Chapter XXIII: The Group of 1830 (1)

VICTOR HUGO: 1802-1885; SAINTE-BEUVE: 1804-1869; BALZAC: 1799-1850; GEORGE SAND: 1804-1876; DE MUSSET: 1810-1857.

As a convenient method of inclusion and condensation for a number of authors who must by no means be omitted, but for whom there is left little room in these pages, we adopt the plan of making a cluster of important names to be treated in a single chapter. The political and the literary history of France join a sort of synchronism with one another at a certain point of time, which makes this arrangement not only feasible but natural.

The accession of Louis Philippe to the throne of France and the first representation of Victor Hugo's "Hernani" in Paris both occurred in the year 1830. The Bourbon or absolutist tradition in French politics and the classic tradition in French letters were thus at one and the same moment decisively interrupted. For, as in the commencing reign of Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King" of France, the French people became for the first time, under monarchical rule, a recognized estate in the realm, so, with the triumph of Victor Hugo's "Hernani" on the stage, the hour may be said to have struck of culmination in splendor and in influence for the romantic movement in French literature. The dominance of the ideas indicated in the expression "the Romantic Movement" was then suddenly for the moment so overwhelming and so wide that it amounted almost to a usurpation of letters in France. We might indeed have written "The French Romanticists" as a fairly good alternative title to the present chapter.

1. VICTOR HUGO.

The men of 1830--we thus use a designation which has come to be established in French literary history--began each man his career in letters as a fighting romanticist. Victor Hugo was the acknowledged Achilles of the fight. Whoever wavered backward, Victor Hugo clamped his feet for his lifetime on the bridge of war, where his plume nodded defiance, seeming still to say for its wearer standing with a cliff of adamant at his back,

Come one, come all, this rock shall fly
From its firm base as soon as I.

Around Victor Hugo, as the towering central figure among them all, were mustered, though some of them not to remain in this comradeship with him, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, George Sand, De Musset. There were others than these, but these shall for us here constitute the group of 1830.

We shall be in yet better accord with Victor Hugo's estimate of himself, if we take for his symbol a being mightier even than a demigod like Achilles. Let us do so and call him a Titan. But the past tense half seems an anachronism in speaking of Victor Hugo. The earth still trembles to his retiring footsteps and to the portentous reaction of his wrestle in war with the gods. This is his glory--he fought against Olympus, and, if he did not overthrow, at least he was not overthrown. Olympus in our parable was classicism in power; Victor Hugo was the genius of insurgent romanticism.

We thus repeat yet again terms which it would be difficult precisely to define. Classicism and romanticism are two forces in literature, seemingly opposed to each other, which, however, need to be compounded and reconciled in a single resultant, in order to the true highest effect from either. For neither classicism nor romanticism alone concludes the ultimate theory of literature.

Classicism criticises; romanticism creates. Classicism enjoins self-control; romanticism encourages self-indulgence. Classicism is mold; romanticism is matter. Classicism is art; romanticism is nature. Classicism is law; romanticism is life. Romanticism is undoubtedly first and indispensable; but so, not less, classicism is indispensable, though second. Neither, in short, can get along without the other. But Victor Hugo represents romanticism.

Victor Hugo's personality seems to have been a literary force almost as much as was his genius. As his quantity was immense, so his quality was vivific. Such a man was certain to be not only the master of a school but the center of a worship. Mr. Swinburne's late volume on Victor Hugo may be cited in extreme example of the deific ascription rendered by many at the shrine of this idolatry. Mr. Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, lost no opportunity to flout with indignity the claims of Victor Hugo to his supreme literary godship.

This great French writer has so recently died that, for the purposes of this book, he might almost be considered still living. At any rate, he has of late been so much talked about in current periodicals; he is, in some of his books, so freshly familiar to all, and, if we must say it, he offers a subject so perplexing to treat at this moment judicially, that we shall in some measure avoid responsibility by presenting him here with the utmost brevity--brevity, however, to be taken rather as a homage, than as a slight, to the unmanageable greatness by imminency of his merit and his fame.

Victor-Marie Hugo wrote verse very early, beginning as a classicist. In later youth he was royalist and religious in spirit. At twenty he acquired the title of "the sublime boy." How he acquired this title seems a matter of doubt. It is generally supposed to have been given by Chateaubriand, in his quality of patriarch of French letters. But this origin of the sobriquet the present writer has seen seriously suggested to be, along with the sobriquet itself, the pure invention of Victor Hugo's own imaginative egotism; which fruitful source of autobiography is said also to have yielded the poet's noble pedigree--the process of production employed on his part being, in the latter case, the extremely simple one of adopting for ancestry the ancient line of a family, bearing the same name indeed with himself, but otherwise utterly unrelated to his own humble house. The really extraordinary independence of fact with which Victor Hugo undoubtedly made his assertions respecting himself renders any testimony that he bears on this point interesting as imagination rather than instructive as history. For three or four years now he was an irrepressible producer and publisher of verse. At twenty-five he put out his "Cromwell," a drama, with a belligerent preface in favor of romanticism. After this each play of his was a battle for that literary cause. His "Hernani" (1830) was at last more than a battle--it was a victory.

The royalist in due time became republican. When Louis Napoleon was president, Victor Hugo opposed him. When Louis Napoleon made himself emperor, Victor Hugo denounced him. Banished for this from France, the poet betook himself to Belgium. Repelled from Belgium, he found refuge in England. Here, or, more exactly, in the island of Jersey first, and longer, afterward, in the island of Guernsey, he remained till the second empire fell. He then returned to Paris, and shared the melancholy fortunes of that beleaguered capital during the Prussian siege and during the anarchy of the Commune. Here, finally, he died, and, by his own will and testament, in a quite other than the original meaning of that pregnant Scripture phrase, "was buried"--for his funeral was to be attended with peculiar obsequies. He signified his wish to be treated in burial exactly as one of those paupers of whose cause he had been in his works the life-long champion.

During his long exile, which, notwithstanding his passionate love of Paris, he refused to shorten by any understanding arrived at with the emperor, he kept persecuting that usurper with printed diatribes, both in prose and in verse, which for mordant bitterness have probably never been surpassed in the literature of invective. One of these diatribes was a book entitled "The History of a Crime." To this he prefixed a kind of _imprimatur_ of his own, which may be quoted here as well exemplifying the high oracular style of expression characterized by short sentences and short paragraphs--these often of a single sentence only--that he habitually affected:

This work is more than opportune. It is imperative. I publish it.

V. H.

Victor Hugo's egotism was so vast that it was insane if it was not sublime. To exemplify adequately this statement by extracts would ask pages of room. The four lines about to follow, from one of his longer poems, present a modest and moderate example. The poet has been supposing the impossible case that the Supreme Being should take different views, in a certain matter, from his, the poet's, own--that he should outrage his, the poet's, sense of moral propriety. Here is how, in that case, Victor Hugo would, he declares, deal with offending Deity (we translate literally the original Alexandrines, line for line, without attempting to reproduce either meter or rhyme):

I would go, I would see him, and I would seize him,
Amid the heavens, as one takes a wolf amid the woods,
And, terrible, indignant, calm, extraordinary,
I would denounce him with his own thunder.

To Victor Hugo himself, the foregoing was not blasphemy; it was simply sublimity of a sort suitable to the character of the poet. There was, it is said, fully developed mental unsoundness in his father's family and in his own. Victor Hugo's own genius had, we suspect, some trace of a real, though noble, insanity in it.

In 1862, appeared "Les Miserables," which must be accounted, if not the greatest, at least the most popular work of its author. This book was issued simultaneously in eight different cities and in nine different languages--a circumstance probably not paralleled in the history of literature. The fame of "Les Miserables" does not fade, and it hardly will fade. It is a book of truly prodigious elemental power. That, however, Victor Hugo's genius in producing it worked with some disturbing consciousness of a theory of literary art to be exemplified and defended, the following curious note, inserted in the midst of the text, at a point of interest in the story, may serve to show:

Then the poor old man began sobbing and soliloquizing; _for it is a
mistake to suppose that there is no soliloquy in nature. Powerful
agitations often talk aloud._

"Les Miserables" is justly open to many strictures, both on literary grounds and on ethical; but it must be pronounced, notwithstanding, a great, and, on the whole, a noble work.

Victor Hugo made this approach to the illimitable in power, that he was well-nigh equally able to do great things and to do small. To exhibit by specimen his achievement in verse we shall offer here a few of his small things, in the impossibility of representing his great. The small things that we offer may acquire a value extrinsic to themselves if thought of as the gentle play of a giant who could with the same ease have astonished you by exhibitions of strength.

Victor Hugo went a second time, having once failed, to intercede with King Louis Philippe on behalf of a political offender condemned to death. It was late at night, and the monarch could not be seen. The intercessor would not be baffled, and, bethinking himself to appeal by the tenderness of birth and of death to the king, wrote four lines of verse which he left on the table. The allusions in them are to a lovely daughter of the royal house just lost and to a little son just born. We give the French text, and follow it with a close English translation:

Par votre ange envolee ainsi qu'une colombe,
Par ce royal enfant doux et frele roseau,
Grace encore une fois! grace au nom de la tombe!
Grace au nom du berceau!

By your lost angel, dove-like from you flown,
By this sweet royal babe, fair, fragile reed,
Mercy once more! Be mercy, mercy shown,
In the tomb's name, and cradle's, both, I plead.

The poet's plea availed.

Another little gem of Victor Hugo's is the following quatrain, which, though it may have had at first some particular occasion, is capable of the most general application. Again we give the French, for the French here almost translates itself:

Soyons comme l'oiseau pose pour un instant
Sur des rameaux trop freles;
Qui sent trembler la branche, mais qui chant pourtant,
Sachant qu'il a des ailes.

This may be thus rendered, almost word for word:

Like the bird let us be, for one moment alight
Upon branches too frail to uphold,
Who feels tremble the bough, but who sings in despite,
Knowing well she has wings to unfold.

One more little gem from Victor Hugo's treasury of such we are happily able to present in a version whose authorship will commend it; Mr. Andrew Lang translates "The Grave and the Rose." The poet here affirms, as he is very fond of doing, that capital article in his creed, the immortality of the soul:

The Grave said to the Rose,
"What of the dews of morn,
Love's flower, what end is theirs?"
"And what of souls outworn,
Of them whereon doth close
The tomb's mouth unawares?"
The Rose said to the Grave.

The Rose said, "In the shade
From the dawn's tears is made
A perfume faint and strange,
Amber and honey sweet."
"And all the spirits fleet
Do suffer a sky-change
More strangely than the dew--
To God's own angels new,"
The Grave said to the Rose.

The majesty with which this great Frenchman would sometimes, in prose, condescend to be an acrobat walking the tight-rope of grandiloquence stretched over a bottomless abyss of the ridiculous, is well shown in his monograph on Shakespeare. This is accessible in a scholarlike English translation (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, publishers) by Melville B. Anderson. The following sentences will indicate what it is. No one familiar with Victor Hugo can doubt that the great presence of HIMSELF, the writer, was really the chief thing in his musing eye, when, in the latter part of this extract, he was ostensibly describing and vindicating romanticist Shakespeare:

Shakespeare, shuddering, has within himself winds, spirits, magic
potions, vibrations; he sways in the passing breeze, obscure
effluences pervade him, he is filled with the unknown sap of life.
Thence his agitation, at the core of which is peace. It is this
agitation which is lacking in Goethe, wrongly praised for his
impassiveness, which is inferiority. All minds of the first order have
this agitation. It is in Job, in AEschylus, in Alighieri. This
agitation is humanity.... It seems at times as if Shakespeare
terrified Shakespeare. He shudders at his own depth. This is the sign
of supreme intelligence. It is his own vastness which shakes him and
imparts to him strange and mighty oscillations. There is no genius
without billows. An intoxicated savage, it may be. He has the savagery
of the virgin forest; he has the intoxication of the high sea.

"He shudders at his own depth"--hardly could we resist the temptation to bracket in "[Victor Hugo]" after the pronoun "he." Every reader should do this mentally for himself; he otherwise will miss that important part of the true sense, which here is written between the lines. There never was genius with more inseparable, unescapable, tyrannizing consciousness of itself. You feel the personality even more than you feel the genius in reading Victor Hugo.

A considerable part of Victor Hugo's prose production, mostly fiction, has been translated into English. Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Co. publish six portly volumes in a uniform edition. From "Les Miserables" in this series we make extracts which will briefly represent Victor Hugo's prose at its very best, alike in style, in thought, and in spirit. In the first, the writer gives utterance to reflections inspired by the final event of the battle of Waterloo:

This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest
bravery which ever astounded history--is that causeless? No. The
shadow of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the
day of destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that
day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great
souls surrendering their swords. Those who have conquered Europe have
fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say or to do, feeling
the present shadow of a terrible presence. _Hoc erat in fatis._ That
day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is
the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great
man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a
person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself.
The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there
is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God
has passed by.

In the second, Victor Hugo contrasts the two leaders, the conqueror and the conquered, of that momentous day:

Waterloo is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and
Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,
who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more
extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,
prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of
the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of batallions,
carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,
nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,
absolute regularity; on the other intuition, divination, military
oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable
something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the
lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the
mysteries of a profound soul, association with destiny; the stream,
the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to
obey, the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of
battle; faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but
perturbing it. Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its
Michael Angelo; and on this occasion genius was vanquished by
calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact
calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did
not come. Wellington expected Bluecher; he came.

It remains only to exemplify, as best in small space we can, Victor Hugo's portentous, his terrific, power in working up a tragic situation, and displaying it as in a calcium-light of intense imaginative description or narration. We shall then feel that this Titanic figure in French literature is at least by suggestive partial glimpses fairly before our readers. From "Les Miserables," we take the following passage, introduced by the original author as a first step only in the climax by which he represents the supreme agony of his hero in a great crisis of his life:

It sometimes happens that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a
man, traveler or fisherman, while walking at low tide on the beach,
far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past he has
been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch;
his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is bird-lime....

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns toward the land, endeavors
to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is
conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at
every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or
three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road: he halts to get
his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have
disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the
sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more
deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself
free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to
mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his
knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he
is caught in a quicksand....

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually
gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long,
infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or
hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which
seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down
by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout
that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of
punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a
man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the
horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on
the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and
sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores,
cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in
sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a
bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his
nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports
himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath,
and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his
shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible
now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still
gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a
little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the
surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of
a man!

Victor Hugo's hero was involved thus in a quicksand--but the quicksand in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool--he was wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer. All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven. This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo's writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric. Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.

That Victor Hugo willed to be buried exactly like a pauper did not prevent the occurrence of certain very important contrasts between his obsequies and the rites of an ordinary pauper funeral; perhaps, indeed, such a will on his part contributed to create the difference which at all events existed. The funeral attendance was said to be the most numerous ever seen in France. A million spectators were present. Three large wagons headed the procession filled with floral gifts. A beautiful diadem of Irish lilies was contributed by Tennyson, inscribed "To the World's Greatest Poet."

The French apotheosis of a national idol would not be complete without tribute from the theater. Accordingly, the Theatre Francais produced a drama by M. Renan entitled "_Mort_," in which the shades of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Voltaire, and Diderot hold a dialogue about human progress in the century to follow them, and, Corneille asking, "What poet will sing in that era, as sweet and tender as Racine, as logical as Boileau, as clear in style as Voltaire," the genius of the age lyrically answers, "Hugo," at the same time placing a crown on Hugo's bust.

Victor Hugo the man, especially as he mellowed with old age, was a sunny, sweet, benignant nature. He was a hearty, one might almost say a partisan, believer in God--atheism was so offensive to him. Unfortunately, however, Victor Hugo's theism was not such as to enforce departure, in his own personal practice, from that deplorable tradition of his country which has rendered so many distinguished French authors, from the earliest to the latest, offenders against the laws of marriage and of chastity.

2. SAINTE-BEUVE.

Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve's fame as a critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is admitted to be a critic of the first rank. Nay, in the opinion of many, Sainte-Beuve constitutes a rank by himself, having no peers.

Sainte-Beuve's range of subjects was very wide. He exercised himself to be equally open and fair toward all schools of taste and of opinion alike. At the outset, he was of the coterie of the romanticists. But he soon broke with these, either personally repelled by antipathies, or else unconsciously attracted by a secret sympathy of his own, too strong for his contrary will to resist, toward the classical standards respesented in the seventeenth-century writers. He never seems to feel himself more entirely in his element than when he is appreciating the literature of the French golden age.

As to religion, Sainte-Beuve, having had his phase of pietism even, ended by becoming a blank unbeliever. But his own antipathetic personal attitude of intellect and of heart toward Christianity he would not in the least allow to disturb the urbanity and serenity of his tolerance for the most orthodox Christian writers. Such, at any rate, was his standard and ideal.

But at this point, as at all points, the complaisance of Sainte-Beuve's writing is a manner with him, rather than a spirit. It does not penetrate deeply. He loves his "insinuations." That is his own word. He is willing to write a whole essay in criticism for the sake of the "insinuations" which his deceitful blandness will sheathe. Or, rather, he would sooner give up the whole essay than forego a phrase, or perhaps a single word, containing his insinuation. It was partly his critical conscience, no doubt, instinctively nice about shades of opinion and of expression; but then a something very like malice was mingled with his critical conscience. With all that must be conceded to the value of Sainte-Beuve's critical work, readers are conscious, in concluding the perusal of almost any one of his essays, that the result to them is a sapor remaining on their literary palate, rather than substance of nutriment entered into their mental digestion. Their food has been refined into a flavor.

For our illustration of Sainte-Beuve, we go to a paper of his on Bossuet. But we need to prepare our readers. Sainte-Beuve is a writer for the few, instead of for the many. To profit from him requires some effort of attention. One must study a little, as well as simply read. Sainte-Beuve does not deal in heavy strokes. His lines are most of them fine, many of them hair-lines vanishing almost into invisibility. He escapes you like Proteus. Very different is he, by this elusive quality of his, from his countryman, M. Taine, whose bold crayon sketches are at once appreciable to all.

In the choice indicated of specimen, we draw from a series of short criticisms which the author called _Causeries du Lundi_; "Monday-Chats," Mr. William Matthews, who has a volume of select translations from them, not unhappily renders the title. These were originally published as Monday articles in the columns of two Paris journals, the _Constitutionel_ and the _Moniteur_. Mr. Matthews's volume is introduced by a most readable biographical sketch and literary appreciation of Sainte-Beuve himself from the pen of the translator. M. Sainte-Beuve, we ought to say, in addition to his very considerable body of criticism, ranging, as we have intimated, over a wide field of literature, wrote an extended historical monograph on Port Royal, which is constantly referred to by writers as an authority on its subject.

The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding traits:

The simple idea of order, of authority, of unity, of the continual
government of Providence, Bossuet, among the moderns, has grasped more
completely than any other man, and he applies it on all occasions
without effort, and, as it were, by an irrefutable deduction. Bossuet
is the Hebrew genius, expanded, fecundated by Christianity, and open
to all the gains of the human intelligence, but acknowledging
something of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon
precisely at the point where its light ceases. In mien and in tone he
resembles a Moses; there are mingled in his speech traits
characteristic of the Prophet-King, touches of a pathos ardent and
sublime; there sounds the voice eloquent by eminence, the simplest,
the strongest, the most abrupt, the most familiar, the most suddenly
outbursting in thunder. Even where he holds his course unbending, in
an imperious flood, he bears along with him treasures of eternal human
morality. And it is by all these qualities that he is for us a unique
man, and that, whatever may be the employment he makes of his speech,
he remains the model of eloquence the most exalted, and of language
the most beautiful.

Sainte-Beuve is so much a critic that he cannot help criticising by the way, or even sometimes perhaps a little out of the way. But it will be quite to our purpose if we admit here what Sainte-Beuve incidentally says of Lamartine:

[Bossuet] was early distinguished for surprising gifts of memory and
of understanding. He knew Virgil by heart, as, a little later, he knew
Homer. "Less easy to understand is it," says M. de Lamartine, "_how
he was infatuated all his life_ with the Latin poet, Horace, spirit
exquisite, but the reverse of spontaneous and natural, who strings his
lyre with only the softest fibers of the heart; a careless
voluptuary," etc. M. de Lamartine, who has so well discerned the great
features of the eloquence and of the talent of Bossuet, has studied a
little too lightly his life, and he has here proposed to himself a
difficulty which does not exist; there is nowhere mention made in fact
of that _inexplicable predilection_ of Bossuet for Horace, _the least
divine of all the poets_. M. de Lamartine must have inadvertently read
"Horace" instead of "Homer." ... It was Fenelon (and not Bossuet) who
read and relished Horace more than any other poet, who knew him by
heart.... The great pagan preference of Bossuet (if one may use such
an expression) was quite naturally for Homer; after him for Virgil;
Horace, in his judgment and in his liking, came far behind them. But
the book by eminence which gave early direction to the genius and to
the entire career of Bossuet, and which dominated all within him, was
the Bible; it is said that the first time he read it he was
illuminated and transported by it. He had found in it the source
whence his own genius was destined to flow, like one of the four great
rivers in Genesis.

Sainte-Beuve speaks of the relation of the Hotel de Rambouillet to the future great man:

The young Bossuet was conducted thither one evening to preach there an
improvised sermon. In lending himself to these singular exercises and
to these tournaments where his person and his gifts were challenged,
treated as an intellectual virtuoso in the salons of the Hotel de
Rambouillet and the Hotel de Nevers, it does not appear that Bossuet
was in consequence subjected to the slightest charge of vanity, and
there is no example of a precocious genius so praised, caressed by the
world, and remaining so perfectly exempt from all self-love and from
all coquetry.

In the following passage, Sainte-Beuve appreciates, not without insinuated criticism, the younger eloquence of Bossuet the preacher. Conceive this atheist critic, for such in effect Sainte-Beuve was, entering into the spirit of the orthodox Christian, exclusively for the purpose of justly judging and enjoying a strain of pulpit eloquence! But that is Sainte-Beuve:

When he portrays to us Jesus purposing to clothe himself with a flesh
like our own, and when he sets forth the motives for this according to
the Scriptures, with what bold relief and what saliency he does it! He
exhibits that Saviour who above all seeks out misery and distress,
shunning to take on the angelic nature which would have exempted him
from this, leaping over, in some sense, and tasking himself to pursue,
to _apprehend_ wretched human nature, precisely because it is
wretched, clinging to it and running after it, although it flies from
him, although it recoils from being assumed by him; aiming to secure
for himself real human flesh, real human blood, with the qualities and
the weaknesses of our own, and that for what reason? _In order to be
compassionate._ Although in all this Bossuet only makes use of the
terms of the Apostle and perhaps of those of Chrysostom, he employs
them with a delight, a luxury, a gust for reduplication, which
bespeaks vivacious youth: "He has," says the apostle, "_apprehended_
human nature; it flew away, it would have nothing of the Saviour; what
did he do? He ran after it with headlong speed, leaping over the
mountains, that is to say, the ranks of the angels.... He ran like a
giant, with great strides and immeasurable, passing in a moment from
heaven to earth.... There he overtook that fugitive nature; he seized
it, he apprehended it, body and soul." Let us study the youthful
eloquence of Bossuet, even in his risks of taste, as one studies the
youthful poetry of the great Corneille.

Sainte-Beuve cannot let Lamartine alone. In the clause following, italicized by us, our readers are to recognize an irony on the part of the critic:

M. de Lamartine, who, _with that second sight which is granted to
poets_, knew how to see Bossuet distinctly as he was when young, etc.

Having quoted, with significant italics disposed here and there, a highly realistic imaginary picture of the youthful Bossuet from the hand of Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve says:

Here is a primitive Bossuet much toned down and mollified, so it seems
to me, a Bossuet drawn very much at will, to resemble Jocelyn and
Fenelon, in order that it may be said afterward [by Lamartine]: "The
soul evidently in this great man was of one temper, and the genius of
another. Nature had made him tender; dogma had made him hard." I do
not believe in this contradiction in Bossuet, a nature having the most
perfect harmony, and the least at war with itself, that we know. But
what for me is not less certain is, that the illustrious biographer
[Lamartine] here treats literary history absolutely as history is
treated in an historical romance; there you lightly invent your
character, where your information fails, or where dramatic interest
demands it. And without refusing the praise which certain ingenious
and delicate touches of this portrait merit, I will permit myself to
ask more seriously: Is it proper, is it becoming, thus to paint
Bossuet as a youth, to fondle thus with the brush, as one would a
Greek dancing-woman or a beautiful child of the English aristocracy,
him who never ceased to grow under the shadow of the temple, that
serious youth who gave promise of the simple great man, all genius and
all eloquence? Far, far from him [Bossuet] these fondlings and these
physiological feats of a brush which amuses itself with carmine and
with veins....

You feel, with regard to the foregoing criticism, that it is as just as it is penetrative. Lamartine fairly provoked it.

Here is a trait of Bossuet's that pertained remarkably also to Daniel Webster:

Bossuet is not one of those ingenious men of talent who have the art
of treating commonplace subjects excellently, and of introducing into
them foreign materials; but let the subject presented to him be vast,
lofty, majestic, he is at his ease, and, the higher the theme, the
more is he equal to its demands, on his proper plane, and in his
element.

The Abbe Maury is a critic belonging to the classical school of French literature. His best-known work is a treatise on pulpit eloquence. La Harpe is another critic of the same class with Maury, who has a considerable work, historical and critical, devoted to French literature in general. To these two writers Sainte-Beuve makes instructive allusion in the following passage:

Two opinions found expression when the Sermons of Bossuet were first
published, in 1772; I have already indicated that of the Abbe Maury,
who placed these sermons above everything else of that kind which the
French pulpit had produced; the other opinion, which was that of La
Harpe, and which I have known to be shared since by other sensible
men, was less enthusiastic and showed itself more sensitive to the
inequalities and to the discordances of tone. It would be possible to
justify both of these opinions, with the understanding that the first
should triumph in the end, and that the genius of Bossuet, there as
elsewhere, should keep the first rank. It is very true that, read
continuously, without any notice of the age of the writer, and of the
place and circumstances of their composition, some of these discourses
of Bossuet may offend or surprise minds that love to dwell upon the
more uniform and more exact continuity of Bourdaloue or of Massillon.

Victor Cousin is one among the somewhat numerous writers who, within the bounds of this same paper on Bossuet, fall under the touch of Sainte-Beauve's critical lance, that weapon borne ever in rest and ready for any encounter:

A great writer of our days, M. Cousin ... has been disposed once more
to despoil Louis XIV. of his highest glory in order to carry it all
back to the epoch preceding. M. Cousin has a convenient method of
exaggerating and aggrandizing the objects of his admiration: he
degrades or depresses their surroundings. It is thus that, to exalt
Corneille, in whom he sees AEschylus, Sophocles, all the Greek tragic
poets united, he sacrifices and diminishes Racine; it is thus that, in
order the better to celebrate the epoch of Louis XIII. and of the
regency which followed, he depresses the reign of Louis XIV.

It is Sainte-Beuve's specialty--in aim, whether in achievement or not--to be without the tendency thus charged upon M. Cousin, to violate proportion in his criticism. The insinuating delicacy of his adverse, or at least disparaging, critical judgment toward a distinguished contemporary author is well exemplified in the following passage, in which the critic, by his instinct as critic, is irresistibly drawn to make a return to Cousin. The wise reader familiar with Mr. Matthew Arnold will see how exactly the latter caught from his French master the trick of method here displayed:

Ah, I cannot refrain from expressing another thought. When M. Cousin
speaks so at his ease of Louis XIV., of Louis XIII., and of Richelieu,
confidently attributing superiority to that which he prefers and which
he thinks resembles him, I am astonished that he has never once asked
himself this question: "What would have been the gain, what the loss
to my own talent, this talent which is daily compared with that of the
writers of the great age--what would have been gained or lost to that
admirable talent" (I forget that it is he that is speaking) "if I had
had to write or to discourse, were it but for a few years, in the very
presence of Louis XIV., that is to say, of that royal good sense,
calm, sober, and august? And that which I should have thus gained or
lost, in my vivacity and my eloquence, would it not have been
precisely that which it lacks in the way of gravity, of proportion, of
propriety, of perfect justice, and, consequently, of true authority?"

Lamartine does not escape still another light thrust from this dangerous delicate lance, aimed yet again, with exquisite accuracy, through an unquestionable joint in the victim's harness:

"These two rivals in eloquence," says M. de Lamartine, speaking of
Bossuet and of Bourdaloue, "were passionately compared. _To the shame
of the time_, the number of Bourdaloue's admirers surpassed in a short
time that of the enthusiastic devotees of Bossuet. The reason of this
preference for a cold argumentation above a sublime eloquence lies in
the nature of human things. The men of middling stature have more
resemblance to their age than the giants have to their contemporaries.
The orators who deal in argument are more easily comprehended by the
multitude than the orators who are fired with enthusiasm; one must
have wings to follow the lyric orator." ... This theory, invented
expressly to give the greatest glory to the _lyric orators_ and to the
giants, is here at fault. M. de Bausset, author of a work on Bossuet,
has remarked, on the contrary, as a kind of singularity, that it never
entered any man's head at that time to consider Bossuet and Bourdaloue
as subject of comparison, and to weigh in the balance their merit and
their genius, as was so often done in the case of Corneille and of
Racine; or, at least, if they were compared, it was but very seldom.
To the honor and not to the shame of the time, the public taste and
sentiment took note of the difference. Bossuet, in the higher sphere
of the episcopate, remained the oracle, the doctor, a modern Father of
the Church, the great orator, who appeared on funeral and majestic
occasions; who sometimes re-appeared in the pulpit at the monarch's
request, or to solemnize the assemblies of the clergy, leaving on each
occasion an overpowering and ineffaceable recollection of his
eloquence. Meanwhile Bourdaloue continued to be for the age the usual
preacher by eminence, the one who gave a connected course of lectures
on moral and practical Christianity, and who distributed the daily
bread in its most wholesome form to all the faithful. Bossuet has said
somewhere, in one of his sermons: "If it were not better suited to the
dignity of this pulpit to regard the maxims of the Gospel as
indubitable than to prove them by reasoning, how easily could I show
you," etc. There, where Bossuet would have suffered from stooping and
subjecting himself to too long a course of proof and to a continuous
argumentation, Bourdaloue, who had not the same impatience of genius,
was, beyond doubt, an apostolic workman who was more efficient in the
long run, and better fitted for his task by his constancy. The age in
which both appeared had the merit to make this distinction, and to
appreciate each of them without opposing one to the other; and to-day
those who glory in this opposition, and who so easily crush Bourdaloue
with Bossuet, the man of talent with the man of genius, because they
think they are conscious themselves of belonging to the family of
geniuses, too easily forget that this Christian eloquence was designed
to edify and to nourish still more than to please or to subdue.

The "bright consummate flower" of Bossuet's eloquence is to be found in his Funeral Discourses. Of one of these, Sainte-Beuve, with a sudden sympathetic swell of kindred eloquence in description, speaks, in a passage with quotation from which we close our exemplifications of this famous critic:

The death of the Queen of England came to offer him (1669) the
grandest and most majestic of themes. He needed the fall and the
restoration of thrones, the revolution of empires, all the varied
fortunes assembled in a single life, and weighing upon one and the
same head; the eagle needed the vast depth of the heavens, and, below,
all the abysses and the storms of the ocean.

It has been to us some satisfaction that the wrong of distortion by reduction in scale done to the majestic figure of Bossuet in our own treatment of him, and unavoidable there, could thus in a measure be redressed by return to the subject in effective quotation from Sainte-Beuve. Looking back on the extracts preceding, we feel that enough is expressed, or suggested, in them, to justify us in saying, There is Bossuet.

But at any rate we have great confidence in saying, There is Sainte-Beuve.

3. BALZAC.

Honore de Balzac is one of the heroes of literature. He set himself labors of Hercules in literary production, and he toiled at his tasks of will with a tireless tenacity little less than sublime. The moral spectacle of such courageous industry in Balzac, the present writer admires, not the less, but the more, that the intellectual achievement resulting seems to him not commensurately great. Balzac's long "toil and endeavor" was not leavened and lightened and turned into play by that "reflex of unimpeded energy" in him which a lofty philosopher has defined happiness to be. He did his work hardly--with profuse sweat of his brow. His mind did not answer to that definition of genius which makes it a faculty of lighting its own fires. His fires Balzac lighted with late hours, artificial illumination, strong stimulant drinks. He burned himself out early in life--comparatively early, that is to say; he died at fifty-one.

The moral triumph of Balzac we have but half suggested. Not only did he lack the spontaneous joy of genius at work; he lacked also, for many and many a doubtful year, the encouragement of recognition and success. Book after book of his failed, and still he toiled on. The world was fairly conquered at last. The reverse of Tulliver's experience happened with Balzac. One man, in his case, proved "too many" for the world.

For his own part, he freely confesses, the present writer not only admires; he wonders. Balzac's novels do not please him, either as products of genius or as works of art. They please him solely as monuments of victorious labor. They have to his mind exactly the quality that was to have been expected from the history of their production. They smell of oil, they smack of sweat. They are full of stimulated, rather than stimulating, thought. So much as one passage in which imagination played its magnificent play in easy and easily perfect creation, one passage in which the words flowed of themselves, and did not come each pumped with a several stroke of author's will, he cannot remember ever to have found in Balzac. He wonders, therefore, and helplessly wonders, that Balzac should be esteemed, as he is, and that by some good judges, one of the greatest writers in the world.

What Balzac undertook was to write the whole "human tale of this wide world"--that is, to represent in fiction all the manifold phases and aspects of human life and character. He calls the entire series of his novels "The Human Comedy." This title, we have seen it stated, was not original with Balzac, but was adopted by him at the suggestion of a friend who hit upon it as a kind of balance and contrast to Dante's expression, "Divine Comedy." It is not quite a cynic conception of human character and human destiny that Balzac intended thus to express. Still, on the other hand, his view of human nature and human life cannot be said to be genial. The disagreeable preponderates in his fiction--the disagreeable one must call it, rather than the tragic. For true tragedy there is not height enough. In reading Balzac, you breathe for the most part an atmosphere of the not merely common, but--vulgar. Of course, the novelist himself would have said, Very well, such is man, and such is life. This one need not deny, but one can say, It was at least not desirable that readers should be obliged to feel the novelist to be himself vulgar, along with his characters. There is such a thing as refined dealing with people not refined.

Realism was Balzac's aim, and realism was the rock on which Balzac suffered double shipwreck. In seeking to be realistic, he became vulgar; and in seeking to be realistic, he became unreal. For there is an air of unreality diffused everywhere over the pages, meant to be realistic or nothing, of this voluminous writer. Balzac evolved the personages of his fiction out of his own consciousness. They are none of them human beings, such as you meet in the real world. They are _simulacra_, images, bodiless projections, of the author's own mind. They move over his canvas like the specters thrown by the magic-lantern on its screen.

Balzac and Dickens are sometimes paralleled. There certainly is in a number of particulars a superficial resemblance between them. Both undertake to be realists. Both concern themselves chiefly with people of the average sort--sort, perhaps, even tending toward the vulgar. Both exaggerate to a degree that makes them at times almost caricaturists. Both deal abundantly in minute detail of description. But the contrast too between them is great. Balzac is far less spontaneous than Dickens. You feel that Dickens improvises. You never feel this about Balzac. You can hear Balzac drive his Pegasus with shout and with lash. Dickens's Pegasus often flies with his bit between his teeth. Dickens was an observer of men and of things--of books, a student never; there is perhaps scarcely another instance in nineteenth-century literature of an author who owed so little as did Dickens to study of books. From books, on the other hand, Balzac purveyed a large share of his material. Dickens writes as if unconscious that a race of men like the critics existed. Balzac writes in view of the critics. These in fact seem to be his audience quite as much as do the general public. Balzac, beginning that novel of his from which we are presently to draw our sole brief extract to exhibit his manner, enters, according to a fashion of his, upon an elaborate unnecessary description of the house in which the scene of his action is laid. But he prefaces thus:

Before describing this house, it may be well, in the interest of other
writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic preliminaries,
since they have raised a protest from certain ignorant and voracious
readers who want emotions without undergoing the generating process,
the flower without the seed, the child without gestation. Is Art
supposed to have higher powers than Nature?

Such a sentence as that--prefatory, but in the body of the text, and not in a formal preface--would have been impossible to Dickens. In Balzac, it is the most natural thing in the world. And it discloses the secret of the character everywhere stamped on his production. He wrote as a professional writer. He conformed to a law that he himself imposed upon his genius, instead of leaving his genius free to be a law to itself. A real realist, a realist, that is to say, such by nature, and not merely by profession, a realist like De Foe, for example, could never have committed the offense against art of disturbing thus that very illusion of reality which he sought to produce, by exhibiting and defending the method adopted by him to produce it. There could not be a case imposing more obligation on the artist to conceal his art. But Balzac, instead, forces upon his reader the thought of art by calling its very name.

Balzac paints with a big brush and puts on plenty of color. No one need fear in reading him that he will miss delicate shades. There are none such to miss. Balzac does not suggest. He speaks right out. Nay, he insists. You shall by no means fail of understanding him.

But, over against everything that can thus justly be said in diminution of his worth, there remain the unalterable facts, of Balzac's great reputation, just now looming larger than ever, of his voluminous literary achievement, of his population of imaginary personages projected into the world of thought, by actual count more, we believe, than two thousand poll. There is published a portly biographical dictionary exclusively devoted to the characters of Balzac's fiction.

Paralyzed to choose, even to think of choosing, out of the enormous volume of this writer's laborious production, a single page for exemplifying his quality, we pitch desperately upon the conclusion of that story of his called by the accomplished American translator of it, Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, "The Alkahest," "The Search for the Absolute" is the author's own title. This work, belonging in the endless series of volumes dedicated to the display of the "comedy of human life" in all its phases, is a novel which undertakes to illustrate the effect on character and destiny of an exclusive supreme absorption in scientific pursuits. The hero has at length reached the catastrophe of his career. He is an old man who has wrecked fortune after fortune in chemical quest of a scientific chimera, The Absolute. A monomaniac before, he is paralytic now, and the last night of his life is slowly passing. Balzac: