We must, however, first take some notice of Port-Royal, which, either by cause or coincidence, was also the product of a journey, if not an exile, being originally delivered in the form of lectures at Lausanne. It[[586]] is, of course, the most important and substantive single work of its author—the only one, in fact, to which the older and more exacting definition of a book would have shown itself complaisant. It occupied, with completions and revisions, twenty years of his life; it contains perhaps the most elaborate and masterly exposition of that system of combined literary, historical, and social inquiry into the life of a period which he did so much to introduce, and so much more to establish as a literary Kind; and it expresses and registers notably those changes of opinion which made him, in the last two decades of his life, an exponent of an almost entirely irreligious view of life itself. With this aspect of it we do not here concern ourselves; but the book has far too much which does directly concern us, in the strictest construction of our own plan, not to receive detailed attention.
its literary episodes.
I do not know that those “older and more exacting definitions,” which have been just referred to, would pass, without demur, the features which make it of this importance to us. It is true that many, if not most, of the more distinguished men of letters of that century which, in the general judgment, has been regarded as the greatest century of letters in France, had more or less connection with Port Royal: nay, more, that not a few of the Port Royalists of the outer and even inner circles were great men of letters themselves. But whether this entirely justifies (to take examples from the first two volumes only) the inclusion in the book of analyses of Polyeucte and Saint-Genest, which would be ample for extensive monographs on Corneille and Rotrou respectively,—of an elaborate study of the elder Balzac of which the same may be said,—is a very arguable point. Still, the inclusion gives us the book; and, even if it did not, I am not inclined to be strait-laced on these points, or to chicane about the relation of the episodes to the epic.
Let us then be as kind to Sainte-Beuve as he was to himself, and admit what (feeling, I suppose, uneasy) he pleads at vol. ii. p. 107, “Nous voici, ce semble, bien loin de Port Royal; pas si loin que l’on croit”—that the spirit of the two plays is quite Port-Royalist, that Balzac wrote letters to M. de Saint-Cyran (so he did to most people, but no matter), that Pascal, Nicole, Racine come in of course; that even the Mémoires de Grammont are not quite extraneous, for was not la belle Hamilton herself (despite her nez retroussé and her Cupid’s-bow mouth) educated there? We are, in short, to take our literary goods as we find them, and as fate and the author provide: and they certainly provide them in plenty. No detailed examinations of Sainte-Beuve’s are more careful than those of the two plays. If he is a little hard, in the text, on that Christian (and semi-Gascon) Socrates, and writer of most handsome letters, who dwelt on the banks of the Charente, he repairs it in an appendix. The references to minor Louis XIII. literature (though injured by Sainte-Beuve’s dislike to quaintness) are never to be missed: and it is needless to say the same of the whole dealing with Pascal, and of the chapters devoted to the famous labours of the Port-Royalists themselves, in literary and philosophical education. Tillemont, if not exactly a lion in literature, is one of the greatest of lion’s providers therein, and Nicole cannot be denied the title of man of letters. Malebranche comes in as an opponent, Racine as a pupil, though as an ungrateful pupil: and on all these and others Sainte-Beuve indulges in literary excursus of all but his best kind.
On Racine.
The Racine passage is the best worth dwelling on of these, because what Frenchmen say on Racine is always interesting. We know, of course, beforehand that Sainte-Beuve will be, to a certain extent, juste-milieu,—that he will neither be of those who denounce with rage, nor[nor] deplore with pity or contempt, the poor foreigners who cannot hear the celestial music of the great doucereux, nor of those who approach more or less nearly to the view of the poor foreigners themselves. But the piece is specially interesting because it is perhaps the most distinct general retractation of the critic’s ultra-Romantic creed, and because it expresses much the same views as those (very probably derived from it) of Mr Arnold. You must not, says Sainte-Beuve, attempt to judge Racine by passages; there Hugo, Lamartine, even much lesser moderns will beat him. You must judge the whole, and take into consideration the support which each part gives to, and in turn derives from, the others. Nay, more, Racine is “moins imprévu, moins éclatant, moins héroïque, moins transportant” than Corneille, but more “equal,” &c. “L’unité, l’ensemble chez Racine se subordonne tout.” Sainte-Beuve even thinks that he could have done the many poetic things that he did not do as well as those which he did, and that in them (here we may all agree) “on aurait le même Racine.” But did he not lose something under the desperate hook of Boileau? Perhaps. “Il n’avait pas un démon déterminé.” You can understand him at once as you cannot Shakespeare or Molière. He presents the perfection of poetic style, même pour ceux qui n’aiment pas essentiellement la poésie. And the critic, with what some, I suppose, would call a touch of his “perfidy,” adds, “Là, c’est le point faible, s’il en est un.” Let us rather say that, while all reasonable praise of Racine may be read in the lines of this criticism, all reasonable dispraise of him may be read between those lines.
Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire.