SAINTE-BEUVE AND MODERN CRITICISM
Port-Royal (1840-59), Sainte-Beuve's longest piece of connected writing, is a unique work of its kind. Disinclination to tread the beaten track, and the Romanticist's sympathy with religious enthusiasm, two characteristics which early distinguished him, influenced him in choosing the history of Jansenism in France as his subject. Jansenism was an enthusiastic, intelligent, intense form of piety, which, though evolved and retained within the pale of Catholicism, was nevertheless distinguished by a personal, that is to say, heretical, passion for truth, which appeals to our understanding by its independence and to our sympathies by its heroically courageous defiance of persecution and coercion. Like its history, Port-Royal, it reaches its highest level in Pascal, whose frail, emaciated figure as its embodiment presents a curious contrast to that of the plethoric, more healthy-minded German who, in a neighbouring country a century earlier, had carried on a very similar, though more successful struggle against ecclesiastical attempts at compromise.
Sainte-Beuve possessed all the qualifications required of the historian of Jansenism. He was not a believer, but he had been, or believed that he had been one. A man is seldom capable of criticising the views he holds himself, and as seldom of understanding those which he has never held; what we all understand best are the views we once shared, but share no longer. If any one doubts Sainte-Beuve's ability to understand these medieval emotions, that impulse to forsake the world, that strife of the awakened soul with nature, and its repentant, anxious recourse to grace; if any one doubts his comprehension of the real spirit inspiring these sermons and theological pamphlets, of the hearts beating under these nuns' habits, of the devotion, the hopes, and the longings, the mystical ecstasies and the sacred enthusiasm, which flourished on that little spot of holy ground, let that doubter read the first two volumes of Port-Royal, as far as the chapter on Pascal, who was easier of comprehension because he was a figure of more magnitude and was already better known. Let him study the masterly portraits of St. François de Sales and St. Cyran, and observe how with the help of letters, reported conversations, and a few pamphlets and sermons, Sainte-Beuve succeeds in placing before us two figures which are so true to nature, so human, that we seem to be living with them. We are frequently reminded of the fact that Sainte-Beuve was originally a novelist. The scenes among the innocent dwellers in that dovecote, the convent, for instance, have all the vividness of well-written fiction. And Sainte-Beuve employs his imagination only in describing; he never invents or misrepresents.
It is a defect in the book that its first parts, though they are much the best reading, are not conceived in the historical style. We are too vividly reminded that the feuilleton has hitherto been their author's vehicle of expression. In these earlier volumes Sainte-Beuve simply takes Port-Royal as his starting-point. The old monastery is not much more than his citadel, from which he makes one sortie after another; he hunts out parallels, discovers analogies, now in literature, now in real life—interesting, but often far-fetched, and leading to disquisitions not only upon such writers as Corneille, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, and Vauvenargues, but upon modern authors, such as Lamartine and George Sand. The later volumes, on the other hand, the style of which is more soberly historical, lack the attraction of these interpolations; and the subject is too much of a special subject to interest long, in spite of the loving care which has been bestowed on it.
Though Port-Royal is supposed to be his chief work, Sainte-Beuve reaches a far higher level in the long series of volumes known as Causeries du Lundi and Nouveaux Lundis, which contain the shorter articles written during his most perfect period. It will be long before these articles are forgotten. At the time of their author's death, Ulbach wrote: "I cannot tell how much of the literature of which we are now so proud will be preserved by time. Some of Lamartine's and Victor Hugo's verses? some of Balzac's novels? One thing, however, is certain—that it will be impossible to write history without having recourse to Sainte-Beuve and reading him from beginning to end."
Sainte-Beuve has two styles, the youthful and the mature. At the time of his study of sixteenth century literature (from the vocabulary of which he, like the other young Romanticists, adopted various expressions) he got into the habit of picking and choosing his words and polishing and refining his periods to such an extent that he drew down upon himself some justifiably severe criticism—though he hardly deserved the violent reproaches showered on him by Balzac, whom he had annoyed by some sarcastic articles. But when he took to journalism this ultra-refinement of style disappeared. As Littré remarked, "After he had bound himself to send in a feuilleton every week, he had no time to spoil his articles." A style like Sainte-Beuve's second—keen and flexible as a sword-blade—is not easy to characterise. In the first place, it is by no means a striking style. The reader who is not particularly well versed in French literature will not be aware of anything that can be called style. The periods succeed one another unrhythmically; they are not grouped, but proceed carelessly, as Zouaves march; we never come upon a pompous and seldom on a passionate one; occasionally there is an interjection—"Ô poet!" or the like. The language flows like gently rippling water. But the observant reader is charmed by its noble Atticism. The tone is not assertive, but calmly and quietly sceptic. I give a few examples, taken from different works. "Is there stability or instability at the basis of his character? You think instability. But under that instability is there not something more stable? You believe that there is. But under this again is there not something less stable than ever?" How often in their study of character must psychologists query thus, but how few of them could put the question with such delicate precision! What has been called the eccentricity of Sainte-Beuve's style is often only something surprising in his imagery; yet the metaphor itself is always surprisingly correct. In describing a great, austere sixteenth-century preacher of repentance, he tells that this ecclesiastic's contemporaries compared him, because of his dry severity, to a thorn-bush. Later, after giving an account of a vigorous outburst of noble indignation on the part of this man, he adds: "Si j'ai pu dire de M. de Saint-Cyran qu'il était parfois un buisson et un buisson sans jamais de rieurs, il faut ajouter qu'il est souvent aussi un buisson ardent." Observe how the pliant style lends itself to irony and satire. Sainte-Beuve is criticising the style of a literary rival, Nisard; amongst much bitter-sweet praise he insinuates the little remark: "Un académicien lui a trouvé du nerf; les savants lui trouvent de la grâce." Of Cousin he says: "He is a hare with the eye of an eagle." For an example of the power of characterisation latent in the style, take the following sentence from a criticism of De Musset: "Ce n'était pas des couleurs combinées, surajoutées par un procédé successif, mais bien le réel se dorant ça et là comme un atôme à un rayon du matin, et s'envolant tout d'un coup au regard dans une transfiguration divinisée." And for an example of its capacity, equable as it is, to express indignation, take the following passage, which also throws light on the character of the man. He is writing on the subject of a work to which the Academy in full conclave had refused to give the prize adjudged it by a committee of experts, because the "atheistical" principles on which the work was based were at variance with the eclectic philosophy then officially recognised. "There really does exist a small class of sober, unassuming philosophers, who live upon very little, do not intrigue, and are entirely occupied in conscientiously seeking after truth and cultivating their intellects. They refrain from the indulgence of every other passion, and fix their whole attention upon the laws which govern the universe, listening and investigating wherever in the realm of nature the world-soul, the world-thought reveals itself to them. These are men who at heart are stoics, who try to do good and to think as accurately and rightly as they can, even without the hope of any personal reward in the future, content to feel at harmony with themselves and in accord with the harmony of the universe. Is it fitting, I ask, to stamp these men with an odious name on this account, to ostracise them, or at best only to tolerate them with such tolerance as we show to the erring and guilty? Have they not even yet won for themselves in our country a place on which the sunlight falls? Have they not, O ye noble Eclectics, with whom it gives me pleasure to compare them, ye whose invariable and absolute disinterestedness and whose unalterable high-mindedness are known to God and man, have they not the right to be placed at least on an equal footing with you, in virtue of the purity of their doctrine, the uprightness of their motives, and the innocence of their lives? This last great progressive step, worthy of the nineteenth century, I would fain see taken before I die." Sainte-Beuve made various reforms in the art of criticism. In the first place, he put solid ground beneath its feet, gave it the firm foothold of history and science. The old, so-called philosophic criticism treated the literary document as if it had fallen from the clouds, judged it without taking its author into account at all, and placed it under some particular heading in a historical or aesthetic chart. Sainte-Beuve found the author in his work; behind the paper he discovered the man. He taught his own generation and the generations to come, that no book, no document of the past, can be understood before we have gained an understanding of the psychical conditions which produced it, and formed an idea of the personality of the man who wrote it. Not until then does the document live. Not until then does a soul animate history. Not until then does the work of art become transparently intelligible.
Sainte-Beuve's most marked characteristic was an insatiable thirst for knowledge, a quality which he possessed in the form that may be called scientific inquisitiveness. This directed his life even before it expressed itself in his criticism. At first it is only faintly perceptible in his works, because he began with unlimited praise of his contemporaries, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and others, a good deal of which he was obliged subsequently to retract—thus progressing in the opposite direction from Théophile Gautier, who began with severity and gradually declined into a nerveless leniency. But it is possible to trace even Sainte-Beuve's first uncritical praise to his critical instincts. Its exaggeratedness was due to the fact that he stood, as a young man, too near to the personages he criticised; but this circumstance was itself attributable to his curiosity. Before he knew, he dimly divined the difference between books and life, and was less apt than others to accept the author's own account of himself, the image of himself which he desired, by means of his book, to imprint on his readers' minds; and it was the unconscious instinct of investigation, the keen interest of the born psychologist, the longing to see for himself and close at hand, the inclination to pass by all that was official and conventional and make straight for the truth that is concealed, the small facts which explain—that led him to seek personal acquaintance; though he himself believed that it was his enthusiasm for ideas which attracted him irresistibly to their originators.
And here the critic is confronted by one of his greatest difficulties—he knows the truth only about the living, but may speak it only of the dead. And there is no doubt that it makes a disagreeable impression when the death of an author entirely changes the tone of criticism, as Sainte-Beuve's criticism of Chateaubriand, for example, was altered by the latter's death. His earliest article on Chateaubriand was incense pure and simple. We are conscious of the social pressure under which it was written, of the awe and veneration, the personal sympathies and relations, the fear of angry glances from lovely eyes, the impossibility of hurting the feelings of so charming a lady as Madame Récamier by criticising her domestic idol, in short, of all the influences which combined to make the first sketch of Chateaubriand simply an adulatory narrative. The long work and the later articles are, on the contrary, inspired by a perfect rage for saying "No," for tearing off masks.
But when he is at his best, Sainte-Beuve succeeds in finding the golden mean. He does not admire everything and attribute everything to noble motives, but neither does he search for base ones. He neither praises nor depreciates human nature. He understands it. And intercourse with men and women of every description, constant critical observation, French delicacy of perception, and a Parisian training, have given him an extraordinary power of discernment. At his best, the many-sidedness of his mind actually reminds us of Goethe. We are at times tempted to call him "wise"; and few indeed are the critics who tempt us to apply this adjective to them. He very seldom allows himself to be confused or influenced by the popular sentiment connected with a name, no matter whether it is lofty, or pathetic, or depreciatory. He inquires into the pedigree of his author, his constitution and health, his economic position; he snaps up some involuntary confession he has made, and shows that it is supported by other utterances, and that it throws light on, and explains the actions of the man. He describes him in his bright and noble moments; he surprises him in déshabille; with his marvellous capacity for "finding a needle in a haystack," he discovers what the dead man concealed in the inmost recesses of his heart. With the judicial calm of the scientific investigator, he enumerates his tendencies towards good and his tendencies towards evil, and weighs them in the balance. And by such means he produces a trustworthy portrait—or rather, a series of portraits, each one of which is trustworthy, though some of them contradict each other. For, notable critic as Sainte-Beuve is, he invariably shirks one of the greatest difficulties with which the critic has to contend. A conscientious critic has, as a rule, read the work which he undertakes to interpret and criticise, many times and at various stages of his development; each time he has been struck by something different; and in the end he has seen the work from so many different points of view that it is impossible for him, without doing a sort of inward violence to himself, to maintain one single standpoint, one attitude of feeling. And if he happens to be dealing, not with a single work, but with a highly productive author who has passed through many stages of development, or possibly even with a whole school of literature, the difficulty of making one comprehensive picture out of the many different impressions received under totally different psychical conditions, becomes proportionately greater. A building which we have seen only once, half of it in sunlight, half in the shadow of a heavy cloud, stands out distinctly in our memory in a certain light against a particular sky; but a building we have seen at every hour of day, in the dusk and in moonlight, from all sides, from various elevations, and as often from the inside as the outside, a building in which we have lived, and the size of which has dwindled in our eyes as we grew—of such a building we find it difficult to give a single, fully descriptive picture. This difficulty Sainte-Beuve avoids by constantly producing fresh descriptions and fresh criticisms of the same men and their works, leaving it to the reader to draw his own conclusions. It was with good reason that he chose as the motto for a series of his works the saying of Sénac de Meilhan: "Nous sommes mobiles et nous jugeons des êtres mobiles."
The latter of these propositions, namely, that every human being whom we judge has altered, has developed steadily, Sainte-Beuve understood better than it had ever been understood before. He not only changes his tone every time he changes his theme, but changes it every time there is a change in the man or woman who is his theme for the time being; his agile talent imitates all the movements of the individual human soul during its development process.[1] Hence his manner is as changeable as his subject; he is now the biographer, now the critic; he packs as many limiting and defining parentheses into his periods as possible; connects sentences which modify one another; uses technical words which introduce a whole train of ideas and memories; and vague expressions which may mean much more than they say. For though he moves through the dim depths of a man's life with the certainty of the diver who sees the submarine growths through the water, he nevertheless, for many reasons, prefers to write with a certain amount of vagueness of what he has seen. When he is writing of the living it is, of course, only permissible to make vague allusions to their private life; and the dead have, as a rule, descendants or relatives who keep jealous guard over their reputation. Sainte-Beuve, therefore, generally contents himself with showing that he divines or knows much on which he does not choose to dwell.