BOOKS.

TWO POSTHUMOUS WORKS OF SAINTE-BEUVE.• SINCE the death of Sainte-Beuve, which took place on October 13, 1869, not only his writings have excited constant attention, but his individuality also has been carefully studied ; no kind of posthumous fame, not even that springing from indiscretions, has been denied him. There is, however, no ground of complaint on his behalf, for none more than he inculcated the precept and set the example of a literary method which resuscitates remark- able individuals by directing attention to their peculiarities, as much as.to their work ; by studying their original instincts, their natural propensities, their character ; in seeking, above all, the dis- tinctive mark, be it a merit, a fault, or even a comic trait, which sharpens the likeness, and casts on a countenance a light or shadow henceforth ineffaceable. How many masterpieces of acuteness and taste, of deep and delicate observation, are recalled to the memory at the mention of the name of Sainte-Beuve ! How many figures, graceful and attractive, owe him their wreaths ; how many thoughtful brows has he illumined with a ray of immortality ; how many humble merits has he not pro-

claimed ! But also what sinister shadows has he not called before the tribunal of history, loaded with respon- sibility ! No voice was listened to so eagerly as his, none left a greater void in literature when it died away. Hence, when, soon after his death, the last of his secretaries, M. J. Troubat, published a volume entitled Souvenirs et Indiscretions, and when, a few years later, he printed the Cahiers de Sainte-Beuve, and quite recently the first volume of his Correspondence, these productions were received with the same favour as during the lifetime of the master. Nor were the expectations of the public disappointed. The Cahiers tell many secrets of the method and of the prodigious and well-nigh uninterrupted work of their author ; the letters, written during a period of forty-three years, from 1822 to 1865, and polished like everything touched by Sainte- Beuve, furnish a good many characteristic details, and form an indispensable supplement to his biographies, already written or still to come.

Let us first look at the Cahiers. There he jotted down the thoughts and reflections suggested by his reading, the passing impressions of the hour, and sometimes even a casual conversa- tion or a good story. They were an arsenal from which he drew at one moment the first impression in all its brightness, at another the conclusions of a long and almost unprecedented literary experience. We can only notice, en passant, a few of these notes Say what you will, there is much conscience in the House of Peers,' said some one to Talleyrand. ' I entirely agree,'

• Lea Waters de Sainte•Beure. Paris : Alphonse Lemerre. 1876. Sainte-Beuv er Correapondance. Vol. I. Parts : Calmann Ldvy.

answered the latter ; ' just look at Semonville, he alone has got three.' " It is well known that Sainte-Beuve, who let himself be drifted about by so many opposite currents, or who at least, according to his own account, followed them for a time• out of mental curiosity, was for some years connected with Pierre Leroux, who became the head of the Saint-Simonians. When their relations were alluded to in after-life, he answered Yes, I knew Leroux, a distinguished man, who has gone down since. I have lost sight of him, or to say the truth, I have broken with him. He has become a god, and I a librarian. We chose dif- ferent lines." It is also in the Cahiers that Sainte-Beuve, furnish- ing conclusive proof of its correctness, quotes the happy saying of the Duchesse de Broglie on Guizot :—" Ce sait de ae matin, it a l'air de le savoir de toute eternite." But as we have- already remarked, it is to the Cahiers that those must go who desire to study the precede of the artist. " Criticism for me means the plea- sure of understanding minds, not of ruling them." (Callers, p. 114 This sentence would be an appropriate motto for Sainte-Beuve.. No one more than he had the passion of his art,—the untiring patience of research. In the interesting and dignified account of him given by M. Levallois, another of his secretaries, there is.

an astonishing description of his day's work. During the whole- time when the Critiques du Lundi were being composed, that is.

to say, from 1861 to 1869, it was only during the half of Monday that he interrupted the labour of the week, which sometimes ex- tended far into the night. It was a favourite view of his that a person ought only to speak of what he continues to know. The- great work of his life, the history of Port Royal, cost him thirty years of labour ; it originated in a course of lectures at Lausanne in 1837, and the final and complete edition appeared in 1867. He was not satisfied with getting to the bottom of his subject, with penetrating the genius and nature of every one of those con- nected with that tragical history ; he ended by knowing them as we know those with whom we are in daily intercourse, and by exciting in his readers the same intensity of life and interest which is the predominant quality of his work. On this subject the Cahiers again point out the path he followed

Every distinguished individual must, if possible, be studied in his- parents, in the mother, in the sister, in the brother, even in the child- ren ; essential features are to be found there, which are often obscure

in him who combines and unites them all 411 this is very subtle, and would require to be illustrated by a mass of examples which I have collected. I will perhaps develop this idea some day. A literary method of a physiological kind would be the result. If nec6ssary, shall write this philosophy of my criticism." (Cahiers, p. 70.)

This dates from 1847; the essay was never written, but the point of view here indicated remained Sainte-Beuve's to the last.

Long years afterwards, he gives the following analysis of it:-

" We also have our method, and it is neither the quickest nor at first sight the grandest. We do nothing straight off : our bridge is not of one arch, dashingly cast across the stream. To understand a man and to paint him, I must come back and begin again two or three times over. What matters it, provided I gain my end, which is truth?". (Cahiers, p. 145.)

The whole criticism of Sainte-Beuve attests his fidelity to this programme. There is hardly a single great portrait in his splendid gallery to which he did not again and again return, to vary an attitude, to raise a pedestal, to change the light, to sup- press the drapery, or to wither a crown. It will be sufficient to recall the names of Victor Hugo, Bcranger, Cousin, Château-

briand, the most illustrious of all, who, having been worshipped by the Sainte-Beuve of 1834, very nearly ended by becoming his victim in the book, otherwise so interesting, Chdteaubriand et son Groupe litteraire sous l'Empire. The truth is that the points of view were in continual motion before that ever active mind and restless imagination, unsustained by any fixed belief, except in, the correctness of its taste and the largeness of its experience. Thus it came to pass that the friends of yesterday became the adversaries of the morrow. The allies of his youth never succeeded in obtaining forgiveness for exaggerated praise once received at his hands, while on the other hand, former opponents had everything to hope from his literary generosity. M.

Levallois conveys some notion of these constant changes when he- says that the historian of Port Royal ended by positively hating every one connected with it, and actually took the side of Louis.

XIV. against his secretary, who defended Arnauld.

If he thus treated his heroes and heroines, no wonder he was severe upon those whom be had simply to criticise. We all re- member the articles on Talleyrand, against which the family pro- tested in vain. When he thus put him in the pillory, Sainte- Beuve was not giving way to spite, but acting on a carefully

thought-out idea, explained in a most remarkable letter written in. 1863, a propos of Villemain, his former master " Is it necessary, as those who surround him are always doing, eternally to praise his noble and elevated sentiments ? Must one be a dupe one- self, and dupe others ? Men of letters, historians, preachers of morality, are they, then, mere play-actors, who must not be judged independently of the part they have arranged for themselves, and to be described only in the postures they assumed as long as they were on the stage? Or on the contrary, the subject being well understood, is it allowable to slip in the knife, firmly yet discreetly, to indicate the weak point of the armour, to show the seams between the soul and the talent, to praise the one, to mark also the blot in the other, which is perceptible in the talent itself and in the consequences it develops ? Will literature suffer by this? Possibly moral science will gain. To this we are fated to come. There is no such thing any more as isolated criticism. When I understand the man, then only I comprehend the rhetorician" (Corre- spondence, L, p. 316.) It must be borne in mind that Sainte-Beuve himself did not hesi- tate to pay the penalty of his extreme independence in matters of criticism. He has told us himself how be lived till 1840 in a poor

scholar's room, for which he paid twenty-three francs a month ; and he was able to add, " I never got into debt, which is worth considering from a moral point of view." In throwing such various lights upon his literary work, in casting shadows on parts where the brightness was too strong, he himself prepared the antidote for the evil be might have wrought ; he dwelt upon dis- tinct features, isolated characteristics, details wonderfully minute, without troubling himself what would become of the entire structure. But his materials are so rich and so surprisingly beau- tiful, that it is indeed our own fault if we are unable to use them, and if this prodigious wealth of accumulated labour profits us not. By turns classical and romantic, pure idealist and extreme realist, Sainte-Beuve is the greatest of modern critics, and to sum up our view of him, it was not his work which was a failure, but his life. This is unfortunately the impression forced upon us, not only by the revelations which have been made on his behalf, but by his own admissions. The former are of every sort and kind, from those contained in the serious and impartial, but on the whole

hostile treatise of M. d'Haussonville, to those published with such doubtful taste in Souvenirs et Indiscrelions, a book in which par- ticular attention is called to everything which ought to have been lightly passed over. If further proofs were wanting, they have

just been furnished in the Correspondence.

This is addressed to the most different sorts of people, to the companions of his youth, to authors, to friends; and among these, the letters written to the Calvinist minister, Alexandre Vinet, at Lausanne, are distinguished by a grave and confidential, we had almost said tender tone, which was justified by the relations existing between the two men. They began in 1832. Sainte- Beuve, who was born at Boulogne in 1805, commenced by study- ing medicine at Paris ; it was only in 1827 that his literary vocation showed itself so decidedly that he abandoned the career first chosen, to devote himself entirely to it, not merely as a critic, but first of all, and pre-eminently, as a poet. This part of his work, for which he felt a preference which resisted to the last the hostile verdict of the world, was already almost forgotten during

his life ; our generation hardly seeks for more in the Consolations, the Pensees d'Aodt, and even in the Poosies de Joseph Delorme,

which produced some sensation in their day, than mere personal recollections. Their author then belonged to the Romantic school,

and it was then also that be wrote Volupte. But he already differed somewhat from the views of his friends, and as M. Levallois re- marks, Victor Hugo in Notre Dame, Lamartine in Jocelyn, George Sand in Lelia, turned away from the religious point of view, at the very same time when Sainte-Beuve plunged into the mysticism which permeates Yoluptd. The relations between him

and Vinet date from the publication of that book, which Vinet reviewed:—

" I have to thank my critic," said Sainte-Beuve, "for the great liter- ary indulgence which he had for me, and for the Christian counsels and moral tone which dominate his judgment. If he has done more than justice to my literary claims, I also have found matter for reflection and self-examination on other points much more important." (Corresp. L, 21.)

Two years afterwards, in 1834, Sainte-Beuve wrote to Ampere :

—" As for me, my dear friend, I have given myself up entirely to the study of the holy solitude of Port Royal" (Corresp., I., 29).

In November, 1837, thanks to the influence of Vinet and his friends, he began his famous course on this subject at Lausanne. Did his youthful hearers, whom his eloquence transported, sus- pect that those brilliant lectures were owing to disappointment in love? That this, however, was the case is proved in his correspondence beyond all possibility of doubt :—

"After all," ho says, in a letter to Marmier, dated December, 1837, " I was never so comforted by my audios, by the animated solitude they give me for so many hours a day. Love is postponed ; shall I ever go back to it ? I was so deeply wounded by so much indifference,1 but being wounded implies that I still suffer." (Corresp., I., 42.)

In January, 1838, he wrote these significant words to Vinet :-

" It is the misfortune of those who have only inspirations and inclin- ations without faith, to be at the sport of every breath of wind or chance. When I write, when I speak, I feel, so to say, imperatively driven to follow a certain track of truths, and there only I find the ideas necessary for my mind and pen. But if, unfortunately, other thoughts present themselves from time to time, if other currents bring back in a leisure hour the mommy of other days, I let myself go, and my mind and pen abandon themselves to the attraction which is at once old and new." (Correspondence, L, p. 44.)

These and many similar expressions reveal a protracted moral struggle, the varying phases of which it is not for us to judge, but whose final issue we know full well. At last things had reached such a point that Sainte-Beuve, half in earnest and half in joke, said one day to a colleague of the Academy, "Look here, I have never ventured to ask you to dinner, because you are a respectable man." And the author of Port Royal, at the close of his life, wrote these astounding sentences :-

" I have done a little Christian mythology in my time ; it ended in smoke. It was for me like Leda's swan, the means of approaching the fair, et de filer un plus tendre amour. Youth has time, and can make use of everything. I am old now, and I have chased away the mists. I mortify myself less, and I see clearer. 'Tis a pity that all this cannot last, and that the very moment at which we are most completely masters of ourselves and our thoughts, is also that when we are nearest our decay and end." (Correspondence, I., 322.)

Many a man has come to a similar conclusion. What distin- guishes Sainte-Beuve is not that he ended as an unbelieving Epicurean, but that he unceasingly deplored this consummation. " What is to be said," he wrote, "if, on the way, you have vaguely indicated the paths leading to the Land of Promise, to. those who have known how to choose them, and hold steadfastly

on to the last, when you yourself have strayed across the plain. and the desert ?" (Correspondence, I., 230.) On another occasion he says, in a letter to the poet Turquety, who had remained faithful to his Christian sentiments,—" You recall to my mind times long gone by. 1 try to keep them buried, that their memory should not move too actively within me." (Corre- spondence, I., p. 224.) And hearing of Vinet's death, he broke out in those bitter words,—" The crown has fallen from our

heads. If any one could see the life I have led for years, he would soon perceive that I have attached myself to nothing, and that I am truly homeless,—homeless in mind and heart."

(Correspondence, I., p, 142.) Later on be tried to settle ; the memory of Vinet faded away into that twilight with which he loved to surround what he called the illusions daruites, in the- desolate epilogue of Port Royal. But in spite of his efforts, he

remained, as he had himself expressed it, a homeless man. " Per- haps—and who knows ?—I can't get further than this," was kis profession of faith in 1859: " Perhaps, and who knows?" say we, in our turn. Perhaps truth had once appeared to him too vividly to permit him peacefully to re-enter the regions of doubt ? Perhaps he was unable to blot out from his memory the visions of moral beauty which had been revealed to him in those ruined cloisters, repeopled by his incomparable talent, and that he could•

never forgive himself for having welcomed the appearance of Fanny and praised Madame Bovary with the same pen

which resuscitated Jacqueline Pascal and told the story of La Mere Angelique. Perhaps, in short, to conclude in his own words, " There is no more dreary task, nor a more mortal one to the heart, than to,—

" Regarder dans la foi, comma an plus vain mirage, Se prendre is la ruino, et toujours repassor, Comme aux herds d'uno Ath6ne, a l'dternel rivago

Toucher toujours l'autel, sans jamais l'embrasser."