SOME LAST WORDS FROM SAINTE-BEUVE.
It is seven years since the world of letters lost the prince of critics, the last of the critics. His unfinished and unpublished manuscripts were eagerly demanded and devoured; while obituaries, notices, reminiscences and those analyses which the French term appréciations rained in from various quarters. The latest of these that deserves attention was an outline of Saint-Beuve's life and literary career by the Vicomte d'Haussonville, in which, with an affectation of impartiality and fairness, every page was streaked with malice; imperfect justice was done to Sainte-Beuve's intellect; his influence and reputation were understated; and a picture was given of him as a man which could not but be disagreeable and disappointing to the vast number who admired him as a writer. In regard to the first two points, ill-nature and inaccuracy can do no harm: Sainte-Beuve's fame and ability are perfectly well known to the reading public of to-day, and the opinion of posterity will rest upon his own merits rather than on the statements of any biographer, as he is one of the authors whose writings are sure to be more read than what other people write about them. The unpleasant personal impression is not so easily dismissed: however exaggerated we may be disposed to think it, the reflection occurs, "How this man was feared!" The appearance of the notice several years after Sainte-Beuve's death strengthens this conviction: M. d'Haussonville waited until his subject should be quite cold before he ventured to touch him.
The causes of this dread and dislike are not to be found in Sainte-Beuve's voluminous works, nor have I met with any evidence of it in the writings of his literary contemporaries. He obviously held that it is a critic's duty to be just before he is generous, and there may be a lack of geniality in his praise, though it is not given grudgingly; but I cannot recall an instance of literary spite in the large proportion of his writings with which I am familiar. His judgments are often severe, never harsh: he frequently dealt in satire, rarely, as far as my memory serves, in sarcasm, and he condemns irony as one of the least intelligent dispositions of the mind. The only case in which I remember having suspected Sainte-Beuve of ill-nature was in a notice of J. J. Ampère printed in the Revue des Deux Mondes shortly after the latter's death; but a person who had known Ampère long and well, and on the friendliest terms, declared that it gave an entirely fair description of the man, who, full of talent and amiability as he was, had many weaknesses. Two pleas only can justify disinterring and gibbeting an author's private life—either his having done the same by others, or his having made the public the confidant of his individual experience. Few writers have intruded their own personality upon their readers less than Sainte-Beuve has done: the poems and novels of his youth, which won fervent admiration from the literary leaders of that day, De Vigny, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, are now forgotten: he is known to readers of the last half century by a series of critical and biographical essays extending from 1823 or 1824 to 1870, which combine every attribute of perfect criticism except enthusiasm. The most prominent feature of his method is the conscientiousness with which he credits the person upon whom he passes judgment with every particle of worth which can be extracted from his writings, acts or sayings: he adopts as the basis of criticism the acknowledgment of whatever merit may exist in the subject of consideration; and his talent and patience for sifting the grain from the chaff are remarkable and admirable. An author who has left some forty volumes conceived in this spirit should have been safe against an effusion of spleen in his biographer. I am not assailing the fidelity of M. d'Haussonville's portrait—of which I have no means of judging—but the temper in which it is executed, which can be judged without difficulty. Besides the injustice already mentioned, it is disfigured by tittle-tattle, which tends to render the original ridiculous and repulsive, but does not add one whit to our knowledge of Sainte-Beuve as a man or an author.
A defence of Sainte-Beuve is not within the purpose of the present article; but it was impossible for one who has known him favorably for twenty years through his works and the testimony of his most distinguished literary compeers to speak of him at all without protesting against the detraction to which his memory has been subjected. Two small posthumous volumes have lately been issued in France,[C] revealing qualities which might expose the dead man to a mean revenge, though to most readers they will have a delightful freshness unspoiled by any bitter flavor. They consist of a series of notes on all sorts of subjects, literary, dramatic, religious and political, one of them being actually made up of the jottings in his later notebooks, while the other contains the memoranda of a sort of high-class gossip with which Sainte-Beuve supplied a friend, the editor of La Revue Suisse, during the years 1843-45. These were not to be published as they stood, but to be used by the editor, M. Juste Olivier, as he should think best: they are fragmentary, mere bits of raw material—if any product of that accomplished brain can be so termed—to be worked up by another hand. They were qualified by marginal observations, such as "This is for you alone," "This is rather strong," and they were to be absolutely anonymous, the author allowing himself the luxury of free speech, of writing exactly as he thought and felt; in short, of trusting his indiscretion to M. Olivier's discretion. The latter used his judgment independently; Sainte-Beuve's views and comments often became merely one ingredient in an article for which others supplied the rest; and the editor kneaded the whole into shape to his own liking. But the MSS. remained intact, and were confided by M. Olivier to M. Jules Troubat, Sainte-Beuve's private secretary and editor, who has published them in their integrity, he tells us, with the exception of "a few indispensable suppressions." The other volume, as we have said, is composed of his notebooks. These last were intended to take the place of memoirs by Sainte-Beuve himself, who wrote a short preface, under the name of M. Troubat, destined for a larger volume to appear after his death. He published, however, the greater part of those which he had already collected in vol. ii. of the Causeries de Lundi: the present series contains the notes which accumulated subsequently. M. Troubat has given them to the world as they stood. Both books abound in the characteristics of the author's style—good sense, moderation, perception, discrimination, delicacy, sparkle, unerring taste, as well as judgment in matters of intelligence. A parcel of disconnected passages cannot possess the flow and finish of a complete essay, but each bit has the clearness, incisiveness and smooth polish of his native wit. They give us Sainte-Beuve's first impression, thought, mental impulse, about daily events regarding which he sometimes afterward modified his opinion. Not often, however, for he had, if not precisely the prophetic vision which belongs to genius or minds illuminated by enthusiasm or sympathy, that keen far-sightedness which recognizes at a distance rather than foresees the coming event or man. He tells a quantity of anecdotes, and he had exactly the sort of humor and absence of tenderness for human weakness which perceives the point that makes a story good in the greatest variety of speeches and situations. The key to the dislike and fear with which some people must have regarded him while living lies probably in just this appreciation. It is vain to assert that humor is necessarily kindly, or the adjectives "grim" and "savage" would not so often be tacked to it. Nobody could have hoped that friendship would blind Sainte-Beuve to an absurdity: on the other hand, even his enemies might count on his recognition if they had said a good thing, and his not spoiling it in the repetition, as too many friends do. This produced an impartiality in his verdicts which is the moral essence of criticism, but perhaps the most trying quality to the subject of it: he says himself that he had irritated and envenomed more people by his praise than by his blame. He had not a high opinion of human nature, which is curiously illustrated by his female portraits: when there has been only a doubt of a woman's virtue, he never gives her the benefit of the doubt; when there has not been even the suspicion of a slip, he presumes that she kept her secrets better than most people do. He was sensitive to the accusation of cynicism, and resented extremely an article in L'Union of June, 1855, in which he was set down as having not only a skeptical mind, but a skeptical heart; which was no doubt very nearly true. Yet he was on his guard against his natural cynicism in his literary judgments at least, as one need but glance over them to see. In the Cahiers he cites an expression of his fair friend Madame d'Arbonville: "How many good things there are besides the things which we like! We ought to make room within ourselves for a certain opposite;" and he adds that this should be the motto of a liberal and intelligent critic. These convictions helped to make his criticism as admirable, as invaluable, as it is; but the sharpness from which his literary work is free makes his private observations on men and things more entertaining. There are few people so well-natured as not to enjoy the peculiar pungency which gives many of the passages in the two volumes before us their relish: now and then it is as if we had got hold of the cruets which were to season a whole article. There is a batch of anecdotes about Lamartine, whose conspicuous gifts and position put his puerile vanity in relief; and that vanity Sainte-Beuve never spared. Lamartine set the fashion of his own idolatry by constituting himself the high priest; adulation was not enough—he demanded adoration; and he received it. He had a habit of contemplating himself from an objective but highly-idealizing point of view, best expressed by saying that he had a hero-worship for himself: his memoirs and other autobiographical writings are full of it, and in his intercourse it perpetually overflowed. "That is the brow they have tried to bend to the dust!" he exclaimed, standing before his own likeness in Ary Scheffer's studio. Lord Houghton, among his many good stories, had one of spending an evening at Lamartine's in Paris with a circle of celebrities. Alfred de Vigny, who had been out of town, presented himself. "Welcome back!" said Lamartine magnificently. "You come from the provinces: do they admire us down there?"—"They adore you," replied De Vigny with a bow. The conversation was a prolonged paean to the host, with choral strophe and antistrophe. One of the party began to rehearse the aspects in which Lamartine was the greatest man in France—"As a poet, as an orator, as an historian, as a statesman;" and as he paused, "And as a soldier," added Lamartine with a sublime gesture, "if ever France shall need him." This may have been the country neighbor who, we learn from Sainte-Beuve, pronounced Lamartine to be Fénelon without his didacticism, Rousseau without his sophistry, Mirabeau without his incendiary notions. Still, there were asides in the dialogue. One evening, the week before the overthrow of the provisional government of which Lamartine was president, he had a crowded reception, and, notwithstanding the failure and imminent downfall of his administration, he was radiant with satisfaction. "What can M. de Lamartine have to be so pleased about?" said one of his friends to another. "He is pleased with himself," was the reply.—"One of those speeches," observes Sainte-Beuve, "which only friends find to make." But Lamartine was by no means solitary in this infatuation. Sainte-Beuve remarks that "Nothing is so common in our days: some think themselves God, some the Son of God, some archangels. Pierre Leroux thinks himself the first, De Vigny the last: Lamartine is a good prince—he is satisfied to be a seraph."
These books give us daily glimpses of Paris thirty years ago, of that incessant mental movement, inquiry, desire for novelty and vivacity of transient interest which dazzle the brain as the scintillation of the sun upon the unstable waves does the eye. In all great cities, quite as much as in villages, there is a topic which for the moment occupies everybody, and which cannot be escaped, whether you enter a drawing-room, pick up a newspaper or rush into the street: the chief difference is, that in the great cities it changes oftener—"every fortnight here," says Sainte-Beuve of Paris. The history of many a nine days' wonder may be gathered from the Chroniques: we can mark the first effect of occurrences startling at the time, some of which are now wholly forgotten, while others have become historical; we witness the appearance of new divinities who have since found their pedestals, niches or obscure corners. Among these was Ponsard, chiefly known in this country, to those who remember Mademoiselle Rachel's brief, gleaming transit, as the author of Horace et Lydie, a light, bright, graceful piece based upon Horace's "Donec gratus eram tibi."
M. Ponsard, who was from the south of France, arrived in Paris in 1843 with a tragedy called Lucrèce, which had been in his pocket for three years. It was read first at the house of the actor Bocage before a party of artists, actors and men of letters such as Paris alone can bring together. The littérateurs gave their opinion with caution and an oracular ambiguity which did not commit them too much: Gautier, on being asked how he liked it, replied, "It did not put me to sleep;" but the sculptor Préault, not having a literary reputation at stake, declared that if there were a "Roman prize" for tragedy (as there is for music and the fine arts, entitling the fortunate competitor to four years' travel and study in classic lands at the expense of the government) the author would set out on the morrow for the Eternal City. The play was read again a week or two afterward in the drawing-room of the Comtesse d'Agoult, the beautiful, gifted, reckless friend of Lizst's youth, and mother of the wife of Von Bulow and Wagner. The success was complete. Sainte-Beuve was again present; and Lamartine was among the audience full of admiration: the poor young poet could not nerve himself to come. The play was read by Bocage, who took the principal part, that of Brutus, when it was brought out at the Odéon. The chaste Lucretia was played by Madame Dorval, whose strength lay in parts of a different kind, and who announced her new character to a friend with the comment, "I only play women of virtue now-a-days." Reports of the new tragedy, which had been heard only in secret session, soon got about Paris, and excited intense curiosity and impatience; one of the daily papers published a scene from Lucrèce; the sale was immense; everybody praised it to the skies, even members of the Academy. The next day the hoax came out: a clever but third-rate writer, M. Méry, had made April fools of the wits of Paris. The piece itself was soon performed, and made what is called in this country an immense sensation: the theatre, long out of favor, was crowded every night; the papers were full of it every morning; it was the topic about which everybody talked. Authors who had lately written less popular plays were somewhat envious and spiteful; Victor Hugo pronounced Lucrèce to be Livy versified; Dumas repeated (or invented) the speech of an enthusiastic notary, who exclaimed, "What a piece! Not one of my clerks could have written it." Madame de Girardin had just brought out her tragedy of Judith at the Théâtre Français, with the powerful support of Rachel in the principal character: the drama, when read by Rachel and Madame de Girardin (whose beauty, wit and social position gave her during her whole life a fictitious rank in a certain set, of which none were better aware than the members of it) in Madame Récamier's drawing-room, had produced a better effect than it did upon the stage, where it was considered a respectable failure. Madame de Girardin could not control or conceal her chagrin, and meeting M. Ponsard one evening at the Duchesse de Grammont's, declined to have him presented to her. He took his honors so quietly—so tamely in the opinion of some people—that Madame Dorval exhorted him: "Wake up! wake up! you look like a hen that has hatched an eagle's egg." Since the Augustan age of French literature, since Corneille and Racine, a really fine tragedy on a classic subject had been unknown, and the romantic reaction was then at its height. The moral view of Lucrèce was a new and important element of success. "The religious feeling of the Roman matron, the inviolability of the domestic hearth, are these not new? do not they count for much?" observed the virtuous philosopher Ballanche, the devoted, unselfish friend of Madame Récamier. Sainte-Beuve was greatly impressed by the nobility of the characters and treatment, and after pointing out its beauties and shortcomings, set the seal to his encomium by affirming that the secret of the power of Lucrèce was that it had soul.
The extraordinary favor with which this play was received marked an epoch in a small way, a return to antique ideas and themes, to more elevated subjects and modes of dealing with them. Six weeks after its appearance Sainte-Beuve writes: "We have always been rather apish in France: the Grecian, Roman and biblical tragedies which every day now brings forth are innumerable. Who will deliver me from these Greeks and Romans? Here we are overrun by them again after forty years' insurrection, and by the Hebrews to boot." The high-water mark of the author's popularity was the publication of a trifle called the Anti-Lucrèce, which was sold in the purlieus of the Odéon: next day there was a rumor that a second Anti-Lucrèce was in preparation. But the tide had turned: six months later, when the theatre reopened after the summer vacation with the same tragedy, Sainte-Beuve records: "Lucrèce has reappeared only to die, not by the poignard, but of languor, coldness, premature old age. It is frightful how little and how fast we live in these times—works as well as men. We survive ourselves and our children: the generations are turned upside down. Here is a piece which scarcely six months ago all Paris ran to hear without being asked:... now they are tired of it already, and can find nothing in it: it is like last year's snow." The death-blow of the tragedy was given, Sainte-Beuve says, not by the dagger, but by a luckless blunder of the actor who played Lucretia's father, and who, instead of saying, L'assassin pâlissant ("The assassin turning pale,") said, L'assassin polisson ("The scamp of an assassin"); which set everybody laughing; and that was the end of it.
M. Ponsard might console himself, if he liked, by the reflection that his play, if not immortal, had killed his fair rival's Judith and swallowed up Victor Hugo's Burgraves, which had been acted at the Théâtre Français a month before Lucrèce was first produced. Regarding the former, Sainte-Beuve shows unwonted tenderness or policy. "Never let me be too epigrammatic about Madame de Girardin," he wrote to M. Olivier: "I would not seem to play the traitor to her smiles;" though in reference to a sharp encounter between her and Jules Janin he hints that she has claws of her own. He does not deny himself the pleasure of mentioning Victor Hugo's little weaknesses. At the first three representations of Les Burgraves the theatre was packed with the author's friends: on the fourth a less partial public hissed to that degree that the curtain was dropped, and thenceforward each night was stormier until the play was withdrawn. Hugo could not bring himself to allow that he had been hissed, and, being behind the scenes, said to the actors, with the fatal sibilation whistling through the house, "They are interrupting my play" (On trouble ma pièce); which became a byword with these wicked wits. Sainte-Beuve, with his infallible instinct of wherein dwelt the vital greatness or defect of a production, characterizes the piece as an exaggeration. He admits that it has talent, especially in the preface, but adds, "Hugo sees all things larger than life: they look black to him—in Ruy Blas they looked red. But there is grandeur in the Burgraves: he alone, or Chateaubriand, could have written the introduction.... The banks of the Rhine are not so lofty and thunder-riven as he makes out, nor is Thessaly so black, nor Notre Dame so enormous, but more elegant, as may be seen from the pavement. But this is the defect of his eye."
Amidst these theatrical diversions the chronicler alludes to the fashionable preaching which occupied the gay world at hours when playhouses and drawing-rooms were not open. There was a religious revival going on in Paris almost equal to that which Moody and Sankey have produced here. "During Passion Week" (1843) "the crowd in all the churches, but at Notre Dame particularly, was prodigious. M. de Ravignan preached three times a day—at one o'clock for the women of the gay world, in the evening for the men, at other hours for the workingmen. He adapted his sermons to the different classes: to the women of the world he spoke as a man who knows the world and has belonged to it. They rushed, they crowded, they wept. I do not know how many communicants there were at Easter, but I believe the figure has not been so high for fifty years." At Advent of the same year the same scenes were repeated, with the Abbé Lacordaire in the pulpit. This excitement, and the debates in the Chamber on the subject of the theological lectures at the Sorbonne and College of France, call forth some excellent pages regarding the condition of Catholicism in France and the Gallican Church, and a brief, rapid review of the causes of the decline of the latter, which Sainte-Beuve asserts (more than thirty years ago) to be defunct. "Gallicanism, the noblest child of Catholicism, is dead before his father, who in his dotage remains obstinately faithful to his principles.... Gallicanism in its dissolution left a vast patrimony: the Jesuits may grab a huge bit of it, but the bulk will be diminished and disseminated.... At the rate things are going, Catholicism is tending to become a sect." The insight of this is as remarkable as the expression. Some years afterward, marking the progress of liberal ideas in religion, he says: "Men's conceptions of God are constantly changing. What was the atheism of yesterday will be the deism of to-morrow."
There are few Frenchman of any calling who are indifferent to politics, and the men of letters almost without exception are interested spectators when not actors in public affairs. From 1843 to 1845, the period of the Chroniques, was a dead calm in the political horizon of France, undisturbed by the little distant cloud of warfare in Algiers: the Legitimists worked up farcical fermentations which had no more body or head than those of the present day, although the chances of the party were rather better. The duke of Bordeaux (as the Comte de Chambord was then called) made an excursion to England one Christmas, which was seized as an occasion, or more probably was a preconcerted signal, for a dreary little demonstration of loyalty on the part of his adherents, who crossed over to pay their respects to him in London: by great arithmetical efforts their number was added up and made to amount to four hundred, though whether so many really went was doubted. There were a few old noblemen of great family: Berryer the eminent lawyer and Chateaubriand were the only names of individual distinction in the list, and the chief results were that Queen Victoria was annoyed (some of the Orleans family being on a visit to her at the time) and intimated her annoyance, and that the superb Chateaubriand was spoken of in the English newspapers as "the good old man;" which Sainte-Beuve enjoyed extremely.
The Cahiers extend from 1847 to 1869, including the vicissitudes which brought about the Second Empire, whose annihilation Sainte-Beuve died half a year too soon to witness. In January, 1848, he felt the storm brewing in the air, though he little guessed from what quarter it would come nor on whose head it would burst. On the revolution of the 24th of February he writes: "What events! what a dream! I was prepared for much, but not so soon, nor for this.... I am tempted to believe in the nullity of every judgment, my own in particular—I who make it a business to judge others, and am so short-sighted.... The future will disclose what no one can foresee. There is no use in talking of ordinary wisdom and prudence: they have been utterly at fault. Guizot, the historian-philosopher, has turned out more stupid than a Polignac: Utopia and the poet's dream, on the contrary, have become facts and reality. I forgive Lamartine everything: he has been great during these days, and done honor to the poetic nature." But afterward, in looking back to the poet's reign, he grew satirical: "It was in the time of the good provisional government, which did so many things and left so many undone. The fortunes of France crumbled to pieces in a fortnight, but it was under the invocation of equality and fraternity. As to liberty, it only existed for madmen, and the wise took good care to make no use of it. 'The great folk are terribly scared,' said my portress, but the small fry triumphed: it was their turn. So much had never been said about work before, and so little was never done. People walked about all day, planted liberty-trees at every street-corner, illuminated willy-nilly, and perorated in the clubs and squares until midnight. The Exchange rang with disasters in the morning: in the evening it sparkled with lanterns and fireworks. It was the gayest anarchy for the lower classes of Paris, who had no police and looked after themselves. The street-boys ran about with flags; workmen without work, but paid nevertheless, walked in perpetual procession; the demireps had kicked over the traces, and on the sidewalks the most virtuous fellow-citizenesses were hugged without ceremony: it must be added that they did not resent it too much. The grisettes, having nothing to eat, gave themselves away for nothing or next to nothing, as during the Fronde. The chorus of the Girondists was sung on every open lot, and there was a feast of addresses. Lamartine wrought marvels such as Ulysses might have done, and he was the siren of the hour. Yet they laughed and joked, and the true French wit revived. There was general good-humor and amiability in those first days of a most licentious spring sunshine. There was an admixture of bad taste, as there always is in the people of Paris when they grow sentimental. They made grotesque little gardens round the liberty-trees, which they watered assiduously.... The small fry adored their provisional government, as they formerly did their good king Louis XII., and more than one simple person said with emotion, 'It must be admitted that we are well governed, they talk so well!'" Before three months had elapsed the provisional government was at an end: "their feet slipped in blood—literally, in torrents of blood." "The politicians of late years have been playing a game of chess, intent wholly upon the board, but never giving a thought to the table under the board. But the table was alive, the back of a people which began to move, and in the twinkling of an eye chessboard and men went to the devil."
Among the entries of the next ten or twelve years are sketches of the leading statesmen and scraps of their conversation: those of Thiers are very animated. Sainte-Beuve says that he has a happiness of verbal expression which eludes his pen; "yet raise him upon a pinnacle of works of art" (of which M. Thiers has always been a patron publicly and privately), "of historical monuments and flatterers, and he will never be aught but the cleverest of marmosets." If he had lived another twelvemonth, Sainte-Beuve might have had some other word for the Great Citizen. On Guizot he is still more severe, making him out a mere humbug, and of the poorest sort. When the poet Auguste Barbier became a candidate for the French Academy, M. Guizot had never heard of him, and had to be told all about him and his verses—there was surely no disgrace in this ignorance on the part of a man engrossed in studies and pursuits of a more serious nature—but before a week was over he was heard expressing amazement that another person knew nothing of Barbier, and talking of his poems as if he had always been familiar with them. The Duchesse de Broglie said: "What M. Guizot has known since morning he pretends to have known from all eternity."
This paper might be prolonged almost to the length of the volumes themselves by quoting all the keen, sagacious or brilliant sayings which they contain. Two more, merely to exemplify Sainte-Beuve's command of words in very different lines of thought: "The old fragments of cases in φι and θεν, the ancient remains of verbs in μι the second aorists, which alone survive the other submerged tenses, always produce the same effect upon me, in view of the regular declensions and conjugations, as the multitude of the isles and Cyclades in relation to the Peloponnesus and the rest of the mainland on the map of Greece: there was a time when they were all one. The rocks and peaks still stand to attest it."—"Never is a word which has always brought bad luck to him who used it from the tribune."
M. Troubat speaks of the correspondence of Sainte-Beuve as destined for publication: the Chroniques and Cahiers are like anchovies to whet the appetite for a longer and more continuous reading.
Sarah B. Wister.
FOOTNOTES:
[C] Chroniques Parisiennes and Les Cahiers de Sainte-Beuve.