Chapter 9
In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve--who had then, for more than thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the function of critic--describes what is a fundamental feature of his method in arriving at a judgment on books and authors. "Literature, literary production, is in my eyes not distinct, or at least not separable, from the rest of the man and his organization. I can enjoy a work, but it is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of the man himself; and I readily say, _as is the tree so is the fruit_. Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study." This, of course, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with the moderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know the man who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interior beginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best means is, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, his predecessors. "You are sure to recognize the superior man, in part at least, in his parents, especially in his mother, the most direct and certain of his parents; also in his sisters and his brothers, even in his children. In these one discovers important features which, from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminent individual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the _fond_, is found in others of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state."
Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic. Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part the cause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact in delineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence all living parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes is more captivating than his "Portraits de Femmes," a translation of which we are glad to see announced.
Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of the "Nouveaux Lundis," an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deep is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes the occasion to write a paper on "Les saints Evangiles," especially the Sermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beatitudes, he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world such accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar address to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anything like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we not a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectly heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before all coming generations?
"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or less instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly existed. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating, bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind such words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the Mount?"
Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity toward the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the other sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:--
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also....
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away....
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?...
"Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists, not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece any more than in Confucius. It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any more than in the modern Franklin. The principle of inspiration is different, if indeed it be not opposite: the paths may come together for a moment, but they cross one another. And it is this delicate ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source."
Of M. Sainte-Beuve's delight in what is the most excellent product of literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page. "Poetry," says he, "is the essence of things, and we should be careful not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods of color. The task of poetry is not to say everything, but to make us dream everything." And he cites a similar judgment of Fenelon: "The poet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch but what can be beautified." In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaks of the youthful poems of Milton: "'Il Penseroso' is the masterpiece of meditative and contemplative poetry; it is like a magnificent oratorio in which prayer ascends slowly toward the Eternal. I make no comparison; let us never take august names from their sphere. All that is beautiful in Milton stands by itself; one feels the tranquil habit of the upper regions, and continuity in power." In a paper on the letters of Ducis, he proves that he apprehends the proportions of Shakespeare. He asks: "Have we then got him at last? Is our stomach up to him? Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (_cette moelle de lion_)?" And again, in an article on the men of the eighteenth century, he writes: "One may be born a sailor, but there is nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a battle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that, and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare."
Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, how catholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takes pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency. Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Moliere, his words flame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust in his own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His native favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not overrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls "the Frenchman par excellence," and of whom he is proud as the literary sovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devoted to Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, he lauds this spiritually-minded thinker as one of the best of critics. And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: "Voltaire is sometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even are impudent.--There are defects difficult to perceive, that have not been classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them."
In a paper on Louise Labe, a poetess of the sixteenth century, he reproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and then adds: "These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that, at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry." No German or English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature, and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not an exaltation of French prose, it is a depression of French poetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of which possibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts to an acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are not capable of producing and embodying the highest poetry.
Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always mentions with deference. On Eckerman's "Conversations with Goethe" he has a series of three papers, wherein he deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honest pride Goethe's admiration of some of the chief French writers, and his acknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to the French translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the following note, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a high tribute to our distinguished countrywoman: "The English translation is by Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished so unhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes this translation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of the subject and for justness of appreciation it leaves our preface far behind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was a person of true merit and of great intellectual vigor." A sympathetic student of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him; and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature of Goethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that she would have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe "literature," had she lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friends had nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of this gifted, generous, noble-hearted woman.
One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a hand that can shake hard,--and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteen years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of "Causeries du Lundi," a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thus ever in the thick of the literary _melee_. Attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate; the aesthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences and friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris, if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray some of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the critical pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality is seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader will no doubt often perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. His perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious dead who are embalmed in their own excellence. Besides devoting many papers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates of literature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them,--a sign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness.
Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly taken by the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition of virtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes. In the general tone there is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness. Of the humane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take the following as one of many instances. In the correspondence of Lamennais there is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and his later sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thus feelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure: "Let us cast a look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, from youth to our latter years, there are none of these boundless distances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which, for being hidden, are none the less real and profound."
Writing weekly for the _feuilleton_ of a Paris daily journal, M. Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is always animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished, he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When the occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a principle or of a comprehensive thought. "Admiration is a much finer test of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than all the art of satire." By the side of this may be placed a sentence he cites from Grimm: "People who so easily admire bad things are not in a state to enjoy good." How true and cheering is this: "There is in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought with her finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up, smothers, or corrupts." Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says: "What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful." When, to give a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammatic point, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where to borrow just what is wanted. Speaking of embellished oratorical diction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that was discussed in his presence: "It is not enough to have fine sentences: you must have something to put into them." Commenting on the hyper-spirituality of M. Laprade, he says: "M. Laprade starts from the _absolute notion of being_. For him the following is the principle of Art,--'to manifest what we feel of the Absolute Being, of the Infinite, of God, to make him known and felt by other men, such in its generality is the end of Art.' Is this true, is it false? I know not: at this elevation one always gets into the clouds. Like the most of those who pride themselves on metaphysics, he contents himself with words (_il se paye de mots_)." Here is a grand thought, that flashes out of the upper air of poetry: "Humanity, that eternal child that has never done growing."
M. Sainte-Beuve's irony, keen and delicate, is a sprightly medium of truth: witness this passage on a new volume of M. Michelet: "Narrative, properly so called, which never was his forte, is almost entirely sacrificed. Seek here no historical highway, well laid, solid, and continuous; the method adopted is absolute points of view; you run with him on summits, peaks, on needles of granite, which he selects at his pleasure to gets views from. The reader leaps from steeple to steeple. M. Michelet seems to have proposed to himself an impossible wager, which, however, he has won,--to write history with a series of flashes." Could there be a more subtle, covert way of saying of a man that he is hardened by self-esteem than the following on M. Guizot: "The consciousness that he has of himself, and a natural principle of pride, place him easily above the little susceptibilities of self-love." M. Sainte-Beuve is not an admirer of Louis Philippe, and among other sly hits gives him the following: "Louis Philippe was too much like a _bourgeois_ himself to be long respected by the _bourgeoisie_. Just as in former times the King of France was only the first gentleman of the kingdom, he was nothing but the first _bourgeois_ of the country." What witty satire on Lamartine he introduces, with a recognition of popularity that, with one who takes so much joy in applause as Lamartine does, is enough to take the poison out of the sting: "Those who knew his verses by heart (and the number who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not without regret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, in his prose. This prose is, in 'Les Confidences,' too often but the paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the last, paraphrases of his feelings." Amends are made to Lamartine on another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says: "Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and the eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings. That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of wing." This is better as modesty than as criticism. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as of more gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyed getting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of their strongest as well as sweetest notes.
A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, just as a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image of herself. His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy in things French. Through means of it he knows them through and through: they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, his intellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other side the shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more or less the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows. Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Beranger, is spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy, that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M. Michelet, to Madame de Stael and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe, to Fenelon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau.
Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will be impatient to ask, nothing but praise? Not much else. Commencing his literary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from that date to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits, fill several thousand pages. Between his forty-fifth to his sixtieth year he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousand pages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects. This is the period of his critical maturity, the period of the "Causeries du Lundi," followed by the "Nouveaux Lundis." Many men write voluminously, but most of these only write _about_ a subject, not _into_ it. Only the few who can write into their subject add something to literature. One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve. In his mind there is vitality to animate his large acquirement, to make his many chapters buoyant and stimulant. All through his writings is the sparkle of original life.
But let us now cheer the reader who is impatient of much praise, and at the same time perform the negative part of our task.
Well, then, to be bold, as befits a critic of the critic, we beard the lion in his very den. We challenge a definition he gives of the critic. In the seventh volume of the "Causeries," article "Grimm," he says: "When Nature has endowed some one with this vivacity of feeling, with this susceptibility to impression, and that the creative imagination be wanting, this some one is a born critic, that is to say, a lover and judge of the creations of others." Why did M. Sainte-Beuve make Goethe sovereign in criticism? Why did he think Milton peculiarly qualified to interpret Homer? From the deep principle of like unto like; only spirit can know spirit. What were the worth of a comment of John Locke on "Paradise Lost," except to reveal the mental composition of John Locke? The critic should be what Locke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form of literature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, some share of that whereby poetry is fledged, "creative imagination." He may "want the accomplishment of verse," or the constructive faculty, but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful he must have. But do not the presence of "vivacity of feeling with susceptibility to impression" imply the imaginative temperament? If not, then we confidently assure M. Sainte-Beuve that had his definition fitted himself, his "Causeries du Lundi" would never have been rescued from the quick oblivion of the _feuilleton._
Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness, which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue,--the love of glory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon's passion for glory saved him in his latter years from ennui, from "that languor of the soul which follows the age of the passions." Where are to be found men more the victims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not more distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than for insatiable greed of glory,--Byron and Chateaubriand? No form of self-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving, which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyond its sway, on praise and admiration. These stimulants--withdrawn more or less even from the most successful in latter years--leave a void which becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust. Instead of glory being "the potent motive-power in all great souls," as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moral instinct, called by Milton,--
"That last infirmity of noble mind."
In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it as hardly to be traceable in their careers. Love of glory was not the spring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more than Shakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington.