He took the bag of gold from the table and followed her down the stair. Her chariot was waiting her at the door. He handed her in, and laid the bag on the little seat in front.
"Will you tell him to drive home?" she said with a firm voice, and a smile which if any one care to understand let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer, shabby, un-London-like man for a fortune-teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room—not to his Plato, not even to Saul of Tarsus, but to the Lord himself.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
SOME LAST WORDS FROM SAINTE-BEUVE.
It is seven years since the world of letters lost the prince of critics, the last of the critics. His unfinished and unpublished manuscripts were eagerly demanded and devoured; while obituaries, notices, reminiscences and those analyses which the French term appréciations rained in from various quarters. The latest of these that deserves attention was an outline of Saint-Beuve's life and literary career by the Vicomte d'Haussonville, in which, with an affectation of impartiality and fairness, every page was streaked with malice; imperfect justice was done to Sainte-Beuve's intellect; his influence and reputation were understated; and a picture was given of him as a man which could not but be disagreeable and disappointing to the vast number who admired him as a writer. In regard to the first two points, ill-nature and inaccuracy can do no harm: Sainte-Beuve's fame and ability are perfectly well known to the reading public of to-day, and the opinion of posterity will rest upon his own merits rather than on the statements of any biographer, as he is one of the authors whose writings are sure to be more read than what other people write about them. The unpleasant personal impression is not so easily dismissed: however exaggerated we may be disposed to think it, the reflection occurs, "How this man was feared!" The appearance of the notice several years after Sainte-Beuve's death strengthens this conviction: M. d'Haussonville waited until his subject should be quite cold before he ventured to touch him.
The causes of this dread and dislike are not to be found in Sainte-Beuve's voluminous works, nor have I met with any evidence of it in the writings of his literary contemporaries. He obviously held that it is a critic's duty to be just before he is generous, and there may be a lack of geniality in his praise, though it is not given grudgingly; but I cannot recall an instance of literary spite in the large proportion of his writings with which I am familiar. His judgments are often severe, never harsh: he frequently dealt in satire, rarely, as far as my memory serves, in sarcasm, and he condemns irony as one of the least intelligent dispositions of the mind. The only case in which I remember having suspected Sainte-Beuve of ill-nature was in a notice of J. J. Ampère printed in the Revue des Deux Mondes shortly after the latter's death; but a person who had known Ampère long and well, and on the friendliest terms, declared that it gave an entirely fair description of the man, who, full of talent and amiability as he was, had many weaknesses. Two pleas only can justify disinterring and gibbeting an author's private life—either his having done the same by others, or his having made the public the confidant of his individual experience. Few writers have intruded their own personality upon their readers less than Sainte-Beuve has done: the poems and novels of his youth, which won fervent admiration from the literary leaders of that day, De Vigny, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, are now forgotten: he is known to readers of the last half century by a series of critical and biographical essays extending from 1823 or 1824 to 1870, which combine every attribute of perfect criticism except enthusiasm. The most prominent feature of his method is the conscientiousness with which he credits the person upon whom he passes judgment with every particle of worth which can be extracted from his writings, acts or sayings: he adopts as the basis of criticism the acknowledgment of whatever merit may exist in the subject of consideration; and his talent and patience for sifting the grain from the chaff are remarkable and admirable. An author who has left some forty volumes conceived in this spirit should have been safe against an effusion of spleen in his biographer. I am not assailing the fidelity of M. d'Haussonville's portrait—of which I have no means of judging—but the temper in which it is executed, which can be judged without difficulty. Besides the injustice already mentioned, it is disfigured by tittle-tattle, which tends to render the original ridiculous and repulsive, but does not add one whit to our knowledge of Sainte-Beuve as a man or an author.
A defence of Sainte-Beuve is not within the purpose of the present article; but it was impossible for one who has known him favorably for twenty years through his works and the testimony of his most distinguished literary compeers to speak of him at all without protesting against the detraction to which his memory has been subjected. Two small posthumous volumes have lately been issued in France,[C] revealing qualities which might expose the dead man to a mean revenge, though to most readers they will have a delightful freshness unspoiled by any bitter flavor. They consist of a series of notes on all sorts of subjects, literary, dramatic, religious and political, one of them being actually made up of the jottings in his later notebooks, while the other contains the memoranda of a sort of high-class gossip with which Sainte-Beuve supplied a friend, the editor of La Revue Suisse, during the years 1843-45. These were not to be published as they stood, but to be used by the editor, M. Juste Olivier, as he should think best: they are fragmentary, mere bits of raw material—if any product of that accomplished brain can be so termed—to be worked up by another hand. They were qualified by marginal observations, such as "This is for you alone," "This is rather strong," and they were to be absolutely anonymous, the author allowing himself the luxury of free speech, of writing exactly as he thought and felt; in short, of trusting his indiscretion to M. Olivier's discretion. The latter used his judgment independently; Sainte-Beuve's views and comments often became merely one ingredient in an article for which others supplied the rest; and the editor kneaded the whole into shape to his own liking. But the MSS. remained intact, and were confided by M. Olivier to M. Jules Troubat, Sainte-Beuve's private secretary and editor, who has published them in their integrity, he tells us, with the exception of "a few indispensable suppressions." The other volume, as we have said, is composed of his notebooks. These last were intended to take the place of memoirs by Sainte-Beuve himself, who wrote a short preface, under the name of M. Troubat, destined for a larger volume to appear after his death. He published, however, the greater part of those which he had already collected in vol. ii. of the Causeries de Lundi: the present series contains the notes which accumulated subsequently. M. Troubat has given them to the world as they stood. Both books abound in the characteristics of the author's style—good sense, moderation, perception, discrimination, delicacy, sparkle, unerring taste, as well as judgment in matters of intelligence. A parcel of disconnected passages cannot possess the flow and finish of a complete essay, but each bit has the clearness, incisiveness and smooth polish of his native wit. They give us Sainte-Beuve's first impression, thought, mental impulse, about daily events regarding which he sometimes afterward modified his opinion. Not often, however, for he had, if not precisely the prophetic vision which belongs to genius or minds illuminated by enthusiasm or sympathy, that keen far-sightedness which recognizes at a distance rather than foresees the coming event or man. He tells a quantity of anecdotes, and he had exactly the sort of humor and absence of tenderness for human weakness which perceives the point that makes a story good in the greatest variety of speeches and situations. The key to the dislike and fear with which some people must have regarded him while living lies probably in just this appreciation. It is vain to assert that humor is necessarily kindly, or the adjectives "grim" and "savage" would not so often be tacked to it. Nobody could have hoped that friendship would blind Sainte-Beuve to an absurdity: on the other hand, even his enemies might count on his recognition if they had said a good thing, and his not spoiling it in the repetition, as too many friends do. This produced an impartiality in his verdicts which is the moral essence of criticism, but perhaps the most trying quality to the subject of it: he says himself that he had irritated and envenomed more people by his praise than by his blame. He had not a high opinion of human nature, which is curiously illustrated by his female portraits: when there has been only a doubt of a woman's virtue, he never gives her the benefit of the doubt; when there has not been even the suspicion of a slip, he presumes that she kept her secrets better than most people do. He was sensitive to the accusation of cynicism, and resented extremely an article in L'Union of June, 1855, in which he was set down as having not only a skeptical mind, but a skeptical heart; which was no doubt very nearly true. Yet he was on his guard against his natural cynicism in his literary judgments at least, as one need but glance over them to see. In the Cahiers he cites an expression of his fair friend Madame d'Arbonville: "How many good things there are besides the things which we like! We ought to make room within ourselves for a certain opposite;" and he adds that this should be the motto of a liberal and intelligent critic. These convictions helped to make his criticism as admirable, as invaluable, as it is; but the sharpness from which his literary work is free makes his private observations on men and things more entertaining. There are few people so well-natured as not to enjoy the peculiar pungency which gives many of the passages in the two volumes before us their relish: now and then it is as if we had got hold of the cruets which were to season a whole article. There is a batch of anecdotes about Lamartine, whose conspicuous gifts and position put his puerile vanity in relief; and that vanity Sainte-Beuve never spared. Lamartine set the fashion of his own idolatry by constituting himself the high priest; adulation was not enough—he demanded adoration; and he received it. He had a habit of contemplating himself from an objective but highly-idealizing point of view, best expressed by saying that he had a hero-worship for himself: his memoirs and other autobiographical writings are full of it, and in his intercourse it perpetually overflowed. "That is the brow they have tried to bend to the dust!" he exclaimed, standing before his own likeness in Ary Scheffer's studio. Lord Houghton, among his many good stories, had one of spending an evening at Lamartine's in Paris with a circle of celebrities. Alfred de Vigny, who had been out of town, presented himself. "Welcome back!" said Lamartine magnificently. "You come from the provinces: do they admire us down there?"—"They adore you," replied De Vigny with a bow. The conversation was a prolonged paean to the host, with choral strophe and antistrophe. One of the party began to rehearse the aspects in which Lamartine was the greatest man in France—"As a poet, as an orator, as an historian, as a statesman;" and as he paused, "And as a soldier," added Lamartine with a sublime gesture, "if ever France shall need him." This may have been the country neighbor who, we learn from Sainte-Beuve, pronounced Lamartine to be Fénelon without his didacticism, Rousseau without his sophistry, Mirabeau without his incendiary notions. Still, there were asides in the dialogue. One evening, the week before the overthrow of the provisional government of which Lamartine was president, he had a crowded reception, and, notwithstanding the failure and imminent downfall of his administration, he was radiant with satisfaction. "What can M. de Lamartine have to be so pleased about?" said one of his friends to another. "He is pleased with himself," was the reply.—"One of those speeches," observes Sainte-Beuve, "which only friends find to make." But Lamartine was by no means solitary in this infatuation. Sainte-Beuve remarks that "Nothing is so common in our days: some think themselves God, some the Son of God, some archangels. Pierre Leroux thinks himself the first, De Vigny the last: Lamartine is a good prince—he is satisfied to be a seraph."
These books give us daily glimpses of Paris thirty years ago, of that incessant mental movement, inquiry, desire for novelty and vivacity of transient interest which dazzle the brain as the scintillation of the sun upon the unstable waves does the eye. In all great cities, quite as much as in villages, there is a topic which for the moment occupies everybody, and which cannot be escaped, whether you enter a drawing-room, pick up a newspaper or rush into the street: the chief difference is, that in the great cities it changes oftener—"every fortnight here," says Sainte-Beuve of Paris. The history of many a nine days' wonder may be gathered from the Chroniques: we can mark the first effect of occurrences startling at the time, some of which are now wholly forgotten, while others have become historical; we witness the appearance of new divinities who have since found their pedestals, niches or obscure corners. Among these was Ponsard, chiefly known in this country, to those who remember Mademoiselle Rachel's brief, gleaming transit, as the author of Horace et Lydie, a light, bright, graceful piece based upon Horace's "Donec gratus eram tibi."
M. Ponsard, who was from the south of France, arrived in Paris in 1843 with a tragedy called Lucrèce, which had been in his pocket for three years. It was read first at the house of the actor Bocage before a party of artists, actors and men of letters such as Paris alone can bring together. The littérateurs gave their opinion with caution and an oracular ambiguity which did not commit them too much: Gautier, on being asked how he liked it, replied, "It did not put me to sleep;" but the sculptor Préault, not having a literary reputation at stake, declared that if there were a "Roman prize" for tragedy (as there is for music and the fine arts, entitling the fortunate competitor to four years' travel and study in classic lands at the expense of the government) the author would set out on the morrow for the Eternal City. The play was read again a week or two afterward in the drawing-room of the Comtesse d'Agoult, the beautiful, gifted, reckless friend of Lizst's youth, and mother of the wife of Von Bulow and Wagner. The success was complete. Sainte-Beuve was again present; and Lamartine was among the audience full of admiration: the poor young poet could not nerve himself to come. The play was read by Bocage, who took the principal part, that of Brutus, when it was brought out at the Odéon. The chaste Lucretia was played by Madame Dorval, whose strength lay in parts of a different kind, and who announced her new character to a friend with the comment, "I only play women of virtue now-a-days." Reports of the new tragedy, which had been heard only in secret session, soon got about Paris, and excited intense curiosity and impatience; one of the daily papers published a scene from Lucrèce; the sale was immense; everybody praised it to the skies, even members of the Academy. The next day the hoax came out: a clever but third-rate writer, M. Méry, had made April fools of the wits of Paris. The piece itself was soon performed, and made what is called in this country an immense sensation: the theatre, long out of favor, was crowded every night; the papers were full of it every morning; it was the topic about which everybody talked. Authors who had lately written less popular plays were somewhat envious and spiteful; Victor Hugo pronounced Lucrèce to be Livy versified; Dumas repeated (or invented) the speech of an enthusiastic notary, who exclaimed, "What a piece! Not one of my clerks could have written it." Madame de Girardin had just brought out her tragedy of Judith at the Théâtre Français, with the powerful support of Rachel in the principal character: the drama, when read by Rachel and Madame de Girardin (whose beauty, wit and social position gave her during her whole life a fictitious rank in a certain set, of which none were better aware than the members of it) in Madame Récamier's drawing-room, had produced a better effect than it did upon the stage, where it was considered a respectable failure. Madame de Girardin could not control or conceal her chagrin, and meeting M. Ponsard one evening at the Duchesse de Grammont's, declined to have him presented to her. He took his honors so quietly—so tamely in the opinion of some people—that Madame Dorval exhorted him: "Wake up! wake up! you look like a hen that has hatched an eagle's egg." Since the Augustan age of French literature, since Corneille and Racine, a really fine tragedy on a classic subject had been unknown, and the romantic reaction was then at its height. The moral view of Lucrèce was a new and important element of success. "The religious feeling of the Roman matron, the inviolability of the domestic hearth, are these not new? do not they count for much?" observed the virtuous philosopher Ballanche, the devoted, unselfish friend of Madame Récamier. Sainte-Beuve was greatly impressed by the nobility of the characters and treatment, and after pointing out its beauties and shortcomings, set the seal to his encomium by affirming that the secret of the power of Lucrèce was that it had soul.