Their length, &c.
I do not know whether the length of the average causerie was directly conditioned by the fact of its appearance in a daily newspaper[[598]] instead of a Review, or whether Sainte-Beuve’s experience and instinct combined, induced him to make it rather shorter, but much more uniform in length, than his Deux Mondes articles. This length is pretty exactly twenty pages—a few articles being a little longer and a few a little shorter, but the greater number coming very close to the score of, say, 350 words each. It may be a superstition based on this great practitioner’s practice, but I think the majority of his successors have found that this length—say, from six to eight thousand words—is singularly normal for the treatment of an average subject of the larger literary kind. It ought not to weary the reader; it does not cramp the writer; and it does not tempt him to undue expatiation. Occasionally Sainte-Beuve, of course, doubled or trebled or even further multiplied causeries where the subject demanded it; but at first he did this very seldom, and he never made it the rule. In selecting his subjects he naturally preferred a new book when he could get it, if only as a “peg”: and he had plenty of choice. His rejections, however, were sometimes disappointing, particularly so in the case of M. Egger’s History of Greek Criticism, which he had intended to take. He neither specially chose nor specially rejected themes that he had already treated: and sometimes, though not often, he reproduced parts of his old work. As to the treatment, enough has been said of that above, or will be said below. It was almost unique: it is still almost unmatched. As far as any general scheme is extricable, it is the obvious one of a few general remarks—not very seldom expanding into precious tractatules—of more or less abstract criticism; a biographical sketch, anecdoted with special view to literary influences; remarks, with more or less quotation, on books and passages; and sometimes a sketch, usually rather shy and suggestive than peremptory, of comparative “placing”—the comparison, however, having been subtly presented throughout. But the method is never stereotyped: and the variations are of the essence.
Bricks of the house.
The hundreds of articles and the thousands of passages which these eight-and-twenty volumes present are naturally difficult to deal with after the method which has been here adopted; but a few pages may be fairly devoted to a selection from the notabilia with which “the sweet compulsion” of reading them through again for the purpose has provided me freshly. At the very beginning, and in the first volume, though it is one of the most brilliant of all, Sainte-Beuve is rather militant: he never became quite Olympian. The opening article on Saint-Marc Girardin[[599]] (between whom and our critic there was always a little friction) has a good deal of “malice” in the French, if not exactly in the English, sense: and that which follows on Lamartine’s Confidences, with a later one on Raphael, though just enough, is distinctly cruel, and savours of political vengeance on the fallen dictator. But these ticklish and disgustful contemporaneities give way to those perfect studies of the Sévignés (if it be not profane to speak of that person in the plural), the Hamiltons, the Jouberts, the Comines, the Firdousis, which we associate most happily and most characteristically with Sainte-Beuve. There is less, though there is some, of the wholly welcome dealing with technically “ancient” literature: but there are two consummate articles of “criticism in the second intention”—the papers on “Villemain and Cousin as Men of Letters,” and on “Feletz, and Empire Criticism.”
The second volume or semester of this Annus Mirabilis—for the two cover the whole twelvemonth[twelvemonth] from October 1 to September 30, 1849-1850, with exactly fifty-two articles told down for the fifty-two weeks[[600]]—contains the famous and generous “Mlle. de Lespinasse”; the “Huet,” which is perhaps as good an example as one can find of the whole in some ways; the admirable “Chesterfield”; a wonderfully just “Mazarin”; the “Gil Blas,” which will be reprinted with Gil Blas for centuries; and that magnanimous and yet not uncritical adjustment of coals of fire which Sainte-Beuve set alight in honour of the death of Balzac,—all of them varied, picked out, and set off by a profusion of studies of the eighteenth century, less literary in substance but literary enough in connection, and prefaced in one case, that of the “Madame du Châtelet,” with a most ingenious link, conduit, or what shall we call it? of explanatory connection between the purely literary and the merely gossiping. If there is to be found, also, an extremely bitter-sweet appendix on M. de Pontmartin, and an article on Chateaubriand, which is a superfluity and a blunder after the great book, we can pardon them. No other man has ever done such another year’s darg in criticism.
We must not follow the rest of the twenty years or thereabouts with equal precision, though few of them were less substantially filled. An indication to those who do not know, a reminder to those who do, of certain sommités among the articles; and a small sheaf of specially important passages, may lead us to the final summary of Sainte-Beuve’s critical position and achievement.
A whole cluster of remarkable things opens the Third volume. The “Rabelais” is practically the first piece of absolutely sane and appreciative criticism on the subject, the starting-point and foundation of what is now the accepted opinion of the competent. The “Qu’est ce qu’un classique?” is one of those more general pieces of criticism in which Sainte-Beuve does not go out of his way to indulge, but which he does, when he does them, in a manner showing the superiority which practice in actual “judging of authors” confers on its practitioners when they “go up higher.” The “Rousseau” is almost equal to the “Rabelais,” and it is not the first comer in criticism who can be just to both. His social-historic studies of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century serve as foils, and as intrinsically delightful reading, though they are often on the fringes of literature itself. The article on Latouche is a little ungenerous, and that on Fontenelle more than a little inadequate; while I wish that Sainte-Beuve had not indulged in a singularly vain and violent contrast between Camille Desmoulins and Vauvenargues. But the “Pasquier,” the “Saint-Simon,” the new “Diderot,” make amends.
His occasional polemic.