a scientific demand for positive truth. It
is the history of the century.
And in literature I find the same inconstancy on the surface, while at
heart he suffered little change. Only here his experience ran counter to
the times, and most of the opprobrium that has been cast on him is due
to the fact that he never allowed the clamour of popular taste and the
warmth of his sympathy with present modes to drown that inner critical
voice of doubt. As a standard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanticists
he still maintained his reserves, and, on the other hand, long after he
had turned renegade from that camp he still spoke of himself as only
_demi-converti_. The proportion changed with his development, but from
beginning to end he was at bottom classical in his love of clarity and
self-restraint, while intensely interested in the life and aspirations
of his own day. There is in one of the recently published letters to
Victor Hugo a noteworthy illustration of this steadfastness. It was, in
fact, the second letter he wrote to the poet, and goes back to 1827, the
year of _Cromwell_. On the twelfth of February, Hugo read his new
tragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evidently warm in expressions
of praise. But in the seclusion of his own room the critical instinct
reawoke in him, and he wrote the next day a long letter to the
dramatist, not retracting what he had said, but adding certain
reservations and insinuating certain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiques
rentrent dans une seule que je m'etais deja permis d'adresser a votre
talent, l'exces, l'abus de la _force_, et passez-moi le mot, la
_charge_." Is not the whole of his critical attitude toward the men of
his age practically contained in this rebuke of excess, and
over-emphasis, and self-indulgence? And Sainte-Beuve when he wrote the
words was just twenty-three, was in the first ardour of his attachment
to the giant--the Cyclops, he seemed to Sainte-Beuve later--of the
century.
But after all, it is not the elusive seeker of these years that we think
of when Sainte-Beuve is named, nor the author of those many
volumes,--the _Portraits_, the _Chateaubriand_, even the
_Port-Royal_,--but the writer of the incomparable _Lundis_. In 1849 he
had returned from Liege after lecturing for a year at the University,
and found himself abounding in ideas, keen for work, and without regular
employment. He was asked to contribute a critical essay to the
_Constitutionnel_ each Monday, and accepted the offer eagerly. "It is
now twenty-five years," he said, "since I started in this career; it is
the third form in which I have been brought to give out my impressions
and literary judgments." These first _Causeries_ continued until 1860,
and are published in fourteen solid volumes. There was a brief respite
then, and in 1861 he began the _Nouveaux Lundis_, which continued in the
_Moniteur_ and the _Temps_ until his last illness in 1869, filling
thirteen similar volumes. Meanwhile his mother had died, leaving him a
house in Paris and a small income, and in 1865 he had been created a
senator by Napoleon III. at the instigation of the Princesse Mathilde.
In his earlier years he had been poor and anxious, living in a student's
room, and toiling indefatigably to keep the wolf from the door. At the
end he was rich, and had command of his time, yet the story of his
labours while writing the latest _Lundis_ is one of the heroic examples
of literature. "Every Tuesday morning," he once wrote to a friend, "I go
down to the bottom of a pit, not to reascend until Friday evening at
some unknown hour." Those were the days of preparation and plotting.
From his friend M. Cheron, who was librarian of the Bibliotheque
Imperiale, came memoirs and histories and manuscripts,--whatever might
serve him in getting up his subject. Late in the week he wrote a rough
draft of the essay, commonly about six thousand words long, in a hand
which no one but himself could decipher. This task was ordinarily
finished in a single day, and the essay was then dictated off rapidly to
a secretary to take down in a fair copy. That must have been a strenuous
season for the copyist, for Sainte-Beuve read at a prodigious rate,
showing impatience at any delay, and still greater impatience at any
proposed alteration. Indeed, during the whole week of preparation he was
so absorbed in his theme as to ruffle up at the slightest opposition.
In the evening he would eat a hearty dinner, and then walk out with his
secretary to the outer Boulevards, the Luxembourg, or the Place
Saint-Sulpice, for his digestion, talking all the while on the coming
_Lundi_ with intense absorption. And woe to the poor companion if he
expressed any contradiction, or hinted that the subject was trivial,--as
indeed it often was, until the critic had clothed it with the life of
his own thought. "In a word," Sainte-Beuve would cry out savagely, "you
wish to hinder me in writing my article. The subject has not the honour
of your sympathy. Really it is too bad." Whereupon he would turn angrily
on his heel and stride home. The story explains the nature of
Sainte-Beuve's criticism. For a week he lived with his author; "he
belonged body and soul to his model! He embraced it, espoused it,
exalted it!"--with the result that some of this enthusiasm is
transmitted to the reader, and the essays are instinct with life as no
other critic's work has ever been. The strain of living thus
passionately in a new subject week after week was tremendous, and it is
not strange that his letters are filled with complaints of fatigue, and
that his health suffered in spite of his robust constitution. Nor was
the task ended with the dictation late Friday night. Most of Saturday
and Sunday was given up to proofreading, and at this time he invited
every suggestion, even contradiction, often practically rewriting an
essay before it reached the press. Monday he was free, and it was on
that day occurred the famous Magny dinners, when Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert,
Renan, the Goncourts, and a few other chosen spirits, met and talked as
only Frenchmen can talk. Every conceivable subject was passed under the
fire of criticism; nothing was held sacred. Only one day a luckless
guest, after faith in religion and politics and morals had been laughed
away, ventured to intimate that Homer as a canon of taste was merely a
superstition like another; whereupon such a hubbub arose as threatened
to bring the dinners to an end at once and for all. The story is told in
the _Journal_ of the Goncourts, and it was one of the brothers, I
believe, who made the perilous insinuation. Imagine, if you can, a party
of Englishmen taking Homer, or any other question of literary faith,
with tragic seriousness. Such an incident explains many things; it
explains why English literature has never been, like the French, an
integral part of the national life.
And the integrity of mind displayed in the _Lundis_ is as notable as the
industry. From the beginning Sainte-Beuve had possessed that inquisitive
passion for the truth, without which all other critical gifts are as
brass and tinkling cymbals. Nevertheless, it is evident that he did not
always in his earlier writings find it expedient to express his whole
thought. He was, for example, at one time the recognised herald of the
romantic revolt, and naturally, while writing about Victor Hugo, he did
not feel it necessary to make in public such frank reservations as his
letters to that poet contain. His whole thought is there, perhaps, but
one has to read between the lines to get it. And so it was with the
other men and movements with which he for a while allied himself. With
the _Lundis_ came a change; he was free of all entanglements, and could
make the precise truth his single aim. No doubt a remnant of personal
jealousy toward those who had passed him in the race of popularity
embittered the critical reservations which he felt, but which might
otherwise have been uttered more genially. But quite as often this
seeming rancour was due to the feeling that he had hitherto been
compelled to suppress his full convictions, to a genuine regret for the
corrupt ways into which French literature was deviating. How nearly the
exigencies of a hack writer had touched him is shown by a passage in a
letter to the Oliviers written in 1838. His Swiss friend was debating
whether he should try his fortunes in Paris as a contributor to the
magazines, and had asked for advice. "But where to write? what to
write?" replied Sainte-Beuve; "if one could only choose for himself! You
must wait on opportunity, and in the long run this becomes a transaction
in which conscience may be saved, but every ideal perishes,"--_dans
laquelle la conscience peut toujours etre sauve mais ou tout ideal
perit._ Just about this time he was thinking seriously of migrating with
the Oliviers to this country. It would be curious to hear what he might
have written from New York to one who contemplated coming there as a
hack writer. As for the loss of ideals, his meaning, if it needs any
elucidation, may be gathered from a well-known passage in one of his
books:
The condition of man ordinarily is no more than a succession of
servitudes, and the only liberty that remains is now and then to
effect a change. Labour presses, necessity commands, circumstances
sweep us along: at the risk of seeming to contradict ourselves or
give ourselves the lie, we must go on and for ever recommence; we
must accept whatever employments are offered, and even though we
fill them with all conscientiousness and zeal we raise a dust on
the way, we obscure the images of the past, we soil and mar our
own selves. And so it is that before the goal of old age is
reached, we have passed through so many lives that scarcely, as we
go back in memory, can we tell which was our true life, that for
which we were made and of which we were worthy, the life which we
would have chosen.
Those were the words with which he had closed his chapters on
_Chateaubriand_; yet through all his deviations he had borne steadily
toward one point. In after years he could write without presumption to a
friend: "If I had a device, it would be the _true_, the _true_ alone;
and the beautiful and the good might come out as best they could." There
are a number of anecdotes which show how precious he held this integrity
of mind. The best known is the fact that, in the days before he was
appointed senator, and despite the pressure that was brought to bear on
him, he still refused to write a review of the Emperor's _History of
Caesar_.
Both the sense of disillusion, which was really inherent in him from his
youth, and the passion for truth hindered him in his "creative" work,
while they increased his powers as a critic. He grew up, it must be
remembered, in the midst of the full romantic tide, and as a writer of
verse there was really no path of great achievement open to him save
that of Victor Hugo and Lamartine and the others of whose glory he was
so jealous. Whatever may have been the differences of those poets, in
one respect they were alike: they all disregarded the subtle _nuance_
wherein the truth resides, and based their emotions on some grandiose
conception, half true and half false; nor was this mingling of the false
and true any less predominant in one of Hugo's political odes than in
Lamartine's personal and religious meditations. Now, the whole bent of
Sainte-Beuve's intellect was toward the subtle drawing of distinctions,
and even to-day a reader somewhat romantically and emotionally inclined
resents the manner in which his scalpel cuts into the work of these
poets and severs what is morbid from what is sound. That is criticism;
but it may easily be seen that such a habit of mind when carried to
excess would paralyse the poetic impulse. The finest poetry, perhaps, is
written when this discriminating principle works in the writer strongly
but unconsciously; when a certain critical atmosphere about him
controls his taste, while not compelling him to dull the edge of impulse
by too much deliberation. Boileau had created such an atmosphere about
Moliere and Racine; Sainte-Beuve had attempted, but unsuccessfully, to
do the same for the poets of the romantic renaissance. His failure was
due in part to a certain lack of impressiveness in his own personality,
but still more to the notions of individual licence which lay at the
very foundation of that movement. There is a touch of real pathos in his
superb tribute to Boileau:
Let us salute and acknowledge to-day the noble and mighty harmony
of the _grand siecle_. Without Boileau, and without Louis XIV.,
who recognised Boileau as his Superintendent of Parnassus, what
would have happened? Would even the most talented have produced in
the same degree what forms their surest heritage of glory? Racine,
I fear, would have made more plays like _Berenice_; La Fontaine
fewer _Fables_ and more _Contes_; Moliere himself would have run
to _Scapins_, and might not have attained to the austere eminence
of _Le Misanthrope_. In a word, each of these fair geniuses would
have abounded in his natural defects. Boileau, that is to say, the
common sense of the poet-critic authorised and confirmed by that
of a great king, constrained them and kept them, by the respect
for his presence, to their better and graver tasks. And do you
know what, in our days, has failed our poets, so strong at their
beginning in native ability, so filled with promise and happy
inspiration? There failed them a Boileau and an enlightened
monarch, the twain supporting and consecrating each other. So it
is these men of talent, seeing themselves in an age of anarchy
and without discipline, have not hesitated to behave accordingly;
they have behaved, to be perfectly frank, not like exalted
geniuses, or even like men, but like schoolboys out of school. We
have seen the result.
Nobler tribute to a great predecessor has not often been uttered, and in
contrast one remembers the outrage that has been poured on Boileau's
name by the later poets of France and England. One recalls the scorn of
the young Keats, in those days when he took licence upon himself to
abuse the King's English as only a wilful genius can:
Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist face to face,
And did not know it,--no, they went about,
Holding a poor decrepit standard out
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!
I am not one to fling abuse on the school of Dryden and Pope, yet the
eighteenth century may to some minds justify the charge of Keats and the
romanticists. Certainly the critical restraint of French rules, passing
to England at a time when the tide of inspiration had run low, induced a
certain aridity of manner. But consider for a moment what might have
been the result in English letters if the court of Elizabeth had
harboured a man of authority such as Boileau, or, to put it the other
way, if the large inspiration of those poets and playwrights had not
come before the critical sense of the land was out of its swaddling
clothes. What might it have been for us if a Boileau and an Elizabeth
together had taught Shakespeare to prune his redundancies, to
disentangle his language at times, to eliminate the relics of barbarism
in his denouements; if they had compelled the lesser dramatists to
simplify their plots and render their characters conceivable moral
agents; if they had instructed the sonneteers in common sense and in the
laws of the sonnet; if they had constrained Spenser to tell a
story,--consider what this might have meant, not only to the writers of
that day, but to the tradition they formed for those that were to come
after. We should have had our own classics, and not been forced to turn
to Athens for our canons of taste. There would not have been for our
confusion the miserable contrast between the "correctness" of Queen
Anne's day and the creative genius of Elizabeth's, but the two together
would have made a literature incomparable for richness and judgment. It
is not too much to say that the absence of such a controlling influence
at the great expansive moment of England is a loss for which nothing can
ever entirely compensate in our literature.
Such was the office which Sainte-Beuve sought to fulfil in the France of
his own day. That conscious principle of restraint might, he thought,
when applied to his own poetical work, introduce into French literature
a style like that of Cowper's or Wordsworth's in England; and to a
certain extent he was successful in this attempt. But in the end he
found the Democritean maxim too strong for him: _Excludit sanos Helicone
poetas_; and, indeed, the difference between the poet and the critic may
scarcely be better defined than in this, that in the former the
principle of restraint works unconsciously and from without, whereas in
the latter it proceeds consciously and from within. And finding himself
debarred from Helicon (not by impotence, as some would say, but by
excess of self-knowledge), he deliberately undertook to introduce a
little more sanity into the notions of his contemporaries. I have shown
how at the very beginning of his career he took upon himself privately
such a task with Hugo. It might almost be said that the history of his
intellect is summed up in his growth toward the sane and the simple;
that, like Goethe, from whom so much of his critical method derives, his
life was a long endeavour to supplant the romantic elements of his taste
by the classical. What else is the meaning of his attack on the excesses
of Balzac? or his defence of Erasmus (_le droit, je ne dis des tiedes,
mais des neutres_), and of all those others who sought for themselves a
governance in the law of proportion? In one of his latest volumes he
took the occasion of Taine's _History of English Literature_ to speak
out strongly for the admirable qualities of Pope:
I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sacrifice of
the writers and poets whom I will call the moderate. For a long
time they had all the honours: one pleaded for Shakespeare, for
Milton, for Dante, even for Homer; no one thought it necessary to
plead for Virgil, for Horace, for Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope,
Tasso,--these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the
first have completely gained their cause, and matters are quite
the other way about: the great and primitive geniuses reign and
triumph; even those who come after them in invention, but are
still naive and original in thought and expression, poets such as
Regnier and Lucretius, are raised to their proper rank; while the
moderate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the classics
to our fathers, we tend to make subordinate, and, if we are not
careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. Something like disdain
and contempt (relatively speaking) will soon be their portion. It
seems to me that there is room for all, and that none need be
sacrificed. Let us render full homage and complete reverence to
those great human forces which are like the powers of nature, and
which like them burst forth with something of strangeness and
harshness; but still let us not cease to honour those other forces
which are more restrained, and which, in their less explosive
expression, clothe themselves with elegance and sweetness.
And this love of the golden mean, joined with the long wanderings of his
heart and his loneliness, produced in him a preference for scenes near
at hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So it was that the idyllic
tales of George Sand touched him quickly with their strange romance of
the familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that school had sought out
the nature of India, the savannahs of America, the forests of Canada.
"Here," he says, "are discoveries for you,--deserts, mountains, the
large horizons of Italy; what remained to discover? That which was
nearest to us, here in the centre of our own France. As happens always,
what is most simple comes at the last." In the same way he praised the
refined charm of a poet like Cowper, and sought to throw into relief the
purer and more homely verses of a Parny: "If a little knowledge removes
us, yet greater knowledge brings us back to the sentiment of the
beauties and graces of the hearth." Indeed, there is something almost
pathetic in the contrast between the life of this laborious recluse,
with his sinister distrust of human nature, and the way in which he
fondles this image of a sheltered and affectionate home.
But the nineteenth century was not the seventeenth, neither was
Sainte-Beuve a Boileau, to stem the current of exaggeration and egotism.
His innate sense of proportion brought him to see the dangerous
tendencies of the day, and, failing to correct them, he sank deeper into
that disillusion from which his weekly task was a long and vain labour
of deliverance. He took to himself the saying of the Abbe Galiani:
"Continue your works; it is a proof of attachment to life to compose
books." Yet it may be that this very disillusion was one of the elements
of his success; for after all, the real passion of literature, that
perfect flower of the contemplative intellect, hardly comes to a man
until the allurement of life has been dispelled by many experiences,
each bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps, when the hope
of love (the _spes animi credula mutui_) and the visions of ambition,
the belief in pleasure and the luxury of grief, have lost their sting,
do we turn to books with the contented understanding that the shadow is
the reality, and the seeming reality of things is the shadow. At least
for the critic, however it may be for the "creative" writer, this final
deliverance from self-deception would seem to be necessary. Nor do I
mean any invidious distinction when I separate the critic from the
creative writer in this respect. I know there is a kind of hostility
between the two classes. The poet feels that the critic by the very
possession of this self-knowledge sets himself above the writer who
accepts the inspiration of his emotions unquestioningly, while the
critic resents the fact that the world at large looks upon his work as
subordinate, if not superfluous. And yet, in the case of criticism, such
as Sainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almost ceases to exist.
No stigma attaches to the work of the historian who recreates the
political activities of an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vast bridge
between the past and the present. Yet, certainly, the best and most
durable acts of mankind are the ideals and emotions that go to make up
its books, and to describe and judge the literature of a country, to
pass under review a thousand systems and reveries, to point out the
meaning of each, and so write the annals of the human spirit, to pluck
out the heart of each man's mystery and set it before the mind's eye
quivering with life,--if this be not a labour of immense creative energy
the word has no sense to my ears. We read and enjoy, and the past slips
unceasingly from our memory. We are like the foolish peasant: the river
of history rolls at our feet, and for ever will roll, while we stand and
wait. And then comes this magician, who speaks a word, and suddenly the
current is stopped; who has power like the wizards of old to bid the
tide turn back upon itself, and the past becomes to us as the present,
and we are made the lords of time. I do not know how it affects others,
but for me, as I look at the long row of volumes which hold the
interpretation of French literature, I am almost overwhelmed at the
magnitude of this man's achievement.
Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, because he was primarily a
critic, drew his knowledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it
were, at second hand. The very contrary is true. As a younger man, he
had mixed much with society, and even in his later years, when, as he
says, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still, through his friendship
with the Princesse Mathilde and others of the great world, kept in close
touch with the active forces of the Empire. As a matter of fact, every
one knows, who has read at all in his essays, that he was first of all a
psychologist, and that his knowledge of the human breast was quite as
sure as his acquaintance with libraries. He might almost be accused of
slighting the written word in order to get at the secret of the writer.
What attracted him chiefly was that middle ground where life and
literature meet, where life becomes self-conscious through expression,
and literature retains the reality of association with facts. "A little
poesy," he thought, "separates us from history and the reality of
things; much of poesy brings us back." Literature to him was one of the
arts of society. Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch was
never surer and his eloquence more communicable, than when he was
dealing with the great ladies who guided the society of the eighteenth
century and retold its events in their letters and memoirs,--Mme. du
Deffand, Mme. de Grafigny, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and those who preceded
and followed. Nowhere does one get closer to the critic's own
disappointment than when he says with a sigh, thinking of those
irrecoverable days: "Happy time! all of life then was turned to
sociability." And he was describing his own method as a critic, no less
than the character of Mlle. de Lespinasse, when he wrote: "Her great art
in society, one of the secrets of her success, was to feel the
intelligence _(l'esprit)_ of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to
forget her own. Her conversation was never either above or below those
with whom she spoke; she possessed measure, proportion, rightness of
mind. She reflected so well the impressions of others, and received so
visibly the influence of their intelligence, that they loved her for the
success she helped them to attain. She raised this disposition to an
art. 'Ah!' she cried one day, 'how I long to know the foible of every
one!'" And this love of the social side of literature, this hankering
after _la bella scuola_ when men wrote under the sway of some central
governance, explains Sainte-Beuve's feeling of desolation amidst the
scattered, individualistic tendencies of his own day.
There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's critical art,--his treatment of
literature as a function of social life, and his search in all things
for the golden mean. There we find his strength, and there, too, his
limitation. If he fails anywhere, it is when he comes into the presence
of those great and imperious souls who stand apart from the common
concerns of men, and who rise above our homely mediocrities, not by
extravagance or egotism, but by the lifting wings of inspiration. He
could, indeed, comprehend the ascetic grandeur of a Pascal or the
rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, but he was distrustful of that fervid
breath of poesy that comes and goes unsummoned and uncontrolled. It is a
common charge against him that he was cold to the sublime, and he
himself was aware of this defect, and sought to justify it. "Il ne faut
donner dans le sublime," he said, "qu'a la derniere extremite et a son
corps defendant." Something of this, too, must be held to account for
the haunting melancholy that he could forget, but never overcome. He
might have lived with a kind of content in the society of those refined
and worldly women of the eighteenth century, but, missing the solace of
that support, he was unable amid the dissipated energies of his own age
to rise to that surer peace that needs no communion with others for its
fulfilment. Like the royal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the
highest degree of culture, which is religion. He strove for that during
many years, but alone he could not attain to it. As early as 1839 he
wrote, while staying at Aigues-Mortes: "My soul is like this beach,
where it is said Saint Louis embarked: the sea and faith, alas! have
long since drawn away." One may excuse these limitations as the "defect
of his quality," as indeed they are. But more than that, they belong to
him as a French critic, as they are to a certain degree inherent in
French literature. That literature and language, we have been told by no
less an authority than M. Brunetiere, are pre-eminently social in their
strength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuve was indirectly justifying
his own method when he pointed to the example of Voltaire, Moliere, La
Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the great ancestors. "They have all,"
he said, "a corner from which they mock at the sublime." I am even
inclined to think that these qualities explain why England has never
had, and may possibly never have, a critic in any way comparable to
Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glory of English literature lies in the very
field where French is weakest, in the lonely and unsociable life of the
spirit, just as the faults of English are due to its lack of discipline
and uncertainty of taste. And after all, the critical temperament
consists primarily in just this linking together of literature and life,
and in the levelling application of common sense.
Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, indeed almost inconceivable
in English, he is still immensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable,
to us for that very reason. There is nothing more wholesome than to dip
into this strong and steady current of wise judgment. It is good for us
to catch the glow of his masterful knowledge of letters and his faith in
their supreme interest. His long row of volumes are the scholar's Summa
Theologiae. As John Cotton loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of
Calvin before he went to sleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve,
sure of his never-failing abundance and his ripe intelligence.