The earlier articles.

The earliest detachment of this great army, as presented in that régiment de marche the Premiers Lundis (made up of all sort of things from these raw recruits to the poor old veterans of Senate-speech more than forty years later), might deserve their author’s modest or merciless sentence from the severe point of view of his greatest pupil. They are certainly not “chief and principal things” in themselves. Sainte-Beuve was very young (barely twenty) when he began to write them, and, as we have said, it is nearly impossible for a very young critic to be a very good critic, though it is deplorably possible for a rather old one to be more than rather bad. Some of them are so short as to give no room for much display of individual and original talent. Sometimes they deal with things ephemeral, and now forgotten, in a merely journalist fashion. Sometimes, as in the dealing with Scott’s Napoleon, inevitable and insuperable prejudices and preoccupations come in. One may even admit frankly that, nonnunquam, there are symptoms which lead one to understand, after a fashion, the charges of dulness[[571]] and of galimatias which were brought against Sainte-Beuve by persons from Balzac[[572]] downwards, and which have sometimes seemed mere spiteful lunacy to readers of the Causeries at their most brilliant period only. But to the expert there is unmistakable and not merely fancied quality even here. There is already the indefinable, but in previous critics so unfortunately rare, desire to appreciate, to understand. There is almost always a sober judgment; not seldom a delicate if rather tentative subtlety. Above all, there are signs of something very different from the sham omniscience which is such a temptation to the young reviewer,—of a range and width of reading, classical, modern, foreign, most surprising and most unusual at the time.

The Tableau,[[573]] with its associated selection of Ronsard, and some other matter appended to its later editions, is quite a landmark in French literary history. It turned (or rather marked the turning of) the tide in regard to sixteenth-century literature, interested the youth of the day in the Pléiade, stimulated the new prosodical movements, did much else. But its author’s powers were immature: and there is not a great deal of the highest critical importance in its individual utterances and judgments. Perhaps the most noteworthy is the statement in the Preface that “L’Art consacre et purifie tout ce qu’il touche”—a companion axiom to the Preface of the Orientales, which neither critic nor poet would have fully indorsed in their later days, though many of their followers would.

Portraits Littéraires and Portraits de Femmes.

The Portraits Littéraires, with its satellite or tow-boat the Portraits de Femmes, appears to have been a sort of favourite with Sainte-Beuve. He rearranged it early from the original Critiques et Portraits Littéraires;[[574]] he sifted out the Portraits de Femmes, as if to concentrate special attention on them; he added from time to time appetising and really important bonuses and primes of appendices, Pensées, personal confidences, and the like. A good deal of his best-known work is in the four volumes (including the Femmes) as they are now[[575]] current: and probably the collection meets the taste, of the general reader at least, as well as any other of his numerous collections, if not better. This, I venture to think,—using a phrase of an author who would probably not have agreed with me in this particular instance,—is because the general reader “does not want criticism,” or does not want it first of all. Sainte-Beuve, who knew everything, and cared not to conceal it, knew, as the general reader does not know, that the causerie, whether in volume- or essay-form, of mingled biography and criticism, was of English, not French invention: and he confesses that he longed to imitate it. He did so, and carried it even beyond Johnson: but he was frequently tempted to let the biography and the personality rather swamp the criticism, and I think he has done so here. In the Portraits de Femmes especially, be it gallantry, gossip-loving, or God knows what, though there may be much interest, there is uncommonly little criticism, even on La Rochefoucauld, who presents himself in the middle of the galaxy with a singular and sultanesque intrusion. On some of the subjects, such as Mme. de Longueville, there could be none: even on Mme. de Sévigné and Mme. de Staël, where the opportunities were infinite, there is little; and where there is most, as in the case of Pauline de Meulan (Mme. Guizot), it is where we care least about it. Of history and life plenty, and therefore of amusement much; of criticism very little.

Life and its farrago—of which I desire not to speak disrespectfully more than of any other equator, but which are not my subject—have rather less exclusive hold in the Portraits Littéraires proper and segregated, but still a greater hold than literature. In those days Sainte-Beuve, as he himself more than once confesses, was even more of a philosopher than of a littérateur. There are of course exceptions, where the past greatness of the author takes the future greatness of the critic by storm beforehand, and forces acquaintance and recognition from its destined brother. Even in these cases one often feels that the critic “is not ready”—that the hour has not fully come. The early and strongly “Romantic” articles on the great classics of the seventeenth century, which open the first volume, are not merely wrong with the crudity of early partisanship, as he himself represents them. Indeed in this respect they are hardly wrong at all. But they are not right in the right way. Except the very remarkable piece, “Du Génie Critique et de Bayle,” where the vocation asserted itself, there is hardly one of them (if even this is) worthy of Sainte-Beuve. The “Diderot,” to make a move forward, is capital on the man, a little short of capital on the writer. The best critical thing in the volume is the “Nodier”—much later in date (1840) than the rest of its contents. The second volume, which has something of this advantage, in point of time, contains much better things:—the well-known “Molière,” the long (some would say the disproportionately long) “Fontanes,” the “Joseph de Maistre,”[[576]] the “Naudé,” and a delightful paper on Aloysius Bertrand of Gaspard de la Nuit,[[577]] which combines the old Romantic enthusiasm with the acquired craftsmanship. The third, better still in this latter respect, has less interesting subjects, except in the case of the “Theocritus” and the “Mlle. Aissé,” which is again a “Portrait de Femme,” hardly at all literary. A sacred shame invades me at even appearing to speak disrespectfully of this book. Compared with anything not of its author’s, and not of that author’s at a future time, it would be very great: but its greater younger brothers are its enemies.

The Portraits Contemporains.