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6

LIFE AND WRITINGS OF SAINTE-BEUVE.*

'TO-MORROW,' exclaims Mr. Phoebus to Lothair, to-morrow the critics will You know who the critics The men who have failed in literature and art.' This is certainly not true of the literary critics of our time, who comprise an absolute majority of the most successful authors, e.g., Scott, Southey, Moore, Hallam, Sydney Smith, Gifford, Brougham, Milman, Lockhart, Lord Stanhope, Lord Houghton, Mill, Carlyle, Froude, Macaulay, Lytton. Moreover, success in criticism, like that of Jeffrey or Sainte-Beuve, is success in literature; but one of these, Sainte

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Beuve, might be cited as giving the semblance of plausibility to the paradox; for, if he did not actually fail in literature, his reputation derives comparatively little lustre from his original compositions in prose or verse. The Causeries du Lundi' have thrown Joseph Delorme' and 'Volupté' into the shade, and it is pre-eminently as a critic that we feel bound to reconsider his claim to the high place amongst the classics of his tongue which the general voice of his countrymen has gradually and reluctantly, compulsively rather than impulsively, assigned to him.

To praise the talent of Sainte-Beuve,' observes a far from partial biographer, 'would be a superfluous work: public opinion has slowly got accustomed to consider him as the first critic of our time, and my modest suffrage is not necessary to maintain him in that rank.' His influence and renown in that capa

17

city have not been confined to France. Mr. Without going quite so far as Matthew Arnold, a bold and original thinker, who terms him the finest critical spirit of our time,' we readily admit that we, in England, rarely undertake a subject, falling within the department of letters, that has attained to European interest within the last forty years, without first turning to see what SainteBeuve has said about it. Nor in the great majority of instances, whatever the extent of our prior knowledge, have we failed to meet with something useful or valuable, if only a trait of character, an anecdote, an illustration, or haply the key to an unknown or neglected train of thought. At the same time we have been repeatedly struck by the want of breadth and elevation of view, as well as by the entire absence of settled convictions that led him into so many startling inconsistencies: that caused him to be more admired than esteemed by the most illustrious of his compeers and colleagues in the Senate and the Academy.

'I was once,' relates M. d'Haussonville,' accidentally present at an animated discussion between persons who were comparing SainteBeuve with Mérimée from the point of view of moral value. The controversy was warm; some stood out for Mérimée, others for SainteBeuve. All of a sudden one of the company

who had hitherto, contrary to his habits, preserved a deep silence, exclaimed, as he began pacing up and down the room: "Do you know the veritable superiority of Mérimée over Sainte-Beuve? I will tell you. Mérimée is a gentleman; Sainte-Beuve is not." (Mérimée

non to be classified, and we are now in a condition to consider him and his works in all their bearings without reserve, which, when we risked a review of them (January, 1866) in his lifetime, we conWe then owned with fessedly were not. regret that the required fulness of detail was wanting: that we were compelled to grope in semi-darkness, where our successors or ourselves might live to walk in full sunlight. There is no longer room for such regret; the full sunlight has broken upon us; the most trustworthy materials were poured out with unexampled profusion so soon as the seal of secrecy was broken and the restraints of private confidence were removed by his death. We have now an autobiography concise but complete as to dates and facts, a long autobiographical letter, a volume of reminiscences entitled 'Souvenirs et Indiscretions' by a private secretary; and (above all) the 'Life and Works,' by the Vicomte d'Haussonville; biography which leaves nothing to be desired in the way of information, illustration, or appreciation. It is Sainte-Beuve drawn from close observation and study, and judged as well by his personal qualities as by his works. Corrected editions of his principal writings, with notes by himself or his secretary, have been multiplied since his death, and it is an additional reason for the resumption of our task that some of the most remarkable passages of his career occurred within a

a

est gentilhomme; Sainte-Beuve n'est pas gentil- few years of its end. To save the trouble

homme.)'

'I should never,' adds M. d'Haussonville, have dared to translate my thoughts under so aristocratic a form if I had not heard this judgment fall from the mouth of M. Cousin.' But SainteBeuve and M. Cousin were declared rivals, almost open enemies, and we should say that Mérimée's superiority was conventional rather than moral: that it lay more in birth, breeding and manners, than in mind. This probably is all M. Cousin meant; for a man may be what we understand by 'gentleman without being gentilhomme in France.

This very conflict of opinion touching Sainte-Beuve makes him a moral problem to be solved, an intellectual anomaly to be investigated, a psychological phenome

of reference, we will briefly recapitulate the details of his birth, education, early youth, and hesitation in the choice of a calling till his destination became irrevocably fixed.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was born on the 23rd of December, 1804, at Boulogne-sur-Mer. His father was an employé in the department of taxes; the mother, of a respectable family in the same town who delayed their union till he was was named comptroller. This event did not come to pass till he was fifty-two, and she past forty. He died within a few months of the marriage, leaving her with child of Charles Augustin, who, although he never saw the paternal face or heard the paternal voice, was still thought to have been indebted more for his distinctive tenden

cies to the father than to the mother, who watched over him from infancy and was domesticated with him till her death at the advanced age of eighty-six. He seems to have shared and encouraged this theory; for when it was the fashion to celebrate mothers, when Victor Hugo and Lamartine were emulously eloquent about theirs, the combined inspiration of filial gratitude and example could only extort from Sainte-Beuve a meagre and solitary tribute to his. Coupling her with an old aunt whom he had just seen laid in her coffin, he exclaims:

'Elle m'aimait pourtant-et ma mère aussi m'aime,

mourra.'

Et ma mère à son tour mourra

and Sainte-Beuve, although naturally anxious to prove a connection with the Doctor Jacques de Sainte- Beuve who figures in his ' Port Royal,' failed in carrying his pedigree higher up than his grandfather, a comptroller of taxes at Aix. He therefore took his part bravely, and openly repudiated the pretension he was unable to make good. Not being noble,' he writes, 'I did not choose to give myself the air of being so.' Just so Béranger:

'Hé quoi! J'apprends que l'on critique
Le de qui précède mon nom.
Etes-vous de noblesse antique?

Moi, noble? Oh! vraiment, messieurs, non.

*

*

*

Je suis vilain, et très-vilain.'

*

*

This contrasts strangely with the lines To adopt Sainte-Beuve's own account in which he refers to his father: in his Autobiography :

'Mon père ainsi sentait. Si, né dans sa mort même,

Ma mémoire n'eut pas son image suprême, Il m'a laissé du moins son âme et son esprit, Et son goût tout entier, à chaque marge écrit.'

The father was a man of cultivated taste and (for his means) a liberal purchaser of books; two or three of which he left covered with marginal notes, showing discrimination and research. His memory reflected honor on his descendant, and he was no longer present in the flesh with those outward and visible marks of straitened circumstances which are trying to fastidiousness or wounding to self-love. The mother, on the other hand, was simply a warm - hearted, homely, affectionate creature, who was hard pressed to provide for his material wants. He is always without socks,' was her recorded exclamation to a female friend. As he grew to man's estate, she was sorely disquieted by his more ambitious yearnings. She regarded literature as a precarious and unprofitable trade, and never felt confident of his position till he was elected of the Academy. Instead of consulting her, as Molière consulted his old woman, he was wont to treat superciliously any opinion she ventured to express on topics not lying within her peculiar province as housekeeper.

In more than one official document, his father is inscribed as de Sainte-Beuve, but there is no proof that the noble prefix was otherwise adopted by him; it was clearly never used by the mother,

'My mother without fortune, and a sister of my father, who joined her, brought me up. I followed my studies at the pension of M. Bleriot, at Boulogne. I had terminated the entire course, including my rhetoric, at thirteen and a-half. But I well knew all that was wanting in me, and I desired my mother to send me to Paris, although this was a great sacrifice on account of her small means.

ber, 1818, and since this time, saving rare ab'I came to Paris for the first time in Septem

sences, I have never ceased to inhabit it. I was put to board with M. Landry, Rue de la Cerisaie. M. Landry, formerly professor of Louis-le-Grand, mathematician and philosoand met at it from the first his favorite friends, pher, was a freethinker. I dined at his table, the academician Picard amongst others. I was treated as a big boy, as a little man.'

During his first year at this boarding. house he was a student at the Collége Charlemagne, where he gained the first prize for history: during the second, he completed his second course of rhetoric at the Collége Bourbon, where he gained the first prize for Latin verse.

'But I was already emancipated. In doing my philosophy under M. Damiron, I hardly believed in it. Enjoying full liberty at my pension, because I did not abuse it, I went every evening to the Athénée, Rue de Valois, at the Palais Royal, from seven to eight, to follow the

courses of physiology, chemistry, and natural history, of MM. Magendie, Robiquet, de Blainville, and hear literary lectures, &c. I was there presented to M. de Tracy. I had a decided taste for the study of medicine. My mother came then to settle in Paris, and, lodging with her, I followed the course of the School (of Medicine).'

This was in June, 1823. Besides attending medical lectures, he. (in English

phrase) walked the hospitals for nearly three years; and there can be no doubt that his anatomical studies strengthened, if they did not found or form, the marked leaning towards materialism which he subsequently avowed. 'I began frankly and bluntly by the most advanced eighteenth century, by Tracy, Daunon, Lamarck, and the physiology; there is my veritable ground (fonds).' It was said of Tracy that he blushed to believe, and cared only to know; and the apostrophe placed in the mouth of the old savant by M. Octave Feuillet (in 'Redemption') breathed the true spirit of the school: How should I help believing in the immortal soul? I have touched it with my finger.' We agree with M. d'Haussonville, that it was almost a matter of course that a disposition like Sainte-Beuve's should be warped by such pursuits. One must have the soul and the intellect singularly inclined to spiritualism not to feel an involuntary trouble in presence of the mysterious phenomena that physiological science reveals to our researches. When we see, palpitating under the dissecting-knife, the organs in which life appears to be concentrated, we may sometimes be tempted to forget that the principle and the source of life are elsewhere.' There is ample proof, however, that SainteBeuve had too much spiritualism or poetry in his nature to adopt implicitly the hard cold doctrine of the Tracy school. At the Landry boarding-house he had formed a life-long friendship with Eustache Barbe, afterwards the Abbé Barbe, with whom he kept up an uninterrupted correspondence of the most confidential kind, exhibiting all the oscillations of his mind on religious subjects. In a letter to this friend, about the time when he spoke of the eighteenth century as his fonds, he writes:-'You tell me that the Government is a power exercised by Ministers, which is very true; and you add, Power emanating from God alone. Undoubtedly this power comes from God in the sense that all comes from Him, and that He is the source of all; but I believe -and he then proceeds to show why he does not believe in Right Divine.

Contemporaneous with this mental struggle between faith and reason, was another intimately connected with it

whether he should adopt medicine or literature as a profession. In 1827, Dubois, the professor under whom he had studied at the Collége Charlemagne, founded the 'Globe,' invited him to become a contributor, and took considerable pains to train him as a journalist. 'He tried me with a number of small articles. They are signed S. B., and it is easy for any biographer to follow my tentative beginnings. One day, Dubois said to me," Now you know how to write, and you can go alone."' His success in this line was apparently not marked enough to decide his future career till an incident occurred, which threw a fresh and preponderating influence into the scale and speedily caused medicine to kick the beam. There are two versions. Victor Hugo's is, that one morning as he was at breakfast, the servant announced M. Sainte-Beuve, and showed in a young man, a stranger, who introduced himself as a neighbor and writer for the 'Globe,' ready and willing to undertake a continuation of the articles (already commenced by another), on the poet's Cromwell. The interview,' it is added, 'was a very agreeable one on both sides, and promises of a renewal of intercourse were exchanged.' Sainte-Beuve disputes the accuracy of this circumstantial narrative. He says that, Dubois having commissioned him to review Victor Hugo's 'Odes et Ballades,' he wrote (January 2nd and 9th, 1827) two articles which attracted the notice of Goethe:

'I had then no acquaintance with Victor Hugo. We were near neighbors without knowing it. He came to thank me for the articles, without finding me. The next day, or the day after, I called on him, and found him at breakfast. This little scene, and my entrée, have been painted in lively colors in "Victor Hugo, raconté." But, it is not accurate to say that I came to offer to place the "Globe" at his disposal. From my youth upwards I have understood criticism differently: modeste, mais digne. I have never offered myself, I have waited for people to come to me. Dating from this day, began my initiation into the romantic school of poets. Till then I was sufficiently antipathic, on account of the royalism and the mysticism, which I did not share. I had even

written in the "Globe" a severe article on the

"Cinq Mars" of M. de Vigny, shocked by the falsehood of its historic side. It was in this

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