To the same period—perhaps to the same spirit of investigation and experiment—belongs the single prose work of fancy which has proceeded from his pen. It is a species of romance, bearing the title of Volupté, and designed to exhibit the struggle between the senses and the soul, or, more strictly speaking, the effect upon the intellectual nature of an early captivity to the pleasures of sense. The hero, Amaury, after a youth of indulgence, finds himself in the prime of his manhood, with his powers of perception and of thought vigorous and matured, but incapable of acting, of willing, or of loving. He inspires love, but cannot return it; he feels, he admires, but he shrinks from any step demanding resolution or self-devotion. Hence, instead of conferring happiness, he makes victims,—victims not of an active, but of a merely passive and negative egotism. A conjunction of circumstances brings him to a sudden and vivid realization of his condition and its results. Instead of escaping by suicide, as might be expected,—and as would probably have been the case if Werther had not forestalled him,—he breaks loose from his thraldom by a supreme effort, and finds in the faith and sacrifices of a religious life the means of restoration and of permanent freedom. He enters a seminary, is ordained priest, and performs the funeral rites of the woman whose affection for him had been the most ardent and exalted, and whom his purified heart could have best repaid.
In form, the work is an autobiography. The thoughts with which it teems are delicate and subtile; the style, somewhat labored and over-refined, is in contrast with that of the Poésies, while it betrays the same struggle for a greater amplitude and independence. In point of art the book appears to us a failure. The theme is not objectionable in itself. It is similar to that of many works which have sprung from certain phases of individual experience. But if such experience is to be idealized, its origin should disappear. Shakespeare may have undergone all the conflicts of doubt and irresolution represented in "Hamlet"; but in reading "Hamlet" we think, not of Shakespeare's conflicts, but of our own. Volupté is too palpably a confession. The story is not a creation; it has been simply evolved by that process of thought which transports a particular idiosyncrasy into conditions and circumstances where it becomes a kind of destiny and a subject of speculation. Reality is wanting, for the very reason that the Imagination, after being called into play, has proved too feeble for her office. Herein Amaury differs widely from René. Apart from the difference of power, Chateaubriand had poured out his entire self; he had transcended the limits of his actual life, but never those of his mental experience. M. Sainte-Beuve had felt only a part of what he sought to depict; the rest he had conjectured or borrowed. The pages which describe the hero's impressions and emotions in consecrating himself to the service of the Church were written by Lacordaire. They are a faithful transcript from nature, but from a nature not at all resembling that to which they have been applied. The circumstances under which the book was composed will exhibit the difference. The author was then intimate with Lamennais, whose eloquent voice, soon afterwards to be raised in support of the opposite cause, was proclaiming the sternest doctrines of a renovated Catholicism. A spell which acted so widely and so marvellously could not be altogether unfelt by a mind whose peculiar property it was to yield itself to every influence in order to extort its secret and comprehend its power. Beyond this point the magic failed. "In all my transitions,"—thus he has written of himself,—"I have never alienated my judgment and my will; I have never pledged my belief. But I had a power of comprehending persons and things which gave rise to the strongest hopes on the part of those who wished to convert me and who thought me entirely their own." Thus Lamartine, in a rapturous strain, had congratulated himself on having been the instrument of saving his friend from the abysm of unbelief. When Lamennais was forming the group of disciples who retired with him to La Chesnaye, M. Sainte-Beuve was invited to join them. While declining the proposal, he imagined the position in which he might have been led to embrace it, and—wrote Volupté.
The revolution of 1830, with the events that led to it, marks a turning-point in literary as well as in political history. The public mind was in a state of ebullition very unlike that of an ordinary political contest, in which one party pulls while the other applies the drag, one seeks to maintain, the other to destroy. All parties were pulling in different directions; all sought to destroy, in order to reconstruct; principles, except with the extremists, were simply expedients, adopted to-day, abandoned on the morrow. Nor is this to be explained, as English writers generally explain it, by the mere volatility of the French temperament. In England, an established basis of political power is slowly but constantly expanding; privilege crumbles and wears away under the gradual action of democracy; concession on the one side, moderation on the other, are perfectly feasible, and obviate the necessity for sudden ruptures and violent transitions. But in France the question created by past convulsions, and left unsolved by recent experiments, was this: What is the basis of power? Privilege had been so shorn that those who desired to make that the foundation were necessarily not conservatives, but reactionists. On the other hand, if popular power were to be accepted in its widest sense, then a thousand questions, a thousand differences of opinion in regard to the mode, the form, the application, would naturally spring up. Besides, would it not be safer, wiser, to modify ideas by experience, to look abroad for patterns, to seek for an equilibrium, a juste milieu? Thus there was a diversity of systems, but all contemplative of change. No one was in favor of standing still, for there was nothing to stand upon. In a word, the agitation was not so much one of measures, of principles, or of prejudices, as of ideas.
Now in an agitation of this kind, literary men—that is to say, the men whose business is to think—are likely to be active, and in France, at least, are apt to become prominent and influential. But they, of all men, by the very fact that they think, are least under the control of party affinities and fixed doctrines, the most liable to be swayed by discussion and reflection. Hence the spectacle, so frequent at that time and since, of men distinguished in the world of letters passing from the ranks of the legitimists into those of the republicans, from the advocacy of papal supremacy in temporal affairs to that of popular supremacy in religious affairs, from the defence of a landed aristocracy to the demand for a community of property; and afterwards, in many instances, returning with the backward current, abjuring freedom and embracing imperialism.
In the case of M. Sainte-Beuve the changes were neither so abrupt nor so complete as in that of many others. But his course was still more meandering, skirting the bases of opposite systems, abiding with none. Never a blind adherent or a vehement opponent, he glided almost imperceptibly from camp to camp. He consorted, as we have seen, with legitimists and neo-Catholics, and allowed himself to be reckoned as one of them. Through the columns of the Globe, which had now become the organ of the Saint-Simonians, he invited the Romanticists to "step forth from the circle of pure art, and diffuse the doctrines of a progressive humanity." On the advent of Louis Philippe, he was inclined to accept the constitutional régime as the triumph of good sense, as affording a practical solution and a promise of stability. But he appears soon to have lost his faith in a government too narrow in policy, too timid in action, too vulgar in aspect, to satisfy a cultivated Parisian taste.
A similar flexibility will be noticed in his literary judgments. Shall we then pronounce him a very chameleon in politics and in art? Shall we say, with the critic already quoted, M. de Pontmartin, that his mental hues have been simply reflections, effaced as rapidly as they were made? On the contrary, we believe that he, of all men, has retained the various impressions he has once received. Unlike so many others, who, in changing their views, have contradicted all their former utterances, disowned their former selves, undergone a sort of bisection into two irreconcilable halves, M. Sainte-Beuve has linked one opinion with another, modified each by its opposite, and thus preserved his continuity and cohesion. "Everything has two names," to use his own expression, and he has never been content with knowing only one of them. Guided by a sympathetic intelligence, adopting, not symbols, but ideas, he has, by force of penetration and comprehension, extracted the essence of each doctrine in turn. His changes therefore indicate, not superficiality, but depth. He is no more chargeable with volatility than society itself. Like it he is a seeker, listening to every proposition, accepting what is vital, rejecting what is merely formal. There is not one of the systems which have been presented, however contrasted they may appear, but has left its impress upon society,—not one but has left its impress on the mind and opinions of M. Sainte-Beuve.
In one particular—the most essential, in reality, of all—his constancy has been remarkable. He has remained true to his vocation. At the moment when his literary brethren, availing themselves of the opening we have noticed, were rushing into public life,—scholars and professors becoming ambassadors and ministers of state, poets and novelists mounting the tribune and the hustings, historians descending into the arena of political journalism,—M. Sainte-Beuve settled himself more firmly in the chair of criticism, concentrating his powers on the specialty to which they were so peculiarly adapted. His opportunities for doing this more effectively were themselves among the results of the events already mentioned. A greater freedom and activity of discussion demanded new and ampler organs. Cliques had been broken up; co-workers, brought together by sympathy, separated by the clash of opinions and ambitions, had dispersed; both in literature and in politics a wider, more inquisitive, more sympathetic public was to be addressed. Already in 1829, Véron, one of those shrewd and speculative—we hardly know whether to call them men of business or adventurers, who foresee such occasions, had set up the Revue de Paris, on a more extended plan than that of any previous French journal of the kind. The opening article of the first number was from the pen of M. Sainte-Beuve. But this undertaking was subsequently merged in that of the Revue des Deux Mondes, which, after one or two abortive beginnings, was fairly started in January, 1831, and soon assumed the position it has ever since retained, at the head of the publications of its class. It enlisted among its contributors nearly all the leading writers of the day, none of whom was so regular and permanent, none of whom did so much to build up its reputation and confer upon it the stamp of authority, as M. Sainte-Beuve. His connection with it extended over seventeen years, the period between the last two revolutions. His papers seem to have averaged five or six a year. They form, with those which had been previously inserted in the Revue de Paris, a series of Portraits, now embraced in seven volumes, and divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into Portraits littéraires, Portraits contemporains, and Portraits de Femmes. The names included, which with few exceptions are those of French writers, belong to different epochs, different schools, and different departments of literature. Many are famous; some are obscure; not a few, which had before been overlooked or overshadowed, owe the recognition they have since received to their admission into a gallery where the places have been assigned and the lights distributed by no partial or incompetent umpire.
In the case of any kind of literature, but especially in that of criticism, it is interesting to have an author's own ideas of his office and art. The motto of the Edinburgh Review—"Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur"—was a very good indication of the spirit of its founders, whose legal habits and aspirations naturally suggested the spectacle of a court, in which the critic as judge was to sit upon the bench, and the author as prisoner was to stand at the bar. Had Jeffries, instead of Jeffrey, presided over the assizes, they could not have been gayer or bloodier. It is interesting to remember that among the criminals sentenced without reprieve were the greatest poet and the most original thinker of the time. A journal which has earned something of the prestige that attached to the youthful Edinburgh takes a not very different view of its own functions. "An author may wince under criticism," say the writers of the Saturday Review; "but is the master to leave off flogging because the pupil roars?" Here, too, the notion of the relative position of author and critic is perfectly natural. Young gentlemen, with a lively recollection of their own construings and birchings, are only too happy in the opportunity of sitting with bent brows and uplifted rod, watching for a false quantity or similar peccadillo, which may justify a withering rebuke or a vigorous flagellation. If we add, that these writers exhibit that accuracy of statement which usually accompanies the assumption of infallibility, and that their English is of that prim and painful kind, common to pedagogues, which betrays a constant fear of being caught tripping while engaged in correcting others, the comparison—to cite once more M. de Pontmartin—"will appear only the more exact." We forbear to descend to a far lower class, judges who know nothing of law, masters who have never been scholars, truly "incomplete artists" who cannot "forget or bury" their own extremely "circumscribed talent," but who are perfectly willing to bury, and would fain induce the world to forget, that of every suspected rival.
Had M. Sainte-Beuve entered upon his task with similar conceptions and associations, his early anatomical studies would perhaps have suggested the patient under the scalpel as an appropriate device. But we are in danger of dishonoring him by the mere supposition. Scattered through his works—beginning with the earliest and coming down to the latest—we find such sentences as the following: "The critical spirit is in its nature facile, insinuating, mobile, and comprehensive; it is a great and limpid river, which winds and spreads itself around the productions and the monuments of genius." "The best and surest way to penetrate and to judge any writer, any man, is to listen to him,—to listen long and intently: do not press him; let him move and display himself with freedom, and of himself he will tell you all about himself; he will imprint himself upon your mind. Be assured that in the long run no man, no writer, above all no poet, will preserve his secret." "It is by virtue of an exquisite analogy that the word 'taste' has prevailed over the word 'judgment.' Judgment! I know minds which possess it in a high degree, but which are yet wanting in taste; for taste expresses what is finest and most instinctive in an organ which is at once the most delicate and the most complex." "To know how to read a book, judging it as we go along, but never ceasing to taste it,—in this consists almost the whole art of criticism." "What Bacon says as to the proper mode of educing the natural meaning from Scripture may be applied to ancient writings of all kinds, or even to the most modern. The best and sweetest criticism is that which exudes from a good book, not pressed as in a wine-press, but squeezed gently in a free reading. I love that criticism should be an emanation from the book." "Whenever I speak of a writer, I prefer to exhibit him in the brightest and happiest hour of his talent, to place him, if possible, directly under the rays." "The greatest triumph of criticism is when it recognizes the arrival of a power, the advent of a genius." "I cannot admit that the best mode of correcting a talent which is in process of development is to begin by throwing an inkstand at its head." "I am almost frightened at seeing to what an extent literary criticism becomes difficult, when it refrains from arrogance and from insult, claiming for itself both an honest freedom of judgment and the right to participate largely in the bestowment of deserved praise, as well as to maintain a certain cordiality even in its reservations." "If Diderot was as far as possible from being a dramatic poet, if he was destitute of that supreme creative power which involves the transformation of an author's own personality, he possessed, on the other hand, in the highest degree, that faculty of demi-metamorphosis which is the exercise and the triumph of criticism, and which consists in putting one's self in the the place of the author, occupying the point of view to the subject under examination, and reading every writing in the spirit by which it was dictated."
Let us admit that these are not so much absolute principles of criticism as the features which characterize that of the writer himself and the method which he has almost involuntarily pursued. Let us admit this, and in doing so we concede to him all the qualities that are rarest and most desirable in his art,—impartiality, sincerity, disinterestedness; freedom from theory, from passion, and from prejudice; insight, comprehension, sensitiveness to every trait and every kind of beauty and of power; a patient ardor and pure delight in acquisition, and a generous desire, in the interest of literature itself, to communicate the results and inspire similar feelings. Without denying that all good criticism will partake more or less largely of these qualities, or that some of them have been more abundantly possessed, more profoundly applied, by others, we believe that it would be difficult to cite an instance in which they have been so entirely combined or so continuously exercised. M. Sainte-Beuve is pre-eminently an artist in criticism. He has exhibited that self-absorption which it is easy to imagine, easy to find examples of, in poetry, in painting, and in music, but which in criticism had hitherto been hardly conceivable. "There is in him," wrote Gustave Planche in 1834,—and the force of the eulogy is in no degree impaired by subsequent censures from the same quarter,—"a happy mingling of enthusiasm and curiosity, renewed in proportion as they are appeased, and enrolled in the service of all nascent or unrecognized abilities.... He speaks the truth for the sole pleasure of speaking it, and asks no gratitude either from the disciples whom he initiates or from the new deities whom he exalts.... Whenever he finds a poet not sufficiently listened to, he aims to enlarge the audience, erects a stage on which to place him, and arranges everything for enabling him to produce the fullest effect.... Before him French criticism, when it was not either acrimonious or simply learned, consisted in a mere commonplace repetition of precepts and formulas of which the sense had been lost. His perpetual mobility is but a constant good faith; he believes in the most opposite schools, because believing is with him only a mode of comprehending."