M. Sainte-Beuve’s irony, keen and delicate, is a sprightly medium of truth: witness this passage on a new volume of M. Michelet: “Narrative, properly so called, which never was his forte, is almost entirely sacrificed. Seek here no historical highway, well laid, solid, and continuous; the method adopted is absolute points of view; you run with him on summits, peaks, on needles of granite, which he selects at his pleasure to gets views from. The reader leaps from steeple to steeple. M. Michelet seems to have proposed to himself an impossible wager, which, however, he has won,—to write history with a series of flashes.” Could there be a more subtle, covert way of saying of a man that he is hardened by self-esteem than the following on M. Guizot: “The consciousness that he has of himself, and a natural principle of pride, place him easily above the little susceptibilities of self-love.” M. Sainte-Beuve is not an admirer of Louis Philippe, and among other sly hits gives him the following: “Louis Philippe was too much like a bourgeois himself to be long respected by the bourgeoisie. Just as in former times the King of France was only the first gentleman of the kingdom, he was nothing but the first bourgeois of the country.” What witty satire on Lamartine he introduces, with a recognition of popularity that, with one who takes so much joy in applause as Lamartine does, is enough to take the poison out of the sting: “Those who knew his verses by heart (and the number who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not without regret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, in his prose. This prose is, in ‘Les Confidences,’ too often but the paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the last, paraphrases of his feelings.” Amends are made to Lamartine on another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says: “Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and the eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings. That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of wing.” This is better as modesty than as criticism. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as of more gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyed getting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of their strongest as well as sweetest notes.
A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, just as a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image of herself. His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy in things French. Through means of it he knows them through and through: they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, his intellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other side the shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more or less the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows. Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Béranger, is spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy, that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M. Michelet, to Madame de Staël and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe, to Fénélon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau.
Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will be impatient to ask, nothing but praise? Not much else. Commencing his literary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from that date to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits, fill several thousand pages. Between his forty-fifth to his sixtieth year he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousand pages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects. This is the period of his critical maturity, the period of the “Causeries du Lundi,” followed by the “Nouveaux Lundis.” Many men write voluminously, but most of these only write about a subject, not into it. Only the few who can write into their subject add something to literature. One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve. In his mind there is vitality to animate his large acquirement, to make his many chapters buoyant and stimulant. All through his writings is the sparkle of original life.
But let us now cheer the reader who is impatient of much praise, and at the same time perform the negative part of our task.
Well, then, to be bold, as befits a critic of the critic, we beard the lion in his very den. We challenge a definition he gives of the critic. In the seventh volume of the “Causeries,” article “Grimm,” he says: “When Nature has endowed some one with this vivacity of feeling, with this susceptibility to impression, and that the creative imagination be wanting, this some one is a born critic, that is to say, a lover and judge of the creations of others.” Why did M. Sainte-Beuve make Goethe sovereign in criticism? Why did he think Milton peculiarly qualified to interpret Homer? From the deep principle of like unto like; only spirit can know spirit. What were the worth of a comment of John Locke on “Paradise Lost,” except to reveal the mental composition of John Locke? The critic should be what Locke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form of literature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, some share of that whereby poetry is fledged, “creative imagination.” He may “want the accomplishment of verse,” or the constructive faculty, but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful he must have. But do not the presence of “vivacity of feeling with susceptibility to impression” imply the imaginative temperament? If not, then we confidently assure M. Sainte-Beuve that had his definition fitted himself, his “Causeries du Lundi” would never have been rescued from the quick oblivion of the feuilleton,
Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness, which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue,—the love of glory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon’s passion for glory saved him in his latter years from ennui, from “that languor of the soul which follows the age of the passions.” Where are to be found men more the victims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not more distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than for insatiable greed of glory,—Byron and Chateaubriand? No form of self-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving, which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyond its sway, on praise and admiration. These stimulants—withdrawn more or less even from the most successful in latter years—leave a void which becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust. Instead of glory being “the potent motive-power in all great souls,” as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moral instinct, called by Milton,—
“That last infirmity of noble mind.”
In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it as hardly to be traceable in their careers. Love of glory was not the spring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more than Shakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington.
The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the French nation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animal vigor of the conqueror’s mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that he does not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon’s moral nature, and the consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor the unmanning effects of his despotism. The words used to describe the moral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be the strokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset. In the paper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the “rare good sense” of Napoleon, of “his instinct of justice.” But was it not a compact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct of justice, backed by a Titan’s will, wielding a mighty intellect, that enabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despot and the merciless devastator? Again, can it be said of Napoleon that he possessed good sense in a rare degree? Good sense is an instinctive insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. The moral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon’s moral endowment was but fractional. Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basis of all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical, or in its action one-sided; and even in such its presence must be felt. In whatever reaches general human interests, whether as practical act or imaginative creation, good sense must be, for their prosperity, a primary ingredient. “The Tempest” and “Don Quixote” shoot up into shining, imperishable beauty because their roots draw their first nourishment from this hearty, inexhaustible substratum. And let us say, that in M. Sainte-Beuve himself good sense is the foundation of his eminent critical ability. He has been led, we conceive, to attribute more of it to Napoleon than is his due by the blinding splendor of Napoleon’s military genius, through which, with such swiftness and cumulative effect, he adapted means to ends on the purely material plane.
When Murray applied to Lord Byron to write a book about the life and manners of the upper class in Italy, Byron declined the proposal from personal regards, and then added, that were he to write such a book it would be misjudged in England; for, said he, “their moral is not your moral.” Such international misinterpretations and exaggerations are instinctive and involuntary. A nation from its being a nation, has a certain one-sidedness. To the Italian (even to one who carries a stiletto) the English practice of boxing is a sheer brutality; while to an Englishman (himself perhaps not a Joseph) the cavaliere servente is looked upon with reprobation tempered by scorn. To this misjudgment from the foreign side and over-estimation on the domestic, books, too, are liable; but to books as being more abstract than usages, more ideal than manners, an absolute moral standard can with less difficulty be applied. Applying it to Gil Blas, is not M. Sainte-Beuve subject to arraignment when he speaks of this and the other writings of Le Sage as being “the mirror of the world?” Molière, too, is a satirist, and from his breadth a great one; and surely the world he holds a mirror before is a much purer world than that of Le Sage; and what of the Shakespearean world? The world of Le Sage is a nether world. “Of Gil Blas it has been well said that the book is moral like experience.” The experience one may get in brothels and “hells,” in consorting with pimps and knaves, has in it lessons of virtue and morality,—for those who can extract them; but even for these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the experience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment of Joubert: “Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to have been written in a café, by a player of dominoes, on coming out of the comic theatre.”