Shelburne Essays, Third Series

by Paul Elmer More

Much has been made of these varied twistings of Sainte-Beuve's, both for his honour and dishonour. Certainly they enabled him to insinuate himself into almost every kind of intelligence and report of each author as if he were writing out a phase of his own character; they made him in the end the spokesman of that eager and troubled age whose ferment is to-day just reaching America. France scarcely holds the place of intellectual supremacy once universally accorded her, yet to her glory be it said that, if we look anywhere for a single man who summed up within himself the life of the nineteenth century, we instinctively turn to that country. And more and more it appears that to Sainte-Beuve in particular that honour must accrue. His understanding was more comprehensive than Taine's or Renan's, more subtle than that of the former, more upright than that of the latter, more single toward the truth and more accurate than that of either. He never, as did Taine, allowed a preconceived idea to warp his arrangement of facts, nor did he ever, at least in his mature years, allow his sentimentality, as did Renan, to take the place of judgment. Both the past and the present are reflected in his essays with equal clearness.

On the other hand, this versatility of experience has not seldom been laid to lightness and inconsistency of character. I cannot see that the charge holds good, unless it be directed also against the whole age through which he passed. If any one thing has been made clear by the publishing of Sainte-Beuve's letters and by the closer investigation of his life, it is that he was in these earlier years a sincere seeker after religion, and was only held back at the last moment by some invincible impotence of faith from joining himself finally with this or that sect. And he was thus an image of the times. What else is the meaning of all those abortive attempts to amalgamate religion with the humanitarianism left over from the eighteenth century, but a searching for faith where the spiritual eye had been blinded? I should suppose that Sainte-Beuve's refusal in the end to speak the irrevocable word of adhesion indicated rather the clearness of his self-knowledge than any lightness of procedure. Nor is his inconsistency, whether religious or literary, quite so great as it is sometimes held up to be. The inheritance of the eighteenth century was strong upon him, while at the same time he had a craving for the inner life of the spirit. Naturally he felt a powerful attraction in the preaching of such men as Saint-Simon and Lamennais, who boasted to combine these two tendencies; but the mummery of Saint-Simonism and the instability of Mennaisianism, when it came to the test, too soon exposed the lack of spiritual substance in both. With this revelation came a growing distrust of human nature, caused by the political degeneracy of France, and by a kind of revulsion he threw himself upon the Jansenism which contained the spirituality the other creeds missed, and which based itself frankly on the total depravity of mankind. He was too much a child of the age to breathe in that thin air, and fell back on all that remained to him,—inquisitive doubt and a scientific demand for positive truth. It is the history of the century.

And in literature I find the same inconstancy on the surface, while at heart he suffered little change. Only here his experience ran counter to the times, and most of the opprobrium that has been cast on him is due to the fact that he never allowed the clamour of popular taste and the warmth of his sympathy with present modes to drown that inner critical voice of doubt. As a standard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanticists he still maintained his reserves, and, on the other hand, long after he had turned renegade from that camp he still spoke of himself as only demi-converti. The proportion changed with his development, but from beginning to end he was at bottom classical in his love of clarity and self-restraint, while intensely interested in the life and aspirations of his own day. There is in one of the recently published letters to Victor Hugo a noteworthy illustration of this steadfastness. It was, in fact, the second letter he wrote to the poet, and goes back to 1827, the year of Cromwell. On the twelfth of February, Hugo read his new tragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evidently warm in expressions of praise. But in the seclusion of his own room the critical instinct reawoke in him, and he wrote the next day a long letter to the dramatist, not retracting what he had said, but adding certain reservations and insinuating certain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiques rentrent dans une seule que je m'étais déjà permis d'adresser à votre talent, l'excès, l'abus de la force, et passez-moi le mot, la charge." Is not the whole of his critical attitude toward the men of his age practically contained in this rebuke of excess, and over-emphasis, and self-indulgence? And Sainte-Beuve when he wrote the words was just twenty-three, was in the first ardour of his attachment to the giant—the Cyclops, he seemed to Sainte-Beuve later—of the century.

But after all, it is not the elusive seeker of these years that we think of when Sainte-Beuve is named, nor the author of those many volumes,—the Portraits, the Chateaubriand, even the Port-Royal,—but the writer of the incomparable Lundis. In 1849 he had returned from Liège after lecturing for a year at the University, and found himself abounding in ideas, keen for work, and without regular employment. He was asked to contribute a critical essay to the Constitutionnel each Monday, and accepted the offer eagerly. "It is now twenty-five years," he said, "since I started in this career; it is the third form in which I have been brought to give out my impressions and literary judgments." These first Causeries continued until 1860, and are published in fourteen solid volumes. There was a brief respite then, and in 1861 he began the Nouveaux Lundis, which continued in the Moniteur and the Temps until his last illness in 1869, filling thirteen similar volumes. Meanwhile his mother had died, leaving him a house in Paris and a small income, and in 1865 he had been created a senator by Napoleon III. at the instigation of the Princesse Mathilde.

In his earlier years he had been poor and anxious, living in a student's room, and toiling indefatigably to keep the wolf from the door. At the end he was rich, and had command of his time, yet the story of his labours while writing the latest Lundis is one of the heroic examples of literature. "Every Tuesday morning," he once wrote to a friend, "I go down to the bottom of a pit, not to reascend until Friday evening at some unknown hour." Those were the days of preparation and plotting. From his friend M. Chéron, who was librarian of the Bibliothèque Impériale, came memoirs and histories and manuscripts,—whatever might serve him in getting up his subject. Late in the week he wrote a rough draft of the essay, commonly about six thousand words long, in a hand which no one but himself could decipher. This task was ordinarily finished in a single day, and the essay was then dictated off rapidly to a secretary to take down in a fair copy. That must have been a strenuous season for the copyist, for Sainte-Beuve read at a prodigious rate, showing impatience at any delay, and still greater impatience at any proposed alteration. Indeed, during the whole week of preparation he was so absorbed in his theme as to ruffle up at the slightest opposition. In the evening he would eat a hearty dinner, and then walk out with his secretary to the outer Boulevards, the Luxembourg, or the Place Saint-Sulpice, for his digestion, talking all the while on the coming Lundi with intense absorption. And woe to the poor companion if he expressed any contradiction, or hinted that the subject was trivial,—as indeed it often was, until the critic had clothed it with the life of his own thought. "In a word," Sainte-Beuve would cry out savagely, "you wish to hinder me in writing my article. The subject has not the honour of your sympathy. Really it is too bad." Whereupon he would turn angrily on his heel and stride home. The story explains the nature of Sainte-Beuve's criticism. For a week he lived with his author; "he belonged body and soul to his model! He embraced it, espoused it, exalted it!"—with the result that some of this enthusiasm is transmitted to the reader, and the essays are instinct with life as no other critic's work has ever been. The strain of living thus passionately in a new subject week after week was tremendous, and it is not strange that his letters are filled with complaints of fatigue, and that his health suffered in spite of his robust constitution. Nor was the task ended with the dictation late Friday night. Most of Saturday and Sunday was given up to proofreading, and at this time he invited every suggestion, even contradiction, often practically rewriting an essay before it reached the press. Monday he was free, and it was on that day occurred the famous Magny dinners, when Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Renan, the Goncourts, and a few other chosen spirits, met and talked as only Frenchmen can talk. Every conceivable subject was passed under the fire of criticism; nothing was held sacred. Only one day a luckless guest, after faith in religion and politics and morals had been laughed away, ventured to intimate that Homer as a canon of taste was merely a superstition like another; whereupon such a hubbub arose as threatened to bring the dinners to an end at once and for all. The story is told in the Journal of the Goncourts, and it was one of the brothers, I believe, who made the perilous insinuation. Imagine, if you can, a party of Englishmen taking Homer, or any other question of literary faith, with tragic seriousness. Such an incident explains many things; it explains why English literature has never been, like the French, an integral part of the national life.

And the integrity of mind displayed in the Lundis is as notable as the industry. From the beginning Sainte-Beuve had possessed that inquisitive passion for the truth, without which all other critical gifts are as brass and tinkling cymbals. Nevertheless, it is evident that he did not always in his earlier writings find it expedient to express his whole thought. He was, for example, at one time the recognised herald of the romantic revolt, and naturally, while writing about Victor Hugo, he did not feel it necessary to make in public such frank reservations as his letters to that poet contain. His whole thought is there, perhaps, but one has to read between the lines to get it. And so it was with the other men and movements with which he for a while allied himself. With the Lundis came a change; he was free of all entanglements, and could make the precise truth his single aim. No doubt a remnant of personal jealousy toward those who had passed him in the race of popularity embittered the critical reservations which he felt, but which might otherwise have been uttered more genially. But quite as often this seeming rancour was due to the feeling that he had hitherto been compelled to suppress his full convictions, to a genuine regret for the corrupt ways into which French literature was deviating. How nearly the exigencies of a hack writer had touched him is shown by a passage in a letter to the Oliviers written in 1838. His Swiss friend was debating whether he should try his fortunes in Paris as a contributor to the magazines, and had asked for advice. "But where to write? what to write?" replied Sainte-Beuve; "if one could only choose for himself! You must wait on opportunity, and in the long run this becomes a transaction in which conscience may be saved, but every ideal perishes,"—dans laquelle la conscience peut toujours être sauve mais où tout idéal périt. Just about this time he was thinking seriously of migrating with the Oliviers to this country. It would be curious to hear what he might have written from New York to one who contemplated coming there as a hack writer. As for the loss of ideals, his meaning, if it needs any elucidation, may be gathered from a well-known passage in one of his books:

The condition of man ordinarily is no more than a succession of servitudes, and the only liberty that remains is now and then to effect a change. Labour presses, necessity commands, circumstances sweep us along: at the risk of seeming to contradict ourselves or give ourselves the lie, we must go on and for ever recommence; we must accept whatever employments are offered, and even though we fill them with all conscientiousness and zeal we raise a dust on the way, we obscure the images of the past, we soil and mar our own selves. And so it is that before the goal of old age is reached, we have passed through so many lives that scarcely, as we go back in memory, can we tell which was our true life, that for which we were made and of which we were worthy, the life which we would have chosen.

Those were the words with which he had closed his chapters on Chateaubriand; yet through all his deviations he had borne steadily toward one point. In after years he could write without presumption to a friend: "If I had a device, it would be the true, the true alone; and the beautiful and the good might come out as best they could." There are a number of anecdotes which show how precious he held this integrity of mind. The best known is the fact that, in the days before he was appointed senator, and despite the pressure that was brought to bear on him, he still refused to write a review of the Emperor's History of Cæsar.

Both the sense of disillusion, which was really inherent in him from his youth, and the passion for truth hindered him in his "creative" work, while they increased his powers as a critic. He grew up, it must be remembered, in the midst of the full romantic tide, and as a writer of verse there was really no path of great achievement open to him save that of Victor Hugo and Lamartine and the others of whose glory he was so jealous. Whatever may have been the differences of those poets, in one respect they were alike: they all disregarded the subtle nuance wherein the truth resides, and based their emotions on some grandiose conception, half true and half false; nor was this mingling of the false and true any less predominant in one of Hugo's political odes than in Lamartine's personal and religious meditations. Now, the whole bent of Sainte-Beuve's intellect was toward the subtle drawing of distinctions, and even to-day a reader somewhat romantically and emotionally inclined resents the manner in which his scalpel cuts into the work of these poets and severs what is morbid from what is sound. That is criticism; but it may easily be seen that such a habit of mind when carried to excess would paralyse the poetic impulse. The finest poetry, perhaps, is written when this discriminating principle works in the writer strongly but unconsciously; when a certain critical atmosphere about him controls his taste, while not compelling him to dull the edge of impulse by too much deliberation. Boileau had created such an atmosphere about Molière and Racine; Sainte-Beuve had attempted, but unsuccessfully, to do the same for the poets of the romantic renaissance. His failure was due in part to a certain lack of impressiveness in his own personality, but still more to the notions of individual licence which lay at the very foundation of that movement. There is a touch of real pathos in his superb tribute to Boileau:

Let us salute and acknowledge to-day the noble and mighty harmony of the grand siècle. Without Boileau, and without Louis XIV., who recognised Boileau as his Superintendent of Parnassus, what would have happened? Would even the most talented have produced in the same degree what forms their surest heritage of glory? Racine, I fear, would have made more plays like Bérénice; La Fontaine fewer Fables and more Contes; Molière himself would have run to Scapins, and might not have attained to the austere eminence of Le Misanthrope. In a word, each of these fair geniuses would have abounded in his natural defects. Boileau, that is to say, the common sense of the poet-critic authorised and confirmed by that of a great king, constrained them and kept them, by the respect for his presence, to their better and graver tasks. And do you know what, in our days, has failed our poets, so strong at their beginning in native ability, so filled with promise and happy inspiration? There failed them a Boileau and an enlightened monarch, the twain supporting and consecrating each other. So it is these men of talent, seeing themselves in an age of anarchy and without discipline, have not hesitated to behave accordingly; they have behaved, to be perfectly frank, not like exalted geniuses, or even like men, but like schoolboys out of school. We have seen the result.