Chapter XXIX: Sainte-Beuve

Gautier's critical writings, though they form such an enormous proportion of his total production, are already almost forgotten; he survives as the novelist and poet. But one of his contemporaries, who like him was both a poet and a critic, and whose name during their lifetime was frequently coupled with his, has had a different fate. The rank which Sainte-Beuve won for himself as a critic is so elevated as completely to overshadow his position as a poet, and as a historian in the usual sense of the word. As a poet he showed himself to be possessed of delicate and original talent; but he was an epoch-making critic, one of the men who inaugurate a system and found a new branch of art. In a certain sense it may be said that he was a greater innovator in his province than the other authors of the period in theirs; for there was modern lyric poetry before Victor Hugo, but modern criticism in the strict acceptation of the word did not exist before Sainte-Beuve. At any rate he remodelled criticism as completely as Balzac did fiction. During the last years of his life his authority was undisputed; nevertheless, it was not until some ten years after his death that the literary public beyond the frontiers of France awoke to a full sense of his preeminence. An excellent foreign critic of French literature, the German historian, Karl Hillebrand, has pronounced Sainte-Beuve's to be the master-mind of the period, an assertion which, though it may be an exaggeration, can only be called absurd if criticism be regarded as in itself a lower branch of art than the drama or lyric poetry. This, however, is surely now an antiquated standpoint. To the author that branch of art is the highest in which his nature finds fullest expression; and though there may be an order of precedence among intellects, it is extremely doubtful if there is an order of precedence among arts, and most doubtful of all when an art or branch of art has been remoulded by a productive intellect into its own special, almost personal, organ. So much is certain, that in reasoning power (not only in critical acumen) Sainte-Beuve holds the first place in the generation of 1830.

The peculiar quality of his mind was its capacity of understanding and interpreting an extraordinary number of other minds. If superiority to the other prominent individuals of the group cannot be claimed for him, the reason lies in the limitations of his gift. Amongst the minds he understood were not numbered the minds of fertile, unrefined geniuses like Balzac, and great but eccentric geniuses like Beyle. And, far-reaching as was his vision, he was seldom able to take a comprehensive view; few historians and thinkers have had such unsystematic minds. This defect had its good side; his freedom from all inclination to systematise kept him fresh to the last, enabled him perpetually, as it were, to slough his skin; so that the man who in 1827 attracted Goethe's attention by his first articles in the _Globe_, in 1869 was not only in complete, understanding sympathy with the group of young scientists and artists who at the moment gave France her claim to the consideration of Europe, but was in a manner their leader. To the very last year of his life he was regarded by all the best men as the natural general, under whose eye the "young guard" was specially anxious to distinguish itself. But his lack of system, his inability to grasp his subject as a whole, not only prevented Sainte-Beuve from distinguishing his name by any single great work, but even from ever attaining in his writings to grandeur of proportion, to the grand style. His eye was formed to see details, characteristic, important details, but no whole. He saw these details in constant, perpetually varying movement, the movement which is life, and by imitating all this movement in his brain and with his pen he gave his pictures a more exact resemblance to life than had ever been seen before. But he had not sufficient mastery over his details; he did not possess the gift of tracing apparent to deeper-lying causes, and these to a first cause.

As a critic he was only capable of describing the isolated individual, and even of the individual he only very occasionally gave a complete, final idea (Talleyrand, Proudhon); he showed him now from this side, now from that, now at one, now at another age, now in one, now in another relation to society. Even his short articles display a lack of the power of concentration; he hid his best ideas in subordinate clauses, his most suggestive thoughts in notes. He broke his bread of life into crumbs. He hid his gold, as peasants used to do, in dark corners, in holes in the floors and walls, at the bottom of chests and in stockings; he was incapable of moulding it into figures.

The freedom from system which was his strong point had this great advantage, that it preserved his writings from artificial symmetry. He never sacrificed for the sake of the inward equilibrium of his work a syllable of what he thought ought to be said; and much less would he have done so to make his description and his style graphic. He had no aversion for the complicate, the intricate, the unfinished. But the result of his lack of that philosophic spirit which largely consists in a tendency to summarise and the love of a whole as whole, is that one never receives powerful, simple impressions from his works. The important and the less important too often occupy the same plane. Regarded as an artist, he reminds us of those Japanese painters, the great artistic value of whose work began to be acknowledged in Europe about the year 1880. One reason why the pictures of these artists surprise and delight is, that there is not a trace of academic symmetry in them; they never completely satisfy us because they despise perspective, but they bring living things before us as if they were alive.

Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer on the 23rd of December 1804. His father, a clever government official and cultured gentleman, was fifty-two before he made up his mind to marry; and his mother at the time of her marriage was nearly forty. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve died before they had been married a year, two months before the birth of his son, whose critically reflective turn of mind was plainly an inheritance from the father he never saw. Sainte-Beuve the elder was interested in all kinds of literature, but especially in poetry; he left his books with their margins crowded with annotations and remarks, the spirit of which curiously anticipates the tendency of his son's writings.[1] Madame Sainte-Beuve, whose mother was an Englishwoman, taught her son English at an early age, and to her is doubtless due his taste (a very uncommon taste in France in those days) for English lyric poetry, for Bowles, Crabbe, Cowper, and especially for Wordsworth and those other poets of the Lake School whom he so often translated and quoted. Something melancholy and prematurely old in his temperament is in all probability attributable partly to the advanced age of both his parents, and partly to the effect produced on his mother's mind, before he was born, by the illness and death of her husband.

Sainte-Beuve was a timid, melancholy child. At the age of twelve, home influence had developed in him an almost alarming degree of childish piety; he served as an acolyte at the mass with extraordinary fervour. The fever of Catholicism was short, but it left its traces, which at one time in later life showed very plainly; and during all the earlier years of his youth the lad not only retained his reverence for Christianity, but dwelt much on religious doubts and theological questions. This lasted until, as a student, he felt himself at once drawn to the philosophers of the eighteenth century and to the living representatives of the sensationalistic philosophy, Tracy, Daunou, and Lamarck, with whose assistance he soon freed himself from the grasp of theology. His intellectual position on entering manhood was that of the pure empiricist; at a later period religious moods and tendencies reasserted themselves; but these again gave way to empiricism, which proved to be the final attitude of his mind. At school he had distinguished himself in history and languages; but, in spite of his strong literary tendencies, he determined, partly for the sake of his future, partly to counteract a too purely literary training, to study medicine. From 1823 to 1827, whilst by no means neglecting literature, he pursued the usual physiological and anatomical studies with ardour and interest. He was poor, but never in want; for he was frugal and extremely industrious.

The young medical student was anything but good-looking. His big round head, covered with fine and yet rough reddish hair, was almost too large for his body; and his figure was bad. But in the bright blue eyes, which seemed now large, now small, and which sometimes dilated strangely, there shone a thousand questions, smiled a mischievous wit, and dreamed a curiously ingratiating, half-poetic, half-sensual longing. As the poor, plain-looking student, his acquaintance with the fair sex was almost entirely limited to the frail sinners of the Quartier Latin. He had an ardently sensual, gross temperament, which demanded the immediate gratification of its desires; but with the gratification invariably came remorse and a strong feeling of humiliation. Quite as markedly developed as the sensuality was a dreamy, poetic imaginativeness, which, tinged as it was with a gentle melancholy, naturally took the direction of romanticism and mysticism. He had, perhaps, a little of the ugly man's involuntary jealous dislike of the men whose good looks capture feminine hearts at once, and yet he himself had something of their dangerously insinuating quality.

Early in 1827 Sainte-Beuve published in the _Globe_ two articles on Victor Hugo's _Odes et Ballades_, which procured him admission to the Romanticist circle. Hugo came to thank him, but did not find him at home. A few days later Sainte-Beuve returned the call. He found Hugo and his wife at breakfast, and thus made at the same moment the acquaintance of the two persons who were to have most influence over his life for many years to come. He soon became the accredited critic of the Romantic School. His first important task was to prove the connection of the new school with the older French literature, to provide it, so to speak, with Gallic ancestors. This task he accomplished in his excellent critical work, _Tableau de la Poésie française au XVIe Siècle_ (1827-28), the aim of which is to show plainly the thread which stretches across the classical age and connects the generation of 1830 with Ronsard, Du Bellay, Philippe des Portes, and those other authors of the Renaissance who had been so long and so unjustly despised. This book occupies the same position among Sainte-Beuve's works that _Les Grotesques_ does among Théophile Gautier's. It was written before _Les Grotesques_, and is as thorough and critically discriminating as Gautier's work is plastic and eccentric.

In 1829 followed Sainte-Beuve's first lyric essay, _Poésies de Joseph Delorme_, a collection of curious, elaborate poems which made no small sensation. They purported to be written by a young medical student who had died of consumption; but in the preface, under the transparent pseudonym, Sainte-Beuve described himself and his own life. Joseph Delorme is of the race of Obermann--poor, gifted, full of compassion for the woes of humanity, a lustreless genius like the founder of the race, but of even a more complex character than he; for Joseph is a philosopher who is unhappy because of his scepticism, an idealist who with all his idealism is addicted to low dissipation. The hero is the usual despairing youth of the 1830 period, but there is more of the bourgeois in him than in the heroes of Saint-Beuve's contemporaries; his despair is less magnificent and more true to nature. As regards form, the poems are remarkable for their return to the charming old French metres of Ronsard and Charles d'Orléans, and also for the frequency with which the sonnet (beloved of Sainte-Beuve as of Wilhelm Schlegel) recurs. But they interest us chiefly because of the tendency to realism which their author already begins to display, a realism which, though it can sometimes be traced to the influence of the English poets of the Lake School, is yet as a rule, with its daring choice of subjects (in the poem "Rose" for example), original and essentially French. The ideal element is represented by the author's ecstatic effusions on the subject of the _Cénacle_, the little fraternal circle of poets and painters into which he had lately been admitted, and the members of which he panegyrises, now collectively, now singly. His admiration of his friends knows no bounds. Some of the poems at the time of their appearance were ridiculed for their affectation ("Les rayons jaunes" undoubtedly verges on the ridiculous) others were considered vulgar. Guizot characterised Joseph Delorme as "un Werther jacobin et carabin" (Werther as the Jacobin and "medical"). On the whole, however, the book may be said to have had the decided success which it deserved.

Sainte-Beuve's next collection of poems, _Les Consolations_ (published in March 1830), his novel _Volupté_ (published in 1834), and the first two volumes of _Port-Royal_, mark the emotional and somewhat pious period in the life of their author. _Les Consolations_ is dedicated to Victor Hugo in terms of hysterical admiration coupled with expressions of Christian contrition, and Hugo's name occurs frequently in the book; but it was in reality quite as much an offering to Madame Hugo, who was the love of Sainte-Beuve's youth, and to whom the first poem and several others are addressed. Of his relations with her he wrote too openly in _Le Livre d'Amour_, a collection of poems which obviously treat of realities, and which, though printed, was never published.[2] And in the novel _Volupté_, too, we have no difficulty in recognising its author's relations with Victor Hugo and his household in Amaury's relations with the eminent politician, Monsieur de Couaën, and his wife.

Sainte-Beuve himself and many of his biographers have hinted that the works which he wrote during the period of his enthusiasm for Madame Hugo, all of which have a faint Catholic tinge or varnish, were directly inspired by that lady, who was a devout Catholic in her youth, though an ardent freethinker in later life, in the days when she wrote her husband's life to his dictation. It has been asserted that Sainte-Beuve, in his lover's ardour, went the length of accustoming himself to speak in her language and even to share her feelings. This explanation, however, I refuse to accept, as I feel convinced that Sainte-Beuve in his old age deceived both himself and others by speaking as he did of his youthful works. In a letter dated July 1863, he writes to Hortense Allart de Méritens, the authoress (Madame Saman): "I tried a little Christian mythology in my youth; but it has evaporated. It was for me the swan of Leda, a means of obtaining access to the fair and producing tenderness in them. Youth has time and employs every means." I object to this, to say the least of it, frivolous manner of explaining away a phenomenon which is plainly attributable to the natural attraction possessed by Catholicism for a youthfully pliant and dependent character, an attraction in this case strengthened by the general tendency of the period, which, as usually happens, was becoming a fashionable tendency before disappearing altogether. The period was the period of the revival of philosophic spiritualism. In 1828 Sainte-Beuve attended the lectures which Jouffroy, after his dismissal, gave in his own house; and he was also, like almost all the young men of his day, strongly influenced by Cousin. The fashionable philosophers converted him temporarily from sensationalism. Romanticism was still regarded by many of the younger men in the light in which it was originally regarded by Hugo, namely, as a reaction against the pagan art and literature of the Classicists; and one branch of the Romantic School was, from its eager desire for the poetic revival of medievalism, so closely associated with the young Catholic party which rallied round Lamennais and founded the newspaper _L'Avenir_ (to which Sainte-Beuve contributed articles), that it was not at all surprising that a few drops from the aspergill of the Neo-Catholics lighted upon the young Romantic writers, and found their way into their works. The part of _Volupté_ which describes conventual life, was actually written by Lacordaire. The piety which prevails throughout _Les Consolations_--and which annoyed many, amongst others Beyle, a sincere admirer of Sainte-Beuve--and the incense fumes which permeate the second part of _Volupté_, vividly recall corresponding phenomena in German Romanticism.

In spite of its diffuseness and heaviness, _Volupté_ is a delicately profound psychological study. It consists of confessions of the nature of Rousseau's, but recorded in a style which is richer in imagery, more saturated with colour, and more delicately shaded than Rousseau's; the emotionally lyric tone reminds us of Lamartine's _Jocelyn_, a work which treats the same kind of theme more chastely. Sainte-Beuve's book presents us with the life-story of a pleasure-seeking, dissipated youth, interspersed with many a profound, sagacious reflection. It represents the sensual and the tender impulses of the soul as equally destructive of the vigour and energy of youth. It treats mainly of those enervating friendships with young women, especially with young married women, in cultivating which clever young men often squander so much time. The word "squander" seems to me to convey Sainte-Beuve's meaning better than the word "lose"; for he himself reproaches a gifted writer whose vigorous style is lacking in shades, with having worked too hard and lived too lonely a life, with having injured himself by too seldom seeking the society "which is the best of all, and leads one to lose most time in the pleasantest way, the society of women."

Amaury, the hero of the book, is on intimate terms with three women. One, who is the wife of his teacher and chief, he loves more than he ventures to let her understand; the second, to whom he is betrothed, he gives up for the sake of the first; and yet at the very same time he allows himself to drift into an intimate friendship with the third, whom he alternately adores passionately, and pains by his cruel indifference--a friendship which neither satisfies him, nor saves him from indulging in the lowest debauchery. Intelligent, ambitious, and obstinately industrious as Amaury is, his intellectual vigour is gradually paralysed by all these entanglements, and he at last feels that there is no hope for him except in submission to the severest discipline of the Roman Catholic Church. His account of his life as a young man is given in the form of the confession of an ecclesiastic, and the unction of parts of it is insufferable; the outbursts of remorse, the moral and religious admonitions, the prayers and homilies, which interrupt the flow of the tale, are tiresome; but the reader is sufficiently compensated for them.

Two things make the book a remarkable one--in the first place, the perfect understanding which it displays of the development process and the diseases of the soul, an understanding which speaks of persistent self-examination, and foreshadows the coming critic; in the second place, the insight into feminine character, which reveals the feminine element in Sainte-Beuve's own nature, and prognosticates his unique success in the critical interpretation of the personalities of notable women. I append a few specimens of his keen observation and impressive reflections:--"How ungrateful youth is by nature! It throws away with a contemptuous gesture everything that has not been given to it by itself. It will only be bound by ties which it has formed itself, demands friends of its own choice, for itself alone, being certain that in its soul are treasures sufficient to buy hearts with, and life sufficient to fructify them. Hence we see it bestow itself for life on friends whom it did not know yesterday, and swear eternal devotion to women who are almost strangers." "How contemptible human friendships are! How they exclude one another! How they follow one another and drive one another away like waves! Alas! this house to which you repair every morning and every evening, which seems like your home and better than your home, and for which you neglect everything that hitherto has been sweet to you, this house, you may be quite certain, will some day lose favour in your eyes; you will avoid it as a fatal place, and if by chance your business leads you into its neighbourhood, you will take a long round to avoid seeing it. The cleverer you are, the stronger will be the feeling." Every one of a truthful disposition who has been under the painful necessity of concealing his or her real feeling, will understand the following sentence, and admire its brevity:--"I tried to express what I really felt, while apparently expressing what I did not feel--to be honest to myself and to mislead her." Here, again, is a mournful little picture of life:--"A brigade is marching slowly along a road. The enemy's troops, in ambush on both sides, make terrible havoc with their rifles, and in the end there is an open fight. The brigade succeeds in putting the enemy to flight, and when the general arrives in the evening at the nearest town with the lucky survivors of his force and the torn remnants of his flag, this is called a triumph. When some one part of our plans, our ambition, our love, has suffered less than the rest, we call this glory or success." And the following is an apt little simile. It is of jealous love Sainte-Beuve is writing;--"At this stage, when it desires absolute possession, when it is irritated and embittered by the slightest opposition, nay, even by the beloved object's affection for others, I can only compare it with those Asiatic despots who, in order to clear the way to the throne for themselves, assassinate all their nearest relations, even their own brothers."

With _Les Pensées d'Août_ Sainte-Beuve closed his career as a poet. It is the only one of his poetical ventures which was quite unsuccessful, and the poems which the volume contains are certainly his coldest; yet it seems to me, though my opinion is unsupported by any other critic, that it is in this work he first displays marked originality. It is realistic to an extent which is quite unique in the lyric poetry of the Romantic School; no poet had yet ventured to make such free use of the language and the surroundings of daily life. In the North, where a poet even to-day would hardly have the courage to give an omnibus or a railway platform a place in a lyric poem, such a work as _Les Pensées d'Août_ would still almost be regarded in the light of a specimen of the poetry of the future.

In it, as in _Les Poésies de Joseph Delorme_, we find several of the characteristics of the English Lake School transplanted to French soil. Sainte-Beuve, like the Englishmen, presents us with simple, sober pictures of real life, and his style, like theirs, is founded upon the conviction that there ought not to be any essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical compositions. But in Sainte-Beuve's poems we have, instead of the strange want of crispness and point of the English poems, a genuinely French dramatic tension. Each of them is a little drama developed within the limits of a short lyric narrative.

Take, as a good specimen, the poem entitled _À Madame la Comtesse de T_. The Countess to whom it is dedicated relates the story. She is travelling by steamer from Cologne to Mainz. To see the scenery better, she has seated herself in her carriage, which is in the fore part of the ship, and she is consequently beside the steerage passengers--servants, workmen and their wives, poor people of all descriptions. One of her children exclaims: "Mother, there is Count Paul!" She looks round and recognises the acquaintance named, a Polish political refugee (the year is 1831). His features are refined and his hands are white, but he is dressed in the old, shabby clothes of a working-man. He is in the company of a family of plain English workpeople. The husband is a coarse-looking man, who is always eating or smoking; his wife is, at the first glance, insignificant; they have a daughter with them, a pretty girl of about fourteen. The Countess's first idea is that the young Pole has been attracted by the girl; then she sees that it is the mother, whose eyes follow him wherever he goes. And this mother is no longer a young woman, though she must, not so long ago, have been very pretty; her figure, in spite of the poverty of her dress, is elegant, and her hair is beautiful. With a solicitude, which is not that of love, but of tenderness towards the being by whom one is beloved, the young man puts her cloak round her and holds the umbrella over her when it rains. He buys expensive grapes for her little boys. The Countess divines that in the distant town where he sought refuge he has found friends in this poor family. But he, like herself, is to go on shore at Mainz, and his friends are to continue their journey in the steamer.

"Montant sur le bateau, je suivis la détresse,
Le départ jusqu'au bout! Il baise avec tendresse
Les deux petits garçons, embrasse le mari,
Prend la main à la fille (et l'enfant a souri,
Maligne, curieuse, Ève déjà dans l'âme);
Il prend, il serre aussi les deux mains à la femme,
Évitant son regard.--C'est le dernier signal
De la cloche! Il s'élance! O le moment final!
Quand on ôte le pont et pendant qu'on démarre,
Quand le cable encor crie, ô minute barbare!
Au rivage mouvant, alors il fallait voir,
De ce groupe vers lui, gestes, coups de mouchoir;
Et les petits enfants, chez qui tout devient joie,
Couraient le long du bord d'où leur cri se renvoie.
Mais la femme, oh! la femme, immobile en son lieu,
Le bras levé, tenant un mouchoir rouge-bleu
Qu'elle n'agitait pas, je la vois là sans vie,
Digne que, par pitié, le Ciel la pétrifie!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Je pensai: Pauvre cœur, veuf d'insensés amours,
Que sera-ce demain, et ce soir, et toujours?
Mari commun, grossier, enfants sales, rebelles;
La misère; une fille aux couleurs déjà belles,
Et qui le sait tout bas, et dont l'œil peu clément
A, dans tout ce voyage, épié ton tourment:
Quel destin!--Lui pourtant, sur qui mon regard plonge,
Et qu'embarrasse aussi l'adieu qui se prolonge,
Descendit.--Nous voguions. En passant près de lui,
Une heure après: 'Monsieur, vous êtes aujourd'hui
Bien seul,' dis-je.--'Oui,' fit-il en paroles froissées,
'Depuis Londres, voilà six semaines passées,
J'ai voyagé toujours avec _ces braves gens_.'
L'accent hautain notait les mots plus indulgents.
--'Et les reverrez-vous bientôt?' osai-je dire.
--'Jamais!' répliqua-t-il d'un singulier sourire;
'Je ne les reverrai certainement jamais;
Je vais en Suisse; après, plus loin encor, je vais!'"

I would also call attention to a little poem which is a real work of genius, _Monsieur Jean, Maître d'école_. It is the story of a poor country schoolmaster, who, brought up in a foundling hospital, has known nothing of his parents until he one day suddenly finds out who his father is--no less a man than the famous Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, as his readers know, deposited the children of his wife Theresa (of whom he had no absolute certainty of being the father) in the Paris foundling hospital. The schoolmaster has not read Rousseau, but he begins now, and studies _Émile, La nouvelle Héloïse_, and all the other works with the deepest interest. He is more intensely conscious than other readers both of their fertile geniality and of the very slight feeling of personal responsibility displayed by their author. At last he can no longer resist the desire to make the acquaintance of his parents.

"Il part donc, il accourt au Paris embrumé;
Il cherche au plein milieu, dans sa rue enfermé,
Celui qu'il veut ravir; il a trouvé l'allée,
Il monte;... à chaque pas son audace troublée
L'abandonnait--Faut-il redescendre?--Il entend,
Près d'une porte ouverte, et d'un cri mécontent,
Une voix qui gourmande et dont l'accent lésine:
C'était là! Le projet que son âme dessine
Se déconcerte; il entre, il essaie un propos.
Le vieillard écoutait sans tourner le dos,
Penché sur une table et tout à sa musique.
Le fils balbutiait; mais, avant qu'il s'explique,
D'un regard soupçonneux, sans nulle question,
Et comme saisissant sur le fait l'espion:
'Jeune homme, ce métier ne sied pas à ton âge;
Epargne un solitaire en son pauvre ménage;
Retourne d'où tu viens! ta rougeur te dément!
'Le jeune homme, muet, dans l'étourdissement,
S'enfuit, comme perdu sous ces mots de mystère,
Et se sentant deux fois répudié d'un père.
Et c'était là celui qu'il voudrait à genoux
Racheter devant Dieu, confesser devant tous!
C'était celle.... O douleur! impossible espérance!"

And he hastens back to the country to practise in life as a poor schoolmaster some of the great precepts which are to be found in his father's works, but are set at naught by his practice. The good seed in Rousseau's _Émile_ germinates in the education which the children entrusted to this schoolmaster receive.

_Les Pensées d'Août_ was published in 1837. Thenceforward Sainte-Beuve was exclusively the critic.

[1] Some of the father's aphorisms are given as an appendix to Morand's edition of Sainte-Beuve's letters to the Abbé Barbe.

[2] The most important poems of this collection are printed in Pons's low-minded book, _Sainte-Beuve et ses inconnues_.