and yet its support was supposed to be necessary to the State. Although "the abyss of revolution " was only partly filled, perhaps because this was so, and many institutions were tottering near its brink, the times were more favorable to a conservative than to a radical philosophy of life. A moderate and rational Catholicism, and a dignified respect for the pre-revolutionary traditions of the country, provided, however, they were combined with an acknowledgment of the unchangeable results of the Revolution-these were the qualities which it was hoped some great intellectual leader would possess. He might be retrospective, but he must not be retrogressive. We shall not be surprised, therefore, at the welcome given to Châteaubriand and Lamartine. Here were two poets of unquestionable talent. The sources of the great deep seemed to have been opened to supply their inexhaustible speech. They came forward with many professions of power to heal and quiet. They had good intentions. They had fervor. They had charm. But, alas they were not great souls, strong in self-command. Ignorant of themselves, and how to rule themselves, they were not. able to persuade by example. Sainte-Beuve detected the note of personal vanity and unsoundness in Châteaubriand and the note of intellectual insufficiency in Lamartine. He perceived, dimly at first and notwithstanding his cordial admiration of their power, that even their genius for expression-and it was genius -tempted them into a facile substitution of rhetoric for thought, that, as Lowell says, they were the lackeys of fine phrases. And when he learned to know them in personal intercourse, particularly Châteaubriand, he reached the conclusion that their own sentiments, their own lives, their own greatness, or their own weaknesses and faults, were the sole subject of their poetry, the sole theme of all their eloquence. They published to the world and elevated to the dignity of eternal law the fleeting instincts of their individual natures. other words they were sentimentalists. The simplicity of great artists, the unconscious In repose of great men-these were absent from Châteaubriand and Lamartine. Yet the public was corrupted in turn by those whom it had spoiled. A species of unsound enthusiasm-what the French call engouement-followed these men. Early in his career Sainte-Beuve comprehended that what his generation needed, in the face of these infatuations, was sane and conservative criticism. To be the enemy of engouements and charlatanism, Sainte-Beuve pronounces "the true and characteristic mark of a critic." The keynote of all his firmest criticism is struck in the following words, which he might with propriety have placed at the head of his collected" Causeries : " "As for us critics, placed between tradition and innovation, it is our delight to be forever recalling the past with reference to the present, comparing the two, and insisting on the excellence of the old work while welcoming the new; for I am not speaking of those critics who are always ready to sacrifice systematically the one to the other. While the young modern artist swims in the full stream of the present, rejoicing in it, quenching his thirst in it, and dazzled by its sheen, we live in these comparisons, so full of repose, and take our pleasure in the thousand ideas to which they give birth." This is the whole story of Sainte-Beuve's usefulness. This is his apologia pro vita sua. If these men, Thus conceived, the office of criticism has the nobility of self-effacement in the cause of public welfare. It is a work of rescue. All about us and within us there are immature and dangerous ideas struggling for acceptance. Weak or pernicious books are appearing in greater number than good ones. Ill-balanced men are pushing forward. these ideas, these books prevail, in so far as they prevail the work of culture is retarded. We know that in the long day Time will sift much that is true from all this false, but that does not make our individual misfortune less if, while we live, the second best is preferred to the really excellent. Many philosophers would have us believe that man possesses a faculty capable of distinguishing intuitively the beautiful in literature, art, and nature. Sainte-Beuve, however, was an experimentalist in this. Most of us are of the same creeping school. We are willing to profit by the opinions of others. We prefer to read the books which have lasted longest and been most in human hands. We are afraid to trust the æsthetic sense. We have our own ideas, to be sure. You may always have thought Byron or the Italian opera unsatisfactory, but it required the weight of a consensus of other people's judgments in the same direction to make you altogether fixed and happy in your decision. For one thing, the critical sense changes with age. At fourteen we deem "Lalla Rookh a great English classic. At seventy-five, very likely, we shall have settled down to a steady perusal of Job and Solomon, content with their eloquent inconclusiveness. A healthy criticism, however, bids us take into account the experience of men at all times of life-young men, middle-aged men, old men-and submit ourselves somewhat to their tastes. And the testimony of the dead is at least as valuable as that of the living. It is a significant difference between science and literary criticism that the former often deals exclusively with things at present in the world, without a single backward look at historical antecedents; whereas literature not only has its roots in the past, but blooms and ripens there. The study of literature gives as one of its happiest results the sense of the continuity of thought and the dependence of each age upon its predecessors. capable of appealing effectually to the standards of experience. He enlarged the comprehension of the word "classic" by comprehending under it many works of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, which were practically unknown in 1830, and indicating their excellent features. He made new divisions and discovered hidden relationships. One of his favorite ideas, for example, is that a peculiar quality of urbanity and distinction is to be found in the writings of the generation which flourished in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, so that even the minor letter-writers and memoir-writers of that period-the period of Voltaire's youth have a singular gift of grace. Never before and never after are there such limpidity of style, such perfect ease, such crystalline perfection, as in La Sage, Vauvenargues, Madame du Deffand, the Abbé Prévost, Fontenelle. Vauvenargues and Madame du Deffand would have been but little known at present, out of France at least, if Sainte-Beuve had not insisted on their worth. Many persons on reading the "Causeries" are disappointed to find so little indication of system, or rather of a system. "This is not criticism," they exclaim; "this is history, if you will, but not criticism." They are quite right. It is not criticism as a German professor would understand the term. It is not a philosophy of literature. The "Causeries" are quiet, familiar, unpretending talks, and rather gossipy, as the word indicates. A little modest guidance, some reconstitution of the milieu, the explanation of difficulties, and the pointing out of a few details of beauty which might otherwise escape obThe advice of Bildad the Shuhite is a servation-this is usually the proper extent sound maxim in criticism. "Can the rush grow up without mire? Sainte-Beuve not only saved many seventeenth-century writers from comparative oblivion, but he confirmed the reputation of Bossuet and Saint-Simon, of Fénelon and La Fontaine, of Madame de Sévigné and Pascal. During half a century already, the best French authors have been more read than they would have been without his learned, skilful, and enthusiastic insistence on their interest, their charm, their importance. His generation was rich in poets and novelists, but would have been poor without him in men of sound taste, of a critic's duties. It is tiresome to be told just how and why we should be impressed. Such was Sainte-Beuve's theory and such his practice. He has been much criticised for his habit of making an author's personality and life a basis for judging his works. And at first sight this appears a proceeding of doubtful wisdom. But let us see how he conducts the investigation. He assumes that into a novel, or a poem, or a drama, an author does throw his own personality, and that books are actions. It would be a waste of time, therefore, not to go direct to the heart of an author's life, if we can, rather than shut ourselves up to the consideration of only one phase of his activity. Knowing, for instance, the personal insufficiency of Châteaubriand, Sainte-Beuve felt that it would be exercising too much patience to wait until that insufficiency was also detected by the public in all the sentimentalist's vaunted books. It must be in the books, for it was in the man, and sooner or later a man is revealed, with more or less completeness, in his productions. So he did not scruple to tell what he knew of Châteaubriand as he had seen and heard him. With even less hesitation did he seek to discover the personality of men and women not his contemporaries. It is to this fondness for detailed portraiture that we are indebted for the charming and useful biographies which so many of the "Causeries" contain. Each author tells his own life, and, so far as possible, in his own words, which are supported or corrected by extracts from the letters and journals of his acquaintances. SainteBeuve's vast knowledge of memoirs, both published and in manuscript, was supplemented by the reading of his secretaries, whom he kept employed in the public libraries of Paris. And much of his feeling for the eighteenth century-a feeling which strikes us as so fresh and immediate, much of his information about the lives of André Chénier, Bernardin de SaintPierre, Rousseau, Franklin, Walpole, Gibbon, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Madame d'Épinay, and the Encyclopædists, came to him by oral tradition. To mention only one of several lines of communication open to him, he was for some time a frequenter of Madame Récamier's salon. She had known in her youth the society of the Consulate, and through it that of the reign of Louis XVI. SainteBeuve's method, which has been often attacked on the ground that it is too much concerned with personality, is in reality the simplest and most natural method in the world. Sainte-Beuve is not hampered with philosophical prepossessions. But one could wish that he were at times more frank in his judgments of literary values, and particularly that he more frequently disclosed his own opinion on points of conduct. In short, one feels that he shirks a plain duty and fails to grasp an opportunity. One suspects that the constitutional cowardice imputed to him by his biographers has something to do with this. Toward the end of his life his indifference to moral distinctions is fairly cynical, and is doubtless due in part to practical defiance of a moral obligation in his own conduct. To most of us it is unsatisfactory to read much in any field, passing in review a long list of men and women, of actions and ideas, without co-ordinating and speculating. We do need some philosophical thread. We are not content with the mere accumulation of facts; we must draw conclusions. And one feels disappointed sometimes that a man so well furnished with facts is so seldom disposed to aid in the fulfilment of this natural desire. SainteBeuve admits his reluctance. "I am a man of doubt and repentances," he exclaims. In the generous "Causerie" in which he welcomes a fellow-critic, Edmond Schérer, then knocking for admittance to the Parisian world, Sainte-Beuve says of him : "He does not feel his way; he does not hesitate. He is a firm, solidly based intelligence, which has in itself a standard whereby to measure exactly every other intelligence. He is a peer, rendering verdicts upon his peers. He is a veritable judge." In matters of taste and style SainteBeuve has himself the trenchant confidence of decision which he remarks in his young rival. But Schérer's boldness was in another sort of judgment. He had just published his "Mélanges de Critique religieuse," which included essays on authors whom Sainte-Beuve would have considered to be in his own province too, such as Joseph de Maistre and Taine, but whom he would scarcely have cared or dared to discuss from a definite position in philosophy and religion, as Schérer did. SainteBeuve doubted the ability of the French public to appreciate the serious treatment habitual to Schérer, and with a sort of gran rifiuto, which is painful reading, betrayed his own distaste for any criticism which attempts to go beneath the surface of life. One grows weary, in the end, of the French habit of shunning serious conversation. A man may be devoid of theory, and yet be capable of rendering very valuable judgments. One would be grateful to Sainte-Beuve for more of them. His position was peculiar, and his duty obvious. He was making the literary men and women of the reign of Louis XIV. live over again for the benefit of a generation which, as he declared, needed standards of life. By touching lightly upon evils whose existence and whose tainted and contaminating results he well knew, he failed to represent seventeenth-century life as it really was, in France, and the standard loses its authority. He should have had the courage to publish boldly his opinion of the enormous corruption of a reign whose greatness has been over-estimated, not without harm to the French character. Like most other French critics and historians, he caressed so daintily these false ideals, that if we had not Saint-Simon to tell us the truth, we might miss the whole point of the timely and necessary revolt which began with the eighteenth century. Alluding to the subjects of his lectures in the École Normale, from 1857 to 1861, Sainte-Beuve makes a distinction, which he has happily not always observed, between his work as a teacher and his work as a critic. The two offices are quite distinct, he says, "the critic's being, above all things, the search for what is new and the discovery of talent; the teacher's the maintenance of tradition and the conservation of taste." Yet it is worthy of remark that most of the subjects of his "Causeries" and " Portraits "were chosen without reference to works which had been recently published. Less than half the "Causeries du Lundi" are book reviews. In his practice as critic he was performing more than ever the duty which he lays down as that of a teacher; he was maintaining tradition and conserving taste. The persons whom Sainte-Beuve most delights to introduce are those who not only have written, but have made some stir in the world by their swords or their tongues or their fair eyes. The more serious side of court life is, however, not neglected. Indeed, Sainte-Beuve has seldom gone deeper into detail than regarding Bossuet, to whom he devotes three of the "Causeries du Lundi," and Fénelon, whom he discusses in two. More and more, as he grew older, SainteBeuve became a classicist, a conservative, feeling the dignity and beauty of the past and acknowledging its authority. He was keenly alive to fine shades of difference. He had the aristocratic instinct, and preferred the best to the second best, the noble to the common, the interests of a select few to the interests of the mass. There are well-bred books, just as there are men of born distinction. The Republic of Letters is not a very happy phrase if it is supposed to imply equality, and in the world of books it is no disgrace to be a tuft-hunter. Stronger than the most selfish parasite's fondness for a duke is Sainte-Beuve's instinct for a grand or an elegant style. He has wonderful facility also in detecting whatever is unnatural or false. His favorite device for disabusing his readers of exaggerated respect for any book was to quote some violent or sentimental passage from it, some strained metaphor, some weak or pretentious phrase, and then ask if Voltaire could have used such language, or if the simple diction and polished thought of Madame de Sévigné were not preferable. From the persons and books he disliked, it is apparent that Sainte-Beuve's especial antipathy was for declamation, the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of discourse, the oratorical habit, the love of mere rhetoric, the want of simplicity, excess of emphasis, or to sum up all in his own word, la phrase. This he considered the worst element of bad style, and a sure indication of vulgar taste. Is it not remarkable that in our American colleges the form of writing which has been most encouraged by the giving of prizes and commencement honors-indeed, the only kind of English composition which in some institutions has been officially preserved at all—is the so-called oration, a sort of exercise now seldom called for by the demands of professional or social life, and always dangerous in its effects on style? As a true disciple of the prose writers of that chosen period of his, the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, Sainte-Beuve is annoyed by vagueness, and his own works are marvellously clear. He is more concrete than is usual with critics. He has the precision of a fencer, with all a fencer's grace. He has the French faculty for fine insinuation. His "Causeries" read like skilful conversations; they abound in delicate approaches and feigned withdrawals. His good-humor and self-command are wellnigh perfect. His flashes of indignation are so rare as to be always welcome. But he is, for the most part, imperturbable, serene. Not many men, having to write a piece of literary criticism once a week for half a lifetime, would have developed so few crotchets and refrained so entirely from arbitrary or tyrannical judgments. Despite his vast and minute information, there is in Sainte-Beuve no mere pedantry of letters, no boasting of mere research. He does not throw up barriers of erudition between the reader and the author who is under discussion, but tries, rather, to remove every obstruction. He does not think it beneath his dignity to sketch broad, popular outlines of the lives and works of his subjects. He is never content with furnishing a mass of recondite facts. In each of his sketches you can refresh your knowledge of the author who is being criticised. It is not, as a rule, taken for granted that even the main features of his life will be known to you. Sainte-Beuve treats these elementary matters with a patient enthusiasm, an originality, a charm of language, which make them always fresh and delightful. Thus one of the first effects he produces is to acquaint the reader personally with a man or a woman. Sainte-Beuve somewhere uses the words savant and érudit in such a way as to show the beautiful distinction between them. A man may be érudit and stuffed with learning, yet it may be all congested in his brain, and he but a crude scholar. A savant, on the other hand, has better possession of his faculties and knows how to open his treasures to the world. Knowledge will not swamp a man, unless he be deficient in active energy or power of expression, which is almost the same thing. SainteBeuve was distinctly savant. He is neither a scientist nor a philologist in his treatment of literature; he is a man of letters. It is natural to expect of a critic so intimately acquainted with these details that he should, at least toward the end of his career, draw valuable conclusions as to the distinguishing qualities of the French race, and the relative value of its intellectual product. Sainte-Beuve answers but insufficiently this expectation. We find among his works a small number of essays on foreign authors. They show that he possessed breadth of sympathy and capacity for accommodation. But they are relatively few, and moreover they nearly all treat of writers who had a large share of the French spirit and lived much in France, or wrote in French. Such are Lord Chesterfield, Benjamin Franklin, Gibbon, and Frederick the Great. No history of French literature would be complete if it failed to take account of these. Sainte-Beuve is still, therefore, in his original circle when he speaks of them. To be sure, he has essays on Goethe, Dante, Firdausi, Theocritus, Virgil, and Pliny the Elder, but yet it must be said that he does not abound in those rich comparisons between different literatures which constitute much of the value of Arnold's critical writings and Schlegel's. In this he is a true Frenchman, for his countrymen are none too hospitable to foreign ideas and none too well acquainted with other literatures than their own. They are, after all, much more insular than their neighbors across the Channel. When Sainte-Beuve does, however, venture upon comparisons, he shows an admirable catholicity of spirit, and we can only regret that he so seldom let his mind go forth on foreign travel. From the rare excursions he allowed it to make, it returned with booty characteristic of the lands it had traversed. Thoroughly French though he was, and limited by some French prejudices, his essay on Cowper, for example, proves that he could appreciate an English type of intelligence absolutely foreign to his countrymen-incomprehensible to many of them. In reading this "Causerie" one feels that perhaps Sainte-Beuve's practice of abstaining from international comparison does not indicate lack of knowledge or appreciation on his part so much as on the part of the public for which he wrote. It is chiefly when thinking of this restraint and of what we lose by it, that one regrets the peculiar circumstances of his authorship. For, after all, and it is not a reproach, we must conclude that Sainte-Beuve was a journalist, and that although his success was made possible by his close contact with the public, it was also limited thereby. |