Chapter IX: Usefulness of Art (4)

The _terza rima_--already in use--Dante adopted as suitable to continuous narrative. With his feeling and aesthetic want rhymed verse harmonized, the triple repetition offering no obstacle, Italian being copious in endings of like sound. His measure is iambic, free iambic, and every line consists, not of ten syllables, but of eleven, his native tongue having none other than feminine rhymes. And this weakness is so inherent in Italian speech, that every line even of the blank verse in all the twenty-two tragedies of Alfieri ends femininely, that is, with an unaccented eleventh syllable. In all Italian rhyme there is thus always a double rhyme, the final syllable, moreover, invariably ending with a vowel. This, besides being too much rhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect, the eleventh syllable being a superfluous syllable.

In these two prominent features English verse is different from Italian: it has feminine rhymes, but the larger part of its rhymes are masculine; and it has fewer than Italian. This second characteristic, the comparative fewness of rhymes, is likewise one of its sources of strength: it denotes musical richness and not poverty, as at first aspect it seems to do, the paucity of like-sounding syllables implying variety in its sounds. It has all the vocalic syllables and endings it needs for softness, and incloses them mostly in consonants for condensation, vigor, and emphasis.

Primarily the translator has to consider the resources and individualities of his own tongue. In the case of Dante the rhythmical basis is the same in both languages; for the iambic measure is our chief poetic vehicle, wrought to perfection by Shakespeare and Milton. There only remains, then, rhyme and the division into stanzas. Can the _terza rima_, as used by Dante, be called a stanza? The lines are not separated into trios, but run into one another, clinging very properly to the rhymes, which, interlinking all the stanzas by carrying the echo still onward, bind each canto into one whole, just as our Spenserian form does each stanza into a whole of nine lines. Whether stanzas, strictly speaking, or not, shall we say our mind frankly about the _terza rima_? To us it seems not deserving of admiration _for its own sake_; and we surmise that had it not been consecrated by Dante, neither Byron nor Shelley would have used it for original poems. We are not aware that Dante's example has been followed by any poet of note in Italy. _Terza rima_ keeps the attention suspended too long, keeps it ever on the stretch for something that is to come, and never does come, until at the end of the canto, namely, the last rhyme. The rhymes cannot be held down, but are ever escaping and running ahead. It looks somewhat like an artificial contrivance of the first rhymers of an uncultivated age. But Dante used it for his great song; and there it stands forever, holding in its folds the "Divina Commedia."

Now, in rendering into English the poem of Dante, is it essential,--in order to fulfill the conditions of successful poetic translation,--to preserve the triple rhyme? Not having in English a corresponding number of rhymes, will not the translator have to resort to transpositions, substitutions, forcings, indirections, in order to compass the meaning and the poetry? Place the passages already cited from Mr. Dayman beside the original, and the reader will be surprised to see how direct and literal, how faithful at once to the Italian thought and to English idiom in expressing it, Mr. Dayman is. His harness of triplets seems hardly to constrain his movement, so skillfully does he wear it. If we confront him with the spirited version in quatrains of Dr. Parsons, in the passages cited from the "Inferno," or with those from the "Paradiso," in Mr. Longfellow's less free unrhymed version, the resources and flexibility of Mr. Dayman in handling the difficult measure will be again manifest. To enable our readers to compare the translations with the original and with one another, we will give the Italian, and then the three versions, of the latter part of the Francesca story, from Canto V. of the "Inferno:"--

"Poi mi rivolsi a loro, e parlai io,
E cominciai: Francesca, i tuoi martiri
A lagrimar mi fanno tristo, e pio.
Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri,
A che, e come concedette Amore
Che conosceste i dubbiosi desiri?
Ed ella a me: nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria, e cio sa 'l tuo dottore.
Ma se a conoscer la prima radice
Del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
Faro come colui che piange, e dice.
Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto
Di Lancilotto, come Amor lo strinse.
Soli eravamo, e senza alcun sospetto.
Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
Quella lettura, e scolorocci 'l viso:
Ma solo un punto fu quel, che ci vinse.
Qando leggemmo il disiato riso
Esser baciato da cotanto amante,
Questi, che mai da me non sia diviso,
La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse:
Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.
Mentre che l'uno spirito queste disse,
L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade
Io venni meno come s'io morisse,
E caddi, come corpo morto cade."

Mr. Dayman:--

"Then toward them turned again: 'Thy racking woe,'
I said, 'Francesca, wrings from out mine eyes
The pious drops that sadden as they flow.
But tell me, in your hour of honeyed sighs,
By whom and how love pitying broke the spell,
And in your doubtful longings made too wise.'
And she to me: 'No keener pang hath hell,
Than to recall, amid some deep distress,
Our happier time: thy teacher knows it well.
Yet if desire so strong thy soul possess
To trace the root from whence our love was bred,
His part be mine, who tells and weeps no less.
'T was on a day when we for pastime read
Of Lancillot, how love snared him to ruin:
We were alone, nor knew suspicious dread.
Oft on that reading paused our eyes, renewing
Their glance; and from our cheeks the color started;
But one sole moment wrought for our undoing:
When that we read of lover so kind-hearted
Kissing the smile so coveted before,
He that from me shall never more be parted
Kissed me with lip to lip, trembling all o'er.
The broker of our vows, it was the lay,
And he who wrote--that day we read no more.'
The other spirit, while the first did say
These words, so moaned, that with soft remorse
As death had stricken me, I swooned away,
And down I fell, heavily as falls a corse."

Mr. Longfellow:--

"Then unto them I turned me, and I spake,
And I began: 'Thine agonies, Francesca,
Sad and compassionate to weeping make me.
But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs,
By what and in what manner Love conceded
That you should know your dubious desires?'
And she to me: 'There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.
But if to recognize the earliest root
Of love in us thou hast so great desire,
I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.
One day we reading were for our delight
Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthrall.
Alone we were, and without any fear.
Full many a time our eyes together drew
That reading, and drove the color from our faces;
But one point was it that o'ercame us.
Whenas we read of the much-longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
That day no farther did we read therein.'
And all the while one spirit uttered this,
The other one did weep so, that, for pity,
I swooned away as if I had been dying,
And fell even as a dead body falls."

Dr. Parsons:--

"Then, turning round to them, I thus began:
'Francesca! tears must overflow mine eyes:
My pitying soul thy martyr-throes unman;
But tell me,--in the time of happy sighs,
Your vague desires how gave Love utterance first?"
And she to me: "The mightiest of all woes
Is, in the midst of misery, to be cursed
With bliss remembered,--this thy teacher knows.
Yet, wouldst thou learn our passion's root and head,
As one may speak whose eyes with tears are dim,
So will I speak. Together once we read
The tale of Lancelot,--how Love bound him.
Alone we were without suspecting aught:
Oft in perusal paled our cheeks their hue,
And oft our eyes each other's glances caught;
But one sole passage 't was which both o'erthrew.
At reading of the longed-for smile,--to be
By such a lover's kissing so much blest,
This dearest--never shalt thou part from me!
His lips to mine, to mine, all trembling, pressed.
The writer was our Galeot with his book:--
That day we read no further on." She stopped:
Meanwhile he moaned so that compassion took
My sense away, and like a corse I dropped.

Observe that Dr. Parsons has put Dante's twenty-eight lines of eleven syllables into twenty-four lines of ten syllables; and this without losing a drop of the precious stream he undertakes to pour. But why does he make Francesca address her companion personally, instead of saying, "who shall never part from me?" And why does Mr. Dayman say, "pious drops," instead of piteous? Mr. Dayman and Mr. Longfellow fill up the twenty-eight lines. In neither of the three is there any strain or wresting of the sense. But all three, and before them Lord Byron and Carey, mistranslate this passage,--

"Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
Quella lettura."

All these translators interpret it to mean, that while they read, their eyes often met; whereas Dante says, they read that passage over more than once; or, literally rendered, several times that reading or passage drew to it their eyes. To restore the meaning of the original adds to the refinement of the scene.

Why does Mr. Longfellow use such long words as _compassionate_ instead of _pitiful_ or _piteous_, _recognize_ for _know_, _palpitating_ for _trembling_, _conceded that you should know_ for _gave you to know_? By the resolution to translate line for line, Mr. Longfellow ties his poetic hands. The first effect of this self-binding is, to oblige him to use often long Latin-English instead of short Saxon-English words, that is, words that in most cases lend themselves less readily to poetic expression. Mr. Dayman, not translating line for line, is free from this prosaic incumbrance; but as he makes it a rule to himself that every English canto shall contain the same number of lines as its original, he is obliged, much more often than Mr. Longfellow, to throw in epithets or words not in the Italian. And Dr. Parsons, who, happily freeing himself from either verbal or numerical bond, in several instances compresses a canto into two or three lines less than the Italian, and the XXXI. into nine lines less, might with advantage have curtailed each canto ten or twelve lines.

Do what we will, poetic translation is brought about more from without than from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, a lack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in good original work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in so far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr. Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the words; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetry with a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity, this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some pages, have--contrary to all good usage--the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic endings--and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven syllables and on some pages more than a third--do a part in causing Mr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would sound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings are relaxed.

Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volume where opposite each English page is the corresponding page of the original, as in Mr. Dayman's, one cannot fail to be struck with the comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of the comparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as the strongest exemplification, the ever-recurring _and_, and the often-repeated _is_, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter, _e_. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In lines of thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants to fourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators have about twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one. From this comparative rejection of consonants, Italian cannot, as English can, bind into one syllable words of seven or eight letters, like _friends_ and _straight_, nor even words of six letters, like _chimed_, _shoots_, _thwart_, _spring_; nor does Italian abound as English does in monosyllables, and the few it has are mostly of but two or three letters. In combination its syllables sometimes get to four letters, as in _fronte_ and _braccia_. As a consequence hereof, Dante's lines, although always of eleven syllables, average about twenty-nine letters, while those of the three translators about thirty-three. Hence, the poem in their versions carries more weight than the original; its soul is more cumbered with body.

In order to the faithful reproduction of Dante, to the giving the best transcript, possible in English, of his thought and feeling, should not regard be had to the essential difference between the syllabic constitutions of the two languages, what may be called the physical basis of the two mediums of utterance? Here is the Francesca story, translated in the spirit of this suggestion:--

I turned to them, and then I spake:
"Francesca! tears o'erfill mine eyes,
Such pity thy keen pangs awake.
But say: in th' hour of sweetest sighs,
By what and how found Love relief
And broke thy doubtful longing's spell?"
And she: "There is no greater grief
Than joy in sorrow to retell.
But if so urgently one seeks
To know our Love's first root, I will
Do as he does who weeps and speaks.
One day of Lancelot we still
Read o'er, how love held him enchained.
Without mistrust we were alone.
Our cheeks oft were of color drained:
One passage vanquished us, but one.
When we read of lips longed for pressed
By such a lover with a kiss,
This one whom naught from me shall wrest,
All trembling kissed my mouth. To this
That book and writer brought us. We
No farther read that day." While she
Thus spake, the other spirit wept
So bitterly, with pity I
Fell motionless, my senses swept
By swoon, as one about to die.

In the very first line two Italian trisyllables, _rivolsi_ and _parlai_, are given in English with literal fidelity by two monosyllables, _turned_ and _spake_. In the fourth observe how, in a word-for-word rendering, the eleven Italian syllables become, without any forcing, eight English:

"Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri:"
"But tell me: in th' hour of sweet sighs."

For the sake of a more musical cadence, this line is slightly modified. Again, in the line,--

"Than joy in sorrow to retell,"

_joy_ represents, and represents faithfully, three words containing six syllables, _del tempo felice_: _retell_ stands for _ricordarsi_, and _in sorrow_ for _nella miseria_, or, three syllables for six; so that, by means of eight syllables, is given a full and complete translation of what in Italian takes up seventeen. English the most simple, direct, idiomatic, is needed in order that a translation of Dante be faithful to his simplicity and naturalness; and this is the first fidelity his translator should feel himself bound to. Owing to the fundamental difference between the syllabic structures of the two languages, we are enabled to put into English lines of eight syllables the whole meaning of Dante's lines of eleven. In the above experiment even more has been done. The twenty-eight lines of Dante are given in twenty-six lines of eight syllables each, and this without any sacrifice of the thought or feeling; for the "this thy teacher knows," which is omitted, besides that the commentators cannot agree on its meaning, is parenthetical in sense, and with reverence be it said, in so far a defect in such a relation. As to the form of Dante, what is essential in that has been preserved, namely, the iambic measure and the rhyme.

Let us try if this curtailment of syllables will be successful when applied to the terrible words, written in blackest color, over the gate of Hell, at the beginning of the third canto of the "Inferno":--

Through me the path to place of wail:
Through me the path to endless sigh:
Through me the path to souls in bale.
'Twas Justice moved my Maker high:
Wisdom supreme, and Might divine,
And primal Love established me.
Created birth was none ere mine,
And I endure eternally:
Ye who pass in, all hope resign.

Has anything been lost in the transit from Italian words to English? English speech being organically more concentrated than Italian, does not the reduction of eleven syllables to eight especially subserve what ought to be the twofold aim of all poetic translation, namely, along with fidelity to the thought and spirit of the original, fidelity to the idiom, and cast and play of the translator's own tongue?

Here is another short passage in a different key,--the opening of the last canto of the "Paradiso":--

Maid-mother, daughter of thy Son,
Meek, yet above all things create,
Fair aim of the Eternal one,
'Tis thou who so our human state
Ennobledst, that its Maker deigned
Himself his creature's son to be.
This flower, in th' endless peace, was gained
Through kindling of God's love in thee.

In this passage nine Italian lines of eleven syllables are converted into eight lines of eight syllables each. We submit it to the candid reader of Italian to say, whether aught of the original has been sacrificed to brevity.

The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity to which the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate for the partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabic verse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante does not feel the want.

One more short passage of four lines,--the famous figure of the lark in the twentieth Canto of the "Paradiso":--

Like lark that through the air careers,
First singing, then, silent his heart,
Feeds on the sweetness in his ears,
Such joy to th' image did impart
Th' eternal will.

This paper has exceeded the length we designed to give it; but, nevertheless, we beg the reader's indulgence for a few moments longer, while we conclude with an octosyllabic version of the last thirty lines of the celebrated Ugolino story. It is unrhymed; for that terrible tale can dispense, in English, with soft echoes at the end of lines.

When locked I heard the nether door
Of the dread tower, I without speech
Into my children's faces looked:
Nor wept, so inly turned to stone.
They wept: and my dear Anselm said,
"Thou look'st so, father, what hast thou?"
Still I nor wept nor answer made
That whole day through, nor the next night,
Till a new sun rose on the world.
As in our doleful prison came
A little glimmer, and I saw
On faces four my own pale stare,
Both of my hands for grief I bit;
And they, thinking it was from wish
To eat, rose suddenly and said:
"Father, less shall we feel of pain
If them wilt eat of us: from thee
Came this poor flesh: take it again."
I calmed me then, not to grieve them.
The next two days we spake no word.
Oh! obdurate earth, why didst not ope?
When we had come to the fourth day
Gaddo threw him stretched at my feet,
Saying, "Father, why dost not help me?"
There died he; and, as thou seest me,
I saw the three fall one by one
The fifth and sixth day; then I groped,
Now blind, o'er each; and two whole days
I called them after they were dead:
Then hunger did what grief could not.

V.

SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC.

A literary critic, a genuine one, should carry in his brain an arsenal of opposites. He should combine common sense with tact, integrity with indulgence, breadth with keenness, vigor with delicacy, largeness with subtlety, knowledge with geniality, inflexibility with sinuousness, severity with suavity; and, that all these counter qualities be effective, he will need constant culture and vigilance, besides the union of reason with warmth, of enthusiasm with self-control, of wit with philosophy,--but hold: at this rate, in order to fit out the critic, human nature will have to set apart its highest and best. Dr. Johnson declared, the poet ought to know everything and to have seen everything, and the ancients required the like of an orator. Truly, the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued as generously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped by the light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of the Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be susceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of the critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing aggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue lines that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be able swiftly to follow these lines.

Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip a veritable sure critic, we have yet to add two cardinal qualifications, which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberal allotment. The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M. Sainte-Beuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but a mellow, radiant geniality. The other, which is of still deeper account, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue--for so it deserves to be called--born directly of the nobler sensibilities, those in whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and the profound, the beautiful and the true. He who is not well endowed with these higher senses is not a bad critic; he is no critic at all. Not only can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he can as little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implying failures to reach a certain fullness, implying a falling short of the complete, to say where and what are deficiencies, involves the having in the mind an idea of the full and complete. The man so meagrely furnished as to hold no such idea is but a carper, not a critic. To know the bad denotes knowledge of the good; in criticism as in morals, a righteous indignation can only flash from a shock to pure feelings.

In a notice of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a campaign of a great captain equally a work of genius? Napoleon is here the high sovereign critic, the Goethe in this department, as the Feuquieres, the Jominis, the St. Cyrs are the La Harpes or the Fontanes, the Lessings or the Schlegels, all good and expert critics; but he is the first of all, nor, if you reflect on it, could it have been otherwise. And who then would say better things of Homer than Milton?"--Goethe supreme in literary criticism, Milton on Homer; this touches the root of the matter; sympathy with the writer and his work the critic must have,--sympathy as one of the sources of good judgment, and even of knowledge. You cannot know, and therefore not judge of a man or book or thing, unless you have some fellow-feeling with him or it; and to judge well you must have much fellow-feeling. The critic must, moreover, be a thinker; reason is the critic's sun. Scott and Byron could say just and fresh things about poets and poetry; but neither could command the whole field, nor dig deep into the soil. Witness Byron's deliberate exaltation of Pope. Whereas Wordsworth and Coleridge were among the soundest of critics, because, besides being poets, they were both profound thinkers.

For the perfecting of the literary critic the especial sympathy needed is that with excellence; for high literature is the outcome of the best there is in humanity, the finished expression of healthiest aspirations, of choicest thoughts, the ripened fruit of noble, of refined growths, the perfected fruit, with all the perfume and beauty of the flower upon it. Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve, throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in addition to that primary proof of having himself written good poems. Besides the love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct draws him to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love is the more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined. Through variety of knowledge, with intellectual keenness, he enjoys excellence in the diversified forms that literature assumes. His pages abound in illustrations of his versatility, which is nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in the contrast between two successive papers (both equally admirable) in the very first volume of the "Causeries du Lundi," the one on Madame Recamier, the other on Napoleon. Read especially the series of paragraphs beginning, "Some natures are born pure, and have received _quand meme_ the gift of innocence," to see how gracefully, subtly, delicately, with what a feminine tenderness, he draws the portrait of this most fascinating of women, this beautiful creature, for whom grace and sweetness did even still more than beauty, this fairy-queen of France, this refined coquette, who drew to her hundreds of hearts, this kindly magician, who turned all her lovers into friends. Then pass directly to the next paper, on the terrible Corsican, "who weakened his greatness by the gigantic--who loved to astonish--who delighted too much in what was his forte, war,--who was too much a bold adventurer." And further on, the account of Napoleon's conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in which account M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness and truthfulness and penetration of the great German. The impression thus made on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve's power is deepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot and his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly against those historians "who strain humanity, who make the lesson that history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place of Providence," which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p. 150), "is often but a deification of our own thought."

In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve--who had then, for more than thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the function of critic--describes what is a fundamental feature of his method in arriving at a judgment on books and authors. "Literature, literary production, is in my eyes not distinct, or at least not separable, from the rest of the man and his organization. I can enjoy a work, but it is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of the man himself; and I readily say, _as is the tree so is the fruit_. Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study." This, of course, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with the moderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know the man who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interior beginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best means is, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, his predecessors. "You are sure to recognize the superior man, in part at least, in his parents, especially in his mother, the most direct and certain of his parents; also in his sisters and his brothers, even in his children. In these one discovers important features which, from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminent individual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the _fond_, is found in others of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state."

Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic. Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part the cause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact in delineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence all living parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes is more captivating than his "Portraits de Femmes," a translation of which we are glad to see announced.

Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of the "Nouveaux Lundis," an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deep is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes the occasion to write a paper on "Les saints Evangiles," especially the Sermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beatitudes, he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world such accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar address to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anything like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we not a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectly heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before all coming generations?

"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or less instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly existed. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating, bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind such words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the Mount?"

Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity toward the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the other sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:--

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also.

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy
coat, let him have thy cloak also....

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow
of thee turn not thou away....

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what
ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body,
what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the
body than raiment?...

"Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists, not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece any more than in Confucius. It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any more than in the modern Franklin. The principle of inspiration is different, if indeed it be not opposite: the paths may come together for a moment, but they cross one another. And it is this delicate ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source."

Of M. Sainte-Beuve's delight in what is the most excellent product of literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page. "Poetry," says he, "is the essence of things, and we should be careful not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods of color. The task of poetry is not to say everything, but to make us dream everything." And he cites a similar judgment of Fenelon: "The poet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch but what can be beautified." In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaks of the youthful poems of Milton: "'Il Penseroso' is the masterpiece of meditative and contemplative poetry; it is like a magnificent oratorio in which prayer ascends slowly toward the Eternal. I make no comparison; let us never take august names from their sphere. All that is beautiful in Milton stands by itself; one feels the tranquil habit of the upper regions, and continuity in power." In a paper on the letters of Ducis, he proves that he apprehends the proportions of Shakespeare. He asks: "Have we then got him at last? Is our stomach up to him? Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (_cette moelle de lion_)?" And again, in an article on the men of the eighteenth century, he writes: "One may be born a sailor, but there is nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a battle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that, and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare."

Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, how catholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takes pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency. Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Moliere, his words flame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust in his own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His native favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not overrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls "the Frenchman par excellence," and of whom he is proud as the literary sovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devoted to Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, he lauds this spiritually-minded thinker as one of the best of critics. And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: "Voltaire is sometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even are impudent.--There are defects difficult to perceive, that have not been classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them."

In a paper on Louise Labe, a poetess of the sixteenth century, he reproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and then adds: "These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that, at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry." No German or English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature, and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not an exaltation of French prose, it is a depression of French poetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of which possibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts to an acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are not capable of producing and embodying the highest poetry.

Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always mentions with deference. On Eckerman's "Conversations with Goethe" he has a series of three papers, wherein he deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honest pride Goethe's admiration of some of the chief French writers, and his acknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to the French translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the following note, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a high tribute to our distinguished countrywoman: "The English translation is by Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished so unhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes this translation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of the subject and for justness of appreciation it leaves our preface far behind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was a person of true merit and of great intellectual vigor." A sympathetic student of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him; and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature of Goethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that she would have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe "literature," had she lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friends had nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of this gifted, generous, noble-hearted woman.

One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a hand that can shake hard,--and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteen years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of "Causeries du Lundi," a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thus ever in the thick of the literary _melee_. Attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate; the aesthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences and friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris, if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray some of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the critical pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality is seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader will no doubt often perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. His perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious dead who are embalmed in their own excellence. Besides devoting many papers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates of literature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them,--a sign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness.

Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly taken by the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition of virtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes. In the general tone there is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness. Of the humane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take the following as one of many instances. In the correspondence of Lamennais there is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and his later sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thus feelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure: "Let us cast a look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, from youth to our latter years, there are none of these boundless distances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which, for being hidden, are none the less real and profound."

Writing weekly for the _feuilleton_ of a Paris daily journal, M. Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is always animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished, he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When the occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a principle or of a comprehensive thought. "Admiration is a much finer test of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than all the art of satire." By the side of this may be placed a sentence he cites from Grimm: "People who so easily admire bad things are not in a state to enjoy good." How true and cheering is this: "There is in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought with her finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up, smothers, or corrupts." Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says: "What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful." When, to give a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammatic point, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where to borrow just what is wanted. Speaking of embellished oratorical diction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that was discussed in his presence: "It is not enough to have fine sentences: you must have something to put into them." Commenting on the hyper-spirituality of M. Laprade, he says: "M. Laprade starts from the _absolute notion of being_. For him the following is the principle of Art,--'to manifest what we feel of the Absolute Being, of the Infinite, of God, to make him known and felt by other men, such in its generality is the end of Art.' Is this true, is it false? I know not: at this elevation one always gets into the clouds. Like the most of those who pride themselves on metaphysics, he contents himself with words (_il se paye de mots_)." Here is a grand thought, that flashes out of the upper air of poetry: "Humanity, that eternal child that has never done growing."

M. Sainte-Beuve's irony, keen and delicate, is a sprightly medium of truth: witness this passage on a new volume of M. Michelet: "Narrative, properly so called, which never was his forte, is almost entirely sacrificed. Seek here no historical highway, well laid, solid, and continuous; the method adopted is absolute points of view; you run with him on summits, peaks, on needles of granite, which he selects at his pleasure to gets views from. The reader leaps from steeple to steeple. M. Michelet seems to have proposed to himself an impossible wager, which, however, he has won,--to write history with a series of flashes." Could there be a more subtle, covert way of saying of a man that he is hardened by self-esteem than the following on M. Guizot: "The consciousness that he has of himself, and a natural principle of pride, place him easily above the little susceptibilities of self-love." M. Sainte-Beuve is not an admirer of Louis Philippe, and among other sly hits gives him the following: "Louis Philippe was too much like a _bourgeois_ himself to be long respected by the _bourgeoisie_. Just as in former times the King of France was only the first gentleman of the kingdom, he was nothing but the first _bourgeois_ of the country." What witty satire on Lamartine he introduces, with a recognition of popularity that, with one who takes so much joy in applause as Lamartine does, is enough to take the poison out of the sting: "Those who knew his verses by heart (and the number who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not without regret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, in his prose. This prose is, in 'Les Confidences,' too often but the paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the last, paraphrases of his feelings." Amends are made to Lamartine on another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says: "Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and the eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings. That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of wing." This is better as modesty than as criticism. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as of more gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyed getting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of their strongest as well as sweetest notes.

A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, just as a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image of herself. His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy in things French. Through means of it he knows them through and through: they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, his intellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other side the shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more or less the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows. Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Beranger, is spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy, that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M. Michelet, to Madame de Stael and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe, to Fenelon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau.

Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will be impatient to ask, nothing but praise? Not much else. Commencing his literary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from that date to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits, fill several thousand pages. Between his forty-fifth to his sixtieth year he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousand pages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects. This is the period of his critical maturity, the period of the "Causeries du Lundi," followed by the "Nouveaux Lundis." Many men write voluminously, but most of these only write _about_ a subject, not _into_ it. Only the few who can write into their subject add something to literature. One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve. In his mind there is vitality to animate his large acquirement, to make his many chapters buoyant and stimulant. All through his writings is the sparkle of original life.

But let us now cheer the reader who is impatient of much praise, and at the same time perform the negative part of our task.

Well, then, to be bold, as befits a critic of the critic, we beard the lion in his very den. We challenge a definition he gives of the critic. In the seventh volume of the "Causeries," article "Grimm," he says: "When Nature has endowed some one with this vivacity of feeling, with this susceptibility to impression, and that the creative imagination be wanting, this some one is a born critic, that is to say, a lover and judge of the creations of others." Why did M. Sainte-Beuve make Goethe sovereign in criticism? Why did he think Milton peculiarly qualified to interpret Homer? From the deep principle of like unto like; only spirit can know spirit. What were the worth of a comment of John Locke on "Paradise Lost," except to reveal the mental composition of John Locke? The critic should be what Locke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form of literature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, some share of that whereby poetry is fledged, "creative imagination." He may "want the accomplishment of verse," or the constructive faculty, but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful he must have. But do not the presence of "vivacity of feeling with susceptibility to impression" imply the imaginative temperament? If not, then we confidently assure M. Sainte-Beuve that had his definition fitted himself, his "Causeries du Lundi" would never have been rescued from the quick oblivion of the _feuilleton._

Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness, which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue,--the love of glory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon's passion for glory saved him in his latter years from ennui, from "that languor of the soul which follows the age of the passions." Where are to be found men more the victims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not more distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than for insatiable greed of glory,--Byron and Chateaubriand? No form of self-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving, which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyond its sway, on praise and admiration. These stimulants--withdrawn more or less even from the most successful in latter years--leave a void which becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust. Instead of glory being "the potent motive-power in all great souls," as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moral instinct, called by Milton,--

"That last infirmity of noble mind."

In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it as hardly to be traceable in their careers. Love of glory was not the spring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more than Shakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington.