Shelburne Essays, Third Series

by Paul Elmer More

Nobler tribute to a great predecessor has not often been uttered, and in contrast one remembers the outrage that has been poured on Boileau's name by the later poets of France and England. One recalls the scorn of the young Keats, in those days when he took licence upon himself to abuse the King's English as only a wilful genius can:

Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist face to face,
And did not know it,—no, they went about,
Holding a poor decrepit standard out
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!

I am not one to fling abuse on the school of Dryden and Pope, yet the eighteenth century may to some minds justify the charge of Keats and the romanticists. Certainly the critical restraint of French rules, passing to England at a time when the tide of inspiration had run low, induced a certain aridity of manner. But consider for a moment what might have been the result in English letters if the court of Elizabeth had harboured a man of authority such as Boileau, or, to put it the other way, if the large inspiration of those poets and playwrights had not come before the critical sense of the land was out of its swaddling clothes. What might it have been for us if a Boileau and an Elizabeth together had taught Shakespeare to prune his redundancies, to disentangle his language at times, to eliminate the relics of barbarism in his dénouements; if they had compelled the lesser dramatists to simplify their plots and render their characters conceivable moral agents; if they had instructed the sonneteers in common sense and in the laws of the sonnet; if they had constrained Spenser to tell a story,—consider what this might have meant, not only to the writers of that day, but to the tradition they formed for those that were to come after. We should have had our own classics, and not been forced to turn to Athens for our canons of taste. There would not have been for our confusion the miserable contrast between the "correctness" of Queen Anne's day and the creative genius of Elizabeth's, but the two together would have made a literature incomparable for richness and judgment. It is not too much to say that the absence of such a controlling influence at the great expansive moment of England is a loss for which nothing can ever entirely compensate in our literature.

Such was the office which Sainte-Beuve sought to fulfil in the France of his own day. That conscious principle of restraint might, he thought, when applied to his own poetical work, introduce into French literature a style like that of Cowper's or Wordsworth's in England; and to a certain extent he was successful in this attempt. But in the end he found the Democritean maxim too strong for him: Excludit sanos Helicone poetas; and, indeed, the difference between the poet and the critic may scarcely be better defined than in this, that in the former the principle of restraint works unconsciously and from without, whereas in the latter it proceeds consciously and from within. And finding himself debarred from Helicon (not by impotence, as some would say, but by excess of self-knowledge), he deliberately undertook to introduce a little more sanity into the notions of his contemporaries. I have shown how at the very beginning of his career he took upon himself privately such a task with Hugo. It might almost be said that the history of his intellect is summed up in his growth toward the sane and the simple; that, like Goethe, from whom so much of his critical method derives, his life was a long endeavour to supplant the romantic elements of his taste by the classical. What else is the meaning of his attack on the excesses of Balzac? or his defence of Erasmus (le droit, je ne dis des tièdes, mais des neutres), and of all those others who sought for themselves a governance in the law of proportion? In one of his latest volumes he took the occasion of Taine's History of English Literature to speak out strongly for the admirable qualities of Pope:

I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sacrifice of the writers and poets whom I will call the moderate. For a long time they had all the honours: one pleaded for Shakespeare, for Milton, for Dante, even for Homer; no one thought it necessary to plead for Virgil, for Horace, for Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope, Tasso,—these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the first have completely gained their cause, and matters are quite the other way about: the great and primitive geniuses reign and triumph; even those who come after them in invention, but are still naïve and original in thought and expression, poets such as Regnier and Lucretius, are raised to their proper rank; while the moderate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the classics to our fathers, we tend to make subordinate, and, if we are not careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. Something like disdain and contempt (relatively speaking) will soon be their portion. It seems to me that there is room for all, and that none need be sacrificed. Let us render full homage and complete reverence to those great human forces which are like the powers of nature, and which like them burst forth with something of strangeness and harshness; but still let us not cease to honour those other forces which are more restrained, and which, in their less explosive expression, clothe themselves with elegance and sweetness.

And this love of the golden mean, joined with the long wanderings of his heart and his loneliness, produced in him a preference for scenes near at hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So it was that the idyllic tales of George Sand touched him quickly with their strange romance of the familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that school had sought out the nature of India, the savannahs of America, the forests of Canada. "Here," he says, "are discoveries for you,—deserts, mountains, the large horizons of Italy; what remained to discover? That which was nearest to us, here in the centre of our own France. As happens always, what is most simple comes at the last." In the same way he praised the refined charm of a poet like Cowper, and sought to throw into relief the purer and more homely verses of a Parny: "If a little knowledge removes us, yet greater knowledge brings us back to the sentiment of the beauties and graces of the hearth." Indeed, there is something almost pathetic in the contrast between the life of this laborious recluse, with his sinister distrust of human nature, and the way in which he fondles this image of a sheltered and affectionate home.

But the nineteenth century was not the seventeenth, neither was Sainte-Beuve a Boileau, to stem the current of exaggeration and egotism. His innate sense of proportion brought him to see the dangerous tendencies of the day, and, failing to correct them, he sank deeper into that disillusion from which his weekly task was a long and vain labour of deliverance. He took to himself the saying of the Abbé Galiani: "Continue your works; it is a proof of attachment to life to compose books." Yet it may be that this very disillusion was one of the elements of his success; for after all, the real passion of literature, that perfect flower of the contemplative intellect, hardly comes to a man until the allurement of life has been dispelled by many experiences, each bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps, when the hope of love (the spes animi credula mutui) and the visions of ambition, the belief in pleasure and the luxury of grief, have lost their sting, do we turn to books with the contented understanding that the shadow is the reality, and the seeming reality of things is the shadow. At least for the critic, however it may be for the "creative" writer, this final deliverance from self-deception would seem to be necessary. Nor do I mean any invidious distinction when I separate the critic from the creative writer in this respect. I know there is a kind of hostility between the two classes. The poet feels that the critic by the very possession of this self-knowledge sets himself above the writer who accepts the inspiration of his emotions unquestioningly, while the critic resents the fact that the world at large looks upon his work as subordinate, if not superfluous. And yet, in the case of criticism, such as Sainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almost ceases to exist. No stigma attaches to the work of the historian who recreates the political activities of an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vast bridge between the past and the present. Yet, certainly, the best and most durable acts of mankind are the ideals and emotions that go to make up its books, and to describe and judge the literature of a country, to pass under review a thousand systems and reveries, to point out the meaning of each, and so write the annals of the human spirit, to pluck out the heart of each man's mystery and set it before the mind's eye quivering with life,—if this be not a labour of immense creative energy the word has no sense to my ears. We read and enjoy, and the past slips unceasingly from our memory. We are like the foolish peasant: the river of history rolls at our feet, and for ever will roll, while we stand and wait. And then comes this magician, who speaks a word, and suddenly the current is stopped; who has power like the wizards of old to bid the tide turn back upon itself, and the past becomes to us as the present, and we are made the lords of time. I do not know how it affects others, but for me, as I look at the long row of volumes which hold the interpretation of French literature, I am almost overwhelmed at the magnitude of this man's achievement.

Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, because he was primarily a critic, drew his knowledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it were, at second hand. The very contrary is true. As a younger man, he had mixed much with society, and even in his later years, when, as he says, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still, through his friendship with the Princesse Mathilde and others of the great world, kept in close touch with the active forces of the Empire. As a matter of fact, every one knows, who has read at all in his essays, that he was first of all a psychologist, and that his knowledge of the human breast was quite as sure as his acquaintance with libraries. He might almost be accused of slighting the written word in order to get at the secret of the writer. What attracted him chiefly was that middle ground where life and literature meet, where life becomes self-conscious through expression, and literature retains the reality of association with facts. "A little poesy," he thought, "separates us from history and the reality of things; much of poesy brings us back." Literature to him was one of the arts of society. Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch was never surer and his eloquence more communicable, than when he was dealing with the great ladies who guided the society of the eighteenth century and retold its events in their letters and memoirs,—Mme. du Deffand, Mme. de Grafigny, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and those who preceded and followed. Nowhere does one get closer to the critic's own disappointment than when he says with a sigh, thinking of those irrecoverable days: "Happy time! all of life then was turned to sociability." And he was describing his own method as a critic, no less than the character of Mlle. de Lespinasse, when he wrote: "Her great art in society, one of the secrets of her success, was to feel the intelligence (l'esprit) of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to forget her own. Her conversation was never either above or below those with whom she spoke; she possessed measure, proportion, rightness of mind. She reflected so well the impressions of others, and received so visibly the influence of their intelligence, that they loved her for the success she helped them to attain. She raised this disposition to an art. 'Ah!' she cried one day, 'how I long to know the foible of every one!'" And this love of the social side of literature, this hankering after la bella scuola when men wrote under the sway of some central governance, explains Sainte-Beuve's feeling of desolation amidst the scattered, individualistic tendencies of his own day.

There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's critical art,—his treatment of literature as a function of social life, and his search in all things for the golden mean. There we find his strength, and there, too, his limitation. If he fails anywhere, it is when he comes into the presence of those great and imperious souls who stand apart from the common concerns of men, and who rise above our homely mediocrities, not by extravagance or egotism, but by the lifting wings of inspiration. He could, indeed, comprehend the ascetic grandeur of a Pascal or the rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, but he was distrustful of that fervid breath of poesy that comes and goes unsummoned and uncontrolled. It is a common charge against him that he was cold to the sublime, and he himself was aware of this defect, and sought to justify it. "Il ne faut donner dans le sublime," he said, "qu'à la dernière extrémité et à son corps défendant." Something of this, too, must be held to account for the haunting melancholy that he could forget, but never overcome. He might have lived with a kind of content in the society of those refined and worldly women of the eighteenth century, but, missing the solace of that support, he was unable amid the dissipated energies of his own age to rise to that surer peace that needs no communion with others for its fulfilment. Like the royal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the highest degree of culture, which is religion. He strove for that during many years, but alone he could not attain to it. As early as 1839 he wrote, while staying at Aigues-Mortes: "My soul is like this beach, where it is said Saint Louis embarked: the sea and faith, alas! have long since drawn away." One may excuse these limitations as the "defect of his quality," as indeed they are. But more than that, they belong to him as a French critic, as they are to a certain degree inherent in French literature. That literature and language, we have been told by no less an authority than M. Brunetière, are pre-eminently social in their strength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuve was indirectly justifying his own method when he pointed to the example of Voltaire, Molière, La Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the great ancestors. "They have all," he said, "a corner from which they mock at the sublime." I am even inclined to think that these qualities explain why England has never had, and may possibly never have, a critic in any way comparable to Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glory of English literature lies in the very field where French is weakest, in the lonely and unsociable life of the spirit, just as the faults of English are due to its lack of discipline and uncertainty of taste. And after all, the critical temperament consists primarily in just this linking together of literature and life, and in the levelling application of common sense.

Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, indeed almost inconceivable in English, he is still immensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable, to us for that very reason. There is nothing more wholesome than to dip into this strong and steady current of wise judgment. It is good for us to catch the glow of his masterful knowledge of letters and his faith in their supreme interest. His long row of volumes are the scholar's Summa Theologiæ. As John Cotton loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve, sure of his never-failing abundance and his ripe intelligence.