THE ICING OF THE CRITICS : C. A. SAINTE- THE

Italian adage traduttori traditori is never more applicable than when the book victimised is French, and English is the language into which it is turned. French with its shallow flow of words, limitations of phrase and idiom, and crystal clearness of meaning : English with its rich vocabulary, independence of traditional form, and magic of suggestive power,—tongues thus differently constituted must needs be imperfect literary commensurables. The " traitors " now before us have been guilty of a mere minimum of crime. Their translation of a series of masterpieces of French critical prose is as Ciceronian in quality as the peculiarities of the American lingua rusticana permit, their notes on points of authorship and history are useful, and we have only to com- plain that they have converted certain of the great master's separate essays into pastiecios bearing a single title. Sainte-Beuve, born in 1804, educated for medicine, and aspiring to greatness as a poet, enrolled himself, after a

• Portraits of the Eighteenth Century. Historic and Literary. By C. A. Sainte- Beare. Translated by Katharine P. Wormeley and George Burnham Ives. With a Critical Introduction by Edmund Scherer, 2 YOlsi London; (.5, P, Putnam's Sous. 1218. net.] prolonged visit to England, in the second Ceinacie, the Parisian social coterie of poetical Romanticists of whom Victor Hugo was chief. Besides attempts " to build the lofty rhyme," which did not satisfy Parisian taste, he experimented in political

and literary prose, wrote a novel, and undertook first his Historic and Literary Portraits, then his Causeries de Lundi, essays constructed on the narrative-conversational pattern which brought him European paramountcy as a critic. On devient kitissier, on est no rotisseur, wrote the great Brillat- Savarin;. but Sainte-Beuve soon discovered that though intuition might suffice for the kitchen, ideal criticism wanted a broader basis. The reviewer of to-day who, after a few dips into the book sent him for notice, disposes of his work in an afternoon, finally spending half-an-hour on the correction of his proofs, will laugh at a remark in his rival's "Portrait" of Diderot:—

"You seclude yourself fora fortnight with the writings of some illustrious dead man—poet or philosopher ; you study him, you turn him this way or that, you question him at your leisure ; you make him pose for you, so to speak ; it is almost as if one passed a fortnight in the country making a portrait or a bust of Byron, Scott, or Goethe."

That is what must be gone through if you want to con- struct a "comparative biography '° of a great writer. In an essay not contained in the volumes before us, Sainte- Beuve tells you how, profiting by a hint given by. Madame de Stael (not the more notable lady of the Begence with two "a's" in her name), he determined to put up the shutters on the traditional criticisms, which were little more than tables of contents touched and improved by a teacher of pedantic rhetoric. Institute a system of "natural" observation ; study your writer's personal life and character,

his physiology, the origin of his talent, and find out who admired and who hated his work. You arrive thus at a

method of criticism, though not quite at a code. Approaching, moreover, the neighbourhood of our Galtonian idea, Sainte- Beare goes on to say, tel arbre, tel fruit, therefore try to tabulate " the group." Study your author's sisters. The Miss Lamartines, for instance, formed a perfect "nest of nightingales," whose chirpings would be re-echoed in the

poet's Harmonies and the History of the Girondins. Then the two Miss Chateaubria,nds, with their dissimilar

characters, might afford insight into the want of equilibrium descernible, perhaps, in the Genie du Christianisme. When critics are prejudiced against a. popular author, their turn will be served if they meet an emollient that softens their dislike,—qui les oclaire, lea rassure. Sainte- Beuve detested Le Peau de Chagrin, but the individuality of Miss Balzac was calculated to open his mind to a more scientific view of her brother's genius.

The new system of entrenchments being thus drawn round the fortress, the critic was ready for the operations which would enable him to say with confidence, mon siege est fait. Here is M. Scherer's account of Sainte-Beuve's final steps of attack on his citadel :—

" From the time when the Lundis began, his whole life was governed by the traditions of the task he had undertaken. Those marvellous articles came from the cell of a Benedictine monk. Sainte-Beuve's door was closed, except on Monday, the day of publication; which was made a day of rest and holiday. The books he needed for his works were collected in advance in the public libraries by devoted friends. The readings from them made, the passages noted, he made a first sketch of his article ; then he built it,' as he used to say. After which, he corrected every part of it, and began to write it, dictating to his secretary, snatching the pen himself now and then, interlining, modifying, bettering. The whole conscience of the scholar and artist was on the qui viva during this labour, and to the last moment. On Friday the article was finished : Sainte-Beuve drew breath ; he went to read his work to Veron, whose bourgeois tact he valued; after which he stayed to dinner with Wren and a few friends. The task was not finished, however ; after the printing came the correction of proofs, of which two, sometimes three, were needed to satisfy his requirements. Saturday and Sunday were passed thus, and then the next week was already there with its new article to sketch out. Such is the cost of perfect things, of lasting things!"

The essayist was a good Greek and Latin scholar, and his "dip into the Thames" gave him a knowledge of our language unique in a Frenchman, so that he did not

read Cowper, or Byron, or Wordsworth through the usual Parisian spectacles. Cosmopolitan and sober in intellectual

temperament, he was always polite in controversy, never cynical, had no malice in his ink-bottle, and as regards

religion, far from being touched by the prevalent French sentiment, ecrasez l'infiime, his anger is aroused when he finds Voltaire chaffing at the election of a new Pope. Against the black spot that gave Sainte-Beuve such an evil name during a part of his life may be set the independence of character which distinguished him from some other literary magnates of his day. He declined the courtly advantages placed at his disposal by his notorious partisanship for Napoleon IIL, a leaning not based on Caesarian feeling, but on the belief that the "man of December" was "the wall" wanted for the protection of France against a modern Reign of Terror, with its trieoteuses and guillotine.

In one sidewalk of criticism Sainte-Beuve was more at home than, for instance, his contemporary Taine, who, master as he was of the art of literary description of landscapes and pictures, could hardly distinguish, so his friends used to say, between a Rosa Bonheur and a Delacroix. Calling Diderot's Salons "noble discourses on art," the essayist reluctantly allows that they lie outside their subject, treating painting from the literary, dramatic standpoint, judging form and colour, not with the eyes, but with the spectacles of the mind, and making a canvas a peg on which the critic hangs fanciful aesthetic sermons of his own. The great Encyclopaedist, objects Sainte-Beuve, was not blind to the power of technique, yet in describing, for example, a picture by his favourite, Greuze, he would translate it into words, interpret it, and add to its plain meaning. Diderot's masterly analyses are, in fact, derivative paintings, "little poems, appropriate to the pictures, and printed on the opposite page as it were." In the " Girl Weeping for her Dead Bird" he tells you to notice that the child is shamming ; she really cares about something else. That something Diderot reveals in a poetical elegy of his own invention which "transfixes the idyll on the canvas," so that "the picture is, with him, simply a pretext for reverie, for poetic thoughts."

The father of the Positive Philosophy, M. Comte, had his stall at the Opera. We do not know whether Sainte-Beuve, who hated theatres, indulged in that luxury (which, ha he

hardly ever left Paris for a single day for fourteen years, he ought to have allowed himself), but he had an acquaintance- ship with music very different from that of the average litterateur. His matchless portrait of Benjamin Franklin as philosopher, politician, and diplomatist contains this melodious intermezzo :-

" He wrote something on 'Old Scotch Melodies,' and the delightful impression they made upon the soul. He tried, in a very acute analysis, much as a Dugald Stewart might have done later, to explain why those old melodies are so charming. His remarks on this subject bear the stamp of that ingenious simplicity of thought which is the sign of a truly philosophical mind. Nevertheless, in the matter of music, as in all else, it is evident that what Franklin likes is simplicity ; he wants music conformed to the sense of the words and the feelings expressed. and this with as little effort as possible. But there is a kingdom of Sounds, as there is one of Colour and of Light; and this magnificent kingdom in which we see the Handels and the Pergoleses rise and soar, as in the other we see the Titians and the Rubenses float and play, Franklin was not formed to enter ; he who invented and perfected the harmonica remained in the principles of elementary music. In nothing did he like luxury, and in the fine arts luxury is richness and talent itself."

Matthew Arnold called Sainte-Beuve "an unrivalled guide to French genius and literature," and even "the most notable critic of our time": a special obiter dictum of the present director of our insular instruction runs in a similar strain. Mr. Birrell's recognition of Sainte-Beuve's superiority might well have been prompted by the monographs on Buffon and Frederick the Great. One sees the real living Buffon getting

up at 6 a.m., having himself wife and dressed in the CEil-de- Beeuf fashion of the time, wearing clean cuffs and frills, march- ing across parterres and terraces of his Burgundy chilteau, and ascending the steps of a tower to the vaulted study in which he

slaved at his great works on the animal kingdom, mineralogy, geology, and so forth. The eager naturalist and speculator, said by Hume to be more like a Marshal of France than a man of letters, is also shown in a comical aspect. When the pompous Director of the Jardin du Roi was ordered to arrange, nolens volens, his plants according to the new sexual system of Linnaeus, he showed his disgust at the Swede's innovation by having the names of the new botany written on the under-side of the labels. A bantering passage of the essay runs thus :-

"He was rather fond of arrsaging things and creatures in codes of height, if we may say so, and of physical size ; so it was that he thought fitting to begin the history of birds with that of the Ostrich, which is the elephant of that order of creatures."

To an underestimate of Buffon as theorist Sainte-Benue was led by the experts consulted by him, in his usual pre- cautionary manner, regarding the great naturalist's cosmical speculations, some of which, as now read, have a Darwinian flavour.

The essayist's personal knowledge of the "eternal feminine " was superficial, yet his portraiture of great women is always Sainte-Beuve premier cru, and the vintage varies with the characteristics of each separate queen of wit and beauty.

There is the Duchesse de Maine, at her little Court of Sceaux, with her Order of the Honey Bee of Mount Hymettus, actress, Latin scholar, student of Descartes and Fonteuelle, and if not as great a mathematician as Voltaire's "sublime

Emilie," a keen worker with the telescope and microscope. There is Madame d'Epinay, beloved of Melchoir Grimm for twenty-seven years, called by Diderot an " image of tenderness

and sensuality," and according to Voltaire "an eagle in a cage of gauze," with Rousseau at her feet, authoress of notable power. Also the wealthy Madame de Lambert, type of genius and virtue, in the salon (which the essayist will not have called a bureau &esprit), holding her own in badinage or in deep discussion with the Academicians of the vine lumitre : and, at her side, Madame Necker, noble exemplar of reason and morality, great literary artist,—each of the likenesses of these women and others, has its own distinct bouquet. The lifelike portrait of that seductive wife of the Controller- General Necker, the flower transplanted to Paris from Lausanne, "la belle Curdled," the cynosure of all neighbour- ing eyes, is flanked by the juvenile Gibbon with his " I have seen Mlle. Curchod—omnia vincit Amor, et nos cedamue Amori "; and there is a delightful extract from a Paris letter of the newly married lady, written seven years after the future historian's sentimental "decline and fall," which runs thus :— " I had him at my house every day ; he had become gentle, yielding, humble, modest, even to timidity,"—language called by the modern Frenchman "a mixture of cordiality and pique." This spotless woman, writes the author, would have wished her illustrious daughter, Madame de Staid, " to be altogether different" from what she was in certain pages of her life, and he adds that the maternal cast of mind, softened and mel- lowed after the first generation, reappeared in the thoughts and moral principles of a family of illustrious survivors.

Sainte- Beuve could not foresee that in a third generation of Curchods the attractive qualities of in belle Suzanne would be again visible near Lake Leman's "crystal face."