The star of Sainte-Beuve in the literary firmament of France shone brilliantly during his lifetime; since his death its luminosity has increased. Indeed, one may say that it has become a sort of sun which lights the literary way with great brilliancy. Much has been written about Sainte-Beuve in the brief half-century since his death—brief because of the tremendous changes which have taken place in his country during that time and which have left relatively little leisure to discuss and estimate the influence and achievement of a contemporary. Moreover, the French are loath to commit themselves by placing a crown of immortality on the brow of their artists, before time and a certain unanimity of public opinion have confirmed the judgment of early admirers. Yet, in the case of Sainte-Beuve it was different. Immediately after his death he became for them the greatest critic of the nineteenth century—possibly the greatest of all ages. It has not been thought premature to attribute to him paternity of the modern school of criticism, represented by Rémy de Gourmont. In the early seventies, Matthew Arnold popularised Sainte-Beuve in England and reverberations of this publicity soon reached this country; but it is doubtful that he has the reputation here, especially among the younger writers, that he deserves.
Until recently the biography by Count d’Haussonville has been our most important document about Sainte-Beuve. It requires a delicate and refined pen to write about Sainte-Beuve and it requires an inborn distinction of mind and a responsiveness of heart such as d’Haussonville possessed to understand and render the aristocracy of Sainte-Beuve’s art—the art of one who was above all an artist, with great intellectual powers at the service of his art, and who, not content with his natural endowments, took endless pains and by prodigious industry acquired vast learning.
And now we have another biography. A cultured and scholarly American has written the most voluminous life of Sainte-Beuve that has appeared in any language. Lewis Freeman Mott has gathered all the information that previous biographers have given; garnered the most minute details, elaborated and interpreted them. He has followed his subject from birth to death, minute by minute, with closest attention. Mr. Mott’s Sainte-Beuve gives an impression of concentrated effort. He has worked close enough to the subject to detect nuances difficult to perceive, not close enough to hear the beating of the heart, and too close to comprehend, in one large inclusive sweep, the atmosphere, the local colour and the surroundings. It is a laboriously conceived study, painstakingly faithful, rigorously integral, but not alluring.
Mr. Mott is one of the few biographers to lay emphasis on Sainte-Beuve’s artistic endowment, but even he has done it more in the letter than in the spirit. We wish that this last biographer had traced Sainte-Beuve’s emotional reactions, instead of setting the finished work before us with no clue to its genesis and fabrication. We know that the French critic had more regard for good taste in literature than for talent; that he was constantly seeking truth, that he frowned on falsification of history and human nature; that he revolted against the unnatural, abhorred abstract language and found delight even in the most fugitive appearance of poetry, but all this we must divine, for Mr. Mott does not prove it. He states the case as it appears to him and is neither partisan nor judicial. He carries impartiality to the point of indifference.
In the days of Sainte-Beuve’s early maturity, literary clans were the fashion in Paris, and the Cénacle of which he was one of the shining lights, together with Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset and Victor Hugo, was one of the most fashionable. The young men who met there to discuss their ambitions, to find relaxation and stimulus and to air their views, were “strangely garbed, wearing a 'Merovingian prolixity of hair,’ and were ferociously prepared to eat any stray Academician. They drank healths out of a skull, tore the green coat from the back of Dumas” and showed an effervescence and enthusiasm which has disappeared from the manners of modern writers. But the Cénacle was short lived, and Mr. Mott has skilfully rendered the change of moods in Sainte-Beuve, whose enthusiasm took him along different channels after the crisis of 1830. He soon saw the danger of isolation, and of breaking up into groups; “literature must become broader, more profound, accessible to all. The time of the Cénacle is past; the Romantic reversion to the Middle Ages, the solitary inward revery, the detachment from reality” have been replaced by sentiment for progressive and struggling humanity. Sainte-Beuve then became revolutionary and proletarian, but lost none of his delicate and artistic powers.
Sainte-Beuve had the capacity to shift quickly from one viewpoint to the other, from one belief to another, from one political opinion to its antithesis. This is common enough in men of great emotional make-up, but it seldom goes with the sangfroid, the coolness, the good sense and the clear judgment that he displayed. In him, these sudden turns had their key in his emotions. He was sick at heart, a prey to the passion that first Madame Hugo, then other women inspired in him. In order to distract or benumb himself, he played with every conceivable sort of thought. In all his love affairs, he was ardent and sincere, and entered them without reserve or calculation. Though he sought relief from the passion that possessed him, his emotional disturbance was not allowed to interfere with his intellectual labour.
Mr. Mott should have taken the following quotation from Sainte-Beuve, pondered and meditated it, for within it lies the secret of great biographies:
“I have always been fond of the correspondence of great men, of their conversations, their thoughts, all the details of their character and manners, of their biography in short; and especially when this biography has not already been compiled by another, but may be composed and constructed by oneself. Shutting yourself up for a fortnight with the writing of some dead celebrity, some poet or philosopher, you study him, turn him over and over, and question him at leisure; you make him pose for you; it is almost as though you passed a fortnight in the country making a portrait or a bust of Byron, Scott or Goethe; only you are more at ease with your model and the tête-à-tête at the same time that it requires strict attention, permits much closer familiarity. Soon, an individuality takes the place of the vague, abstract type. The moment the familiar motion, the revealing smile, the vainly hidden crack or wrinkle is seized, at that moment, analysis disappears in creation, the portrait speaks and lives, you have found the man.”
Somehow the reader feels that Mr. Mott did not make Sainte-Beuve pose for him.
It was the man in Sainte-Beuve, not the intellectual, who broke with Victor Hugo and it was the jealousy of a human being, not the superiority of a poet, that made him hate Madame Hugo when his affair with her had lost its allurement. Mr. Mott has laid much stress on that affair, and some may question the taste that guided him in this phase of Sainte-Beuve’s life; but it must be said that Mr. Mott is firm in his belief that there was more imagination, sentiment and words in the romance of the two lovers than reality. He believes that their love was based on a spiritual understanding, and one is inclined to agree with him after reading his remarks on Sainte-Beuve’s inflamed state of mind, after becoming familiar with the behaviour of the characters in his only novel, Volupté, and after learning of the health of Madame Hugo. Mr. Mott contrasts skilfully the sort of affair in which Victor Hugo plunged with robustious frankness, with that of Sainte-Beuve and Madame Hugo, it makes the latter appear like the pretty frolics of adolescence.