Chapter 10
The military glory wherewith Napoleon fed and flattered the French nation for fifteen years, and the astonishing intellectual and animal vigor of the conqueror's mind, dazzle even M. Sainte-Beuve, so that he does not perceive the gaping chasms in Napoleon's moral nature, and the consequent one-sidedness of his intellectual action, nor the unmanning effects of his despotism. The words used to describe the moral side of the Imperial career are as insufficient as would be the strokes of a gray crayon to depict a conflagration or a sunset. In the paper from which has already been quoted he speaks of the "rare good sense" of Napoleon, of "his instinct of justice." But was it not a compact array of the selfish impulses against a weak instinct of justice, backed by a Titan's will, wielding a mighty intellect, that enabled Napoleon to be the disloyal usurper, then the hardened despot and the merciless devastator? Again, can it be said of Napoleon that he possessed good sense in a rare degree? Good sense is an instinctive insight into all the bearings of act or thought, an intuitive discernment of the relations and consequences of conduct or purpose, a soundness of judgment, resulting from the soundness of, and equilibrium among, the upper powers of reason and sensibility. The moral side is at least the half of it: Napoleon's moral endowment was but fractional. Good sense, it may be added, lies solidly at the basis of all good work, except such as is purely professional or technical, or in its action one-sided; and even in such its presence must be felt. In whatever reaches general human interests, whether as practical act or imaginative creation, good sense must be, for their prosperity, a primary ingredient. "The Tempest" and "Don Quixote" shoot up into shining, imperishable beauty because their roots draw their first nourishment from this hearty, inexhaustible substratum. And let us say, that in M. Sainte-Beuve himself good sense is the foundation of his eminent critical ability. He has been led, we conceive, to attribute more of it to Napoleon than is his due by the blinding splendor of Napoleon's military genius, through which, with such swiftness and cumulative effect, he adapted means to ends on the purely material plane.
When Murray applied to Lord Byron to write a book about the life and manners of the upper class in Italy, Byron declined the proposal from personal regards, and then added, that were he to write such a book it would be misjudged in England; for, said he, "their moral is not your moral." Such international misinterpretations and exaggerations are instinctive and involuntary. A nation from its being a nation, has a certain one-sidedness. To the Italian (even to one who carries a stiletto) the English practice of boxing is a sheer brutality; while to an Englishman (himself perhaps not a Joseph) the _cavaliere servente_ is looked upon with reprobation tempered by scorn. To this misjudgment from the foreign side and over-estimation on the domestic, books, too, are liable; but to books as being more abstract than usages, more ideal than manners, an absolute moral standard can with less difficulty be applied. Applying it to Gil Blas, is not M. Sainte-Beuve subject to arraignment when he speaks of this and the other writings of Le Sage as being "the mirror of the world?" Moliere, too, is a satirist, and from his breadth a great one; and surely the world he holds a mirror before is a much purer world than that of Le Sage; and what of the Shakespearean world? The world of Le Sage is a nether world. "Of Gil Blas it has been well said that the book is moral like experience." The experience one may get in brothels and "hells," in consorting with pimps and knaves, has in it lessons of virtue and morality,--for those who can extract them; but even for these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the experience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment of Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to have been written in a _cafe_, by a player of dominoes, on coming out of the comic theatre."
Without being over-diffident, we may feel our footing not perfectly secure on French ground when we differ from a Frenchman; we are therefore not sorry to catch M. Sainte-Beuve tripping on English ground. In a review of the translation of the celebrated Letters of Lord Chesterfield--whom he calls the La Rochefoucauld of England--he refers to, and in part quotes, the passages in which Chesterfield gives his son advice as to his _liaisons_; and he adds: "All Chesterfield's morality, on this head, is resumed in a line of Voltaire,--
"Il n'est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie."
It is these passages that make the grave Dr. Johnson blush: we only smile at them." For ourselves, we blush with Johnson, not that the man of the world should give to his youthful son, living at a corrupt Continental court, counsel as to relations which were regarded as inevitable in such a circle; but that the heart of the father should not have poured (were it but parenthetically) through the pen of the worldling some single sentence like this: "Writing to you, my son, as an experienced man of the world to one inexperienced, I recommend the good taste in such matters and the delicacy which become a gentleman; but to his dear boy, your father says, avoid, if possible, such _liaisons_; preserve your purity; nothing will give you such a return throughout the whole of the future." But, a single sentence like this would _vitiate_ the entire Chesterfieldian correspondence.
How fully and warmly M. Sainte-Beuve prizes moral worth may be learnt from many passages. Not the least animated and cordial of his papers is one on the Abbe Gerbet, in the sixth volume, a paper which shows, as Gustave Planche said of him, that "he studies with his heart, as women do;" and one in the second volume on Malesherbes, whom he describes as being "separated, on the moral side, from the Mirabeaus and the Condorcets not by a shade, but by an abyss," and whom he sums up as "great magistrate, minister too sensitive and too easily discouraged, heroic advocate, and sublime victim." Of this noble, deeply dutiful, self-sacrificing Frenchman, this exemplar of moral greatness, Lord Lansdowne wrote many years before the French Revolution: "I have seen for the first time in my life what I did not believe could exist, that is, a man _who is exempt from fear and from hope_, and who nevertheless is full of life and warmth. Nothing can disturb his peace; nothing is necessary to him, and he takes a lively interest in all that is good."
In a paper on a volume of miscellaneous prose essays by M. Laprade, M. Sainte-Beuve has this sentence: "What strikes me above all and everywhere is, that the author, whether he reasons or whether he addresses himself to literary history, only understands his own mode of being and his own individuality. Hereby he reveals to us that he is not a critic." The first paragraph of a keen critique on M. de Pontmartin ends thus: "To say of even those writers who are opposed to us nothing which their judicious friends do not already think and are obliged to admit, this is my highest ambition." Discussing the proper method of dealing with the past, he writes: "For myself I respect tradition and I like novelty: I am never happier than when I can succeed in reconciling them together." Of Hoffman he says, in a paper on literary criticism: "He has many of the qualities of a true critic, conscientiousness, independence, ideas, an opinion of his own." These sentences, with others of like import, are keys to the character of the volumes from which they are taken. The office of the critic M. Sainte-Beuve administers, not for temporary or personal ends, but with a disinterested sense of its elevation and its responsibilities. Through healthy sympathies and knowledge ample and ripe, through firm sense with artistic flexibility, through largeness of view and subtlety of insight, he enters upon it more than ordinarily empowered for its due discharge. He is at once what the French call _fin_ and what the English call "sound." In literary work, in biographical work, in work aesthetical and critical, he delights, and he has a wide capacity of appropriation. The spirit of a book, a man, an age, he seizes quickly. With a nice perception of shades he catches the individual color of a mind or a production; and by the same faculty he grasps the determining principles in a character. Delicately, strongly, variously endowed, there is a steady equilibrium among his fine powers. Considering the bulk and vast variety and general excellence of his critical work, is it too much to say of him, that he is not only, as he has been called, the foremost of living critics, but that he deserves to hold the first place among all critics? No other has done so much so well. Goethe and Coleridge are something more; they are critics incidentally; but M. Sainte-Beuve, with poetical and philosophical qualities that lift him to a high vantage-ground, has made criticism his life-work, and through conscientious and symmetrical use of these qualities has done his work well. Besides much else in his many and many-sided volumes, there is to be read in them a full, spirited history of French literature.
Our attempt to make M. Sainte-Beuve better known on this side the Atlantic we cannot more fitly conclude than with a sketch of him--a literary sketch--by himself. This we find in the fifth volume of the "Nouveaux Lundis," in a paper on Moliere, published in July, 1863. A man who, in the autumnal ripeness of his powers, thus frankly tells us his likes and dislikes, tells us what he is. While by reflected action the passage becomes a self-portraiture, it is a sample of finest criticism.
"To make Moliere loved by more people is in my judgment to do a public service.
"Indeed, to love Moliere--I mean to love him sincerely and with all one's heart--it is, do you know? to have within one's self a guarantee against many defects, much wrong-headedness. It is, in the first place, to dislike what is incompatible with Moliere, all that was counter to him in his day, and that would have been insupportable to him in ours.
"To love Moliere is to be forever cured--do not say of base and infamous hypocrisy, but of fanaticism, of intolerance, and of that kind of hardness which makes one anathematize and curse; it is to carry a corrective to admiration even of Bossuet, and for all who, after his example, exult, were it only in words, over their enemy dead or dying; who usurp I know not what holy speech, and involuntarily believe themselves to be, with the thunderbolt in their hand, in the region and place of the Most High. Men eloquent and sublime, you are far too much so for me!
"To love Moliere, is to be sheltered against, and a thousand leagues away from, that other fanaticism, the political, which is cold, dry, cruel, which never laughs, which smells of the sectary, which, under pretext of Puritanism, finds means to mix and knead all that is bitter, and to combine in one sour doctrine the hates, the spites, and the Jacobinism of all times. It is to be not less removed, on the other hand, from those tame, dull souls who, in the very presence of evil, cannot be roused to either indignation or hatred.
"To love Moliere, is to be secured against giving in to that pious and boundless admiration for a humanity which worships itself, and which forgets of what stuff it is made, and that, do what it will, it is always poor human nature. It is, not to despise it too much, however, this common humanity, at which one laughs, of which one is, and into which we throw ourselves through a healthful hilarity whenever we are with Moliere.
"To love and cherish Moliere, is to detest all mannerism in language and expression; it is, not to take pleasure in, or to be arrested by, petty graces, elaborate subtlety, superfine finish, excessive refinement of any kind, a tricky or artificial style.
"To love Moliere, it is to be disposed to like neither false wit nor pedantic science; it is to know how to recognize at first sight our _Trissotins_[6] and our _Vadius_ even under their rejuvenated jaunty airs; it is, not to let one's self be captivated at present any more than formerly by the everlasting _Philaminte_, that affected pretender of all times, whose form only changes and whose plumage is incessantly renewed; it is, to like soundness and directness of mind in others as well as in ourselves. I only give the first movement and the pitch; on this key one may continue, with variations.
[6] Trissotin, Vadius, and Philaminte, are personages in Moliere's comedy of _Les Femmes Savantes_ (The Blue-Stockings).
"To love and openly to prefer Corneille, as certain minds do, is no doubt a fine thing, and, in one sense, a very legitimate thing; it is, to dwell in, and to mark one's rank in, the world of great souls: but is it not to run the risk of loving together with the grand and sublime, false glory a little, to go so far as not to detest inflation and magniloquence, an air of heroism on all occasions? He who passionately loves Corneille cannot be an enemy to a little boasting.
"On the other hand, to love and prefer Racine, ah! that is, no doubt, to love above all things, elegance, grace, what is natural and true (at least relatively), sensibility, touching and charming passion; but at the same time is it not also, to allow your taste and your mind to be too much taken with certain conventional and over-smooth beauties, a certain tameness and petted languidness, with certain excessive and exclusive refinements? In a word, to love Racine so much, it is to run the risk of having too much of what in France is called taste, and which brings so much distaste.
"To love Boileau--but no, one does not love Boileau, one esteems him, one respects him; we admire his uprightness, his understanding, at times his animation, and if we are tempted to love him, it is solely for that sovereign equity which made him do such unshaken justice to the great poets his contemporaries, and especially to him whom he proclaims the first of all, Moliere.
"To love La Fontaine, is almost the same thing as to love Moliere; it is, to love nature, the whole of nature, humanity ingenuously depicted, a representation of the grand comedy "of a hundred different acts," unrolling itself, cutting itself up before our eyes into a thousand little scenes with the graces and freedoms that are so becoming, with weaknesses also, and liberties which are never found in the simple, manly genius of the master of masters. But why separate them? La Fontaine and Moliere--we must not part them, we love them united."
* * * * *
The number of "Putnam's Magazine," containing this paper, was sent to M. Sainte-Beuve accompanied by a note. In due time I received an answer to the note, saying that the Magazine had not reached him. Hereupon I sent the article by itself. On receiving it he wrote the following acknowledgment.
In my note I referred to a rumor of his illness. His disease was, by _post-mortem_ examination, discovered to be as the newspapers had reported, the stone. But a consultation of physicians declared that it was what he states it to be in his letter. Had they not made so gross a mistake, his life might have been prolonged.
"PARIS, 6 _Decembre_, 1868, No. 11 Rue Mont Parnasse.
"CHER MONSIEUR:--
"Oh! Cette fois je recois bien decidement le tres aimable et si bien etudie portrait du _critique_. Comment exprimer comme je le sens ma gratitude pour tant de soin, d'attention penetrante, de desir d'etre agreable tout en restant juste? Il y avait certes moyen d'insister bien plus sur les variations, les disparates et les defaillances momentanees de la pensee et du jugement a travers cette suite de volumes. C'est toujours un sujet d'etonnement pour moi, et cette fois autant que jamais, de voir comment un lecteur ami et un juge de gout parvient a tirer une figure une et consistante de ce qui ne me parait a moi meme dans mon souvenir que le cours d'un long fleuve qui va s'epandant un pen au hazard des pentes et desertant continuellement ses rives. De tels portraits comme celui que vous voulez bien m'offrir me rendent un point d'appui et me feraient veritablement croire a moi-meme. Et quand je songe a l'immense quantite d'esprits auxquels vous me presentez sous un aspect si favorable et si magistral dans ce nouveau monde de tant de jeunesse et d'avenir, je me prends d'une sorte de fierte et de courageuse confiance comme en presence deja de la posterite.
"Le mal auquel vous voulez bien vous interesser est tout simplement une hypertrophie de la prostate. Les souffrances ne sont pas vives, mais l'incommodite est grande, ne pouvant supporter a aucun degre le mouvement de la voiture, ce qui restreint ma vie sociale a un bien court rayon.
"Veuillez agreeer, cher Monsieur, l'assurance de ma cordiale gratitude, et de mes sentiments les plus distingues.
SAINTE-BEUVE."
VI.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
A brain ever aglow with self-kindled fire--a cerebral battery bristling with magnetic life--such is Thomas Carlyle. Exceptional fervor of temperament, rare intellectual vivacity, manful earnestness--these are the primary qualifications of the man. He has an uncommon soul-power. Hence his attractiveness, hence his influence. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, throbs with his own being. Themselves all authors put, of course, more or less, into what they write: few, very few, can make their sentences quiver with themselves. This Mr. Carlyle does by the intenseness of a warm individuality, by the nimble vigor of his mental life, and, be it added, by the rapture of his spirituality. The self, in his case, is a large, deep self, and it sends an audible pulse through his pen into his page.
To all sane men is allotted a complete endowment of mental faculties, of capacities of intellect and feeling; the degree to which these are energized, are injected with nervous flame, makes the difference between a genius and a blockhead. There being high vital pressure at a full, rich, interior source, and thence, strong mental currents, through what channels the currents shall flow depends on individual aptitudes, these aptitudes shaping, in the one case, a Dante, in another, a Newton, in another, a Mirabeau. And Nature, with all her generosity, being jealous of her rights, allows no interchange of gifts. Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force of will and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven. In his dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than many other intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity and ambition have at times led him into paths where great deficiencies disclose themselves by the side of great superiorities. His mind is biographical, not historical; stronger in details than in generalization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, not constructive; literary, not philosophical. Mr. Carlyle is great at a picture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction. Wealth of thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire, irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem with passages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his "Cromwell" and his "Frederick." Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr. Carlyle, in writing their lives with duteous particularity, has embraced the full story of the epoch in which each was the leader. To him they are more than leaders. Herein he and Mr. Buckle stand at opposite poles; Mr. Buckle underrating the protagonists of history, them and their share of agency; Mr. Carlyle overrating them,--a prejudicial one-sidedness in both cases. Leader and led are the complements the one of the other.
History is a growth, and a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sow the seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and still more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient, calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful, nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. One healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking him to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntingly throw into the face of contemporaries an Abbot Sampson of the twelfth century as a model. A judicial expounder would not cite one single example as a characteristic of that age in contrast with this. A patient, impartial elucidator, would not deride "ballot-boxes, reform bills, winnowing machines:" he would make the best of these and other tools within reach; or, if his part be to write and not to act, would animate, not dishearten, those who are earnestly doing, and who, by boldly striking at abuses, by steadily striving for more justice, by aiming to lift up the down-trodden, prepare, through such means as are at hand, a better ground for the next generation. If to such workers, instead of God-speed, a writer of force and influence gives jeers and gibes, and ever-repeated shrieks about "semblance and quackery, and cant and speciosity, and dilettantism," and deems himself profound and original, as well as hopeful, when he exclaims: "Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of human worth and truth, we shall never by all the machinery in Birmingham discover the true and worthy:" in that case, does he not expose him to the taunt of being himself very like a mouthing quack, and his words, which should be cordial, brotherly, do they not partake of the hollow quality of what Mr. Carlyle holds in such abhorrence, namely, of cant? The sick lion crouches growling in his lair; he cannot eat, and he will not let others eat.
Many grateful and admiring readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with his ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven's name, what are all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,--worldly bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow sway-wielding dukes,--what are all these, and much else, but so many exemplications of might that is not right? When might shall cease to bully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia. Utopia may be at infinite distance, not attainable by finite men; but as surely as our hearts beat, we are gradually getting further from its opposite, the coarse rule of force and brutality, such rule as in the twelfth century was rife all around "Abbot Sampson."