Chapter II: Mil-Huit-Cent-Trente (1)

THE ‘GLOBE’—CHARLES DE RÉMUSAT, VITET, J. J. AMPÈRE—SAINTE-BEUVE: HIS
TOPOGRAPHY— THE EARLIER ARTICLES—3‘PORTRAITS LITTÉRAIRES’ AND
‘PORTRAITS DE FEMMES’— THE ‘PORTRAITS CONTEMPORAINS’—HE “ARRIVES”—
PORT-ROYAL, ITS LITERARY EPISODES—ON RACINE— ‘CHATEAUBRIAND ET SON
GROUPE LITTÉRAIRE’— FAULTS FOUND WITH IT—ITS EXTRAORDINARY MERITS,
AND FINAL “DICTA”— THE ‘CAUSERIES’ AT LAST—THEIR LENGTH, ETC.—
BRICKS OF THE HOUSE—HIS OCCASIONAL POLEMIC— THE ‘NOUVEAUX LUNDIS’—
THE CONCLUSION OF THIS MATTER— MICHELET AND QUINET—HUGO—‘WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE‘— ‘LITTÉRATURE ET PHILOSOPHIE’—THE ‘CROMWELL’ PREFACE,
AND THAT TO THE ‘ORIENTALES’— CAPITAL POSITION OF THIS LATTER—THE
“WORK”— NISARD: HIS ‘ÆGRI SOMNIA’—HIS ‘ESSAIS SUR LE ROMANTISME’—
THEIR “CULPA MAXIMA”—GAUTIER—HIS THEORY: “ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” ETC.—
HIS PRACTICE: ‘LES GROTESQUES’—‘HISTOIRE DU ROMANTISME,’ ETC.—
UBIQUITY OF FELICITY IN HIS CRITICISM—SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN— PLANCHE—
WEIGHT OF HIS CRITICISM—MAGNIN—MÉRIMÉE.

[Sidenote: _The Globe._]

It is well known, even to not very careful students of French literature, that the famous term which has been taken as the title of this chapter is something of a misnomer,—that the still more famous “representation of _Hernani_” was in effect the shouting after the battle, not the battle itself. The pains which have been spent above on the Empire Critics, greater and smaller, must have been most ill-bestowed if they have not shown that the working of the world-spirit had done already much of what had to be done—that the _i_'s only had to be dotted and the _t_'s crossed, by the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century. The crossing and dotting was done, as usual, with some violence, and it attracted corresponding attention; but the letters had been shaped long before. Dubois and Pierre Leroux had founded the famous _Globe_—object of the admiration of Goethe and cradle of the talent of Sainte-Beuve and others—in 1824. It furnishes comfort and support to those who believe that criticism is nothing if not philosophical, by the very strong philosophical colour which it took on. Jouffroy was one of its chief pillars; and attention has often been drawn to his tractate in it, _Comment les dogmes finissent_ (as to which it can only be remarked that no dogma has ever died yet, and that every dogma, as a natural product of something in human nature, is immortal till human nature perishes), as a symptom and symbol of its literary as of its other doctrines. [Sidenote: _Charles de Rémusat, Vitet, J. J. Ampère._] We are here, however, only concerned with its strictly (if not merely) literary contributors, Sainte-Beuve himself, Charles de Rémusat, J. J. Ampère, Vitet, and the rest. Of Sainte-Beuve we shall have plenty to say presently; the rest need not delay us long. The extraordinarily brilliant talents of Charles de Rémusat[565] were always touching literature: but philosophy and politics constantly drew him away from the Muses proper, though whether he talks of Abelard or of Anselm, of Bacon or of Channing, he is never negligible. Vitet became a politician and an antiquary chiefly, but has left at least one remarkable literary document in his well-known essay on the _Chanson de Roland_.[566] As for J. J. Ampère, he supplemented and furthered the study of foreign literatures, which Villemain had made almost obligatory, by an unusual frequentation of foreign countries; and besides some excellent work on the literary history (especially in mediæval times) of his own language, wrote many books of literary travel.

On the whole, however (for Sainte-Beuve grew out of and far above his _Globe_ stage), the _general_ interest of the reviewing in this paper is superior to that of its component parts as criticisms and its individual authors as critics. Those who now read Goethe’s remarks on it to Eckermann[567] may, if they neglect the historic estimate, be a little puzzled at the great German’s enthusiasm. He was right, however, as, in a general way, he usually was. These young men took literature with a wider knowledge and purview of it than the old critics had brought to bear, and with very much less subservience to particular theory as to what the book _ought to be_, and a more obliging though quite independent attention to what it _was_. Their “eclecticism” (which was philosophically the tone or ticket of their paper) adapted itself especially well to these literary exercitations: indeed Eclecticism is never so well justified of any of her necessarily mixed family as in literature. But their greatest is their greatest by so far, that we may well turn to him.

[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve: his topography._]

Sainte-Beuve was not infrequently seized with an amiable and very convenient fancy for constructing small retrospective guides and clues to the mighty maze of his fifty or sixty volumes of critical essays. The most definite and important, written in September 1861, just at the beginning of the _Nouveaux Lundis_, and appended to the second volume of the Garnier edition of _Portraits Littéraires_, distributes his whole career under heads. First comes his novitiate in the _Globe_ up to 1827; then the Romantic campaign of the _Ronsard_, the _Tableau du Seizième Siècle_, and the articles of 1828-29; then the nearly twenty years’ stretch of his contributions (preserved in the _Portraits Littéraires_ themselves and the _Portraits Contemporains_) to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, with _Port-Royal_ as a solid cut-and-come-again accompaniment; then _Chateaubriand et son Groupe_; then the _Causeries du Lundi_ properly so called, and, lastly, the series which he was beginning as he wrote. The work of the first period of which he speaks with some disdain—_ce ne sont que des essais sans importance_—he never actually republished; but towards the end of his life he repented and intended to do so, and such part of it as could be recovered appeared posthumously, with a good many waifs and strays of other kinds, as _Premiers Lundis_. If to these we add the _Étude sur Virgile_[568] and perhaps the _P. J. Proudhon_,[569] we shall nearly have exhausted his available stores, and quite, I think, those of critical interest.[570]

[Sidenote: _The earlier articles._]

The earliest detachment of this great army, as presented in that _régiment de marche_ the _Premiers Lundis_ (made up of all sort of things from these raw recruits to the poor old veterans of Senate-speech more than forty years later), might deserve their author’s modest or merciless sentence from the severe point of view of his greatest pupil. They are certainly not “chief and principal things” in themselves. Sainte-Beuve was very young (barely twenty) when he began to write them, and, as we have said, it is nearly impossible for a very young critic to be a very good critic, though it is deplorably possible for a rather old one to be more than rather bad. Some of them are so short as to give no room for much display of individual and original talent. Sometimes they deal with things ephemeral, and now forgotten, in a merely journalist fashion. Sometimes, as in the dealing with Scott’s _Napoleon_, inevitable and insuperable prejudices and preoccupations come in. One may even admit frankly that, _nonnunquam_, there are symptoms which lead one to understand, after a fashion, the charges of dulness[571] and of _galimatias_ which were brought against Sainte-Beuve by persons from Balzac[572] downwards, and which have sometimes seemed mere spiteful lunacy to readers of the _Causeries_ at their most brilliant period only. But to the expert there is unmistakable and not merely fancied _quality_ even here. There is already the indefinable, but in previous critics so unfortunately rare, desire to appreciate, to understand. There is almost always a sober judgment; not seldom a delicate if rather tentative subtlety. Above all, there are signs of something very different from the sham omniscience which is such a temptation to the young reviewer,—of a range and width of reading, classical, modern, foreign, most surprising and most unusual at the time.

The _Tableau_,[573] with its associated selection of Ronsard, and some other matter appended to its later editions, is quite a landmark in French literary history. It turned (or rather marked the turning of) the tide in regard to sixteenth-century literature, interested the youth of the day in the _Pléiade_, stimulated the new prosodical movements, did much else. But its author’s powers were immature: and there is not a great deal of the highest critical importance in its individual utterances and judgments. Perhaps the most noteworthy is the statement in the _Preface_ that “L’Art consacre et purifie tout ce qu’il touche”—a companion axiom to the Preface of the _Orientales_, which neither critic nor poet would have fully indorsed in their later days, though many of their followers would.

[Sidenote: Portraits Littéraires _and_ Portraits de Femmes.]

The _Portraits Littéraires_, with its satellite or tow-boat the _Portraits de Femmes_, appears to have been a sort of favourite with Sainte-Beuve. He rearranged it early from the original _Critiques et Portraits Littéraires_;[574] he sifted out the _Portraits de Femmes_, as if to concentrate special attention on them; he added from time to time appetising and really important bonuses and _primes_ of appendices, _Pensées_, personal confidences, and the like. A good deal of his best-known work is in the four volumes (including the _Femmes_) as they are now[575] current: and probably the collection meets the taste, of the general reader at least, as well as any other of his numerous collections, if not better. This, I venture to think,—using a phrase of an author who would probably not have agreed with me in this particular instance,—is because the general reader “does not want criticism,” or does not want it first of all. Sainte-Beuve, who knew everything, and cared not to conceal it, knew, as the general reader does not know, that the _causerie_, whether in volume- or essay-form, of mingled biography and criticism, was of English, not French invention: and he confesses that he longed to imitate it. He did so, and carried it even beyond Johnson: but he was frequently tempted to let the biography and the personality rather swamp the criticism, and I think he has done so here. In the _Portraits de Femmes_ especially, be it gallantry, gossip-loving, or God knows what, though there may be much interest, there is uncommonly little criticism, even on La Rochefoucauld, who presents himself in the middle of the galaxy with a singular and sultanesque intrusion. On some of the subjects, such as Mme. de Longueville, there could be none: even on Mme. de Sévigné and Mme. de Staël, where the opportunities were infinite, there is little; and where there is most, as in the case of Pauline de Meulan (Mme. Guizot), it is where we care least about it. Of history and life plenty, and therefore of amusement much; of criticism very little.

Life and its farrago—of which I desire not to speak disrespectfully more than of any other equator, but which are not my subject—have rather less exclusive hold in the _Portraits Littéraires_ proper and segregated, but still a greater hold than literature. In those days Sainte-Beuve, as he himself more than once confesses, was even more of a philosopher than of a _littérateur_. There are of course exceptions, where the past greatness of the author takes the future greatness of the critic by storm beforehand, and forces acquaintance and recognition from its destined brother. Even in these cases one often feels that the critic “is not ready”—that the hour has not fully come. The early and strongly “Romantic” articles on the great classics of the seventeenth century, which open the first volume, are not merely wrong with the crudity of early partisanship, as he himself represents them. Indeed in this respect they are hardly wrong at all. But they are not right in the right way. Except the very remarkable piece, “Du Génie Critique et de Bayle,” where the vocation asserted itself, there is hardly one of them (if even this is) worthy of Sainte-Beuve. The “Diderot,” to make a move forward, is capital on the man, a little short of capital on the writer. The best critical thing in the volume is the “Nodier”—much later in date (1840) than the rest of its contents. The second volume, which has something of this advantage, in point of time, contains much better things:—the well-known “Molière,” the long (some would say the disproportionately long) “Fontanes,” the “Joseph de Maistre,”[576] the “Naudé,” and a delightful paper on Aloysius Bertrand of _Gaspard de la Nuit_,[577] which combines the old Romantic enthusiasm with the acquired craftsmanship. The third, better still in this latter respect, has less interesting subjects, except in the case of the “Theocritus” and the “Mlle. Aissé,” which is again a “Portrait de Femme,” hardly at all literary. A sacred shame invades me at even appearing to speak disrespectfully of this book. Compared with anything not of its author’s, and not of that author’s at a future time, it would be very great: but its greater younger brothers are its enemies.

[Sidenote: _The_ Portraits Contemporains.]

Still not of these is the _Portraits Contemporains_. One feels inclined to say at the beginning, and perhaps not disinclined to repeat the saying at the end, that the title announces an attempt foredoomed to failure.[578] It is almost inevitable that a contemporary portrait in literature should fail to be a likeness, should be at best a _charge_, from one point of view or another. Sainte-Beuve himself in one place (with a naïveté more characteristic of him than those who have not read him very long and very carefully may think, but seldom so openly expressed) admits that his sitters had an awkward trick of falsifying his presentations. He had traced out for them, more or less early in their career, that career as they _ought_ to pursue it; but lo! they would follow their own stars, and not his tracings and indications. This is one danger, and a common, if not universal one, with its result,—not often realised in Sainte-Beuve’s own case, but constantly in that of smaller critics,—that the prophet loses his temper with these disobedient ducklings, and rates them, not because they behave badly, but because they behave in a way different from that which he expected and wished. But more dangerous still, and less to be avoided even by the staunchest and most vigilant censors, are those insidious, innumerable, ineluctable personal or partisan differences and prejudices which dazzle and trouble the contemporary’s eyes: and, worst perhaps of all, that incurable “too-nearness,” that hopeless lack of the firm perspective of the past, which clings to him, and will not let him attain to clearness and the Whole. Accordingly the _Portraits Contemporains_ are, with the _Portraits Littéraires_, the most unequal of Sainte-Beuve’s work, and all the more often disappointing because of the contemporaneity.

That reserve, indeed, which was made at the end of the notice of the _Portraits Littéraires_ is even more imperatively called for here, and it is most important that while recognising that the real Sainte-Beuve— the plenilune—is as yet but crescent, we should recognise his brightness and his crescency. It is, for instance, not merely hasty, but fundamentally uncritical, to exclaim at the length, the fulness, the cordiality, with which figures like Fontanes, Fauriel, Daunou are treated; and to contrast, with abomination, the hesitancy, the grudging, the reserves, in the case not merely of Hugo,[579] but of Vigny, Lamartine, even Musset, the roughness on Balzac, the comparative respect paid to Sue, and the comparatively cavalier treatment long accorded to Gautier. Even in regard to the great stone of stumbling, it is necessary, for us who were born later, to remember that however ardent in the _chevelu_ and _gilet rouge_ and _hierro!_ manner we may think we should have been if we had been born earlier, the Hugo of the time before the _Châtiments_, and the _Contemplations_, and the _Legénde_, great as he is, is not the Hugo of that glorious trinity. As for the Empire Critics, no impatience at their disproportionate allowance ought to prevent acknowledgment of Sainte-Beuve’s rare equity and true critical spirit towards the immediate predecessors with whom he did _not_ agree—a thing, as we have seen, deplorably rare in criticism.

Indeed, save in that Supreme Court of Critical History where the dignity of the place excuses the personal insignificance of the judge, and puts the greatest author on his defence, apology for these five volumes would be needless, and almost impertinent. They certainly need not fear assay either of pieces or of passages. In the First, where most of the dubious places occur, where the judgment is most immature, and the

style most inclined to the jargonish,[580] the “Senancour,” and in part the “Lamennais,” demand special notice, while the opening of the “Béranger,” with its sketch of the _causerie_ method, is of extreme interest, and the frequent references to English writers[581] show us already the largeness of the critic’s equipment. The Second is perhaps to be more cordially welcomed for the miscellanies at its end (including the striking critical imaginations put into the mouths of Diderot and Hazlitt) than for any of its more imposing constituents. The “Balzac” article, though it is in the main just, has a harshness and a touch of personal rudeness about it which are very unusual in Sainte-Beuve, and not quite explicable. The novelist might certainly be excused for thinking it wantonly uncivil. It is a little distressing, too, to read the hostile appendix which Sainte-Beuve ill-advisedly put to his “Montalembert” paper. But “_Misères que tout cela!_” The “Ballenche” and the “Villemain,” the “Mme. Desbordes-Valmore” and the “Ulric Guttinguer,”[582] nearly, if not quite, take the taste out. In vol. iii., an extremely interesting opening on Vinet, and a good close on Mérimée, hold between them things even better and sometimes well known— the “Töpffer,” the “Xavier de Mestre,” the “Jasmin,” the “J. J. Ampère”— and show, in the “Magnin” and elsewhere, that admirably _horizontal_ view of all periods of French literature which Sainte-Beuve was almost the first to take, and in which he has had far too few followers, whether in regard to French literature or others.

This reappears in the “Fauriel,”[583] which takes up nearly a third of vol. iv., and is there accompanied by an excellent paper on Barante, a longer but much less capital one on Thiers, two of Sainte-Beuve’s best known pieces on Leopardi and Parny, and one—for us—of peculiar interest on Daunou, containing perhaps the most vivid, and at the same time delicate, sketch in existence of the latest type of Neo-classic critic in France, before M. Brunetière’s revival sixty years later,—a type without La Harpe’s exaggeration and caricature, with a certain mildness and toleration towards the newer things, but secretly and _saturatedly_ convinced that Reason is the Goddess of Literature, that fine verse _is_ “almost as good as fine prose,” and that fineness in both consists of absolute good sense, logical connection, grammatical impeccability, and a horror of the _verbum inusitatum_. In this, too, the later and more perfect manner is increasingly present throughout; and, naturally, still more so in the Fifth, where the dates bring us to the very eve of the great period itself, and the essays are sometimes hardly distinguishable from the work thereof. The very best of these, perhaps, are the three classical pieces (for Sainte-Beuve was never prudish about titles, and not more than half of the Portraits in this volume deal with contemporaries in any sense) on Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and Meleager, in which, not for the first time, but for the first time in nearly or quite his full force, he once more makes a new departure in criticism by handling antiquity in true _causerie_ style. But the “Desaugiers,” the “Louise Labé,” and the “Casimir Delavigne” are also noteworthy, while the paper on Gautier’s _Les Grotesques_, a little meticulous and pedagogic in parts, and written in avowed protest of a mild kind, is still more so.[584]

[Sidenote: _He “arrives.”_]

In fact, by about 1845[585] he had very nearly developed his full powers, and he was shaking off the awkward transition state when he had ceased to be _romantique à plusieurs_ (he never was _à tous_) _crins_, and not yet become himself, and himself only. He had almost accomplished the _causerie_, the mixture of biography, and criticism, and “talk about it,” which Dryden, I maintain, is the first to have actually hit upon, which Johnson had strengthened but a little stiffened in the _Lives_, and which he himself re-fashioned by taking hints of depth and insight from Coleridge and the English Companions, touches of grace and _engouement_ out of a score of French eighteenth-century critics, from Fontenelle and Diderot down to Fontanes and Daunou, adding knowledge of literary history, and a not too peremptory theory of time and _milieu_, from the Germans and the ambient air, enthusiasm from the still smouldering hearth of the deserted _cénacle_, and that magic and indefinable dose, that “little of my own sauce,” as Mrs Tibbs has it, which genius provides, and of which it keeps the secret. His ability to concoct this mixture, or rather to produce this new organism, had been by this time almost fully shown; but the final proof was given, and the new kind was definitely named and sent abroad, only after the composition of the most substantive work (except _Port-Royal_) which he had yet attempted, and the best—itself displaying the gifts he had now acquired in the fullest measure. Probably the critical moment was hastened, as so often happens, by an external catastrophe, the upset of the July Monarchy, and by that transplantation into Belgium for a time which, though he has put the best face on it, was certainly an exile, and by no means wholly a voluntary one.

[Sidenote: _Port-Royal,_]

We must, however, first take some notice of _Port-Royal_, which, either by cause or coincidence, was also the product of a journey, if not an exile, being originally delivered in the form of lectures at Lausanne. It[586] is, of course, the most important and substantive single work of its author—the only one, in fact, to which the older and more exacting definition of a _book_ would have shown itself complaisant. It occupied, with completions and revisions, twenty years of his life; it contains perhaps the most elaborate and masterly exposition of that system of combined literary, historical, and social inquiry into the life of a period which he did so much to introduce, and so much more to establish as a literary Kind; and it expresses and registers notably those changes of opinion which made him, in the last two decades of his life, an exponent of an almost entirely _irreligious_ view of life itself. With this aspect of it we do not here concern ourselves; but the book has far too much which does directly concern us, in the strictest construction of our own plan, not to receive detailed attention.

[Sidenote: _its literary episodes._]

I do not know that those “older and more exacting definitions,” which have been just referred to, would pass, without demur, the features which make it of this importance to us. It is true that many, if not most, of the more distinguished men of letters of that century which, in the general judgment, has been regarded as the greatest century of letters in France, had more or less connection with Port Royal: nay, more, that not a few of the Port Royalists of the outer and even inner circles were great men of letters themselves. But whether this entirely justifies (to take examples from the first two volumes only) the inclusion in the book of analyses of _Polyeucte_ and _Saint-Genest_, which would be ample for extensive monographs on Corneille and Rotrou respectively,—of an elaborate study of the elder Balzac of which the same may be said,—is a very arguable point. Still, the inclusion gives us the book; and, even if it did not, I am not inclined to be strait-laced on these points, or to chicane about the relation of the episodes to the epic.

Let us then be as kind to Sainte-Beuve as he was to himself, and admit what (feeling, I suppose, uneasy) he pleads at vol. ii. p. 107, “Nous voici, ce semble, bien loin de Port Royal; pas si loin que l’on croit”— that the spirit of the two plays is quite Port-Royalist, that Balzac wrote letters to M. de Saint-Cyran (so he did to most people, but no matter), that Pascal, Nicole, Racine come in of course; that even the _Mémoires de Grammont_ are not quite extraneous, for was not _la belle_ Hamilton herself (despite her _nez retroussé_ and her Cupid’s-bow mouth) educated there? We are, in short, to take our literary goods as we find them, and as fate and the author provide: and they certainly provide them in plenty. No detailed examinations of Sainte-Beuve’s are more careful than those of the two plays. If he is a little hard, in the text, on that Christian (and semi-Gascon) Socrates, and writer of most handsome letters, who dwelt on the banks of the Charente, he repairs it in an appendix. The references to minor Louis XIII. literature (though injured by Sainte-Beuve’s dislike to quaintness) are never to be missed: and it is needless to say the same of the whole dealing with Pascal, and of the chapters devoted to the famous labours of the Port-Royalists themselves, in literary and philosophical education. Tillemont, if not exactly a lion in literature, is one of the greatest of lion’s providers therein, and Nicole cannot be denied the title of man of letters. Malebranche comes in as an opponent, Racine as a pupil, though as an ungrateful pupil: and on all these and others Sainte-Beuve indulges in literary excursus of all but his best kind.

[Sidenote: _On Racine._]

The Racine passage is the best worth dwelling on of these, because what Frenchmen say on Racine is always interesting. We know, of course, beforehand that Sainte-Beuve will be, to a certain extent, _juste-milieu_,—that he will neither be of those who denounce with rage, nor deplore with pity or contempt, the poor foreigners who cannot hear the celestial music of the great _doucereux_, nor of those who approach more or less nearly to the view of the poor foreigners themselves. But the piece is specially interesting because it is perhaps the most distinct general retractation of the critic’s ultra-Romantic creed, and because it expresses much the same views as those (very probably derived from it) of Mr Arnold. You must not, says Sainte-Beuve, attempt to judge Racine by _passages_; there Hugo, Lamartine, even much lesser moderns will beat him. You must judge the whole, and take into consideration the support which each part gives to, and in turn derives from, the others. Nay, more, Racine is “moins imprévu, moins éclatant, moins héroïque, moins transportant” than Corneille, but more “equal,” &c. “L’unité, l’ensemble chez Racine se subordonne tout.” Sainte-Beuve even thinks that he could have done the many poetic things that he did not do as well as those which he did, and that in them (here we may all agree) “on aurait le même Racine.” But did he not lose something under the desperate hook of Boileau? Perhaps. “Il n’avait pas un démon déterminé.” You can understand him at once as you cannot Shakespeare or Molière. He presents the perfection of poetic style, _même pour ceux qui n’aiment pas essentiellement la poésie_. And the critic, with what some, I suppose, would call a touch of his “perfidy,” adds, “Là, c’est le point faible, s’il en est un.” Let us rather say that, while all reasonable praise of Racine may be read in the lines of this criticism, all reasonable dispraise of him may be read between those lines.

[Sidenote: Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire.]

The great critical truth, that not merely is the tongue of the critic loosed but his eyes are opened by the death of his subject, has seldom been better illustrated than by the volumes entitled _Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire_, originally delivered as lectures at Liége when Sainte-Beuve had left France to the March-haredom of the Second Republic. Of course we must remember that he had had more than twenty years of critical practice wherein to grow in critical wisdom and stature; that in the last sixteen or seventeen, especially, since he had shed his Saint-Simonian and Lamennaisian crotchets, he had (losing some fancy and enthusiasm with them) acquired immensely greater knowledge, critical delicacy, critical insight in most ways; and that, accordingly, the _Portraits_ and other pieces of the ’Forties are, in almost every respect except romantic and poetic _furia_, superior to those of the ’Thirties. But this will not entirely account for the excellence of the _Chateaubriand_, which is a sort of central “broad” in the stream of Sainte-Beuve’s criticism, from which it flows thereafter ever deeper, wider, and clearer. The book indeed is not—what book, and especially what critical book, is?—to be praised unreservedly or with very slight reserves. The common accusations of “envy,” “treachery,” “malignity,” “intolerance of greatness,” and the like, brought against Sainte-Beuve, are exaggerated at the best, and at the worst simply silly. They come partly from the general dislike and suspicion of the critic, who is a critic wholly or mainly, partly from unintelligent, if not quite ungenerous partisanship, partly from the most polluted of all sources, personal and spiteful gossip. But, as nearly always happens, there is some shred of justification for them, and the matter is important enough to be dealt with once for all here.

[Sidenote: _Faults found with it._]

Rarely—so rarely that it is an almost unknown event—shall a man practise, as Sainte-Beuve had for years and decades been practising, criticism of his contemporaries and in many cases friends, without exciting ill-feeling. But that ill-feeling becomes still more certain, and its complexion is likely to be darker, when the criticism is of the peculiar character which it is Sainte-Beuve’s greatest claim in the general view (not quite in mine) to have perfected, if not actually invented. It is true that, in the case of his living subjects, he moves about, among the extra-literary personal traits, which it is his delight to assemble and to group beside the literary details in heightening or contrasting light, with a cat-like dexterity. But even cats sometimes upset things: and the things among which Sainte-Beuve moved were much more ticklish and unstable than the objects of the cat’s legerde_pied_. Moreover, he actually had, as some, though by no means all other great critics have had, a certain predilection for the secondary. He never quite attains to the Longinian soundness of view on the faults-and-beauties question; and it is particularly unfortunate that the two greatest men of letters of his own time and country, Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, were men who specially require a Longinian judgment. Nor am I disposed to deny that his attitude towards the great _Beltenebroso_ of French Literature “doth something smack; doth a little grow to.” Sainte-Beuve’s strange Bonapartism—the strangest instance[587] of that most incomprehensible of political faiths—may have had a little to do with this: but one suspects, putting gossip aside, something more. There was, no doubt, much injustice in the too famous “Mérimée était gentilhomme: Sainte-Beuve ne l'était pas,” but there was an infinitesimal something in it.[588]

Again, to pass to a less “scabrous” subject, the scheme of the book leaves a very little to desire: it may be argued, with some justice, that Sainte-Beuve might better have proceeded entirely by the planet-and-satellite method which he has partly adopted, instead of sometimes mixing planet and satellite up, and sometimes keeping them separate.

[Sidenote: _Its extraordinary merits,_]

But the critical merits of the book are quite extraordinary. I know nothing earlier even approaching it as a comprehensive review of a great writer; and the details are even more admirable than the admirable _ensemble_. As for the latter, whatever may be Sainte-Beuve’s insinuations, whatever his want of cordiality for Chateaubriand the man and the politician,[589] it is impossible to charge him with the least inadequacy as regards Chateaubriand the writer. Like others, he dwells a little too much on the obligatory “images”; but unlike others, he does not limit Chateaubriand’s powers to them; and he is more likely to be thought by foreign critics excessive than grudging in his assignment and recognition of those powers. He does the amplest justice to the immense advance, in intensity and range, of “René” over Bernardin and Jean Jacques. He sees perfectly well that the best and most characteristic part of Byron is only Chateaubriand in English, in verse, with a few more yataghans, and with no crucifixes. He has here gone nearer, I think, to a real “grasp” of the writer, and the whole writer (alas! not of nothing but the writer) than in any other instance.

As for the details, one simply punctuates the book with bravo!s, if reading merely for enjoyment, and the note-book is never out of one’s hand if one is reading for reference. It “enfists” you, as the French say, at once, and it never lets the grasp go, but tightens it ever again and again. Take the admirable conclusion of the second Lecture,[590] with its indication of the way in which Chateaubriand combines the appeal of ancient poetry, of mediæval romance, and of the new fancy for nature, and turn, or rather come (for there should be no turning or skipping in this book) to the justification of the last point in the Fourth.[591]

[Sidenote: _and final_ dicta.]

But it is at the end of the Seventh lecture, in the special critique of _Atala_, that Sainte-Beuve first, I think, shows the wonderful critical mastery which was to distinguish him for the remaining twenty years of his life; and the proofs multiply as we turn the pages. In whom elsewhere—even in Coleridge—shall we find two such sentences, on the _verso_ and _recto_ of the same leaf,[592] showing such different kinds not merely of mastery but of supremacy as those that follow—the last of the Eighth lecture, and, save for a mere bow to the audience, the first of the Ninth? He has, in the first, been contrasting _Paul et Virginie_ (for which he, like almost all Frenchmen, has an affection incomprehensible to us), and he has to admit the transcendence of its successor. “Elle [Atala] gardait,” he says, “son ascendant troublant: au milieu de toutes les reserves qu’une saine critique oppose, la flamme divine y a passé.... On y sent le philtre—le poison qui, une fois connu, ne se guérit pas; on emporte avec soi la flèche empoisonnée du désert.” _Dixit!_ There are critics who feel the philtre and who carry the arrow with them, and there are those who do not.

The other passage is, “Savoir bien lire un livre en le jugeant chemin faisant, et sans cesser de le goûter, c’est presque tout l’art du critique. Cet art consiste encore à comparer.... Faites cela, et laissez-vous faire.” How different this cool prescription from the enthusiasm of the last, and yet how equal in its finality!

I could bestow much more of my tediousness on the reader in regard to this wonderful book: but its allotted space is nearly filled. Once only do I find a pettiness, in fact a falsity, where[593] he carps at the phrase, “A combien de rivages n’ai-je pas vu depuis se briser les mêmes flots que je contemple ici,” in the truly Rymerian note, “Tout les flots se ressemblent: mais ce ne sont pas les _mêmes_ flots, les _mêmes_ vagues qu’il voyait se briser en des lieux si divers.” The _poète mort jeune_ in Sainte-Beuve (to use his own famous words) was _bien mort_ when he wrote this: and the critic had _not_ “felt the philtre.” Does not the greater part of the power of the Angel of the Sea arise from this very mysterious sense of the unity of wave from Pole to Equator, and from coral to iceberg? The lands are broken, separated, isolated: the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea” is one and indivisible, an unbroken link between the live self that sees it here and the dead self that saw it far away and long ago.

But he seldom slips or nods thus. For happier things, note his sketch[594] of the three manners in Chateaubriand, where he compares Fontenelle’s notice of Corneille’s,[595] and might have compared Milton’s; the confession that French is not “une langue qui aurait eu l’accent et qui se souvenait d’avoir étée scandée”; the profound remarks on the Kinds of Criticism;[596] the almost profounder remarks on the different kinds of description.[597] I could multiply these instances almost endlessly, but it is enough to say, or repeat, that if we had nothing else of Sainte-Beuve’s it would place him in the first rank of the critics of the world, and that it is perhaps the earliest book that definitely does so.

[Sidenote: _The_ Causeries _at last_.]

Although the rest of Sainte-Beuve’s life certainly did not fail to justify the immortal and invariable law that the gods never yet gave all things to man at once, yet in the main it was exceptionally fortunate, and the fortune was of the kind most important to our purpose. For once, a man who could do a thing supremely was allowed to do it, under conditions, if not absolutely ideal, yet exceptionally favourable. Had he resisted the temptations of professorships and senatorships, he would have been able, without any interruption, to devote himself entirely to literary work of his own choosing, in his own house, without let or hindrance, publicity or disturbance, without even the pressure (so galling to some temperaments) of any fixed time and place of duty, except the easily adjustable necessities of having his “copy” and his proofs duly ready. Even of the avocations which he permitted himself, the actual interference with his vocation was trifling. The reward in mere money, though of course ludicrous in comparison with the rewards of other professions or even arts, was a competence; and it freed him completely from one of the most disagreeable penances of the working man of letters, the necessity of stepping out of his proper sphere in order to keep himself within it.

With this amiability of the Destinies, and with the man himself so perfectly prepared as we have seen him to be, it is scarcely surprising that the work should be altogether exceptional. It would require a really “encyclopædic head” either to affirm or deny, with competence, the proposition that it is the most complete and four-square batch of work ever done by any craftsman: but I do not know where to look for its rival, in any branch at least of literature. Criticism may or may not be the lowest of such branches; it may or may not be unworthy even to be called a branch. But of it, and barring the previous question, we shall certainly look in vain anywhere for such an example, in quality and quantity combined, as is presented by the _Causeries du Lundi_ and the _Nouveaux Lundis_.

[Sidenote: _Their length, &c._]

I do not know whether the length of the average _causerie_ was directly conditioned by the fact of its appearance in a daily newspaper[598] instead of a Review, or whether Sainte-Beuve’s experience and instinct combined, induced him to make it rather shorter, but much more uniform in length, than his _Deux Mondes_ articles. This length is pretty exactly twenty pages—a few articles being a little longer and a few a little shorter, but the greater number coming very close to the score of, say, 350 words each. It may be a superstition based on this great practitioner’s practice, but I think the majority of his successors have found that this length—say, from six to eight thousand words—is singularly normal for the treatment of an average subject of the larger literary kind. It ought not to weary the reader; it does not cramp the writer; and it does not tempt him to undue expatiation. Occasionally Sainte-Beuve, of course, doubled or trebled or even further multiplied _causeries_ where the subject demanded it; but at first he did this very seldom, and he never made it the rule. In selecting his subjects he naturally preferred a new book when he could get it, if only as a “peg”: and he had plenty of choice. His rejections, however, were sometimes disappointing, particularly so in the case of M. Egger’s _History of Greek Criticism_, which he had intended to take. He neither specially chose nor specially rejected themes that he had already treated: and sometimes, though not often, he reproduced parts of his old work. As to the treatment, enough has been said of that above, or will be said below. It was almost unique: it is still almost unmatched. As far as any general scheme is extricable, it is the obvious one of a few general remarks—not very seldom expanding into precious tractatules—of more or less abstract criticism; a biographical sketch, anecdoted with special view to literary influences; remarks, with more or less quotation, on books and passages; and sometimes a sketch, usually rather shy and suggestive than peremptory, of comparative “placing”—the comparison, however, having been subtly presented throughout. But the method is never stereotyped: and the variations are of the essence.

[Sidenote: _Bricks of the house._]

The hundreds of articles and the thousands of passages which these eight-and-twenty volumes present are naturally difficult to deal with after the method which has been here adopted; but a few pages may be fairly devoted to a selection from the _notabilia_ with which “the sweet compulsion” of reading them through again for the purpose has provided me freshly. At the very beginning, and in the first volume, though it is one of the most brilliant of all, Sainte-Beuve is rather militant: he never became quite Olympian. The opening article on Saint-Marc Girardin[599] (between whom and our critic there was always a little friction) has a good deal of “malice” in the French, if not exactly in the English, sense: and that which follows on Lamartine’s _Confidences_, with a later one on _Raphael_, though just enough, is distinctly cruel, and savours of political vengeance on the fallen dictator. But these ticklish and disgustful contemporaneities give way to those perfect studies of the Sévignés (if it be not profane to speak of that person in the plural), the Hamiltons, the Jouberts, the Comines, the Firdousis, which we associate most happily and most characteristically with Sainte-Beuve. There is less, though there is some, of the wholly welcome dealing with technically “ancient” literature: but there are two consummate articles of “criticism in the second intention”—the papers on “Villemain and Cousin as Men of Letters,” and on “Feletz, and Empire Criticism.”

The second volume or semester of this Annus Mirabilis—for the two cover the whole twelvemonth from October 1 to September 30, 1849-1850, with exactly fifty-two articles told down for the fifty-two weeks[600]— contains the famous and generous “Mlle. de Lespinasse”; the “Huet,” which is perhaps as good an example as one can find of the whole in some ways; the admirable “Chesterfield”; a wonderfully just “Mazarin”; the “Gil Blas,” which will be reprinted with _Gil Blas_ for centuries; and that magnanimous and yet not uncritical adjustment of coals of fire which Sainte-Beuve set alight in honour of the death of Balzac,—all of them varied, picked out, and set off by a profusion of studies of the eighteenth century, less literary in substance but literary enough in connection, and prefaced in one case, that of the “Madame du Châtelet,” with a most ingenious link, conduit, or what shall we call it? of explanatory connection between the purely literary and the merely gossiping. If there is to be found, also, an extremely bitter-sweet appendix on M. de Pontmartin, and an article on Chateaubriand, which is a superfluity and a blunder after the great book, we can pardon them. No other man has ever done such another year’s _darg_ in criticism.

We must not follow the rest of the twenty years or thereabouts with equal precision, though few of them were less substantially filled. An indication to those who do not know, a reminder to those who do, of certain _sommités_ among the articles; and a small sheaf of specially important passages, may lead us to the final summary of Sainte-Beuve’s critical position and achievement.

A whole cluster of remarkable things opens the Third volume. The “Rabelais” is practically the first piece of absolutely sane and appreciative criticism on the subject, the starting-point and foundation of what is now the accepted opinion of the competent. The “_Qu’est ce qu’un classique?_” is one of those more general pieces of criticism in which Sainte-Beuve does not go out of his way to indulge, but which he does, when he does them, in a manner showing the superiority which practice in actual “judging of authors” confers on its practitioners when they “go up higher.” The “Rousseau” is almost equal to the “Rabelais,” and it is not the first comer in criticism who can be just to both. His social-historic studies of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century serve as foils, and as intrinsically delightful reading, though they are often on the fringes of literature itself. The article on Latouche is a little ungenerous, and that on Fontenelle more than a little inadequate; while I wish that Sainte-Beuve had not indulged in a singularly vain and violent contrast between Camille Desmoulins and Vauvenargues. But the “Pasquier,” the “Saint-Simon,” the new “Diderot,” make amends.

[Sidenote: _His occasional polemic._]

And it is always so. There were squalls occasionally, as there were especially certain to be, at the ticklish time, when the Second Consulate or Presidency was passing, not quite ideally, into the Second Empire. He need not have poured broadsides into popgunners like the Staël-Hetzels and the Laurent-Pichats.[601] The first was a very useful publisher and a respectable author of children’s books; I think I remember some tolerable critical work of the second, apart from his politics. But what is either to-day? what, much more, will either be a hundred years hence, beside Sainte-Beuve? He knew Wordsworth: surely he might have remembered that “our noisy _curs_ are” not even “moments in the being of the Eternal Silence.” “They yap; what yap they? let them yap.” For in some cases they can do nothing else: and in all the Silence itself catches them very soon, if we do not lend them an echo.

In the Fourth volume, though the “Mirabeau” articles and the “Chamfort,” the “Saint-Evremond et Ninon” and the “Marmontel” are charming in the mixed kind, I think, for literature, the palm is due to that sentence—so autobiographical and so much more than merely autobiographical—which opens the “Moreau and Dupont” piece, “Je cause rarement ici de poésie, precisément parceque je l’ai beaucoup aimée et que je l’aime encore plus que toute chose.” _Quia multum amavi!_ And he does not derogate from this attitude in the Fifth, where he welcomes Victor de Laprade and Leconte de Lisle, while this also contains delightful things on Raynouard, Rivarol, Retz, Patru, Gourville, and even the remarkable person once called Le-Brun-_Pindare_. In the Sixth we go from Rollin to La Reine Margot, from Bernardin and Courier to Saint Anselm backwards and the Abbé Gerbet forwards, with, at the close, one article of special interest here, Sainte-Beuve’s revised and in some ways _palinodic_ opinions on Boileau. The Seventh is mainly eighteenth century— Montesquieu and the Président de Brosses, Franklin and Barthélemy, Grimm (for whom, here as elsewhere, Sainte-Beuve makes strong fight against the general, and, I am bound to say, in my judgment, the well-grounded, distrust of him), Necker and Volney, with, to give us change from a better time, Regnard and La Fontaine at front and close, Richelieu and Saint François de Sales, Mérimée and Arnault, and the elder Marguerite. On the last he is a little disappointing: and perhaps we might have expected that he would be.

The Eighth, with many excellent examples of the usual seventeenth-eighteenth century _causeries_, and with a most welcome batch of mediæval studies on Joinville, on the _Roman de Renart_, on the _Histoire Littéraire_—good to read even now, and priceless then—contains an article, written with great care, to which an Englishman naturally turns, and with which most Englishmen will be disappointed, that on Gibbon. None of the usual causes could have blunted Sainte-Beuve’s judgment here: yet it is blunted. Missing, in the one sense, what he calls the _javelot_, the _coup de foudre_, the _cri haletant_—in other words, the somewhat theatrical and rhetorical[602] touch of French, he misses also, in the other, Gibbon’s _magnificence_, that sense of the vast procession of events and that power of reproducing it, which gives an almost poetic self-transcendence to an otherwise prosaic and _philosophe_ nature. We all miss things, of course: but such a man as Sainte-Beuve should not have missed such a thing as this. The “Joinville,” however, which immediately follows, makes once more those familiar amends; and the next volume (the Ninth) contains admirable companions to it in the “Froissart” and the “Villehardouin,” this last one of the author’s best. He had now started (to some though not to all extents with advantage) dealing with one subject in several essays: and most of this volume is so occupied. “Stendhal,” “Marivaux,” “Madame Dacier,” with others, show his admirable flexibility. The Tenth is perhaps less attractive, for except Agrippa d’Aubigné and one or two others, its subjects are not as a rule of the first interest, and in one Sainte-Beuve returns to Chateaubriand—not happily. But the Eleventh, with a certain amount of “filling,”—the first collection stopped here, and Sainte-Beuve had to plug the gap made by the removal of the index when it was extended,—has at least two articles, or batches of articles, of the first interest—those on Montluc and Cowper. _Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut_—to appreciate equally, and almost at the same moment, the greater d’Artagnan of Sienna and the patron of Puss.

As a matter of fact, the original enterprise of the weekly _Causerie_ did in a manner finish with this first issue. For five years Sainte-Beuve had kept neck and neck with the enemy. His work afterwards was more intermittent, and even underwent a cessation of some years when he was lecturer at the École Normale, between 1857 and 1861. The last four volumes of the actual _Causeries_ are made up from different sources: though the bulk of the constituents are of the true breed. Among them are some of Sainte-Beuve’s most interesting studies of the past—“Ronsard” (revisited), “Saint Amant,” “Voiture,” “Vauvenargues,” “Villon”—and some of his most famous papers on contemporaries, such as those on Musset and the Guérins. The last volume of all contains two of the most valuable of those invaluable papers on criticism in general, to which we have drawn attention already, that on Nisard’s _History_ and that on _La Tradition en Littérature_. But perhaps the special appeal of these appendix-volumes is the appearance of articles on books and authors that are still in a manner modern—on _Madame Bovary_, on _Fanny_,[603] on M. de Banville, on M. Scherer.

[Sidenote: _The_ Nouveaux Lundis.]

And when the series began again regularly, after this interruption, with the _Nouveaux Lundis_ in 1861, he formally promised or threatened a recrudescence into criticism “truer” and “franker” and more regardless of contemporary protest.

One may be sorry for this, even though the particular ashes are long cooled. Although Sainte-Beuve’s “malignity” was, as has been said, absurdly, and is still sometimes inexcusably, exaggerated, he was far from free from those _iræ_ from which the something less than celestial spirit of the critic so seldom escapes.[604] There is a sort of “rankle,” a kind of distant growl of “That’s _my_ thunder,” in his review at the time of M. Rigault’s _Querelle_, in his later obituary of the author, and even elsewhere: the first paper of the _Nouveaux Lundis_ on Laprade is openly and almost rudely hostile: while the critic proceeds later to exchange fresh broadsides with M. de Pontmartin.

Still, where the element of hostility or personality does not put flies in the ointment, it is of course of the first interest to have such a paper as, say, the “_Madame Bovary_” article, or the later one on “Salammbô,” introductions to such rising “imps of fame” as Taine, Renan, the Goncourts, Saint-Victor, Fromentin, Feuillet,—even such fair and well-weighed, though antagonistic, examinations as that of Veuillot. In regard to Taine and others, especially, Sainte-Beuve is particularly interesting, because they present a crop of his seed, a development of his own method, with the substitution, for that rather _ondoyant et divers_ conclusion or no-conclusion of his to which we shall return, of hard-and-fast theories of ruling ideas, and _milieux_, and the rest. All this, however, would not make up to those of us who love the modern _quâ_ modern little and the contemporary _quâ_ contemporary not at all, if it had induced Sainte-Beuve to give up those inestimable studies of the past, or those well-reasoned considerations of criticism in general, which are his main titles to fame. But it did not. One of the very best of the latter kind is the famous review of M. Taine’s own _Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_. And in the former, the “La Bruyère,” the “Sévigné,” the “Perrault” in the first volume, the “Bossuet” in the second, the article (independent of his “Introduction,” which is itself a masterpiece) to Crepet’s _Poètes Français_, and the batch on the _Mystère d’Orleans_ (that is to say, the Early French Drama) in the third are more than reassuring. Soon, moreover, _Daphnis and Chloe_ promises a renewal[605] of those articles on the classics which are perhaps the only ones ever written, since our regrettable specialisations in the nineteenth century, by a literary critic of the very first order in the modern sphere.[606]