Chapter XXX: Sainte-Beuve

It was to follow his own peculiar, undoubted vocation that Sainte-Beuve gave up the practice of the art of poetry. It was only the art he forsook; for poetry, like an underground spring, communicated life and freshness to his critical investigations of even the driest and most serious subjects.

It is interesting to observe all the steps of the somewhat intricate process by which the first great modern critic was prepared for the exercise of his vocation. At the time when the Romantic circle was broken up by the Revolution of July, Sainte-Beuve stood on such good terms with the Legitimist leaders that Polignac was on the point of offering him the post of secretary to Lamartine, who was then about to proceed as ambassador to Greece. It was a post which the young poet would have had no objection to accept from them; hence he involuntarily cherished a certain feeling of resentment against the new government, under which almost all his literary friends received political preferment. The democratic element which lay latent in his character (he gave up the _de_ which he was entitled to prefix to his name), proclaimed itself; he became a species of interpreter of the naïvely ardent socialistic philosopher, Pierre Leroux, and continued to write in the _Globe_ even after it had passed from the hands of the Romantic dogmatists into those of the Saint-Simonists, and was appearing as their organ, with the motto: _À chacun selon sa vocation à chaque vocation selon ses œuvres_. Like Heine, he had an enthusiastic admiration for Père Enfantin; and in an article written in 1831 he ranks the religious writings of Saint-Simon high above Lessing's _Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts_.

Hardly had he separated from the Saint-Simonists, after the break-up of their "family" in 1832, than he entered into relations with Armand Carrel, the literary chief of Republican France. Although Sainte-Beuve, in the article he wrote on Carrel in 1852, ignores his own close connection with him, it is quite certain that he wrote in Carrel's paper, the _National_, for three years, and on political as well as literary subjects. He enrolled himself among the Republicans, and made acquaintance with them, as he had previously done with the Saint-Simonists, the Romanticists, and the Legitimists. And it was about this same time that his friend, Ampère, procured him admission to the circle of the Abbaye des Bois, where the venerable Madame Récamier reigned and Chateaubriand was worshipped. After a quarrel with Carrel on the subject of an article on Ballanche, which Carrel considered too favourable to Legitimacy, Sainte-Beuve allied himself with Lamennais, who had made overtures of friendship. What attracted him to Lamennais, whose confidant and adviser he soon became, was partly that great churchman's sincere and ardent devotion to the people, partly sympathy with his main theory, that it was necessary, in order to keep the steadily rising stream of democracy within its banks, to oppose to its powerful, and to a certain extent irrefutable, principle one still more powerful, namely, the religious principle, which addressed itself with authority to the people, and with no less authority to their kings. So strongly did Lamennais' attitude before his defection from the Church of Rome appeal to Sainte-Beuve, that he in one of his articles addressed a public, though qualified, reproach to his friend on the subject of this defection, maintaining that a man who had so lately striven to submit other men's minds to the authority of the church had no right to figure as an anti-papal demagogue.

The years 1834-37 were the most painful of Sainte-Beuve's life. In 1837 the sudden termination of his relations with Madame Hugo simultaneously severed his connection with the Romantic circle and obliterated his religious tendencies. He retired to Lausanne, where, in 1837-38, he began the course of lectures which formed the basis of his great work, _Port-Royal_. They had been planned and partly written before; the fact that they were delivered to an audience which, though Protestant, was orthodox, to a certain extent determined their tone. It was also influenced by Sainte-Beuve's intimacy with the eminent Swiss pastor, Vinet, one of the few men whom he all his life continued to revere. Vinet's character and intellect were equally interesting to Sainte-Beuve; he was a strictly and sincerely religious man, and an exceedingly acute and subtle critic of French literature. His representation and vindication of Christianity as _spirituality_ made an impression on Sainte-Beuve's mind, for which theological problems had a natural attraction! Vinet, seeing his friend such an attentive listener, thought that he had converted him, but Sainte-Beuve left Lausanne an unbeliever. After a tour in Italy he returned to Paris, where he resumed his occupation of critic, writing better than he had ever done before, and with this difference, that his criticism, instead of being as heretofore polemical, was now interpretative and instructive.

He became the highly esteemed literary critic of the _Revue des deux Mondes_, an influential man of the world, a welcome guest in aristocratic houses. He was regarded as a somewhat independent, but refined and dignified author; his politics were, generally speaking, those of the Right Centre. A lady, with whom he stood on terms of the closest friendship, ensured his position in the social world. This was Madame d'Arbouville, the authoress of some sad but pleasing stories; she was the widow of a General, and niece of Comte Molé, the Prime Minister. In winter Sainte-Beuve spent his leisure hours in her house or the houses of her friends, and in summer he paid visits to her relations in the country. He became Count Molé's friend and literary adviser, taking the part of this cultured nobleman and adherent of the Classic School against his own old Romantic allies, when these latter showed themselves wanting in taste and tact.[1] Supported by all the Monarchists and Classicists, he was elected a member of the French Academy in 1844, without having to submit to any preliminary defeat. (In one of the letters of Madame de Girardin, his clever enemy, a bitter attack is made on him apropos of this election.)[2] Particular piquancy was lent to the reception of the ex-Romanticist by the fact that it fell to the lot of Victor Hugo, who had been rejected three times before he was elected, to make the installation speech.

Sainte-Beuve, however, felt himself no more bound by his new social ties than by any previous ones. The circle was broken up by the Revolution of 1848; and as the victorious Republicans offended him mortally by publishing a perfectly imbecile charge against him, he felt more isolated than ever before.[3] He left France for the second time, and, settling in Liège, gave there the course of lectures out of which his book, _Chateaubriand et son Groupe littéraire_, was evolved, lectures the tone of which must have been very offensive to the Monarchical and Church party, and which point to the loss of cherished illusions.

Madame d'Arbouville died in 1830, and with her death the private ties which connected him with the old parties were severed. The democratic and socialistic instincts which had drawn him to Armand Carrel and the Saint-Simonists now drew him to the Second Empire. Like all the other men of 1830, with the solitary exception of Auguste Barbier, a poet of high principles but mediocre talent, Sainte-Beuve shared to a certain extent the popular enthusiasm for Napoleon; to him the Empire was an imperialism which had its support in the people and was inimical to the domination of the bourgeoisie; and now, in his famous and much abused article, _Les Regrets_, he not merely proclaimed his allegiance to Napoleon III., but wrote of Orleanists and Legitimists with a strangely oblivious scorn. He was a regular contributor to the _Constitutionnel_, then for a time wrote in the _Moniteur officiel_, afterwards resuming his connection with the _Constitutionnel_. During the last years of his life he wrote for the Opposition newspaper, the _Temps_. He was evidently perfectly honest; it was not for the sake of any advantage to himself that he changed his opinions; he simply now, as always, involuntarily allowed himself to be influenced--with the result of a clear gain of insight and understanding for his future criticism. He came very little into personal contact with the Emperor; in politics he was an adherent of the "Left"; Princess Mathilde and Prince Napoleon treated him as an honoured friend, and he turned the Princess's friendship to account in the most disinterested manner, namely, in the furtherance of unobtrusive, genuinely benevolent schemes.

It was not till the last stage of his career that Sainte-Beuve's talent attained to its full development. The chances are that an uncritical author will deteriorate as he grows older, but that a critic will improve; Sainte-Beuve improved year by year, to the very end of his life. The absolute truthfulness, which was naturally as marked a feature of his character as his industry, but which had often been held in check by one consideration or another, allowed itself ever freer play; and the capacity for work remained as great as in his youth. Sainte-Beuve's writings fill fifty volumes, and in all these volumes there is not a careless line, and inaccuracies are of the rarest occurrence. But it was not until the last stage of his career that he was courageous enough to give perfectly free expression to his real opinions on religious and philosophical subjects. He now eased his mind of everything that he had repressed since the youthful days when he studied the philosophers of the eighteenth century. His want of appreciation of Balzac and Beyle, the one a man of a much coarser, the other of a much more eccentric nature than his own, must not render us oblivious of the courage and determination with which he championed the rising generation of French authors, even such writers as Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, whom he did not altogether understand. Nor ought it to be forgotten that he refused to write an article on Napoleon's _Vie de César_, and that in the Senate he distinguished himself as the solitary but determined opponent of clericalism.

In March 1867 he defended Renan and his _Vie de Jésus_. In June of the same year, when it was proposed (apropos of a complaint from the magnates of the town of Saint-Etienne) to exclude from the public libraries accessible to the people all literature objectionable to the clergy, including the works of Voltaire, Rabelais, &c, he was the solitary member of the servile, priest-ridden Senate who boldly championed intellectual liberty and warmly defended the honour of French literature. The students, who in 1855 had hissed him as an Imperialist, now honoured him with a deputation and a banquet. The lying rumours spread by the clerical press on the subject of a small dinner-party which he inadvertently happened to give on Good Friday, 1868, represented him in the light of an antichrist, of a reincarnated Voltaire; and when in May 1869 he made a last effort, and with a weak voice but stout heart spoke in the Senate in defence of liberty of the press and against the Catholic Universities Bill, his name became a war-cry, became the symbol of free thought. In January 1869 he renounced his allegiance to Imperialism. In October of the same year he died, after five years of illness and a long period of terrible suffering, borne with stoic fortitude.

Sainte-Beuve, with his exceptionally impressionable nature, underwent a whole series of religious, literary, and political transformations. These constituted the school he had to pass through to become the founder of modern criticism. Despite all his changes of opinion, we are safe in asserting that he was honest. Private interest can have had little power in great things over a man with a nature as truthful as that which reveals itself in his writings. Truth and honesty are, as Franklin says, like fire and flame; they have a certain natural brightness which cannot be counterfeited.

[1] See Sainte-Beuve's article on Alfred de Vigny's reception into the Academy, and also the letter, published by himself, which was written to him by a lady (Madame Hugo) on the occasion of the same event.

[2] _Lettres parisiennes_, i v. 170.

[3] He was accused of having accepted bribes from the secret fund of Louis Philippe's government. What lay at the foundation of the charge proved to have been a grant of a sum of--one hundred francs--for the repairing of a stove in the Mazarin Library, of which Sainte-Beuve was librarian.