[577]. I believe this charming book—made accessible for a time by the Brussels reprint of 1868—is again very rare. I once had the pleasure of introducing it to the late Lord Houghton, who told me afterwards that he had bought it “and dressed it up all in moons and stars.”
[578]. Vigny (in a passage which Sainte-Beuve himself quotes with singular blindness or singular boldness) puts the thing finally: Il ne faut disséquer que les morts: cette manière de chercher à ouvrir le cerveau d’un vivant est fausse et mauvaise (A. de. V.'s Journal, quoted in Port. Contemp., final ed., ii. 79).
[579]. And, after all, let us remember that, on the testimony of the Goncourts (Journal, ii. 123), who have left some of the most offensive things against Sainte-Beuve, the critic, as late as 1863, rebuked Taine for belittling Hugo, in these memorable words, “Ne parlez pas d’Hugo. Vous ne le connaissez pas. Mais l'œuvre d’Hugo est magnifique!”
[580]. See for instance the opening (1832) of the “Lamartine” (i. 276).
[581]. E.g., to Crabbe, pp. 328-330; to Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 337-345. Sainte-Beuve, it is hardly necessary to say, was English of the quarter-blood.
[582]. The not quite “single speech” Ulric of that unforgettable piece, “Ils ont dit, L’amour passe et sa flamme est rapide.”
[583]. This contains the admirable, if in more than one sense generous, judgment of Schlegel (Wilhelm), that he a eu l'œil à toutes les grandes choses littéraires, s’il n’a pas toujour rendu justice aux moyennes. Omit grandes in the first clause; substitute it for moyennes and prefix pleine to justice in the second; and the thing becomes a fair verdict on Sainte-Beuve himself.
[584]. One of Sainte-Beuve’s defects (“for the man was mortal”) was an insufficient appreciation of the grotesque and the out-of-the-way.
[585]. He himself put it earlier—at 1840 or thereabouts. No doubt, as I have said above, the essays of the ’Forties as a whole do show a great advance. But I hardly recognise the full Sainte-Beuve before, say, the “Daunou” and the “Leopardi” of 1844.
[586]. The definitive edition was published in 1867-71 (the author died midway in 1869), in 7 vols.—6 of text, the first 5 of which average 600 pp. each, 1 of elaborate index, by that admirable student of the older French literature, M. de Montaiglon. The original dates of publication were 1840-60.