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Etext by Ian Hillman
1 Correspondance de C. A. Sainte-Beuve (1822-'69). Paris, Calmaun Lévy, 1878.
WHEN, in publishing some years since the small collection of letters which Sainte-Beuve had addressed to his gracious and appreciative friend the Princess Mathilde, his last secretary, M. Troubat, announced his intention of getting together and bringing to the light the general correspondence of the great critic, the thing seemed a capital piece of literary good news. After a considerable interval the editor has redeemed his promise, and we have two substantial volumes of Sainte-Beuve's letters. The result may be said, on the whole, to be a very interesting one—-our prospect of high entertainment was not illusory. The letters extend from the year 1822 to the autumn of 1869, the moment of the writer's death, and are naturally most abundant during the closing years of his career—-the second volume occupying entirely the period from 1865. The editor mentions that during the passage of the second volume through the press a number of letters, of whose existence he had not been aware, came into his hands. These he has reserved for a supplementary volume; the reader will have to interpolate them at their proper dates. I do not longer await the appearance of this volume—-it was promised several months ago—-in order to speak of it's predecessors, for these are complete in themselves, and are so rich in interesting matter that I shall be able to do them but scanty justice.
Sainte-Beuve's letters do nothing but complete a portrait which was already a very vivid one. Sainte-Beuve had painted his own likeness in a myriad fine, unerring, cumulative touches; no writer was ever more personal, more certain, in the long run, to infuse into his judgments of people and things those elements out of which an image of himself might be constructed. In Sainte-Beuve the whole man was in the special work—-he was all a writer, a critic, an appreciator. He was literary in every pulsation of his being, and he expressed himself totally in his literary activity. No character and no career were ever more homogeneous. He had no disturbing or perverting tastes; he suffered no retarding or embarrassing accidents. He lost no time, and he never wasted any. He was not even married; his literary consciousness was never complicated with the sense of an unliterary function. His mind was never diverted or distracted from it's natural exercise—-that of looking in literature for illustrations of life, and of looking in life for aids to literature. Therefore it is, as I say, that his work offers a singularly complete image of his character, his tastes, his temper, his idiosyncrasies. It was from himself always that he spoke—-from his own personal and, as they say in France, intimate point of view. He wrote himself down in his published pages, and what was left for his letters was simply to fill in the details, to supply a few missing touches, a few inflections and nuances. As a matter of course, Sainte-Beuve was not an elaborate letter-writer. He had always his pen in his hand, but he had little time for set epistles. His literary career was an intensely laborious one—-his time, attention, and interest, his imagination and sympathies were unceasingly mortgaged. The volumes before us contain almost no general letters—-letters purely sociable and human. The human and sociable touch is frequent, it is perpetual; to use his own inveterate expression, he “slips it in” wherever there is an opening. But his letters are almost always rather brief notes, dictated by some professional or technical occasion. There are very few letters devoted to giving an account of his personal situation, of his movements and adventures, of the incidents of his life. Sainte-Beuve's adventures, indeed, were not numerous, and the incidents in his life were all intellectual, moral, literary incidents—-the publication of his works, the changes, the phases, the development of his opinions. He never travelled; he had no changes of place, of scenery, of society, to chronicle. He once went to Liége, in Flanders, to deliver a course of lectures, and he spent a year at Lausanne for the same purpose; but, apart from this, his life was spent uninterruptedly in Paris.
Of course, when one makes the remark that a man's work is in a peculiar degree the record of a mind, the history of a series of convictions and feelings, the reflection of a group of idiosyncrasies, one does not of necessity by that fact praise it to the skies. Everything depends upon the value of the mind in question. it so happened that Sainte-Beuve's was a wonderful one—-a mind so rich and fine and flexible, that this personal accent, which sounds everywhere in his writings, acquired a superior savour and an exquisite rarity. He had indeed a most remarkable combination of qualities, and there is something marvellous in the manner in which he reconciled certain faculties, which are usually held to be in the nature of things opposed to each other. He had, to begin with, two passions, which are commonly assumed to exclude each other—-the passion for scholarship and the passion for life. He was essentially a creature of books, a literatus; and yet to his intensely bookish and acquisitive mind nothing human, nothing social, was alien. The simplest way to express Sainte-Beuve's high plan is perhaps to say that, putting aside the poets and novelists, the purely imaginative and inventive authors, he is the writer who has imported into literature the largest element of life. No scholar was ever so much of an observer, of a moralist, a psychologist; and no observer, surely, was ever so much of a scholar. He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart. He made use in literature, in an extraordinary manner, of the qualities that are peculiarly social. Some one said of him that he had the organization of a nervous woman and the powers of acquisition of a Benedictine. Sainte-Beuve had nerves assuredly; there is something feminine in his tact, his penetration, his subtlety and pliability, his rapidity of transition, his magical divinations, his sympathies and antipathies, his marvellous art of insinuation, of expressing himself by fine touches and of adding touch to touch. But all this side of the feminine genius was in Sainte-Beuve re-enforced by faculties of quite another order—-faculties of the masculine stamp—-the completeness, the solid sense, the constant reason, the moderation, the copious knowledge, the passion for exactitude and for general considerations. In attempting to appreciate him, it is impossible to keep these things apart; they melt into each other like the elements of the atmosphere; there is scarcely a stroke of his pen that does not contain a little of each of them. He had ended by becoming master of a style of which the polished complexity was a complete expression of his nature—-a style which always reminds one of some precious stone that has been filed into a hundred facets by the skill of a consummate lapidary. In Sainte-Beuve the facets are all there; the stone revolves and exhibits them all in the course of a single paragraph. When I speak of attempting to appreciate him, I know it is not an easy matter, and I have no intention of undertaking a task for which his own resources would have been no more than sufficient. He might have painted his portrait himself; but no other artist holds in his hand those fine-tipped, flexible brushes with which such a likeness should be pointed and emphasized. Various attempts, nevertheless, have been made to appreciate Sainte-Beuve—-as was eminently natural and inevitable. He spent his life in analysing and pondering other people, and it was a matter of course that he also should be put into the scales. But, as a general thing, on these occasions they were not held with a very even hand; as too often happens in France, the process was invalidated by party passion. This is especially the case with the hostile judgments that have been passed upon the great critic—-of which the number, as may well be imagined, is not small. Sainte-Beuve had wounded too many susceptibilities and vanities—-had taken upon himself functions too thankless and invidious—-to find the critics couch a bed of roses. And he not only offended individuals, he offended societies and “sets,” who, as a general thing, never forgave him, and who took their revenge according to their lights and their means. The very pivot of Sainte-Beuve's intellectual existence was what he would have called the liberty of appreciation; it was upon this he took his stand—-it was in the exercise of this privilege that his career unfolded itself. Of course he did not claim a monopoly of the privilege, and he would never have denied that the world was at liberty to appreciate Sainte-Beuve. The greater wisdom, to my mind, was on his side; his great qualities—-his intense interest in the truth of any matter, his desire to arrive at the most just and comprehensive perception of it, his delight in the labour involved in such attempts, and his exquisite skill in presenting the results of such labour—-these things have never been impugned. Into the innumerable hostilities and jealousies of which he was the object—-the resentments more or less just, the reproaches more or less valid, the calumnies more or less impudent—-no stranger, fortunately, need pretend to penetrate. These are matters of detail, and here the details are altogether too numerous. Sainte-Beuve's greatest admirers are not obliged to accept him unconditionally. Like every one else, he had the defects of his qualities. He had a very large dose of what the French call “malice”—-an element which was the counterpart of his subtlety, his feminine fineness of perception. This subtlety served him not only as a magical clew to valuable results, but it led him to play tricks of a sometimes unprofitable kind. It led him to analyse motives with a minuteness which was often fatal to their apparent purity, it led him to slip in—-to glisser, as he always says—-the grain of corrosive censure with the little parcel of amenities. In feats of this kind, Sainte-Beuve was really wonderful; he strikes the reader as more than feminine—-as positively feline. It is beyond question that he has at times the feline scratch. The truth is, that his instrument itself—-his art of expression—-was almost a premium upon the abuse of innuendo. The knowledge that he could leave the impression without having said the thing, must frequently have been an intellectual temptation. Besides, it may be said that Sainte-Beuve's scratch was really, on the whole, defensive, or, at the worst, vindictive; it was, to my belief, never wanton or aggressive. We each have our defensive weapon, and I am unable to see why Sainte-Beuve's was not a legitimate one. He had the feline agility and pliancy; nothing was more natural than that he should have had the feline claw. There is nothing surprising in the tone in which he was usually alluded to by those of his contemporaries who were not fond of him—-in the charges of “perfidity” and malignity; only we must not allow these things too much weight. Sainte-Beuve defended himself, as I have said, in his own manner; he was extremely susceptible and sensitive; he was even a trifle rancorous; he rarely forgave an injury. I spoke just now of his being “personal,” and there is no doubt that he was sometimes so in the invidious sense of the word, as well as in the honourable sense in which I then used it. I do not mean that he sinned in this respect after the fashion of certain American newspapers—-that he was coarsely abusive and intrusive, that he exercised himself upon the private and domestic affairs and idiosyncrasies of the objects of his criticism. But he apprehended the personality, the moral physiognomy of the people to whom he turned his attention—-Victor Cousin, for instance, Lamartine, Villemain, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand—-with an extraordinary clearness and sharpness; he took intellectual possession of it, and never relaxed his grasp. The image was always there, with all it's features, for familiar reference; it illuminated and coloured every allusion that Sainte-Beuve had occasion to make to the original. “What will you have?” he would have said; “I am so intensely impressible, and my impressions are so vivid, so permanent. One can go but by one's impressions; those are mine. Heaven knows how the plate has been polished to take them!” Sainte-Beuve was very apt to remember people's faults in considering their merits. He says in one of his letters that he is more sensible of certain great faults than of a certain order of merits. And then, with his passion for detail, for exactitude and completeness, for facts and examples, he thought nothing unimportant. To be vague was the last thing possible to him, and the deformities or misdemeanours of people he had studied remained in his eyes, as definite as the figures in a table of arithmetical factors.
His great justification, however, it seems to me, is, that the cause that Sainte-Beuve defended was the largest of all, for it was simply the cause of liberty, in which we are all so much interested. This, in essence, is what I mean by saying that certain of those habits of mind which made many people dislike him were defensive weapons. It was doubtless not always a question of defending his own character, but it was almost always a question of defending his position as a free observer and appreciator. This is the fine thing about Sainte-Beuve, and the only thing with which, as strangers, happily detached from that imbroglio of rival interests and ambitions in which his lot was cast, we need greatly concern ourselves. In a society that swarmed with camps and coteries, with partisans and advocates, Sainte-Beuve was more than any one else the independent individual, pinning his faith to no emblazoned standard, and selling his vote to no exclusive group. The literary atmosphere in France has always been full of watchwords and catchwords, the emblems and tokens of irreconcilable factions and of what may be called vested literary interests. Sainte-Beuve's instinct, from the beginning of his career, was to mistrust any way of looking at things which should connect the observer with a party pledged to take the point of view most likely to minister to it's prosperity. Sainte-Beuve cared nothing for the prosperity of parties; he cared only for the ascertainment of the reality and for hitting the nail on the head. He only cared to look freely—-to look all round. The part he desired to play was that of the vividly intelligent, brightly enlightened mind, acting in the interest of literature, knowledge, taste, and spending itself on everything human and historic. He was frankly and explicitly a critic; he attributed the highest importance to the critical function, and he understood it in so large a way that we can easily agree with him. The critic, in his conception, was not the narrow lawgiver or the rigid censor that he is often assumed to be; he was the student, the inquirer, the observer, the interpreter, the active, indefatigable commentator, whose constant aim was to arrive at justness of characterization. Sainte-Beuve's own faculty of characterization was of the rarest and most remarkable; he held it himself in the highest esteem; he valued immensely his impression. There is something admirable in his gravity, consistency, and dignity on this point. I know nothing more finely characteristic of Sainte-Beuve than a phrase which occurs in one of the volumes before me in the course of his correspondence with Madame Christine de Fontanes on the subject of the biographical notice he had undertaken to supply for a new edition of her father's works. The whole correspondence is most interesting, and shows Sainte-Beuve at his best—-full of urbanity and tact, but full also of firmness and reason, knowing exactly what he wishes and means, and adhering to it absolutely. M. de Fontanes, whose reputation has sensibly faded now, was a critic and poet of eminence under the First Empire and the Restoration his daughter was editing a “definitive” collection of his writings, and Sainte-Beuve had sent her his own article to read before insertion. The tone of the article was respectful and sympathetic (it is included at present among his “Portraits Littéraires"), but to certain points in his judgment of her father the Comtesse de Fontanes had taken exception. Sainte-Beuve offered to withdraw the article altogether, but he refused to alter a word. “Upon anything else in the world I would yield,” he says; “pas sur les choses de la plume quand une fois je crois avoir dit (not on the things of the pen when once I think I have hit it). . . . That's my weakness,” he adds; “can you forgive me?” For my own part, I can forgive him easily; I should have found it hard to forgive him if he had acted otherwise. All Sainte-Beuve is in those few words—-all his famous “method,” which has been so much talked about, and, one may almost say, all his philosophy. His method was to “hit it”—-to “say it,” as he says—-to express it, to put his fingers on the point; his philosophy was to accept and make the best of truths thus discriminated. He goes on to give Madame Christine de Fontanes several examples of what he means: “I wrote a biographical notice of M. Ampère the elder, from private documents supplied by the son, my friend. I didn't read him the notice. He only saw it printed, and he was contented, save with a word that I had slipped in upon something that I believed to be a weakness of character in M. Ampère with regard to great people. He said to me, 'I was pleased with it all, except that word, which I would have begged you to leave out if I had seen it beforehand.' It was just for that that I had not submitted my article to him. If I had not been free to write that word I would not have written the notice. . . . When I wrote upon Madame de Staël,” he goes on, “Madame de Broglie [her daughter] sent for me, and, with all that authority of grace and virtue which was hers, prescribed to me certain limits; she desired me to communicate my article in advance; I was unwilling to do so. When she came to read it she was pleased, except with regard to a page which nothing in the world would have induced me to withdraw, for it consisted of my reserves and my insinuations (with regard to the 'romantic' life at Coppet).” Nothing could be more characteristic of Sainte-Beuve than this frank allusion to his insinuations. To “insinuate” was a part of his manner, and was to his sense a perfectly legitimate way of dealing with a subject. Granting certain other of the conditions of his activity, I hold he was quite right. And, indeed, there is nothing intrinsically unlawful in an insinuation; everything depends upon the tone, the manner, the spirit, the cause in which it is made. “From all this,” he pursues, after various other remarks upon the points at issue with Madame de Fontanes, “I conclude that it is impossible that the notice should go into the edition. On your side is your duty; on mine is a feeling which I don't know how to name, mais qui est ma nature même.” It was, in fact, Sainte-Beuve's “very nature” to trust his impressions and to abide by what he considered his last analysis of a matter. He knew with what extreme intelligence he had regarded the point—-he knew the light, the taste, the zeal, the experience he had brought to bear upon it. A certain side of his feeling about criticism is strikingly expressed in one of the later letters (in date) of this collection. The epistle seems to me so good, so full of a sense of the realities of life as distinguished from the shadows, that I shall take the liberty of quoting the greater part of it. It contains an allusion, by the way, which helps to understand the little discussion of which I have just partly given an account. Sainte-Beuve is writing to M. Ernest Bersot:
“Is it not necessary,” he asks, “to break with that false conventionality, that system of cant, which declares that we shall judge a writer not only by his intentions, but by his pretensions? It is time that this should come to an end. I will take the critics as instances. What! am I to see nothing of M. de Fontanes but the great master, polished, noble, elegant, trimmed with fur, religious—-not the quick, impetuous, abrupt, sensual man that he was? What! La Harpe shall be but a man of taste, eloquent in his academic chair, and I shall not see him of whom Voltaire used to say, 'Le petit se fâche!' And for the present, come now—-I speak with you without circumlocution—-I have no animosity at heart, and I appreciate those who have been, in whatever degree, my masters; but here are five-and-thirty years, and more, that I live before Villemain, the great talent, the fine mind, so draped and decorated with generous, liberal, philanthropic, Christian, civilizing sentiments, etc.—-and, in fact, the most sordid soul—- le plus méchant singe qui existe. What must one do in definition—-how must one conclude with respect to him? Must one go on praising his noble, lofty sentiments, as is done invariably round about him? And, as this is the reverse of the truth, must one be a dupe and continue to dupe others? Are men of letters, historians, and moralistic preachers nothing more than comedians, whom one has no right to take outside of the rôle that they have arranged for themselves? Must one see them only on the stage, and look at them only while they are there? Or else is it permitted, when the subject is known, to come boldly, though at the same time discreetly, and slip in the scalpel and show the weak point of the breastplate—-show the seam, as it were, between the talent and the soul—-to praise the one, but to mark also the defect of the other, perceptible even in the talent itself and in the effect that it produces in the long run? Will literature lose by this? It is possible; but moral science will gain. That's where we are going, fatally. There is no longer such a thing as an isolated question of taste. When I know the man, then only can I explain to myself the talker, and especially that species of talker that is the most artful of all—-the one who prides himself on having nothing of the mere talker left. And the great men (you will say), and the respect one owes them, and the reputation that must be so dearly paid for? Very true; every man who competes for praise and celebrity is devoted to every infamy by that very fact. It is the law. Molière is insulted by Bossuet, Goethe by the first rowdy that comes along; only yesterday Renan and Littré by Dupanloup—-and insulted in his character, in his morality. What is to be done about it? It isn't by cuddling one's self that one can escape from it. One must be something or some one; and in that case one resists—-one has one's army—-one counts in spite of one's detractors. As soon as you penetrate a little under the veil of society, as in nature, you see nothing but wars, struggles, destructions, and recompositions. This Lucretian view of criticism isn't a cheerful one; but, once we attain to it, it seems preferable, even with it's high sadness, to the worship of idols.”
There are many things to be said about such a dissertation as that, and among them it may be said that there is something harsh and invidious in it's tone, and that, in whatever degree it may testify to that love of ascertaining the reality which I have spoken of as Sainte-Beuve's great merit, it indicates a good deal of skill in placing the reality in an unbecoming light. This is not the effect, however, that it produces upon my own mind; I take it as the expression of a wholesome impatience of that dull and unintelligent vision of things which so often passes in literature as adequate and decorous, and which, in fact, is poor sentiment quite as truly as it is poor criticism. Sainte-Beuve was a man of imagination and, as our ancestors used to say, of sensibility; as a critic, he had lively sympathies. But he was not a sentimentalist; he was incapable of preferring a contemplation of the surface to a knowledge of the internal spring.
If it be needful to admit that the sharper side of Sainte-Beuve's temperament comes out in such a passage as I have just quoted, it may be added that these volumes are by no means without testimony to the extreme acuteness with which he could feel irritation, and the inimitable neatness and lucidity with which he could express it. The letter to M. Villemain, of the date of September, 1839, and that to Victor Cousin, of July, 1843, are highly remarkable in this respect, and remarkable, too, for the manner in which they appeal to the sympathy of a reader who is totally unacquainted with the merits of the quarrel. The delicate acerbity of the tone, the absence of passion, of violence, or confusion, produce almost an impression of beauty, and our intellectual relish of the perfection with which he says what he desires suffices by itself to place us on his side. There is something essentially French in the tone of Sainte-Beuve's excited susceptibilities; it is hard to imagine an Englishman addressing to a friend, whose conduct he holds to have absolved him from further friendly allegiance, quite the same sort of reproaches as those which Sainte-Beuve conveys in so remarkably tidy a packet to his distinguished fellow critics. These are quarrels of literary—-of intensely literary—-men; and even an Englishman who rejoices in the questionable privilege of possessing what is called the artistic temperament would hardly measure so explicitly the injuries offered to his “personality.” An Englishman's disposition is simpler and less expressive—-his dignity is less vigilant, more confident. There are various examples of Sainte-Beuve's skill in that process known to the French as telling a person son fait. “I only ask of you one thing,” he writes to Madame Louise Colet, who had pestered him to publish a critical appreciation of her literary productions, “to admire you in silence, without being obliged to point out to the public just where I cease to admire you.” In the letters to the Princess Mathilde there occurs a very entertaining episode, related by Sainte-Beuve to his sympathetic correspondent. A lady had sent him her manuscript commonplace-book to read, with the request that he would give an opinion upon the literary value of it's contents. Turning it over, Sainte-Beuve encountered a passage relating to himself, and not present to the lady's mind when she sent him the volume—-a passage of a highly calumnious character, attributing to him the most unattractive qualities, and accusing him of gross immorality. He copies out for the Princess the letter with which he has returned the manuscript of his imprudent friend, in which, after administering a rebuke of the most ingeniously urbane character, he terminates by begging her “to receive the assurance of an esteem which he shall never again have occasion to express.” The whole letter should be read. Even in perfectly friendly letters his famous “malice” crops out—-it has, here and there, an even slightly diabolical savour. A most interesting letter to Charles Baudelaire, of the year 1858, is full of this quality, especially in the closing lines: “ . . . It isn't a question of compliments. I am much more disposed to scold [Baudelaire had just sent him “Les Fleurs du Mal"], and if I were walking with you on the edge of the sea, along a cliff, without pretending to play the Mentor, I would try and trip you up, my dear friend, and throw you suddenly into the water, so that, as you know how to swim, you should henceforth take your course out there in the sunshine and the tide.” The most interesting parts of the contents of these volumes, however, I have found to be the graver and more closely personal ones. In the history of a mind like Sainte-Beuve's every autobiographical touch has a high interest. There are a number of autobiographical touches bearing upon his material life, and illustrating his extreme frugality and the modesty—-the more than modesty—-of his literary income. “From 1830 to 1840,” he says, “I lived in a student's room (in the Cour du Commerce) on a fourth floor, and at the rate of twenty-three francs a month, my breakfasts included.” In 1840 he was appointed titular librarian at the Bibliothèque Mazarine, and then “I found myself rich, or at my ease, for the first time in my life. I began to study again, I learned Greek; my work contains indications of this increase of leisure, and of my being able to do it as I chose. Then came the Academy, toward 1843; I became a member of the committee of the Dictionary, and really I had hard work to spend my income. To do so, I had to buy rare books, for which the taste came to me little by little . . . . I have never had a debt in my life . . . . they attack me there on my strong side. I have my weaknesses, I have told you so: they are those which gave to King Solomon the disgust of everything and the satiety of life. I may have regretted feeling sometimes that they quenched my ardour—-but they never perverted my heart.”
Of autobiographical touches of the other sort—-those that bear upon his character and his opinions—-there are a considerable number—-a number which, however, would be a good deal larger if the letters written before the year 1860 had been more carefully preserved by his correspondents. I marked a great many of these passages as I read, but I must content myself with a few extracts. There was an element of philosophic stoicism in Sainte-Beuve, which is indicated in his earliest letters; the note is struck at intervals throughout the correspondence. “Take care of yourself,” he says to one of his friends, in a letter written at the age of twenty-four; “pass the least time possible in regrets; resign yourself to having had no youth, no past, no future; I don't tell you not to suffer from it, not to die of it even, at the end; but I tell you not to lose your temper over it, nor to let it make you stand still and stamp.” This is quite the same man who found himself impelled to write in 1864: “The more I go on the more indifferent I become; only, judgments take form within me, and, once established, after being shaken and tested two or three times, they never take their departure. I believe, moreover, that I have no animosity. Observe that I have no time for that; animosities themselves need to be cultivated. Obliged, as I am, to change so often the direction of my mind and my interest, to fasten it and make it sink into writings and authors so different, trying to find in each of them the greatest possible amount of truth, I grow case-hardened to pricks and irritations, and, after a little while, I don't even know what they are meant for. But, I repeat to you—-and it is the misfortune and also a little the honour of the critical spirit—-my judgments abide within me.” That is the Sainte-Beuve of my predilection—-I may almost say of my faith—-the Sainte-Beuve whose judgments had no element of vulgarity, but were always serious, comprehensive, touched with light. I see no element of narrowness or obstinacy in the declaration I have just quoted; I only see the perceptive mind, the intelligence. There is an expression of this ripe intelligence, this faculty of perception resting upon a sense of experience, in a letter of 1863 to a female friend: “We are getting ready for a great battle, in which philosophic minds will be known by true marks. I am one of them, after all. I went in for a little Christian mythology in my day, but that has evaporated. It was like the swan of Leda, a means of getting at the fair and wooing them in a more tender fashion. Youth has time and makes use of everything. Now I am old and I have chased away all the clouds. I mortify myself less, and I see plus juste. It is a pity that all this can not last, and that the moment when one is most master of one's self and one's thoughts should be that at which they are nearest faltering and finishing.” I don't know at what period Sainte-Beuve disentangled himself from the “Christian mythology,” but already in 1845 he makes a striking allusion to what he deems to be the collapse of his sentimental faculty: “Your letter touched me, honoured me; but I always find myself without words before your praise, feeling so little worthy of it, passed as I have into the state of a pure critical intelligence, and assisting as I do with a melancholy eye at the death of my heart. I judge myself, and I rest calm, cold, indifferent. I am dead, and I see myself dead—-but without emotion or confusion. Whence comes this strange state? Alas! there are causes old and deep. Here I am talking to you suddenly as to a confessor; but I know you are so friendly, so charitable—-and it is this, this last point, which is everything, and which the world calls the heart, that is dead in me. The intellect shines over the graveyard like a dead moon.” This is strongly stated; apparently Sainte-Beuve is speaking of a certain special function of the heart which, after forty, is not very active in any one. Of a certain intellectual cordiality, the power of tender, of sympathetic appreciation, he gave very frequent proof during the remainder of his long career. If his heart was dead, he had at least what may be called the imagination of the heart. Moreover, the heart can hardly be said to die. In some cases it has never existed; and in these it is not likely to spring into being. But, if it has existed, it is never distinctly got rid of. It changes it's forms of manifesting itself, but there is always a savour of it in the conduct.
It was to be expected that the letters of a great critic should contain a great deal of good criticism, and in this respect these volumes will not be found disappointing. They contain a great variety of fragmentary judgments, and of characteristic revelations and sidelights. With his great breadth of view, his general intelligence, and his love of seeing “juste,” Sainte-Beuve was nevertheless a man of strong predispositions, of vigorous natural preferences. He never repudiated the charge of having strong idiosyncrasies of taste. This, indeed, would have been most absurd; for one's taste is an effect, more than a cause, of one's preferences; it is, indeed, the result of a series of particular tastes. With Sainte-Beuve, as with every one else, it grew more and more flexible with time; it adapted itself, and opened new windows and doors. Indeed, in his last years, he achieved feats that may fairly be called extraordinary, in the way of doing justice to writers and works of an intensely “modern” stamp—-to Baudelaire and Flaubert, to Feydeau and the brothers Goncourt. There is even, in the second of these volumes, a letter, on the whole appreciative, to the young writer whose vigorous brain, in later years, was to give birth to the monstrous “Assommoir.” But originally Sainte-Beuve's was not a mind that appeared likely, even at a late stage of it's evolution, to offer hospitality to M. Émile Zola. He was always a man of his time; he played his part in the romantic movement; Joseph Delorme and the novel of “Volupté” are creations eminently characteristic of that fermentation of opinion, that newer, younger genius which produced the great modern works of French literature. Sainte-Beuve, in other words, was essentially of the generation of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, of Balzac and George Sand. But he was much more on his guard than most of his companions; he was a conservative as well as a liberal; he never was a violent radical. He had a great tenderness for tradition, for the old models, for classic ideas. In 1845 he was open to the charge of “reactionary” taste; it must be remembered that the critics and commentators can not, in the nature of things, afford to run the risks and make the bold experiments of the poets and producers. “I have never liked the modern drama as Hugo and Dumas have made it,” he says; “and I have never recognized in it, the least in the world, the ideal that I conceive in this respect. . . I should be unable to express to you what I feel with regard to the enormities which have partly defeated our hopes, but there are points on which I hold my ground, and I flatter myself that I have never deserted my early convictions. It is all the same to me that Madame de Girardin should come and tell me that I am going in for reaction, pure and simple, and I don't give myself the trouble even of heeding it; but, if you say it, I permit myself to answer no, and to tell you that you are completely mistaken, which is the result, perhaps, of your not attaching the same importance as I to purely literary points—-points on which I have remained very much the same.” Sainte-Beuve here defends himself against the charge of having dropped out of the line; he intimates that it is he who has adhered to the pure “romantic" tradition, and that the eccentric movement refers itself to the two writers he mentions. They were not the only ones of whom he failed to approve; it is unfortunately a substantial fact that he never rendered half justice to Balzac, and that to George Sand he rendered but half at the most. There is an interesting passage bearing upon this in a letter of 1866, written to a critic who had published an appreciative notice of Sainte-Beuve's long and delightful article upon Gavarni. “You have indeed put your finger upon the two delicate points. At bottom, I know, Musset had passion and Théo [Théophile Gautier] didn't have it; and one warms people up only by having a flame one's self. And then Balzac, I know too, with defects that I feel too much (being of quite another family), had power, and Gavarni only had an infinitude of wit, elegance, and observation. But Gavarni had taste and le trait juste—-things I greatly value. That being said, I have my private idea, not as an advocate, but as a critic of conviction, which is, namely, that in our day there is too much water carried to the river, too much admiration quand même, too little real judging. Once the word genius is pronounced, everything is accepted and proclaimed. Musset's worst verses are quoted as proverbs; they are admired on trust. So for the great novelist. It would seem that there had been no observer but he; that Eugène Sue, Frédéric Soulié—-all those big fellows—-have ceased to exist, have been absorbed by him. But it is, above all, when it is a question of the great men of the past, that I am unable to accept that number of genius under which they place him. This is the bottom of my thought, and it doubtless judges me myself.. . . “ And it is here that he goes on to add the remark I have quoted, to the effect that he is more sensitive to certain great defects than to a certain order of qualities. He had, in his latter years, an occasional caprice or slight perversity of judgment; he took two or three rather unaccountable literary fancies.
Such was the high relish which, for a certain period, he professed for the few first productions of M. Ernest Feydeau, and such the serious attention that he appears to have bestowed upon the literary activity of Charles Baudelaire. Both of these writers had their merits, but one would have said that Sainte-Beuve, who was so sensitive to faults, would not have found his account in them. He writes to M. Feydeau, in 1860, on the occasion of this gentleman having put the finishing touches to a novel of a peculiarly repulsive character, which was a very flimsy piece of work into the bargain: “It will be very nice of you to tell me when 'Sylvie' will be worthy in your eyes to make her début in my faubourg; I shall be all eyes, all ears, to receive her.” It must be remembered that Sainte-Beuve was absolutely destitute of prudery; his attitude in regard to that great group of considerations which we of English speech have so conveniently labelled the “proprieties” was eminently Gallic. There is a curious example of this fact in a letter written in 1868, and given in the second of these volumes, in which (alluding conjecturally to a question as to which the French are always so alert in conjecture—-the character of the relations between Benjamin Constant and Madame de Charrière) he makes light to an extraordinary degree of the whole matter of modesty and purity. He lays it down as highly probable that the lady just mentioned was conspicuously deficient in these qualities, and then adds: “Excuse my levity, but be so good as to observe that this does not in any way diminish the esteem that I have for Madame de Charrière. I will say the same for Madame de Staël, equally facile on this point.” Sainte-Beuve had, as a matter of course, the Gallic imagination. It is very well for him to ask his correspondent to excuse his levity; his English reader will probably not do so. But in this particular matter we must almost always make allowance for a degree of levity which we ourselves are not prepared to emulate; and I refer to Sainte-Beuve's conformity of tone only because it helps to explain his incongruous appreciation of MM. Baudelaire and Feydeau. It is a tribute to the Gallic imagination.
But Sainte-Beuve paid so many tributes of a different kind that it is out of place to do more than touch upon this one. Here is a very different note: “If you knew English,” he writes to a clerical friend who had sent him some poetic attempts, “you would have a treasure-house upon which you could draw. They have a poetic literature very superior to ours—-and, above all, more healthy, more full. Wordsworth is not translated; one doesn't translate those things; one goes and drinks them at the fount. Let me enjoin upon you to learn English . . . . In a year or two you would be master of it, and you would have a private poetic treasure for your own use; be a poet—-I was only a little rivulet from those beautiful poetic lakes, with all their gentleness and melancholy.” What I have found most interesting in these pages is the mark of the expert, as I may call it—-the definiteness and clearness, the ripe sagacity, of the writers critical sense. When it is a case of giving advice, of praising or of blaming, of replying to a question or an appeal, there is something delightful in our impression of Sainte-Beuve's perfect competence. He always knows so well the weak point, always touches in passing upon the remedy: “The day on which you shall be willing to sacrifice a little to that French taste which you know so well, to our need of a frame and a border, you will have the value of all your essential qualities.” He writes that to his distinguished fellow critic M. Schérer, whose culture he deemed a little too Germanic; and it would have been impossible to give him in a single sentence better practical advice. There is an admirable letter to M. Taine, on the appearance of the latter's rather infelicitous attempt at satire—-the volume of impressions of M. Graindorge. This letter should be read by every one who has read the book—-it is impossible to express more felicitously the feeling of discomfort produced by seeing a clever man make a great mistake. I have spoken of Sainte-Beuve's letter to Émile Zola; it is full of exquisite good sense (the writers great quality), and the closing lines are worth quoting as an illustration of the definite and practical character of the critical reflections that he offered his correspondents. The allusion is to M. Zola's first novel, “Thérèse Raquin.” “You have done a bold act; you have, in your work, braved both the public and the critics. Don't be surprised at certain indignations—-the combat is opened; your name has been sounded. Such struggles terminate, when an author of talent is so minded, by another work equally bold, but a little less on the stretch, in which the public and the critics fancy they see a concession to their own sense; and the affair is wound up by one of those treaties of peace which consecrate one more reputation.” It must be added that this was not the advice that M. Émile Zola took. He has never, that I know of, signed a treaty of peace; and, though his reputation is great, it can hardly be said to have been “consecrated.” But I must make no more quotations; I must do no more than recommend these two volumes to all those readers for whom Sainte-Beuve may have been at any time a valued companion. They will find a complete reflection of the man and the writer—-the materials for a living portrait. They will find, too, a large confirmation of their confidence. Sainte-Beuve's was a mind of a thousand details, and it is possible to pick out certain points before which an admirer may falter and hesitate. But, as regards the whole, I should never for an instant hesitate. If it is a question of taking Sainte-Beuve or leaving him—-of giving in our adhesion or withholding it—-I take him, definitively, and on the added evidence of these letters, as the very genius of observation, discretion, and taste.