And it is always so. There were squalls occasionally, as there were especially certain to be, at the ticklish time, when the Second Consulate or Presidency was passing, not quite ideally, into the Second Empire. He need not have poured broadsides into popgunners like the Staël-Hetzels and the Laurent-Pichats.[[601]] The first was a very useful publisher and a respectable author of children’s books; I think I remember some tolerable critical work of the second, apart from his politics. But what is either to-day? what, much more, will either be a hundred years hence, beside Sainte-Beuve? He knew Wordsworth: surely he might have remembered that “our noisy curs are” not even “moments in the being of the Eternal Silence.” “They yap; what yap they? let them yap.” For in some cases they can do nothing else: and in all the Silence itself catches them very soon, if we do not lend them an echo.

In the Fourth volume, though the “Mirabeau” articles and the “Chamfort,” the “Saint-Evremond et Ninon” and the “Marmontel” are charming in the mixed kind, I think, for literature, the palm is due to that sentence—so autobiographical and so much more than merely autobiographical—which opens the “Moreau and Dupont” piece, “Je cause rarement ici de poésie, precisément parceque je l’ai beaucoup aimée et que je l’aime encore plus que toute chose.” Quia multum amavi! And he does not derogate from this attitude in the Fifth, where he welcomes Victor de Laprade and Leconte de Lisle, while this also contains delightful things on Raynouard, Rivarol, Retz, Patru, Gourville, and even the remarkable person once called Le-Brun-Pindare. In the Sixth we go from Rollin to La Reine Margot, from Bernardin and Courier to Saint Anselm backwards and the Abbé Gerbet forwards, with, at the close, one article of special interest here, Sainte-Beuve’s revised and in some ways palinodic opinions on Boileau. The Seventh is mainly eighteenth century—Montesquieu and the Président de Brosses, Franklin and Barthélemy, Grimm (for whom, here as elsewhere, Sainte-Beuve makes strong fight against the general, and, I am bound to say, in my judgment, the well-grounded, distrust of him), Necker and Volney, with, to give us change from a better time, Regnard and La Fontaine at front and close, Richelieu and Saint François de Sales, Mérimée and Arnault, and the elder Marguerite. On the last he is a little disappointing: and perhaps we might have expected that he would be.

The Eighth, with many excellent examples of the usual seventeenth-eighteenth century causeries, and with a most welcome batch of mediæval studies on Joinville, on the Roman de Renart, on the Histoire Littéraire—good to read even now, and priceless then—contains an article, written with great care, to which an Englishman naturally turns, and with which most Englishmen will be disappointed, that on Gibbon. None of the usual causes could have blunted Sainte-Beuve’s judgment here: yet it is blunted. Missing, in the one sense, what he calls the javelot, the coup de foudre, the cri haletant—in other words, the somewhat theatrical and rhetorical[[602]] touch of French, he misses also, in the other, Gibbon’s magnificence, that sense of the vast procession of events and that power of reproducing it, which gives an almost poetic self-transcendence to an otherwise prosaic and philosophe nature. We all miss things, of course: but such a man as Sainte-Beuve should not have missed such a thing as this. The “Joinville,” however, which immediately follows, makes once more those familiar amends; and the next volume (the Ninth) contains admirable companions to it in the “Froissart” and the “Villehardouin,” this last one of the author’s best. He had now started (to some though not to all extents with advantage) dealing with one subject in several essays: and most of this volume is so occupied. “Stendhal,” “Marivaux,” “Madame Dacier,” with others, show his admirable flexibility. The Tenth is perhaps less attractive, for except Agrippa d’Aubigné and one or two others, its subjects are not as a rule of the first interest, and in one Sainte-Beuve returns to Chateaubriand—not happily. But the Eleventh, with a certain amount of “filling,”—the first collection stopped here, and Sainte-Beuve had to plug the gap made by the removal of the index when it was extended,—has at least two articles, or batches of articles, of the first interest—those on Montluc and Cowper. Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut—to appreciate equally, and almost at the same moment, the greater d’Artagnan of Sienna and the patron of Puss.

As a matter of fact, the original enterprise of the weekly Causerie did in a manner finish with this first issue. For five years Sainte-Beuve had kept neck and neck with the enemy. His work afterwards was more intermittent, and even underwent a cessation of some years when he was lecturer at the École Normale, between 1857 and 1861. The last four volumes of the actual Causeries are made up from different sources: though the bulk of the constituents are of the true breed. Among them are some of Sainte-Beuve’s most interesting studies of the past—“Ronsard” (revisited), “Saint Amant,” “Voiture,” “Vauvenargues,” “Villon”—and some of his most famous papers on contemporaries, such as those on Musset and the Guérins. The last volume of all contains two of the most valuable of those invaluable papers on criticism in general, to which we have drawn attention already, that on Nisard’s History and that on La Tradition en Littérature. But perhaps the special appeal of these appendix-volumes is the appearance of articles on books and authors that are still in a manner modern—on Madame Bovary, on Fanny,[[603]] on M. de Banville, on M. Scherer.

The Nouveaux Lundis.

And when the series began again regularly, after this interruption, with the Nouveaux Lundis in 1861, he formally promised or threatened a recrudescence into criticism “truer” and “franker” and more regardless of contemporary protest.

One may be sorry for this, even though the particular ashes are long cooled. Although Sainte-Beuve’s “malignity” was, as has been said, absurdly, and is still sometimes inexcusably, exaggerated, he was far from free from those iræ from which the something less than celestial spirit of the critic so seldom escapes.[[604]] There is a sort of “rankle,” a kind of distant growl of “That’s my thunder,” in his review at the time of M. Rigault’s Querelle, in his later obituary of the author, and even elsewhere: the first paper of the Nouveaux Lundis on Laprade is openly and almost rudely hostile: while the critic proceeds later to exchange fresh broadsides with M. de Pontmartin.

Still, where the element of hostility or personality does not put flies in the ointment, it is of course of the first interest to have such a paper as, say, the “Madame Bovary” article, or the later one on “Salammbô,” introductions to such rising “imps of fame” as Taine, Renan, the Goncourts, Saint-Victor, Fromentin, Feuillet,—even such fair and well-weighed, though antagonistic, examinations as that of Veuillot. In regard to Taine and others, especially, Sainte-Beuve is particularly interesting, because they present a crop of his seed, a development of his own method, with the substitution, for that rather ondoyant et divers conclusion or no-conclusion of his to which we shall return, of hard-and-fast theories of ruling ideas, and milieux, and the rest. All this, however, would not make up to those of us who love the modern quâ modern little and the contemporary quâ contemporary not at all, if it had induced Sainte-Beuve to give up those inestimable studies of the past, or those well-reasoned considerations of criticism in general, which are his main titles to fame. But it did not. One of the very best of the latter kind is the famous review of M. Taine’s own Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. And in the former, the “La Bruyère,” the “Sévigné,” the “Perrault” in the first volume, the “Bossuet” in the second, the article (independent of his “Introduction,” which is itself a masterpiece) to Crepet’s Poètes Français, and the batch on the Mystère d’Orleans (that is to say, the Early French Drama) in the third are more than reassuring. Soon, moreover, Daphnis and Chloe promises a renewal[[605]] of those articles on the classics which are perhaps the only ones ever written, since our regrettable specialisations in the nineteenth century, by a literary critic of the very first order in the modern sphere.[[606]]

Towards the last he turned a little too much to the political, and though at the very end the long batch on Talleyrand is succeeded by one equally long on his old favourite, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, the amiable Marceline is not quite a poetess of importance enough, nor is the part actually devoted to her poetry large enough, to make the swan-song quite literary. But there is plenty of genuine matter everywhere, and even the contemporary articles afford room for justice at last to Gautier, and for a long and attractive review of La Poesie en 1865, where M. Sully Prudhomme, and others not even yet quite out of fashion, appear. It may be that something of the irrational and superstitious guignon of continuations attaches to these Nouveaux Lundis: but surely very little.[[607]]