French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

But at this point, as at all points, the complaisance of Sainte-Beuve’s writing is a manner with him, rather than a spirit. It does not penetrate deeply. He loves his “insinuations.” That is his own word. He is willing to write a whole essay in criticism for the sake of the “insinuations” which his deceitful blandness will sheathe. Or, rather, he would sooner give up the whole essay than forego a phrase, or perhaps a single word, containing his insinuation. It was partly his critical conscience, no doubt, instinctively nice about shades of opinion and of expression; but then a something very like malice was mingled with his critical conscience. With all that must be conceded to the value of Sainte-Beuve’s critical work, readers are conscious, in concluding the perusal of almost any one of his essays, that the result to them is a sapor remaining on their literary palate, rather than substance of nutriment entered into their mental digestion. Their food has been refined into a flavor.

For our illustration of Sainte-Beuve, we go to a paper of his on Bossuet. But we need to prepare our readers. Sainte-Beuve is a writer for the few, instead of for the many. To profit from him requires some effort of attention. One must study a little, as well as simply read. Sainte-Beuve does not deal in heavy strokes. His lines are most of them fine, many of them hair-lines vanishing almost into invisibility. He escapes you like Proteus. Very different is he, by this elusive quality of his, from his countryman, M. Taine, whose bold crayon sketches are at once appreciable to all.

In the choice indicated of specimen, we draw from a series of short criticisms which the author called Causeries du Lundi; “Monday-Chats,” Mr. William Matthews, who has a volume of select translations from them, not unhappily renders the title. These were originally published as Monday articles in the columns of two Paris journals, the Constitutionel and the Moniteur. Mr. Matthews’s volume is introduced by a most readable biographical sketch and literary appreciation of Sainte-Beuve himself from the pen of the translator. M. Sainte-Beuve, we ought to say, in addition to his very considerable body of criticism, ranging, as we have intimated, over a wide field of literature, wrote an extended historical monograph on Port Royal, which is constantly referred to by writers as an authority on its subject.

The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding traits:

The simple idea of order, of authority, of unity, of the continual government of Providence, Bossuet, among the moderns, has grasped more completely than any other man, and he applies it on all occasions without effort, and, as it were, by an irrefutable deduction. Bossuet is the Hebrew genius, expanded, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the gains of the human intelligence, but acknowledging something of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely at the point where its light ceases. In mien and in tone he resembles a Moses; there are mingled in his speech traits characteristic of the Prophet-King, touches of a pathos ardent and sublime; there sounds the voice eloquent by eminence, the simplest, the strongest, the most abrupt, the most familiar, the most suddenly outbursting in thunder. Even where he holds his course unbending, in an imperious flood, he bears along with him treasures of eternal human morality. And it is by all these qualities that he is for us a unique man, and that, whatever may be the employment he makes of his speech, he remains the model of eloquence the most exalted, and of language the most beautiful.

Sainte-Beuve is so much a critic that he cannot help criticising by the way, or even sometimes perhaps a little out of the way. But it will be quite to our purpose if we admit here what Sainte-Beuve incidentally says of Lamartine:

[Bossuet] was early distinguished for surprising gifts of memory and of understanding. He knew Virgil by heart, as, a little later, he knew Homer. “Less easy to understand is it,” says M. de Lamartine, “how he was infatuated all his life with the Latin poet, Horace, spirit exquisite, but the reverse of spontaneous and natural, who strings his lyre with only the softest fibers of the heart; a careless voluptuary,” etc. M. de Lamartine, who has so well discerned the great features of the eloquence and of the talent of Bossuet, has studied a little too lightly his life, and he has here proposed to himself a difficulty which does not exist; there is nowhere mention made in fact of that inexplicable predilection of Bossuet for Horace, the least divine of all the poets. M. de Lamartine must have inadvertently read “Horace” instead of “Homer.” ... It was Fénelon (and not Bossuet) who read and relished Horace more than any other poet, who knew him by heart.... The great pagan preference of Bossuet (if one may use such an expression) was quite naturally for Homer; after him for Virgil; Horace, in his judgment and in his liking, came far behind them. But the book by eminence which gave early direction to the genius and to the entire career of Bossuet, and which dominated all within him, was the Bible; it is said that the first time he read it he was illuminated and transported by it. He had found in it the source whence his own genius was destined to flow, like one of the four great rivers in Genesis.

Sainte-Beuve speaks of the relation of the Hotel de Rambouillet to the future great man:

The young Bossuet was conducted thither one evening to preach there an improvised sermon. In lending himself to these singular exercises and to these tournaments where his person and his gifts were challenged, treated as an intellectual virtuoso in the salons of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and the Hôtel de Nevers, it does not appear that Bossuet was in consequence subjected to the slightest charge of vanity, and there is no example of a precocious genius so praised, caressed by the world, and remaining so perfectly exempt from all self-love and from all coquetry.