Still not of these is the Portraits Contemporains. One feels inclined to say at the beginning, and perhaps not disinclined to repeat the saying at the end, that the title announces an attempt foredoomed to failure.[[578]] It is almost inevitable that a contemporary portrait in literature should fail to be a likeness, should be at best a charge, from one point of view or another. Sainte-Beuve himself in one place (with a naïveté more characteristic of him than those who have not read him very long and very carefully may think, but seldom so openly expressed) admits that his sitters had an awkward trick of falsifying his presentations. He had traced out for them, more or less early in their career, that career as they ought to pursue it; but lo! they would follow their own stars, and not his tracings and indications. This is one danger, and a common, if not universal one, with its result,—not often realised in Sainte-Beuve’s own case, but constantly in that of smaller critics,—that the prophet loses his temper with these disobedient ducklings, and rates them, not because they behave badly, but because they behave in a way different from that which he expected and wished. But more dangerous still, and less to be avoided even by the staunchest and most vigilant censors, are those insidious, innumerable, ineluctable personal or partisan differences and prejudices which dazzle and trouble the contemporary’s eyes: and, worst perhaps of all, that incurable “too-nearness,” that hopeless lack of the firm perspective of the past, which clings to him, and will not let him attain to clearness and the Whole. Accordingly the Portraits Contemporains are, with the Portraits Littéraires, the most unequal of Sainte-Beuve’s work, and all the more often disappointing because of the contemporaneity.

That reserve, indeed, which was made at the end of the notice of the Portraits Littéraires is even more imperatively called for here, and it is most important that while recognising that the real Sainte-Beuve—the plenilune—is as yet but crescent, we should recognise his brightness and his crescency. It is, for instance, not merely hasty, but fundamentally uncritical, to exclaim at the length, the fulness, the cordiality, with which figures like Fontanes, Fauriel, Daunou are treated; and to contrast, with abomination, the hesitancy, the grudging, the reserves, in the case not merely of Hugo,[[579]] but of Vigny, Lamartine, even Musset, the roughness on Balzac, the comparative respect paid to Sue, and the comparatively cavalier treatment long accorded to Gautier. Even in regard to the great stone of stumbling, it is necessary, for us who were born later, to remember that however ardent in the chevelu and gilet rouge and hierro! manner we may think we should have been if we had been born earlier, the Hugo of the time before the Châtiments, and the Contemplations, and the Legénde, great as he is, is not the Hugo of that glorious trinity. As for the Empire Critics, no impatience at their disproportionate allowance ought to prevent acknowledgment of Sainte-Beuve’s rare equity and true critical spirit towards the immediate predecessors with whom he did not agree—a thing, as we have seen, deplorably rare in criticism.

Indeed, save in that Supreme Court of Critical History where the dignity of the place excuses the personal insignificance of the judge, and puts the greatest author on his defence, apology for these five volumes would be needless, and almost impertinent. They certainly need not fear assay either of pieces or of passages. In the First, where most of the dubious places occur, where the judgment is most immature, and the

style most inclined to the jargonish,[[580]] the “Senancour,” and in part the “Lamennais,” demand special notice, while the opening of the “Béranger,” with its sketch of the causerie method, is of extreme interest, and the frequent references to English writers[[581]] show us already the largeness of the critic’s equipment. The Second is perhaps to be more cordially welcomed for the miscellanies at its end (including the striking critical imaginations put into the mouths of Diderot and Hazlitt) than for any of its more imposing constituents. The “Balzac” article, though it is in the main just, has a harshness and a touch of personal rudeness about it which are very unusual in Sainte-Beuve, and not quite explicable. The novelist might certainly be excused for thinking it wantonly uncivil. It is a little distressing, too, to read the hostile appendix which Sainte-Beuve ill-advisedly put to his “Montalembert” paper. But “Misères que tout cela!” The “Ballenche” and the “Villemain,” the “Mme. Desbordes-Valmore” and the “Ulric Guttinguer,”[[582]] nearly, if not quite, take the taste out. In vol. iii., an extremely interesting opening on Vinet, and a good close on Mérimée, hold between them things even better and sometimes well known—the “Töpffer,” the “Xavier de Mestre[Mestre],” the “Jasmin,” the “J. J. Ampère”—and show, in the “Magnin” and elsewhere, that admirably horizontal view of all periods of French literature which Sainte-Beuve was almost the first to take, and in which he has had far too few followers, whether in regard to French literature or others.

This reappears in the “Fauriel,”[[583]] which takes up nearly a third of vol. iv., and is there accompanied by an excellent paper on Barante, a longer but much less capital one on Thiers, two of Sainte-Beuve’s best known pieces on Leopardi and Parny, and one—for us—of peculiar interest on Daunou, containing perhaps the most vivid, and at the same time delicate, sketch in existence of the latest type of Neo-classic critic in France, before M. Brunetière’s revival sixty years later,—a type without La Harpe’s exaggeration and caricature, with a certain mildness and toleration towards the newer things, but secretly and saturatedly convinced that Reason is the Goddess of Literature, that fine verse is “almost as good as fine prose,” and that fineness in both consists of absolute good sense, logical connection, grammatical impeccability, and a horror of the verbum inusitatum. In this, too, the later and more perfect manner is increasingly present throughout; and, naturally, still more so in the Fifth, where the dates bring us to the very eve of the great period itself, and the essays are sometimes hardly distinguishable from the work thereof. The very best of these, perhaps, are the three classical pieces (for Sainte-Beuve was never prudish about titles, and not more than half of the Portraits in this volume deal with contemporaries in any sense) on Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and Meleager, in which, not for the first time, but for the first time in nearly or quite his full force, he once more makes a new departure in criticism by handling antiquity in true causerie style. But the “Desaugiers,” the “Louise Labé,” and the “Casimir Delavigne” are also noteworthy, while the paper on Gautier’s Les Grotesques, a little meticulous and pedagogic in parts, and written in avowed protest of a mild kind, is still more so.[[584]]

He “arrives.”

In fact, by about 1845[[585]] he had very nearly developed his full powers, and he was shaking off the awkward transition state when he had ceased to be romantique à plusieurs (he never was à tous) crins, and not yet become himself, and himself only. He had almost accomplished the causerie, the mixture of biography, and criticism, and “talk about it,” which Dryden, I maintain, is the first to have actually hit upon, which Johnson had strengthened but a little stiffened in the Lives, and which he himself re-fashioned by taking hints of depth and insight from Coleridge and the English Companions, touches of grace and engouement out of a score of French eighteenth-century critics, from Fontenelle and Diderot down to Fontanes and Daunou, adding knowledge of literary history, and a not too peremptory theory of time and milieu, from the Germans and the ambient air, enthusiasm from the still smouldering hearth of the deserted cénacle, and that magic and indefinable dose, that “little of my own sauce,” as Mrs Tibbs has it, which genius provides, and of which it keeps the secret. His ability to concoct this mixture, or rather to produce this new organism, had been by this time almost fully shown; but the final proof was given, and the new kind was definitely named and sent abroad, only after the composition of the most substantive work (except Port-Royal) which he had yet attempted, and the best—itself displaying the gifts he had now acquired in the fullest measure. Probably the critical moment was hastened, as so often happens, by an external catastrophe, the upset of the July Monarchy, and by that transplantation into Belgium for a time which, though he has put the best face on it, was certainly an exile, and by no means wholly a voluntary one.

Port-Royal,