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G:A.Sainte-Beuv

Preface

IN selecting from the many volumes of the " Causeries du Lundi" the essays required for the present work, the translator has experienced no little difficulty. The difficulty, as every reader of Sainte-Beuve will readily suppose, has not been the dearth of material, but " the embarrassment of riches." The final decision has been influenced by two considerations, — a desire to choose themes of intrinsic and permanent interest, and a desire to give a due variety. That the translator has done justice to the original in this attempt to reproduce in English some of the masterpieces of modern French criticism, he is very far from flattering himself. If the best translation, even of a third or fourth rate author is inevitably but the "seamy side of the cloth," then he may well despair who has undertaken to convey in English the curiosa felicitas, the subtle graces, and the delicate refinements of Sainte-Beuve's style. Adequately to do so would imply a genius hardly inferior to that of Sainte-Beuve himself.

It is only necessary to add that the order in which the selections have been arranged (with the exception of

VI PREFACE.

the last two), is nearly chronological, and has no reference to the comparative interest of the themes, — the first paper being less interesting than many of the others, — and that a few of the translations of passages quoted in the Introductory Essay have been taken from a paper in the " Westminster Review " and other sources.

Chicago, October 1, 1877.

COI^TENTS.

Introdtjctort Essay oy the Life axd ^\ RITI^^6S of

Sainte-Beuve, ix-lxxxvi

Lewis the Foukteexth, ----- 1

Madame Geoffkin, - - - - - - 162

The Abbe Galiaxi, - - - - - - 22<

THE

LIFE AND WRITINGS OF SAINTE-BEUVE.

/^N a gloomy day in October, 1869, a small house in ^-^ the suburban Rue Montparnasse, in the metropolis of France, was the scene of a public demonstration such as rarely occurs even in that city of spectacles, sights and sensations. France had just lost one of her chief literary stars, — one whose place in the galaxy of letters could be filled by no other, however large its dimensions or brilliant its beams. After a long and heroic struggle with a keenly painful disease, Sainte-Beuve, Senator and Academician, had passed away, and his fellow-citizens had come to testify their respect for his memory. The funeral ceremonies, if ceremonies they could be called, were in keeping with the simplicity of his character. In compliance with his last directions, none of the societies or learned bodies to which he had belonged took part in his burial; but a crowd of ten thousand persons, among whom were poets, historians, novelists, scientists, critics, artists, and journalists of every grade, together with a body of Parisian students, were present at the house, and followed the remains to the tomb. As he had also requested, his remains Avere not taken to a church, no religious rites were observed, and no discourse was pronounced over his grave. As the coffin was lowered into the vault, in the cemetery of Montparnasse, beside the

X INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

grave of his mother, a wreath of violets was placed upon it; and Mons. Lacaussade, one of his executors, advancing to the head of the grave, uttered the words, "Adieu, Sainte-Beuve! adieu, notre ami, adieu!'' then, turning to the crowd, he thanked them in the name of the buried man-of-letters for their attendance, and the ceremony was ended. Many friends and admirers, however, lingered awhile in groups in the burying-ground, to interchange thoughts and feelings on the sad occasion; and all, doubtless, felt that his departure had left a chasm not easily to be filled in the intellectual ranks of France. Who was this man that thus in a christian city had asked for a pagan burial, and what had he done to be honored at his obsequies as few are honored who have been benefactors to their race? Wh}^ if he was so illustrious at home, is he so little known in other lands? These questions we shall endeavor to answer. Let us say, however, in advance, that the task is not an easy one, and that we cannot flatter ourselves that we shall do it more than proximate justice. It would require, indeed, a subtlety of genius, a nicety and delicacy of touch, and a mastery of language, equal to his own, adequately to characterize what the London Athemeuni rightly calls '' this all-searching and ever-working intelligence." By the verdict of nearly all persons competent to decide, he was, what Matthew Arnold terms him, " the finest critical spirit of our time," — perhaps it is not too much to say, the acutest and most brilliant critic of this century. The fineness of his workmanship, the brilliancy and exquisite delicacy of his style, his vast and varied

SAINTE-BEUVE. XI

knowledge, his catholic taste and comprehensive sympathies, and, above all, his rare sense and almost unerring judgment, have been confessed alike by friends and foes. Not only his compeers in Paris, but sagacious judges in England and America, who have weighed his claims, declare that it would be difficult to name another critic of our time who has lighted up such a variety of subjects, who has extracted and hived up the essence of so many masterpieces of genius and learning, who has with so admirable an instinct separated the golden ore of literature from the dross, and fixed on the best specimens of the true, the beautiful, and the good, as Sainte-Beuve.

Even those who may dispute these honors, — if such there may be, — will not deny that instances of such devotion to literature as his, such a ceaseless, persevering advance toward an ideal, are very rare. Sainte-Beuve did not leap at once to the topmost round of the ladder, but worked his way up slowly, gradually, by dint of patient, conscientious toil. His whole life was a progress, without one backward step, or one diversion from the natural path of his genius. Starting on his career with no other gifts than a naturally delicate taste, a rare good sense, and a marked intellectual subtlety, he reached, after twenty years of conscientious toil, the position which he held for twenty years more, in which his criticisms seemed not so much the fruit of investigation and thought as a kind of divination. Literature was his chosen mistress, his first love and his last, in devotion to whom he never for a day relaxed. To her he gladly sacrificed wealth, power, social influence, all other idols;

XU INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

and though, as he passed from youth to age, he saw the hollowness of most objects of human pursuit, — though friends grew cold, popular admiration grew fickle, illusion after illusion vanished, and hopes and trusts were swept away into the abyss, — she never lost her charms. To him she was ever, in the language of Chaucer,

"Ruddy, fresh, lively-hued, And every day her beauty newed";

and so she held him with cords which grew tighter and tighter with age, and which were relaxed only with death. I / Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a posthumous child,

^ was born on the twenty-third da}^ of December, 1804, at Boulogne-on-the-Sea, a town previously noted as the birthplace of but one other eminent man, Daunou. It is a noteworthy fact that his father was fifty-two years of age when he married, and that his mother was then past forty. A few weeks after the marriage the father died; but, though Sainte-Beuve never saw his face or heard his voice, he believed, contrary to the popular judgment in such cases, that he owed his distinctive traits to the father rather than to the mother who watched over him from infancy, and who lived with him to her eighty-sixth year. The elder Sainte-Beuve, a Commissioner of Taxes, was a man of cultivated tastes, and left a considerable number of books, some of which he had annotated on the margin with discrimination and taste. A copy of RioufFe's Memoirs has been preserved, which he had enriched with notes and reflections upon the Reign of Terror; for example, the following, which would hardly have been disavowed by his son: "Public repose

SAINTE-BEUVE. Xlll

and tranquillity cannot be the habitual state of societies: the drop too much always comes." These books the son read, — the more thoughtfully, no doubt, as they afforded the only communion possible with the one whom he most revered as the author of his being. Of this father, whose habits of reading and of minute annotation he seems to have inherited, he thus speaks in one of his poems:

In the official documents of the government, his father is denominated de Sainte-Beuve; but as the noble prefix was never used by his mother, the son dispensed with it. Perhaps he thought, also, of the pleasantries of which the poet de B6ranger was the subject. " Not being noble," he says, " I did not wish to give myself the air of being so." Sainte-Beuve's mother was the daughter of an Englishwoman who had married a French sailor; and English writers are fond of tracing to her the keen predilection which her son betrayed for Cowper, Crabbe, and the Lake poets whose style of verse he tried to reproduce in the French tongue. No doubt such a crossing of the blood has often a happy issue, as may be seen in Montalembert and G. H. Lewes. M. D'Haussonville, Sainte-Beuve's biographer, says that Madame Sainte-Beuve was known to many pex-sons in Paris, who declare that she was a woman d'esprit, de bon sens, et de tact. There is more reason, we think, for believing that she was simply a plain, warm-hearted, affectionate creature, who was more

XIV INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

anxious about her son's material than about his intellectual wants. " He is always without socks," was the good soul's exclamation to a female friend. As he grew up, his literary yearnings troubled her; the career of a man-of-letters she naturally regarded as insufficiently lucrative, and she never felt easy till he was elected Academician.

Finishing at fourteen his rudimentary studies at Boulogne, Sainte-Beuve begged his mother to send him for a better education to Paris. There he was put to board with M. Landry, a mathematician, philosopher, and freethinker, and dined at his table, often with men of learning and eminence. "I was treated," says Sainte-Beuve, "as a big boy, as a little man." Attending successively the colleges of Chai'lemagne and Bourbon, he carried off several historical and Latin prizes, and received also from the government a medal as an exceptional recompense, after which he studied medicine for nearly three years, — a circumstance to which, perhaps, may be traced his early leaning toward materialism. He began life, he tells us, as a pronounced adherent of the most advanced form of eighteenth century philosophy, — the philosophy of Tracy, Daunou, and Lamarck; "there," he says emphatically, " is my true ground " (mon fonds veritable). The spirit of this school may be judged from the apostrophe put by M. Octave Feuillet in one of his dramas into the mouth of one of its chiefs: "How should I help believing in the immortal soul? I have touched it with my finger." It was almost inevitable, as the biographer of our critic rightly concludes, that a disposition like Sainte-Beuve's

SAINTE-BEDVE. XV

should be warped by such pursuits. "One must have, indeed, the soul and the intellect singularly inclined to spiritualism, not to feel an involuntary trouble in presence of the mysterious phenomena that physiological science reveals to our researches. When we see palpitating under the dissecting knife the organs in which life appears to be concentrated, we must sometimes be tempted to forget that the principle and the source of life are elsewhere." Not the least happy of the many inimitable touches in the Prologue to the " Canterbury Tales," is the portraiture of the physician, of whom we are told that "His study was little on the Bible."

We must not, however, interpret too literally Sainte- Beuve's language touching his beliefs at this plastic period. He was too spirituelle (not to say, too spiritual), too poetic, to adopt the hard, chilling doctrines of the materialistic school without a long mental struggle; and we find him, at this very time, in a letter to his schoolfellow, the abbe Barbe, recognizing God as "the source of all things."

We may trace to this period of Sainte-Beuve's medical studies not only his philosophical views, but also, perhaps, the germ and first conception of the method which he inaugurated in literary criticism. No writer, in his critical judgments, has shown a profounder interest in the mysterious influence of material phenomena upon mental phenomena, — no one has been at more pains to show the action of the temperament upon the mind, of the physical nature upon the moral, — than Sainte-Beuve. No doubt, says D'Haussonville, that at that period, as he

XVI INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

leaned over the dissecting table, his adventurous thought often wandered over the shadowy limits which separate the visible from the invisible world. " Besides, was not criticism, as he finally understood and defined it, ' a true course of moral physiology ' ? Did he not dissect the dead, and even the living? No doubt, at that date, the principles of his future method were confusedly germinating in the mind which literary curiosity had already invaded. Often does the genius thus grow and strengthen in secret without the knowledge of its possessor, and the matured man is astonished one day to find himself reaping the fruits which his unconscious youth has sown for him."

Sainte-Beuve had scarcely begun the practice of medicine when a struggle arose in his mind between its claims and those of the Muses. His pecuniary resources were very limited, and he was compelled to watch closely his smallest expenditures. Some years later, when his earliest books had already been given to the world, he wrote to a college friend: "I shall go and see you some Sunday in March, when I shall have received the bill which falls due at that date, and when twenty francs, more or less, in my pocket, shall be of no consequence." Literature, he was well aware, is a good stafl", but a bad crutch; and though the world of letters seemed a far more enchanting one than that of medicine and di-y facts, it was not till after a sharp mental conflict that Apollo and the Nine triumphed over Hippocrates and Galen. Though he threw aside his surgeon's case, he never ceased to be grateful to the noble profession he

SAINTE-BEUVE. Xvii

had left for the direction it had given to his mental development. To it he attributed the philosophical spirit, the love of exactitude and of physiological reality, the good method which characterized his writings; and when, four years later, the Faculty was attacked in the Senate, he nobly stood up and defended it. In 182-1 M. Dubois, the Professor under whom he had studied at the College Charlemagne, founded the Globe, which soon became the most powerful literary journal in France. It was the organ of the Doctrinaires in politics, and in literature of that powerful intellectual movement which signalized the last years of the Restoration, and which seemed to be working a revolution in French literature and French thought. Jouffroy, Remusat, Ampere, Merimee, and De Broglie were among its contributors, besides the glorious trio of the Sorbonne, as Sainte-Beuve called them, Guizot. Cousin, and Villemain; and though the journal was taunted with moderatism by the extremists of the Romantic school, its articles were full of freshness and originality, and won the praise of Goethe. " The editors," said the sage of Weimar, " are men of the world, lively, clear-spirited, and bold to the very highest degree. They have a way of expressing disapprobation which is fine and courteous. Our German savants, on the contrary, always think it necessary immediately to hate a person, if they don't happen to agree with him." To this journal Sainte-Beuve was invited to contribute; and, after he had penned a number of short articles under the direction of Dubois, the latter said to him one day: '''Now you know how to write, and you can go alone."

XVIU INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of Victor Hugo, then in the heyday of his youth and genius, battling brilliantly for fame. Calling one morning upon Sainte-Beuve, M. Dubois showed him two volumes of Odes and Ballads, which he desired him to review. " They are by that young barbarian, Victor Hugo," said he, " who has talent, and who, moreover, is interesting on account of his life and character." The criticism which Sainte-Beuve wrote was a favorable one, though dashed with some strictures on the extravagances of that " enfant sublime,'" as Chateaubriand styled him: and it led to an introduction to the rising author. Gradually the acquaintance ripened into intimacy, and Sainte-Beuve, with his usual facility, became an enthusiastic admirer of the doctrines of the Romantic school and of the genius of its chief. The principal merit of this school was that, like that of the Lake poets in England, it was essentially a protest against artifice and conventionalism in poetry; the fault of the reformers was that they framed canons and shibboleths of their own as narrow as those against which they declaimed. Ere many months Sainte- Beuve became a member of Le Cenacle (the Guest-Chamber), a kind of Mutual Admiration Society of poets, painters, and sculptors in Paris, who had, each of them, according to his own story, a masterpiece in preparation or conception, and all of them together a monopoly of French genius. Among these self-reliant spirits were Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny, Lamartine, and the brothers Deschamps, who, meeting constantly at Victor Hugo's, recited their new verses, and cheered each other

SAINTE-BEUVE. XIX

amid the storm of criticism by whicli they were assailed. By degrees their intimacy so deepened that they called each other by their christian names; and, at last, the tone of familiarity became so general and so catching, that, we are told, M. Hugo was obliged to issue a peremptory ukaze, to prevent his wife from being addressed as Adele. Sainte-Beuve was especially smitten with her charms, and it was to this, in part, that, later in life, he attributed that treason against the principles of sound criticism into which he was betrayed when he applauded her husband's innovations in poetry.

It was under the influence of Victor Hugo and his school that Sainte-Beuve made his first formal contribution to literature, — a woi'k on the French poetry of the Sixteenth Century. The object of this work was twofold,— to find ancestors for the Romantic school in the early French literature, de dresser leur arhre genealogique, and to rescue from oblivion the poetry of the pre-classical period, which that of the . Grand Siecle had overshadowed. By choice extracts and felicitous criticism, Sainte-Beuve showed triumphantly that Moliere, Racine, Corneille, Boileau, and their successors, did not i-epresent the sum total of French poetry; that, as there were brave men " before Agamemnon," so there were fine singers before the age of Lewis the Fourteenth.

Among the oddities or perversities of human nature there is none more unaccountable than the disposition of men who have a decided genius for a certain line of labor, to fancy that they were born to distinguish themselves in some wholly different pursuit. Canova, when t

XX INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

his sculpture was praised, was sure to fetch a painting that he had just daubed, and display it with a smile of paternal pride. Douglas Jerrold, the wit, wanted to write a treatise on natural philosophy; Liston, the comic actor, who could not wink without provoking laughter, believed that tragedy was his true role; Girardet valued his verses far above his pictures; and David mourned the waste of his life in painting, when he was a born diplomatist, and, in place of depicting Napoleon scaling the Alps, might have revolutionized the politics of two hemispheres. Who has forgotten the havoc which that giant of classic scholarship, Bentley, made, when he turned from his proper field of criticism, and laid his hand on Paradise Lost? Sainte-Beuve's good sense did not save him from a similar weakness. His maiden work was pronounced by the " Revue Fran9aise " a marvel of criticism; but had his friends congratulated him on having found his true vein, he would have smiled, it is said, as painfully as did Alfred de Vigny, when, at the time he was meditating a rivalry of Milton, some female admirers cried out in chorus, " Oh, give us more Cmq Mars; that is your line." Like many other young men of that time, Sainte-Beuve not only had a strong taste for poetry, but fully believed that he was born to achieve immortality in verse. Burning to enter the lists with his brilliant associates, he made his poetical entree in 1829 with the "Life, Poems, and Thoughts of Joseph Delorme."

It is said that the author had become an admirer of Wordsworth, Crabbe, and Coleridge, and was ambitious to naturalize in the French language poetry of the same

SAINTE-BEUVE. xxi

simplicity, truthfulness, and subdued passion, drawn from natural scenery and types of every-day life. There is some analogy, pei'haps, between the psychological, subjective manner of Sainte-Beuve and that of the English bards; and it may be admitted that he succeeded, to some extent, in avoiding like them the old, worn-out, conventional diction and threadbare mythological allusions of poetry. But, beyond this, the resemblance fails. There is no affinity between the themes that inspire the Frenchman's song and those of the singer of Eydal Mount, whose boast is that

"In common things that round us lie, Some random truths he can impart; The harvest of a quiet eye,

That broods and sleeps on his own heart."

Between the healthy, soul-bracing sentiments of Wordsworth's men and women and the sickly day-dreams, the fainting fits and frenzies of the moody, wayward Joseph Delorme, who abjured his religion because science had frozen the genial current of his soul; who refused to marry because " his rather rude philanthropy dreaded to be permanently imprisoned in too contracted affections, un egoisme a deux personnes"' ; and who, at one time, shut himself up in a garret, to die like the fabled swan, and at another thought of drowning himself with a Iantern around his neck, — there is a gulf as broad as the distance between the poles. Health, vigorous, buoyant, sunny-tempered health is the salient characteristic of Wordsworth's genius, — the health that springs from communion with Nature and Nature's God; with him the

XXll INTRODUCTOEY ESSAY.

love of nature is " an appetite," and " haunts him like a passion"; he sees and feels that behind the forms, hues, and sounds of the universe, there is something more than meets the external senses; and hence the meanest objects become to him full of mystery, and he finds subjects for his song in svich humble themes as a pebble rounded and polished by the brook, — an exiled shell still echoing the sound of its native ocean, — a thorn on a hill-side overgrown with lichens, — the notes of the cuckoo, — the shadows of the falling leaves, dancing amid the sunshine, — a wagon lumbering and creaking along the dusty highway,— even a meek ass, grazing upon the common, and shaking his passive ears at the oaths and blows of its tormentors. In place of themes like these, Sainte-Beuve gives us a series of pictures drawn from the artificial life of Paris. In place of that unapproachable ideality, that " breath and finer spirit of -all knowledge," which, in the Ode to Immortality, marks the highest limit which the tide of poetry has reached in this century, we have a diluted mixture of Byronism and Wertherism, of Sterne and Rousseau, of mawkish sentiment and diseased fancy, — verse in almost every page of which there is a taint of melancholy, an exhalation of the sick-room and the grave.

Sainte-Beuve's best excuse is that the psychological condition which his poem reveals was the malady of the age. Joseph Delorme, his hero, was of the same family of persons whom Melancholy had marked for her own, as the Werthers, Ren6s, and other imaginary beings whom Byron had made so popular by his Childe Harold.

SAINTE-BEUVE. XXIU

It was a time when, as a reviewer has said, " a diseased liver, a heart complaint, a hectic cough, or chronic dyspepsia, was mistaken by preternatural self-conceit for an infallible mark of genius, and morbid self-consciousness sought notoriety, in default of fame, at the first grave check or mortification, in suicide." It was at the height of this mania that two young Parisians, on the failure of a theatrical piece which they had composed, put an end to their lives by charcoal. The melodious wailings of Joseph Delorme were well received by the Parisian critics, but did not meet with a very sympathetic response from the people. It is true it was no new gospel which he had preached. Chateaubriand had labored hard to propagate the worship of weariness and satiety; but the French are too lively a race, too sunny and merry-hearted, to take pleasure in being unhappy. Tell an Englishman that he is miserable, — that life is an illusion, and pleasure a snare, — that the world is going to the dogs, and he with it, — and that he has provocation enough to commit suicide, — and he will grasp your hand and thank you. But Johnny Crapeau has never learned the "luxury of wo"; he has no relish for the gospel of despair; and when Guizot ridiculed the lugubrious Joseph Delorme as " a Werther turned Jacobin and sawbones," the witticism was received with a shout of laughter which rang through Paris.

Just one year after the Poems of Joseph Delorme, appeared " The Consolations," a collection of lyrical pieces, closely resembling the former in style, but in its sentiments absolutely opposed to it. In place of cold materi-

XXIV IXTEODUCTOEY ESSAY.

alism, of doubt, despair, and mocking scepticism, we have now a species of religious mysticism, and a monotony of piety which reminds one of Hood's line about persons who think that they " are pious, when they are only bilious." Never did a poet undergo a more startling revolution of sentiments in a twelvemonth. Victor Hugo, we are told, was the high-priest of this conversion, though, at a later day, Sainte-Beuve gives the credit with minute particularity to Lamartine. It is Hugo who has led him "to the source of all consolation"; who has led him to see that " the other waters dry up, and that it is only on the border of the celestial Siloe that one can be permanently seated and refreshed." Nevertheless, there are some rather strange passages in this work whose moral is that there is no happiness, above or below, except in faith. '■ The Confessions," undoubtedly the best poem of one who was no poet, was warmly welcomed by Hugo and De Vigny, and won much pi-aise fi'oni the public. " Listen to your genius, sir!" was the characteristic plaudit of Chateaubriand. " I have wept, who never weep," was the tribute of the sentimental Lamartine, whose cambric was always wet with tears. The religious tone of the work, however, was distasteful to many; Merim^e laughed in his sleeve at the joke, as he considered it; and Beranger could barely pardon what he called " that rag of worship thrown over a deist's faith," — adding, in a letter: "When you use the word Seigneur, you make me think of those old cardinals returning thanks to Jupiter and all the gods of Olympus for the election of a new Pope." In spite of these gibes, we may believe in Sainte-Beuve's

SAIXTE-BEUVE. XXV sincerity, and that, if he had not, he at least thought he had, a religious visitation during " those six celestial months of his life," as he terms them, when he dashed off the "Consolations." The change he underwent was only one of the various moral transformations which he, who, chameleon-like, took his hue from his latest associates, and was constant only in his inconstancy, passed through until he reached the last sad stage of blank unbelief in which he died.

That Sainte-Beuve was a skillful poetic artist, we cannot doubt. Gustave Planche, by no means a partial critic, commends in both of Sainte-Beuve's poems " the truthfulness of the pictures and the thoughts," and the admirable clearness and transparency of the style. But it requires a good deal more than delicacy of taste and justness of perception to make a poet; and because he lacks the divine spark, the God-given afllatus, the mysterious something which we can all feel better than we can define, — because he jwssesses his genius rather than is possessed by it, and we feel that his conceptions are elaborated, and not that

"Across his sea of mind The thought comes streaming like a blazing ship Upon a mighty wind," —

we must pronounce these volumes, products though they are of an ingenious, highly-cultured, and thoughtful mind, failures as poems.

The same may be said of his next effort, "August Thoughts," in which the author, after another moral somersault, again finds himself disenchanted, cries "All

XXVI INTRODUCTORY ESSAY,

is vanity," and sits at the feet of Werther and yearns for death. This volume, fortunately, proved a perfect failure, and killed his poetical activity, so far as publication was concerned, though he never ceased to nourish the slumbering flame, and, to his latest hour, felt immeasurably less pride in his criticisms than in his rhymed prose. One of his latest eflusions was a reply to some lines of Alfred de Musset upon a sentiment in one of Sainte-BeuvQ's essays, — " Every man contains a dead poet in his soul." That a critic of such insight should thus have been unable, in his own case, to discriminate between a merely engrafted talent of poetry and the true gift, — between the dainty rhetorical eftects of great ability and the products of that genius which throws out masses of molten ore, and works as if by magic, — is a signal examijle of the blinding effects of self-love. By his latest failure he seems to have reluctantly discovered, that, in the public estimation, criticism, and not poetry, was his calling, and henceforth we find him pursuing the former with undiverted aim.