BOOKS.
SAINTE-BEUT E.*
SECOND NOTICE.]
FROM Lausanne, after a journey in Italy, in which he was haunted by spectres of his own rather than of her past, Sainte-Beuve returned, not to the Paris of Amanry, but to the Paris of the essayist and critic whose marvellous " portraits " in the Revue des Deux Mondes revealed little of his personal feelings. The friendship of Madame d'Arbou- vine, a good and clever woman of the higher social world, opened to him many of its houses. Always antagonistic to the system and Ministers of Louis Philippe, he haunted the • Essays on Men and Women. By C. A. Sainte-Beare. Edited, with Critical Memoir, by William Sharp. London ; D. Stott. 1880.
Abbaye-aux-Bois as an obsequious listener to Chateaubriand- Madame Recamier's interest procured for him an appointment as one of the Keepers of the Mazaiin Library, and he left his fourth story in the Rae Notre Dame des Champs for rooms in the Institut.
His work in 1840 shows him perhaps at his best, for in that year appeared his third volume of Port Royal and his study of La Rochefoucanld, which, he said, "fixed a date and a period in his intellectual life." Henceforward, he accepted the work which seemed specially his. He erected the classification of minds into a branch of natural science. Faithful and minute study of men and women as specimens of human intelligence set in the framework of their environment, was to him not mere literary art, but a beginning of labour towards discovering unknown laws, perhaps a universal morality. He said of Littre that he belonged " to the meritorious and conscientious school of philosophic naturalists, who strive by degrees to liberate humanity from vague disputation, useless solutions, and from idols and decep- tive forces,"—words that might be used by Sainte-Beuve of his own effort, though not of its results. Scepticism sapped his faith even in literature, until he affected to believe that human thought was "a dream which created the object of its dream." It was hardly matter for regret to Sainte-Beuve when the Revolution cast from their eminence his estranged friends the doctrinaires. 1789 was to him no era of advance ; what followed was a sanglante inutiliej which interfered with the salons and literature of Paris. The illiterate mob, on one of those days when Lamartine was dictator, prevented Sainte-Beuve from reading to his friends the latest additions to his Port Royal ! He shook the stained dust of Paris from his feet, and retired out of hearing of Lamartine's orations to Liege. The Romantics, treading rhythmic measures in streets wet with blood, caused him a horror only cured by the Coup d'Etat and the advent of the new Napoleon. " A critic may be brave," he said, " but he is not a hero," a text which goes far to explain much of Sainte-Beuve's career. The Prince of " ana," incarnate Taste, of the subtlest and surest insight, he had no faith in causes or courage to defend one. "What is truth P" he wrote. " We are poor skiffs rowing on a limitless sea, and when we see a gleam of reflected light on the broken wave, we say, this is truth." To him, systems and creeds were curious .mar- ginalia of life. We can hardly accept him, as a scientific naturalist in the realm of mind, who judged of honour and enthusiasms and all ideals, by the literary value. In a letter to Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve writes :—" If I had a motto, it would be Truth and only Truth. Let Good and Beauty shift for themselves." Taste, indeed, saved him from the error of thinking that even his • accuracy and research could fully encompass the truth of any character, and especially the characters of his contemporaries. His wide knowledge made him at once cautious and tolerant, and criticism often overbore the sceptic in him. In his studies, so delicately and reverently touched, of Monsignor Gerbet and Eugenie de Guerin, of St. Francois de Sales, and of Pascal, good and beauty assert their sway not less than truth.
It was Sainte-Beuve's pleasure to publish in later years apologetic notes depreciatory of his romantic and pietistic period ; but he was not, we think, sincere when he wrote of his one novel, that its Christianity was but to flavour its Epicurean meaning, or pretended that his poetry was merely the efflorescence of six months' religious delusion. He wrote to M. Taine of his regret not to have done better work, and he admits late in life, " my heart suffers on this account, and I regret once more that I cannot help in any great thing, and that I do not feel the higher currents of air which fill alike both great and little sails." Under Armand Carrel, Sainte-Beuve worked in the revolutionary cause for three years. He had been warmed by La Mennais' fire. He had had a passing gleam of healthy love; but " great things " were possibly hindered by great taste and critical acumen. In its mordant acid, religion, love, and hope were decomposed, and honour rusted,—honour, but never honesty, for he had the scrupulous austerity of a peasant in the smallest money dealings, from the time he lived in an attic at a rent of 27 fr. a month, including breakfast, to the day when even a suspicion that he had received 100 fr. unduly from the Civil List of Louis Philippe helped to exile him to Liege. He held himself independent of all brotherhood, political or literary. He chose to owe no debts of money or affection.
In 1848, the break-down of the shifty order established by the doctrinaires and Louis Philippe loosed Sainte-Benve's tongue. He was invited by the Belgian authorities to give a course of lectures at Liege. He seized the opportunity, and chose " Chateaubriand and his Literary Group " for an outlet. He " overflowed," he says, " with truths." Chateau- briand was but recently dead ; Sainte-Beuve had been a constant visitor at the Abbaye-aux-Bois ; he owed much to Madame Recamier ; and the reason is not clear why he made his fierce onslaught on the Rene, once the object of his pre- tended respect, unless it can be traced to some wound of vanity. Suddenly Sainte-Benve discovered the weakness of the "emigrant forehead," and broke with the Faubourg St. Germain. His two volumes of destructive criticism on the author of the Genie du Christianismo bear marks of haste, however full of knowledge. We do not, indeed, think that Sainte-Benve excels in his portraits of contemporaries as in his evocations of the men and women of past centuries ; and his Chateaubriand is not so well arranged as his seven volumes on Port Royal. He detested the "Parliamentary orgies" of 1848, the lyrisine of Lamartine, the baseless visions of Socialism. Many of his social, and even his literary illusions, were no doubt shattered in the storm ; but it was unseemly of the author of Consolations and of Amaury's con- fessions, to revile Chateaubriand as " an Epicurean with a Catholic imagination." Would he have discovered the folly of Christianity, had Joseph Delorme gained the poet's crown, or Rene remained the fashion ? The Christianity which, indeed, had tempted Sainte-Bence was of the emotional and mystical type, hence his preference of Veuillot to Lacordaire, of La Mennais to Montalezubert ; yet, fortunately for his readers, he had been led, even by the path which is dangerously near to sensuous satisfaction, to recognise what is noblest in the heroes of the Catholic Church, in Bossuet and Bourdaloue, Gerbet or St. F. de Sales, and often to write as an exile might of the spiritual kingdom.
Immediately after his Liege lectures, Dr. Veron engaged Sainte-Beuve to write those weekly causeries which remain his best known work. They began in the Constitionnel on October 1st, 1849, with a paper on St. Marc Girardin. For twenty years, with one respite of four months, Sainte-Berme poured forth his marvels of accurate knowledge and unfailing taste in succinct form. The labour was intense in producing these essays and portraits, unrivalled in completeness and polish. " On Tuesday," he says, " I went down into my well, coming up to breathe on Monday." His literary probity and passionate curiosity left no fact, however trifling, unexplored, though not to be perhaps used except as an instruction to himself in his light touches. The strain on him told even on his robust and rather rustic strength, and Sainte-Beuve's laboriousness is no small title to our respect. Mr. Sharp finds fault with English criticism, and no doubt it wants that industry in serving a science, that enthusiasm of letters, which enabled Sainte-Beuve to pose as the naturalist of minds, and which gave the dignity of coherent method to his classifica- tions, his " ana," his dream of a universal morality to be based on literary achievement.
After twenty years of devout gratitude for his guidance, it is perhaps time to ask whether his work, great as it is, justified these pretensions. Taste gave him singular justice and insight within the realm of Taste ; but much of human effort, even in literature, remained beyond his ken. And if he, the author of a new criticism, has left after all only cleverer guesses at the real faces in the masque of life, how likely arc men with less taste to fall into grievous bad drawing while they dub their efforts psychological Sainte-Beuve accepted the Coup d'Etat as a relief ; there would be no more mobs, no more Lamartines and Victor Hugos, between him and the sun. His cautions advances to the Bonaparte family were shown in his choice of subjects in 1850-51. He was respectful to the Church as a guardian of order ; he was unsparing of the heroes of 1848, and especially of those who believed that order might consist with liberty, as did, for instance, M. de Falloux. In 1852 appeared his well-known defiance to all who disliked the methods of the Empire. The article, entitled " Regrets," was widely circulated, and the Government at once secured Sainte- Benve's causeries for its organ, the..ifoniieur. For some time he selected his subjects from previous centuries, and some of his most characteristic and charming work was in his Lundis at this date. He was unprepared for the storm of disappr.; a- tion which met his well-deserved appointment to the Chair of Poetry at the College de France in 1855. The students would not hear him, and loaded him with insults. It is said that on his second attempt to gain a hearing, he provided himself with two pistols, for what purpose it is not clear. Probably no event of his life so mortified him, and it certainly affected his future course. He published the lectures he had prepared on Virgil, which was his best answer to the students of the College de France. The indifference and neglect of the Court helped to check his civilities to the Imperial system. He drew away from the Government Press, and devoted himself to the younger generation of writers, whom he did much to launch. Asked by a friend why he encouraged the rising tide of bad taste, "I sacrifice, that I may not be sacrificed," was his shrewd answer, and once more personal ambitions somewhat obscured taste in the now omnipotent critic. Whether as an opportunist or not, Sainte-Beuve, after the campaign of Italy in 1859, resolved to join what he foresaw would be a triumphant party,—the Liberal wing of the Imperial democracy. In 1861, he began again in the Consti- tionnel his Nouveaux Lund is, giving up, for greater latitude of style and subject, his mastership of the Ecole Normale. Re- publishing his earlier causeries, he endeavoured by additions and foot-notes to bring them into harmony with his new tone of anti-Clerical Liberalism. He made a clean breast of thoughts unrevealed till then, in the notes at the end of Vol. XI. ; while the contents of his cahiers, published just before his death, are startling in their crude negation of his earlier faiths. His method of criticism, whatever its merits, had led him to scepticism of all human conclusions. The champion of "truth " had failed to find truth in any direction. He had reached that " saturation," to use his own expression, " in which the heart is drowned." In 1848, he wrote : "I have my weaknesses, the same which gave to Solomon disgust and satiety of life." The year before his death, he sadly recognised the truth : " The sensuous life is a powerful agent for dissolution of faith, and it more or less
inoculates scepticism The principle of certitude is, in the long-run, infected and confused." No one more than Sainte-Beuve himself would have acknowledged that he had neither discovered truth nor law in his new science of literary dissection ; and ambition, which had been strong in him, had to content itself with a Senatorship when he was within three years of death.
If we had not, however inefficiently, followed his example, and endeavoured to guage his literary work according to his circumstances and his conduct, we might have given almost unreserved praise to the admirable sincerity and diligence, the masterly completeness of his invaluable achievement as limner to the Muses. His portraits speak to us in their real voice ; we know more of them than we do of our intimate acquaintances. Those he touched perhaps most lovingly point us forward to a light that he suffered to become obscure for himself. The poetry, the noble aims of many of his men and women, delight us as they might not, had Sainte-Beuve not had sensitive sympathy with them. Not his scientific method, but his individual genius, and the suffering both of soul and body which is here and there betrayed in his splendid con- tribution to our knowledge, make Sainte-Beuve the great and sympathetic critic of our century.
To the last he worked in growing dismay at the approach of the Imperial disaster, and the disturbance that must follow. He was spared the patriotic grief of his friend, Prosper Merimee. He died, after much suffering, on October 13th, 1869, convinced of his sad satiety, if of nothing else. His ambition might have been content, had he seen from another state the enormous crowd who attended his body to the grave. Not the critic's power, but his opposition to the Government and his attacks on the clergy, gained for him the most popular demonstration since Beranger's funeral.
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