With Les Pensées d'Août Sainte-Beuve closed his career as a poet. It is the only one of his poetical ventures which was quite unsuccessful, and the poems which the volume contains are certainly his coldest; yet it seems to me, though my opinion is unsupported by any other critic, that it is in this work he first displays marked originality. It is realistic to an extent which is quite unique in the lyric poetry of the Romantic School; no poet had yet ventured to make such free use of the language and the surroundings of daily life. In the North, where a poet even to-day would hardly have the courage to give an omnibus or a railway platform a place in a lyric poem, such a work as Les Pensées d'Août would still almost be regarded in the light of a specimen of the poetry of the future.
In it, as in Les Poésies de Joseph Delorme, we find several of the characteristics of the English Lake School transplanted to French soil. Sainte-Beuve, like the Englishmen, presents us with simple, sober pictures of real life, and his style, like theirs, is founded upon the conviction that there ought not to be any essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical compositions. But in Sainte-Beuve's poems we have, instead of the strange want of crispness and point of the English poems, a genuinely French dramatic tension. Each of them is a little drama developed within the limits of a short lyric narrative.
Take, as a good specimen, the poem entitled À Madame la Comtesse de T. The Countess to whom it is dedicated relates the story. She is travelling by steamer from Cologne to Mainz. To see the scenery better, she has seated herself in her carriage, which is in the fore part of the ship, and she is consequently beside the steerage passengers—servants, workmen and their wives, poor people of all descriptions. One of her children exclaims: "Mother, there is Count Paul!" She looks round and recognises the acquaintance named, a Polish political refugee (the year is 1831). His features are refined and his hands are white, but he is dressed in the old, shabby clothes of a working-man. He is in the company of a family of plain English workpeople. The husband is a coarse-looking man, who is always eating or smoking; his wife is, at the first glance, insignificant; they have a daughter with them, a pretty girl of about fourteen. The Countess's first idea is that the young Pole has been attracted by the girl; then she sees that it is the mother, whose eyes follow him wherever he goes. And this mother is no longer a young woman, though she must, not so long ago, have been very pretty; her figure, in spite of the poverty of her dress, is elegant, and her hair is beautiful. With a solicitude, which is not that of love, but of tenderness towards the being by whom one is beloved, the young man puts her cloak round her and holds the umbrella over her when it rains. He buys expensive grapes for her little boys. The Countess divines that in the distant town where he sought refuge he has found friends in this poor family. But he, like herself, is to go on shore at Mainz, and his friends are to continue their journey in the steamer.
"Montant sur le bateau, je suivis la détresse,
Le départ jusqu'au bout! Il baise avec tendresse
Les deux petits garçons, embrasse le mari,
Prend la main à la fille (et l'enfant a souri,
Maligne, curieuse, Ève déjà dans l'âme);
Il prend, il serre aussi les deux mains à la femme,
Évitant son regard.—C'est le dernier signal
De la cloche! Il s'élance! O le moment final!
Quand on ôte le pont et pendant qu'on démarre,
Quand le cable encor crie, ô minute barbare!
Au rivage mouvant, alors il fallait voir,
De ce groupe vers lui, gestes, coups de mouchoir;
Et les petits enfants, chez qui tout devient joie,
Couraient le long du bord d'où leur cri se renvoie.
Mais la femme, oh! la femme, immobile en son lieu,
Le bras levé, tenant un mouchoir rouge-bleu
Qu'elle n'agitait pas, je la vois là sans vie,
Digne que, par pitié, le Ciel la pétrifie!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Je pensai: Pauvre cœur, veuf d'insensés amours,
Que sera-ce demain, et ce soir, et toujours?
Mari commun, grossier, enfants sales, rebelles;
La misère; une fille aux couleurs déjà belles,
Et qui le sait tout bas, et dont l'œil peu clément
A, dans tout ce voyage, épié ton tourment:
Quel destin!—Lui pourtant, sur qui mon regard plonge,
Et qu'embarrasse aussi l'adieu qui se prolonge,
Descendit.—Nous voguions. En passant près de lui,
Une heure après: 'Monsieur, vous êtes aujourd'hui
Bien seul,' dis-je.—'Oui,' fit-il en paroles froissées,
'Depuis Londres, voilà six semaines passées,
J'ai voyagé toujours avec ces braves gens.'
L'accent hautain notait les mots plus indulgents.
—'Et les reverrez-vous bientôt?' osai-je dire.
—'Jamais!' répliqua-t-il d'un singulier sourire;
'Je ne les reverrai certainement jamais;
Je vais en Suisse; après, plus loin encor, je vais!'"
I would also call attention to a little poem which is a real work of genius, Monsieur Jean, Maître d'école. It is the story of a poor country schoolmaster, who, brought up in a foundling hospital, has known nothing of his parents until he one day suddenly finds out who his father is—no less a man than the famous Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, as his readers know, deposited the children of his wife Theresa (of whom he had no absolute certainty of being the father) in the Paris foundling hospital. The schoolmaster has not read Rousseau, but he begins now, and studies Émile, La nouvelle Héloïse, and all the other works with the deepest interest. He is more intensely conscious than other readers both of their fertile geniality and of the very slight feeling of personal responsibility displayed by their author. At last he can no longer resist the desire to make the acquaintance of his parents.
"Il part donc, il accourt au Paris embrumé;
Il cherche au plein milieu, dans sa rue enfermé,
Celui qu'il veut ravir; il a trouvé l'allée,
Il monte;... à chaque pas son audace troublée
L'abandonnait—Faut-il redescendre?—Il entend,
Près d'une porte ouverte, et d'un cri mécontent,
Une voix qui gourmande et dont l'accent lésine:
C'était là! Le projet que son âme dessine
Se déconcerte; il entre, il essaie un propos.
Le vieillard écoutait sans tourner le dos,
Penché sur une table et tout à sa musique.
Le fils balbutiait; mais, avant qu'il s'explique,
D'un regard soupçonneux, sans nulle question,
Et comme saisissant sur le fait l'espion:
'Jeune homme, ce métier ne sied pas à ton âge;
Epargne un solitaire en son pauvre ménage;
Retourne d'où tu viens! ta rougeur te dément!
'Le jeune homme, muet, dans l'étourdissement,
S'enfuit, comme perdu sous ces mots de mystère,
Et se sentant deux fois répudié d'un père.
Et c'était là celui qu'il voudrait à genoux
Racheter devant Dieu, confesser devant tous!
C'était celle.... O douleur! impossible espérance!"
And he hastens back to the country to practise in life as a poor schoolmaster some of the great precepts which are to be found in his father's works, but are set at naught by his practice. The good seed in Rousseau's Émile germinates in the education which the children entrusted to this schoolmaster receive.
Les Pensées d'Août was published in 1837. Thenceforward Sainte-Beuve was exclusively the critic.
[1] Some of the father's aphorisms are given as an appendix to Morand's edition of Sainte-Beuve's letters to the Abbé Barbe.