No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?…
“Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists, not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece any more than in Confucius. It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any more than in the modern Franklin. The principle of inspiration is different, if indeed it be not opposite: the paths may come together for a moment, but they cross one another. And it is this delicate ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source.”
Of M. Sainte-Beuve’s delight in what is the most excellent product of literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page. “Poetry,” says he, “is the essence of things, and we should be careful not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods of color. The task of poetry is not to say everything, but to make us dream everything.” And he cites a similar judgment of Fénélon: “The poet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch but what can be beautified.” In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaks of the youthful poems of Milton: “‘Il Penseroso’ is the masterpiece of meditative and contemplative poetry; it is like a magnificent oratorio in which prayer ascends slowly toward the Eternal. I make no comparison; let us never take august names from their sphere. All that is beautiful in Milton stands by itself; one feels the tranquil habit of the upper regions, and continuity in power.” In a paper on the letters of Ducis, he proves that he apprehends the proportions of Shakespeare. He asks: “Have we then got him at last? Is our stomach up to him? Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (cette moelle de lion)?” And again, in an article on the men of the eighteenth century, he writes: “One may be born a sailor, but there is nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a battle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that, and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare.”
Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, how catholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takes pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency. Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Molière, his words flame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust in his own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His native favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not overrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls “the Frenchman par excellence,” and of whom he is proud as the literary sovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devoted to Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, he lauds this spiritually-minded thinker as one of the best of critics. And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: “Voltaire is sometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even are impudent.—There are defects difficult to perceive, that have not been classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them.”
In a paper on Louise Labé, a poetess of the sixteenth century, he reproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and then adds: “These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that, at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry.” No German or English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature, and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not an exaltation of French prose, it is a depression of French poetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of which possibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts to an acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are not capable of producing and embodying the highest poetry.
Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always mentions with deference. On Eckerman’s “Conversations with Goethe” he has a series of three papers, wherein he deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honest pride Goethe’s admiration of some of the chief French writers, and his acknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to the French translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the following note, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a high tribute to our distinguished countrywoman: “The English translation is by Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished so unhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes this translation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of the subject and for justness of appreciation it leaves our preface far behind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was a person of true merit and of great intellectual vigor.” A sympathetic student of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him; and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature of Goethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that she would have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe “literature,” had she lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friends had nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of this gifted, generous, noble-hearted woman.
One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a hand that can shake hard,—and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteen years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of “Causeries du Lundi,” a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thus ever in the thick of the literary mêlée. Attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate; the æsthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences and friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris, if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray some of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the critical pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality is seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader will no doubt often perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. His perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious dead who are embalmed in their own excellence. Besides devoting many papers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates of literature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them,—a sign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness.
Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly taken by the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition of virtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes. In the general tone there is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness. Of the humane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take the following as one of many instances. In the correspondence of Lamennais there is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and his later sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thus feelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure: “Let us cast a look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, from youth to our latter years, there are none of these boundless distances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which, for being hidden, are none the less real and profound.”
Writing weekly for the feuilleton of a Paris daily journal, M. Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is always animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished, he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When the occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a principle or of a comprehensive thought. “Admiration is a much finer test of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than all the art of satire.” By the side of this may be placed a sentence he cites from Grimm: “People who so easily admire bad things are not in a state to enjoy good.” How true and cheering is this: “There is in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought with her finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up, smothers, or corrupts.” Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says: “What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful.” When, to give a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammatic point, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where to borrow just what is wanted. Speaking of embellished oratorical diction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that was discussed in his presence: “It is not enough to have fine sentences: you must have something to put into them.” Commenting on the hyper-spirituality of M. Laprade, he says: “M. Laprade starts from the absolute notion of being. For him the following is the principle of Art,—‘to manifest what we feel of the Absolute Being, of the Infinite, of God, to make him known and felt by other men, such in its generality is the end of Art.’ Is this true, is it false? I know not: at this elevation one always gets into the clouds. Like the most of those who pride themselves on metaphysics, he contents himself with words (il se paye de mots).” Here is a grand thought, that flashes out of the upper air of poetry: “Humanity, that eternal child that has never done growing.”