Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

“ Sainte-Beuve puts down his somewhat hard and unsympathetic outlook quite as much to the uninspiring circumstances of these days as to the general character of his time. He cannot be said to have been early disenchanted, for he never seems to have had any illusions ”

“ It was impossible for Sainte-Beuve to write simply; he could not pronounce a verdict without making it dependent on a whole system of subordinate conditions; he could not utter ever so brief a eulogy without spicing it with all kinds of malice. The greatest critic of France, after the death of Saint-Beuve, once said to me, "A laudatory sentence from Saint-Beuve is a veritable nest of leeches." Now, take in comparison the character of the mind and the whole style of Stuart Mill; his thoughts always on a grand scale, embracing the universal, allowing the individual to slip from notice ”

“ During the next ten years he was mainly occupied with his studies of the writers of the Port Royal school. But it was during the last twenty years of his life, when the famous Causeries du lundi appeared weekly in the columns of the Constitutionnel and the Moniteur, that his most remarkable productions came out. Sainte-Beuve’s style of criticism (which is the key to so much of French literature of the last half-century that it is necessary to dwell on it at some length) , excellent and valuable as it is, lent itself to two corruptions. ”

“ Sainte-Beuve, therefore, generally contents himself with showing that he divines or knows much on which he does not choose to dwell.
With the course of years he became bolder and more scientific in his psychological analysis. In the following passage he defends his right to be so. It is taken from a letter written on the 9th of May 1863 to a critic who had blamed him for certain disparaging remarks in one of his articles: "Art—and especially a purely intellectual art like that of criticism—is an instrument which is difficult to handle, and its worth is dependent upon the worth of the artist. ”

“ That society, though cultivated and liberal, has, in contrast with that of France, remained pure. It retains as its birthright a certain nameless innocence, unknown in the polished French circles a few leagues beyond. M. de Sainte-Beuve wonders at this, and asks,—"Is it that man is kept pure and good by the magnificent beauties in which Nature rocks him there from his babyhood? Is it that the heart becomes awed in presence of that sublime calm of Nature, and, before he is aware of it, the passions have transformed themselves into a religious adoration?" ”

“ We shall deal here with the novel work of Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of France; of Eugène Sue, whose mere popularity exceeded that of any other writer discussed in this half of the volume except Dumas; of men like Sandeau, Charles de Bernard, and Murger, whose actual work in prose fiction is not much less than consummate in its own particular key and subdivisions; of one of the best political satirists in French fiction, Louis Reybaud ”

“ It exhibits already the genuine Sainte-Beuve, the author. who, as M. Duvergier de Hauranne said in the Globe at the time, “sent à sa manière, écrit comme il sent,” the man who, even in the forms of an artificial poetry, remains always “un penseur et un homme d’esprit.” That his Joseph Delorme was not the Werther of romance, but a Werther in the shape of Jacobin and medical student, the only Werther whom Sainte-Beuve by his own practical experience really knew, was a novelty in French poetical literature, but was entirely characteristic of Sainte-Beuve. ”

“ It was not till the last stage of his career that Sainte-Beuve's talent attained to its full development. The chances are that an uncritical author will deteriorate as he grows older, but that a critic will improve ”

“ He excels in the art of distilling a drop of poison in a phial of perfume so as to render the poison delicious and the perfume venomous. His prose is as attractive and magnetizing as a woman slightly compromised in public opinion, and who does not tell all her secrets, but increases her attractions both by what she shows and by what she conceals. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has had no desire but to be a pilgrim of ideas, lacking the first requisite in a pilgrim, which is faith. He has circumnavigated, merely in the character of amateur, every doctrine of the century ”

“ In regard to the first two points, ill-nature and inaccuracy can do no harm: Sainte-Beuve's fame and ability are perfectly well known to the reading public of to-day, and the opinion of posterity will rest upon his own merits rather than on the statements of any biographer, as he is one of the authors whose writings are sure to be more read than what other people write about them. ”

“ These pictures are just so many chapters detached from his history. They are the work of an artist of an exceptional nature; and are worthy of a book written on the critical method of Sainte-Beuve, a book wherein the man would occupy a place at least as considerable as the work itself; for the one and the other are inseparable. ”

“ It is among the French, the great masters of the prose of refined conversation, that his merits have been most appreciated in modern times. Sainte-Beuve, in his Nouveaux Lundis, devotes to him two papers of delicate and admiring criticism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They may be found not merely in the older school before 1830, but in almost all French critics up to the present day: there is perhaps not one, with the single exception of Sainte-Beuve, who is habitually free from them. ”

“ But from the calm backwater of my present life at Holmhurst, as I overlook the past, the pleasures seem to predominate, and I could cordially answer to any one who asked me “Is life worth living?”—“Yes, to the very dregs.”
Sainte-Beuve says, “Il est donné, de nos jours, à un bien petit nombre, même parmi les plus délicats et ceux qui les apprécient le mieux, de recueillir, d’ordonner sa vie selon ses admirations et selon ses goûts, avec suite, avec noblesse.” And latterly my days have been “avec suite;” “avec noblesse” is what they ought to have been. ”

“ It does not lie open to the criticism which that clumsy and feeble apology seemed intended to provoke, and which it had received at the competent hands of M. [Pg 453] Scherer. We have here no mysterious revelations of the designs of Providence, no intimations that the world was created as a theatre for the exaltation of certain godlike individuals. The question, as presented by M. Sainte-Beuve, is a practical one, and as such we accept it. We believe with him in the necessity for great men, in the guidance of heroes. ”

“ Let us pass, however, to a writer enjoying far more celebrity than either the graceful poet Hégésippe Moreau or the grotesque historiographer, Father Loriquet. It was probably from his English mother that Sainte-Beuve derived that taste for certain English poets, with Cowper, Wordsworth, and Shelley among them, whom he attempted to imitate in his earliest flights. His mother, having been left a widow, sent him for preliminary study to the College of Boulogne, his native town; afterwards transferring him, for the completion of his general education, to Paris. ”

“ Sainte-Beuve possessed all the qualifications required of the historian of Jansenism. He was not a believer, but he had been, or believed that he had been one. A man is seldom capable of criticising the views he holds himself, and as seldom of understanding those which he has never held; what we all understand best are the views we once shared, but share no longer. If any one doubts Sainte-Beuve's ability to understand these medieval emotions, that impulse to forsake the world, that strife of the awakened soul with nature, and its repentant, anxious recourse to grace ”

“ The latter of these propositions, namely, that every human being whom we judge has altered, has developed steadily, Sainte-Beuve understood better than it had ever been understood before. He not only changes his tone every time he changes his theme, but changes it every time there is a change in the man or woman who is his theme for the time being; his agile talent imitates all the movements of the individual human soul during its development process. [1] Hence his manner is as changeable as his subject; he is now the biographer, now the critic ”

“ Pilgrim's Progress was a favorite book of Stevenson's; he alludes to it frequently in his essays. See also his own article Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress, first published in the Magazine of Art in February 1882. This essay is well worth reading, and the copies of the pictures which he includes are extremely diverting.]
[Note 15: Sainte-Beuve. The French writer Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) is usually regarded today as the greatest literary critic who ever lived. His constant change of convictions enabled him to see life from all sides.] ”

“ Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve’s fame as a critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is admitted to be a critic of the first rank. ”

“ Underneath its whimsical exaggerations we recognize clearly the truthful outlines and general fidelity of the sketch. But Sainte-Beuve indulges in none of these witty and wandering fancies. He is keenly alive to the proper limitations of his subject; he has but a single purpose in mind, that of helping you to accurately understand the character and the life’s work of the great historian whom he is reviewing; and, while his humor plays lambently on every page, he never makes any conscious effort to be diverting. Nothing can be more sprightly than Mr. ”

“ Now there are in the book on Chateaubriand some disclosures which might better have been spared. But in determining motives we shall go utterly astray if we leave character out of sight; and the whole career of M. Sainte-Beuve rises up against the implication that he was prompted in this instance by any other impulse than that spirit of investigation, that desire to penetrate to the heart of his subject, to unveil truth and dissipate illusions, which has grown stronger and more imperative at every step of his advance. ”

“ Goethe long ago noticed that, whereas Germans reviewed one another as enemies whom they hated, the critics of the Globe reviewed one another as gentlemen. This arose from the higher social development of France and from the closer relations of literature with life there But Sainte-Beuve has more, as a. critic, than the external politeness which once at any rate distinguished his countrymen he has a personal charm of manner due to a sweet and humane temper. ”

“ In these twenty-seven volumes of criticism, scarcely an error has been detected, scarcely a single repetition is met with; there is scarcely a page which a reader, unpressed for time, would be inclined to skip. Where you least agree with the author, there you will perhaps have the most reason to thank him for his hints and elucidations. Is it not then with reason that M. Sainte-Beuve has been styled "the prince of contemporaneous criticism"? His decisions have been accepted by the public, and he has founded a school which does honor to France. ”

“ Almost every personage 'is French, it is true; Sainte-Beuve had a maxim that the critic should prefer subjects which he possesses familiarly. The great place of France in the world is very much due to her eminent gift for social life and development; and this gift French literature has accompanied, fashioned, perfected, and continues to reflect. And nowhere shall we find such interest more completely and charmingly brought out than in Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du lundi and the Nouveaux lundis. As a guide to bring us to a knowledge of the French genius and literature he is unrivaled. ”

“ He has no claim to be regarded as a genius; but, as Sainte-Beuve has said, he well deserves a place “dans la classe des esprits infiniment distingués”—distinguished, however, it ought to be added by intelligence rather than by intellect, and less by the power of saying much than by the power of saying a little well. ”

“ The latest of these that deserves attention was an outline of Saint-Beuve's life and literary career by the Vicomte d'Haussonville, in which, with an affectation of impartiality and fairness, every page was streaked with malice; imperfect justice was done to Sainte-Beuve's intellect ”

“ A love of what is best in art was the habit of Sainte-Beuve's life, and so he too will be remembered as one who has kept the best company in literature,—a man who cheerfully did homage to genius, wherever and whenever it might be found.
I intend to leave as a legacy to a dear friend of mine an old faded book, which I hope he will always prize as it deserves. It is a well-worn, well-read volume, of no value whatever as an edition,—but it belonged to Abraham Lincoln. It is his copy of "The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., to which is prefixed the life of the author by Dr. ”