Shelburne Essays Part 3

Such was the life within, and out of doors were the labours of the gardener and botanist, while

the seasons went Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent Of their own calm and measureless content.

The scene calls forth some of Whittier's most perfect lines of description. Could anything be more harmonious than this, with its economy of simple grace,

Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed?

No poem would be thoroughly characteristic of Whittier without some echo of the slavery dispute, and our first introduction to Pastorius is, indeed, as to a baffled forerunner of John Woolman. But the question here takes on its most human and least political form; it lets in just enough of the outside world of action to save the idyl from unreality.

Nor could religion well be absent; rather, the whole poem may be called an ill.u.s.tration through the Pilgrim's life of that Inner Guide, speaking to him not with loud and controversial tones, as it spoke to George Fox, but with the still, small voice of comfortable persuasion:

A Voice spake in his ear, And lo! all other voices far and near Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear.

The Light of Life shone round him; one by one The wandering lights, that all misleading run, Went out like candles paling in the sun.

The account of the grave Friends, unsummoned by bells, walking meeting-ward, and of the gathered stillness of the room into which only the songs of the birds penetrated from without, is one of the happiest pa.s.sages of the poem. How dear those hours of common wors.h.i.+p were to Whittier may be understood from another poem, addressed to a visitor who asked him why he did not seek rather the grander temple of nature:

But nature is not solitude; She crowds us with her thronging wood; Her many hands reach out to us, Her many tongues are garrulous; Perpetual riddles of surprise She offers to our ears and eyes.

And so I find it well to come For deeper rest to this still room, For here the habit of the soul Feels less the outer world's control; The strength of mutual purpose pleads More earnestly our common needs; And from the silence multiplied By these still forms on every side, The world that time and sense have known Falls off and leaves us G.o.d alone.

For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventieth birthday Longfellow wrote a sonnet on _The Three Silences of Molinos_--the silence of speech, of desire, and of thought, through which are heard "mysterious sounds from realms beyond our reach." Perhaps only one who at some time in his life has caught, or seemed to catch, those voices and melodies is quite able to appreciate the charm of Whittier through the absence of so much that calls to us in other poets.

THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE

It is a hundred years since Sainte-Beuve was born in the Norman city that looks over toward England, and more than a generation has pa.s.sed since his death just before the war with Germany.[4] Yesterday three countries--France, Belgium, and Switzerland--were celebrating his centenary with speeches and essays and dinners, and the singing of hymns. At Lausanne, where he had given his lectures on _Port-Royal_, and had undergone not a little chagrin for his pains, the University unveiled a bronze medallion of his head,--a Sainte-Beuve disillusioned and complex, writes a Parisian journalist, with immoderate forehead radiating a cold serenity, while the lips are contracted into a smile at once voluptuous and sarcastic, as it were an Erasmus grown fat, with a reminiscence of Baudelaire in the ironic mask of the face. It is evidently the "Pere Beuve" as we know him in the portraits, and it is not hard to imagine the lips curling a little more sardonically at the thought of the change that has come since he was a poverty-stricken hack and his foibles were the ridicule of Paris.

Yet through all these honours I cannot help observing a strain of reluctance, as so often happens with a critic who has made himself feared by the rect.i.tude of his judgments. There has, for one thing, been a good deal of rather foolish scandal-mongering and raking up of old anecdotes about his gross habits. Well, Sainte-Beuve was sensual. "Je suis du peuple ainsi que mes amours," he was wont to hum over his work; and when that work was finished, his secretary tells us how he used to draw a hat down over his face (that face _dont le front demesurement haut rayonne de serenite froide_), and go out on the street for any chance liaison. There is something too much of these stories in what is written of Sainte-Beuve to-day; and in the estimate of his intellectual career too little emphasis is laid on what was stable in his opinions, and too much emphasis on the changes of his religious and literary creed. To be sure, these mutations of belief are commonly cited as his preparation for the art of critic, and in a certain sense this is right.

But even then, if by critic is meant one who merely decides the value of this or that book, the essential word is left unsaid. He was a critic, and something more; he was, if any man may claim such a t.i.tle, the _maitre universel_ of the century, as, indeed, he has been called.

And the time of his life contributed as much to this position of Doctor Universalis as did his own intelligence. France, during those years from the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second Empire, was the seething-pot of modern ideas, and the impression left by the history of the period is not unlike that of watching the witch scenes in _Macbeth_.

The eighteenth century had been earnest, mad in part, but its intention was comparatively single,--to tear down the fabric of authority, whether political or religious, and allow human nature, which was fundamentally good, though depraved by custom, to a.s.sert itself. And human nature did a.s.sert itself pretty vigorously in the French Revolution, proving, one might suppose, if it proved anything, that its foundation, like its origin, is with the beasts. To the men who came afterward that tremendous event stood like a great prism between themselves and the preceding age; the pillar of light toward which they looked for guidance was distorted by it and shattered into a thousand coloured rays. For many of them, as for Sainte-Beuve, it meant that the old humanitarian pa.s.sion remained side by side with a profound distrust of the popular heart; for all, the path of reform took the direction of some individual caprice or ideal. There were democrats and monarchists and imperialists; there was the rigid Catholic reaction led by Bonald and de Maistre, and the liberal Catholicism of Lamennais; there was the socialism of Saint-Simon, mixed with notions of a religious hierarchy, and other schemes of socialism innumerable; while skepticism took every form of condescension or antagonism. Literature also had its serious mission, and the battle of the romanticists shook Paris almost as violently as a political revolution. Through it all science was marching with steady gaze, waiting for the hour when it should lay its cold hand on the heart of society.

And with all these movements Sainte-Beuve was more or less intimately concerned. As a boy he brought with him to Paris the pietistic sentiments of his mother and an aunt on whom, his father being dead, his training had devolved. Upon these sentiments he soon imposed the philosophy of the eighteenth century, followed by a close study of the Revolution. It is noteworthy that his first journalistic work on the _Globe_ was a literary description of the places in Greece to which the war for independence was calling attention, and the reviewing of various memoirs of the French Revolution. From these influences he pa.s.sed to the _cenacle_ of Victor Hugo, and became one of the champions of the new romantic school. Meanwhile literature was mingled with romance of another sort, and the story of the critic's friends.h.i.+p for the haughty poet and of his love for the poet's wife is of a kind almost incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon mind. It may be said in pa.s.sing that the letters of Sainte-Beuve to M. and Mme. Hugo, which have only to-day been recovered and published in the _Revue de Paris_, throw rather a new light on this whole affair. They do not exculpate Sainte-Beuve, but they at least free him from ridicule. His successful pa.s.sion for Mme.

Hugo, with its abrupt close when Mme. Hugo's daughter came to her first confession, and his tormented courts.h.i.+p of Mme. d'Arbouville in later years, were the chief elements in that _education sentimentale_ which made him so cunning in the secrets of the feminine breast.

But this is a digression. Personal and critical causes carried him out of the camp of Victor Hugo into the ranks of the Saint-Simonians, whom he followed for a while with a kind of half-detached enthusiasm.

Probably he was less attracted by the hopes of a mystically regenerated society, with Enfantin as its supreme pontiff, than by the desire of finding some rest for the imagination in this religion of universal love. At least he perceived in the new brotherhood a relief from the strained individualism of the romantic poets, and the same instinct, no doubt, followed him from Saint-Simonism into the fold of Lamennais.

There at last he thought to see united the ideals of religion and democracy, and some of the bitterest words he ever wrote were in memory of the final defalcation of Lamennais, who, as Sainte-Beuve said, saved himself but left his disciples stranded in the mire. Meanwhile this particular disciple had met new friends in Switzerland, and through their aid was brought at a critical moment to Lausanne to lecture on _Port-Royal_. There he learned to know and respect Vinet, the Protestant theologian and critic, who, with the help of his good friends the Oliviers, undertook to convert the wily Parisian to Calvinism.

Saint-Beuve himself seems to have gone into the discussion quite earnestly, but for one who knows the past experiences of that subtle twister there is something almost ludicrous in the way these anxious missionaries reported each accession and retrogression of his faith. He came back to Paris a confirmed and satisfied doubter, willing to sacrifice to the G.o.ddess Chance as the blind deity of this world, convinced of materialism and of the essential baseness of human nature, yet equally convinced that within man there rules some ultimate principle of genius or individual authority which no rationalism can explain, and above all things determined to keep his mind open to whatever currents of truth may blow through our murky human atmosphere.

He ended where he began, in what may be called a subtilised and refined philosophy of the eighteenth century, with a strain of melancholy quite peculiar to the baffled experience of the nineteenth. His aim henceforth was to apply to the study of mankind the a.n.a.lytical precision of science, with a scientific method of grouping men into spiritual families.

Much has been made of these varied twistings of Sainte-Beuve's, both for his honour and dishonour. Certainly they enabled him to insinuate himself into almost every kind of intelligence and report of each author as if he were writing out a phase of his own character; they made him in the end the spokesman of that eager and troubled age whose ferment is to-day just reaching America. France scarcely holds the place of intellectual supremacy once universally accorded her, yet to her glory be it said that, if we look anywhere for a single man who summed up within himself the life of the nineteenth century, we instinctively turn to that country. And more and more it appears that to Sainte-Beuve in particular that honour must accrue. His understanding was more comprehensive than Taine's or Renan's, more subtle than that of the former, more upright than that of the latter, more single toward the truth and more accurate than that of either. He never, as did Taine, allowed a preconceived idea to warp his arrangement of facts, nor did he ever, at least in his mature years, allow his sentimentality, as did Renan, to take the place of judgment. Both the past and the present are reflected in his essays with equal clearness.

On the other hand, this versatility of experience has not seldom been laid to lightness and inconsistency of character. I cannot see that the charge holds good, unless it be directed also against the whole age through which he pa.s.sed. If any one thing has been made clear by the publis.h.i.+ng of Sainte-Beuve's letters and by the closer investigation of his life, it is that he was in these earlier years a sincere seeker after religion, and was only held back at the last moment by some invincible impotence of faith from joining himself finally with this or that sect. And he was thus an image of the times. What else is the meaning of all those abortive attempts to amalgamate religion with the humanitarianism left over from the eighteenth century, but a searching for faith where the spiritual eye had been blinded? I should suppose that Sainte-Beuve's refusal in the end to speak the irrevocable word of adhesion indicated rather the clearness of his self-knowledge than any lightness of procedure. Nor is his inconsistency, whether religious or literary, quite so great as it is sometimes held up to be. The inheritance of the eighteenth century was strong upon him, while at the same time he had a craving for the inner life of the spirit. Naturally he felt a powerful attraction in the preaching of such men as Saint-Simon and Lamennais, who boasted to combine these two tendencies; but the mummery of Saint-Simonism and the instability of Mennaisianism, when it came to the test, too soon exposed the lack of spiritual substance in both. With this revelation came a growing distrust of human nature, caused by the political degeneracy of France, and by a kind of revulsion he threw himself upon the Jansenism which contained the spirituality the other creeds missed, and which based itself frankly on the total depravity of mankind. He was too much a child of the age to breathe in that thin air, and fell back on all that remained to him,--inquisitive doubt and a scientific demand for positive truth. It is the history of the century.

And in literature I find the same inconstancy on the surface, while at heart he suffered little change. Only here his experience ran counter to the times, and most of the opprobrium that has been cast on him is due to the fact that he never allowed the clamour of popular taste and the warmth of his sympathy with present modes to drown that inner critical voice of doubt. As a standard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanticists he still maintained his reserves, and, on the other hand, long after he had turned renegade from that camp he still spoke of himself as only _demi-converti_. The proportion changed with his development, but from beginning to end he was at bottom cla.s.sical in his love of clarity and self-restraint, while intensely interested in the life and aspirations of his own day. There is in one of the recently published letters to Victor Hugo a noteworthy ill.u.s.tration of this steadfastness. It was, in fact, the second letter he wrote to the poet, and goes back to 1827, the year of _Cromwell_. On the twelfth of February, Hugo read his new tragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evidently warm in expressions of praise. But in the seclusion of his own room the critical instinct reawoke in him, and he wrote the next day a long letter to the dramatist, not retracting what he had said, but adding certain reservations and insinuating certain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiques rentrent dans une seule que je m'etais deja permis d'adresser a votre talent, l'exces, l'abus de la _force_, et pa.s.sez-moi le mot, la _charge_." Is not the whole of his critical att.i.tude toward the men of his age practically contained in this rebuke of excess, and over-emphasis, and self-indulgence? And Sainte-Beuve when he wrote the words was just twenty-three, was in the first ardour of his attachment to the giant--the Cyclops, he seemed to Sainte-Beuve later--of the century.

But after all, it is not the elusive seeker of these years that we think of when Sainte-Beuve is named, nor the author of those many volumes,--the _Portraits_, the _Chateaubriand_, even the _Port-Royal_,--but the writer of the incomparable _Lundis_. In 1849 he had returned from Liege after lecturing for a year at the University, and found himself abounding in ideas, keen for work, and without regular employment. He was asked to contribute a critical essay to the _Const.i.tutionnel_ each Monday, and accepted the offer eagerly. "It is now twenty-five years," he said, "since I started in this career; it is the third form in which I have been brought to give out my impressions and literary judgments." These first _Causeries_ continued until 1860, and are published in fourteen solid volumes. There was a brief respite then, and in 1861 he began the _Nouveaux Lundis_, which continued in the _Moniteur_ and the _Temps_ until his last illness in 1869, filling thirteen similar volumes. Meanwhile his mother had died, leaving him a house in Paris and a small income, and in 1865 he had been created a senator by Napoleon III. at the instigation of the Princesse Mathilde.

In his earlier years he had been poor and anxious, living in a student's room, and toiling indefatigably to keep the wolf from the door. At the end he was rich, and had command of his time, yet the story of his labours while writing the latest _Lundis_ is one of the heroic examples of literature. "Every Tuesday morning," he once wrote to a friend, "I go down to the bottom of a pit, not to reascend until Friday evening at some unknown hour." Those were the days of preparation and plotting.

From his friend M. Cheron, who was librarian of the Bibliotheque Imperiale, came memoirs and histories and ma.n.u.scripts,--whatever might serve him in getting up his subject. Late in the week he wrote a rough draft of the essay, commonly about six thousand words long, in a hand which no one but himself could decipher. This task was ordinarily finished in a single day, and the essay was then dictated off rapidly to a secretary to take down in a fair copy. That must have been a strenuous season for the copyist, for Sainte-Beuve read at a prodigious rate, showing impatience at any delay, and still greater impatience at any proposed alteration. Indeed, during the whole week of preparation he was so absorbed in his theme as to ruffle up at the slightest opposition.

In the evening he would eat a hearty dinner, and then walk out with his secretary to the outer Boulevards, the Luxembourg, or the Place Saint-Sulpice, for his digestion, talking all the while on the coming _Lundi_ with intense absorption. And woe to the poor companion if he expressed any contradiction, or hinted that the subject was trivial,--as indeed it often was, until the critic had clothed it with the life of his own thought. "In a word," Sainte-Beuve would cry out savagely, "you wish to hinder me in writing my article. The subject has not the honour of your sympathy. Really it is too bad." Whereupon he would turn angrily on his heel and stride home. The story explains the nature of Sainte-Beuve's criticism. For a week he lived with his author; "he belonged body and soul to his model! He embraced it, espoused it, exalted it!"--with the result that some of this enthusiasm is transmitted to the reader, and the essays are instinct with life as no other critic's work has ever been. The strain of living thus pa.s.sionately in a new subject week after week was tremendous, and it is not strange that his letters are filled with complaints of fatigue, and that his health suffered in spite of his robust const.i.tution. Nor was the task ended with the dictation late Friday night. Most of Sat.u.r.day and Sunday was given up to proofreading, and at this time he invited every suggestion, even contradiction, often practically rewriting an essay before it reached the press. Monday he was free, and it was on that day occurred the famous Magny dinners, when Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Renan, the Goncourts, and a few other chosen spirits, met and talked as only Frenchmen can talk. Every conceivable subject was pa.s.sed under the fire of criticism; nothing was held sacred. Only one day a luckless guest, after faith in religion and politics and morals had been laughed away, ventured to intimate that Homer as a canon of taste was merely a superst.i.tion like another; whereupon such a hubbub arose as threatened to bring the dinners to an end at once and for all. The story is told in the _Journal_ of the Goncourts, and it was one of the brothers, I believe, who made the perilous insinuation. Imagine, if you can, a party of Englishmen taking Homer, or any other question of literary faith, with tragic seriousness. Such an incident explains many things; it explains why English literature has never been, like the French, an integral part of the national life.

And the integrity of mind displayed in the _Lundis_ is as notable as the industry. From the beginning Sainte-Beuve had possessed that inquisitive pa.s.sion for the truth, without which all other critical gifts are as bra.s.s and tinkling cymbals. Nevertheless, it is evident that he did not always in his earlier writings find it expedient to express his whole thought. He was, for example, at one time the recognised herald of the romantic revolt, and naturally, while writing about Victor Hugo, he did not feel it necessary to make in public such frank reservations as his letters to that poet contain. His whole thought is there, perhaps, but one has to read between the lines to get it. And so it was with the other men and movements with which he for a while allied himself. With the _Lundis_ came a change; he was free of all entanglements, and could make the precise truth his single aim. No doubt a remnant of personal jealousy toward those who had pa.s.sed him in the race of popularity embittered the critical reservations which he felt, but which might otherwise have been uttered more genially. But quite as often this seeming rancour was due to the feeling that he had hitherto been compelled to suppress his full convictions, to a genuine regret for the corrupt ways into which French literature was deviating. How nearly the exigencies of a hack writer had touched him is shown by a pa.s.sage in a letter to the Oliviers written in 1838. His Swiss friend was debating whether he should try his fortunes in Paris as a contributor to the magazines, and had asked for advice. "But where to write? what to write?" replied Sainte-Beuve; "if one could only choose for himself! You must wait on opportunity, and in the long run this becomes a transaction in which conscience may be saved, but every ideal perishes,"--_dans laquelle la conscience peut toujours etre sauve mais ou tout ideal perit._ Just about this time he was thinking seriously of migrating with the Oliviers to this country. It would be curious to hear what he might have written from New York to one who contemplated coming there as a hack writer. As for the loss of ideals, his meaning, if it needs any elucidation, may be gathered from a well-known pa.s.sage in one of his books:

The condition of man ordinarily is no more than a succession of servitudes, and the only liberty that remains is now and then to effect a change. Labour presses, necessity commands, circ.u.mstances sweep us along: at the risk of seeming to contradict ourselves or give ourselves the lie, we must go on and for ever recommence; we must accept whatever employments are offered, and even though we fill them with all conscientiousness and zeal we raise a dust on the way, we obscure the images of the past, we soil and mar our own selves. And so it is that before the goal of old age is reached, we have pa.s.sed through so many lives that scarcely, as we go back in memory, can we tell which was our true life, that for which we were made and of which we were worthy, the life which we would have chosen.

Those were the words with which he had closed his chapters on _Chateaubriand_; yet through all his deviations he had borne steadily toward one point. In after years he could write without presumption to a friend: "If I had a device, it would be the _true_, the _true_ alone; and the beautiful and the good might come out as best they could." There are a number of anecdotes which show how precious he held this integrity of mind. The best known is the fact that, in the days before he was appointed senator, and despite the pressure that was brought to bear on him, he still refused to write a review of the Emperor's _History of Caesar_.

Both the sense of disillusion, which was really inherent in him from his youth, and the pa.s.sion for truth hindered him in his "creative" work, while they increased his powers as a critic. He grew up, it must be remembered, in the midst of the full romantic tide, and as a writer of verse there was really no path of great achievement open to him save that of Victor Hugo and Lamartine and the others of whose glory he was so jealous. Whatever may have been the differences of those poets, in one respect they were alike: they all disregarded the subtle _nuance_ wherein the truth resides, and based their emotions on some grandiose conception, half true and half false; nor was this mingling of the false and true any less predominant in one of Hugo's political odes than in Lamartine's personal and religious meditations. Now, the whole bent of Sainte-Beuve's intellect was toward the subtle drawing of distinctions, and even to-day a reader somewhat romantically and emotionally inclined resents the manner in which his scalpel cuts into the work of these poets and severs what is morbid from what is sound. That is criticism; but it may easily be seen that such a habit of mind when carried to excess would paralyse the poetic impulse. The finest poetry, perhaps, is written when this discriminating principle works in the writer strongly but unconsciously; when a certain critical atmosphere about him controls his taste, while not compelling him to dull the edge of impulse by too much deliberation. Boileau had created such an atmosphere about Moliere and Racine; Sainte-Beuve had attempted, but unsuccessfully, to do the same for the poets of the romantic renaissance. His failure was due in part to a certain lack of impressiveness in his own personality, but still more to the notions of individual licence which lay at the very foundation of that movement. There is a touch of real pathos in his superb tribute to Boileau:

Let us salute and acknowledge to-day the n.o.ble and mighty harmony of the _grand siecle_. Without Boileau, and without Louis XIV., who recognised Boileau as his Superintendent of Parna.s.sus, what would have happened? Would even the most talented have produced in the same degree what forms their surest heritage of glory? Racine, I fear, would have made more plays like _Berenice_; La Fontaine fewer _Fables_ and more _Contes_; Moliere himself would have run to _Scapins_, and might not have attained to the austere eminence of _Le Misanthrope_. In a word, each of these fair geniuses would have abounded in his natural defects. Boileau, that is to say, the common sense of the poet-critic authorised and confirmed by that of a great king, constrained them and kept them, by the respect for his presence, to their better and graver tasks. And do you know what, in our days, has failed our poets, so strong at their beginning in native ability, so filled with promise and happy inspiration? There failed them a Boileau and an enlightened monarch, the twain supporting and consecrating each other. So it is these men of talent, seeing themselves in an age of anarchy and without discipline, have not hesitated to behave accordingly; they have behaved, to be perfectly frank, not like exalted geniuses, or even like men, but like schoolboys out of school. We have seen the result.

n.o.bler tribute to a great predecessor has not often been uttered, and in contrast one remembers the outrage that has been poured on Boileau's name by the later poets of France and England. One recalls the scorn of the young Keats, in those days when he took licence upon himself to abuse the King's English as only a wilful genius can:

Ill-fated, impious race!

That blasphemed the bright Lyrist face to face, And did not know it,--no, they went about, Holding a poor decrepit standard out Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large The name of one Boileau!

I am not one to fling abuse on the school of Dryden and Pope, yet the eighteenth century may to some minds justify the charge of Keats and the romanticists. Certainly the critical restraint of French rules, pa.s.sing to England at a time when the tide of inspiration had run low, induced a certain aridity of manner. But consider for a moment what might have been the result in English letters if the court of Elizabeth had harboured a man of authority such as Boileau, or, to put it the other way, if the large inspiration of those poets and playwrights had not come before the critical sense of the land was out of its swaddling clothes. What might it have been for us if a Boileau and an Elizabeth together had taught Shakespeare to prune his redundancies, to disentangle his language at times, to eliminate the relics of barbarism in his denouements; if they had compelled the lesser dramatists to simplify their plots and render their characters conceivable moral agents; if they had instructed the sonneteers in common sense and in the laws of the sonnet; if they had constrained Spenser to tell a story,--consider what this might have meant, not only to the writers of that day, but to the tradition they formed for those that were to come after. We should have had our own cla.s.sics, and not been forced to turn to Athens for our canons of taste. There would not have been for our confusion the miserable contrast between the "correctness" of Queen Anne's day and the creative genius of Elizabeth's, but the two together would have made a literature incomparable for richness and judgment. It is not too much to say that the absence of such a controlling influence at the great expansive moment of England is a loss for which nothing can ever entirely compensate in our literature.

Such was the office which Sainte-Beuve sought to fulfil in the France of his own day. That conscious principle of restraint might, he thought, when applied to his own poetical work, introduce into French literature a style like that of Cowper's or Wordsworth's in England; and to a certain extent he was successful in this attempt. But in the end he found the Democritean maxim too strong for him: _Excludit sanos Helicone poetas_; and, indeed, the difference between the poet and the critic may scarcely be better defined than in this, that in the former the principle of restraint works unconsciously and from without, whereas in the latter it proceeds consciously and from within. And finding himself debarred from Helicon (not by impotence, as some would say, but by excess of self-knowledge), he deliberately undertook to introduce a little more sanity into the notions of his contemporaries. I have shown how at the very beginning of his career he took upon himself privately such a task with Hugo. It might almost be said that the history of his intellect is summed up in his growth toward the sane and the simple; that, like Goethe, from whom so much of his critical method derives, his life was a long endeavour to supplant the romantic elements of his taste by the cla.s.sical. What else is the meaning of his attack on the excesses of Balzac? or his defence of Erasmus (_le droit, je ne dis des tiedes, mais des neutres_), and of all those others who sought for themselves a governance in the law of proportion? In one of his latest volumes he took the occasion of Taine's _History of English Literature_ to speak out strongly for the admirable qualities of Pope:

I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sacrifice of the writers and poets whom I will call the moderate. For a long time they had all the honours: one pleaded for Shakespeare, for Milton, for Dante, even for Homer; no one thought it necessary to plead for Virgil, for Horace, for Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope, Ta.s.so,--these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the first have completely gained their cause, and matters are quite the other way about: the great and primitive geniuses reign and triumph; even those who come after them in invention, but are still nave and original in thought and expression, poets such as Regnier and Lucretius, are raised to their proper rank; while the moderate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the cla.s.sics to our fathers, we tend to make subordinate, and, if we are not careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. Something like disdain and contempt (relatively speaking) will soon be their portion. It seems to me that there is room for all, and that none need be sacrificed. Let us render full homage and complete reverence to those great human forces which are like the powers of nature, and which like them burst forth with something of strangeness and harshness; but still let us not cease to honour those other forces which are more restrained, and which, in their less explosive expression, clothe themselves with elegance and sweetness.

And this love of the golden mean, joined with the long wanderings of his heart and his loneliness, produced in him a preference for scenes near at hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So it was that the idyllic tales of George Sand touched him quickly with their strange romance of the familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that school had sought out the nature of India, the savannahs of America, the forests of Canada.

"Here," he says, "are discoveries for you,--deserts, mountains, the large horizons of Italy; what remained to discover? That which was nearest to us, here in the centre of our own France. As happens always, what is most simple comes at the last." In the same way he praised the refined charm of a poet like Cowper, and sought to throw into relief the purer and more homely verses of a Parny: "If a little knowledge removes us, yet greater knowledge brings us back to the sentiment of the beauties and graces of the hearth." Indeed, there is something almost pathetic in the contrast between the life of this laborious recluse, with his sinister distrust of human nature, and the way in which he fondles this image of a sheltered and affectionate home.

But the nineteenth century was not the seventeenth, neither was Sainte-Beuve a Boileau, to stem the current of exaggeration and egotism.

His innate sense of proportion brought him to see the dangerous tendencies of the day, and, failing to correct them, he sank deeper into that disillusion from which his weekly task was a long and vain labour of deliverance. He took to himself the saying of the Abbe Galiani: "Continue your works; it is a proof of attachment to life to compose books." Yet it may be that this very disillusion was one of the elements of his success; for after all, the real pa.s.sion of literature, that perfect flower of the contemplative intellect, hardly comes to a man until the allurement of life has been dispelled by many experiences, each bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps, when the hope of love (the _spes animi credula mutui_) and the visions of ambition, the belief in pleasure and the luxury of grief, have lost their sting, do we turn to books with the contented understanding that the shadow is the reality, and the seeming reality of things is the shadow. At least for the critic, however it may be for the "creative" writer, this final deliverance from self-deception would seem to be necessary. Nor do I mean any invidious distinction when I separate the critic from the creative writer in this respect. I know there is a kind of hostility between the two cla.s.ses. The poet feels that the critic by the very possession of this self-knowledge sets himself above the writer who accepts the inspiration of his emotions unquestioningly, while the critic resents the fact that the world at large looks upon his work as subordinate, if not superfluous. And yet, in the case of criticism, such as Sainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almost ceases to exist.

No stigma attaches to the work of the historian who recreates the political activities of an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vast bridge between the past and the present. Yet, certainly, the best and most durable acts of mankind are the ideals and emotions that go to make up its books, and to describe and judge the literature of a country, to pa.s.s under review a thousand systems and reveries, to point out the meaning of each, and so write the annals of the human spirit, to pluck out the heart of each man's mystery and set it before the mind's eye quivering with life,--if this be not a labour of immense creative energy the word has no sense to my ears. We read and enjoy, and the past slips unceasingly from our memory. We are like the foolish peasant: the river of history rolls at our feet, and for ever will roll, while we stand and wait. And then comes this magician, who speaks a word, and suddenly the current is stopped; who has power like the wizards of old to bid the tide turn back upon itself, and the past becomes to us as the present, and we are made the lords of time. I do not know how it affects others, but for me, as I look at the long row of volumes which hold the interpretation of French literature, I am almost overwhelmed at the magnitude of this man's achievement.

Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, because he was primarily a critic, drew his knowledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it were, at second hand. The very contrary is true. As a younger man, he had mixed much with society, and even in his later years, when, as he says, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still, through his friends.h.i.+p with the Princesse Mathilde and others of the great world, kept in close touch with the active forces of the Empire. As a matter of fact, every one knows, who has read at all in his essays, that he was first of all a psychologist, and that his knowledge of the human breast was quite as sure as his acquaintance with libraries. He might almost be accused of slighting the written word in order to get at the secret of the writer.

What attracted him chiefly was that middle ground where life and literature meet, where life becomes self-conscious through expression, and literature retains the reality of a.s.sociation with facts. "A little poesy," he thought, "separates us from history and the reality of things; much of poesy brings us back." Literature to him was one of the arts of society. Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch was never surer and his eloquence more communicable, than when he was dealing with the great ladies who guided the society of the eighteenth century and retold its events in their letters and memoirs,--Mme. du Deffand, Mme. de Grafigny, Mlle. de Lespina.s.se, and those who preceded and followed. Nowhere does one get closer to the critic's own disappointment than when he says with a sigh, thinking of those irrecoverable days: "Happy time! all of life then was turned to sociability." And he was describing his own method as a critic, no less than the character of Mlle. de Lespina.s.se, when he wrote: "Her great art in society, one of the secrets of her success, was to feel the intelligence _(l'esprit)_ of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to forget her own. Her conversation was never either above or below those with whom she spoke; she possessed measure, proportion, rightness of mind. She reflected so well the impressions of others, and received so visibly the influence of their intelligence, that they loved her for the success she helped them to attain. She raised this disposition to an art. 'Ah!' she cried one day, 'how I long to know the foible of every one!'" And this love of the social side of literature, this hankering after _la bella scuola_ when men wrote under the sway of some central governance, explains Sainte-Beuve's feeling of desolation amidst the scattered, individualistic tendencies of his own day.

There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's critical art,--his treatment of literature as a function of social life, and his search in all things for the golden mean. There we find his strength, and there, too, his limitation. If he fails anywhere, it is when he comes into the presence of those great and imperious souls who stand apart from the common concerns of men, and who rise above our homely mediocrities, not by extravagance or egotism, but by the lifting wings of inspiration. He could, indeed, comprehend the ascetic grandeur of a Pascal or the rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, but he was distrustful of that fervid breath of poesy that comes and goes unsummoned and uncontrolled. It is a common charge against him that he was cold to the sublime, and he himself was aware of this defect, and sought to justify it. "Il ne faut donner dans le sublime," he said, "qu'a la derniere extremite et a son corps defendant." Something of this, too, must be held to account for the haunting melancholy that he could forget, but never overcome. He might have lived with a kind of content in the society of those refined and worldly women of the eighteenth century, but, missing the solace of that support, he was unable amid the dissipated energies of his own age to rise to that surer peace that needs no communion with others for its fulfilment. Like the royal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the highest degree of culture, which is religion. He strove for that during many years, but alone he could not attain to it. As early as 1839 he wrote, while staying at Aigues-Mortes: "My soul is like this beach, where it is said Saint Louis embarked: the sea and faith, alas! have long since drawn away." One may excuse these limitations as the "defect of his quality," as indeed they are. But more than that, they belong to him as a French critic, as they are to a certain degree inherent in French literature. That literature and language, we have been told by no less an authority than M. Brunetiere, are pre-eminently social in their strength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuve was indirectly justifying his own method when he pointed to the example of Voltaire, Moliere, La Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the great ancestors. "They have all,"

he said, "a corner from which they mock at the sublime." I am even inclined to think that these qualities explain why England has never had, and may possibly never have, a critic in any way comparable to Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glory of English literature lies in the very field where French is weakest, in the lonely and unsociable life of the spirit, just as the faults of English are due to its lack of discipline and uncertainty of taste. And after all, the critical temperament consists primarily in just this linking together of literature and life, and in the levelling application of common sense.

Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, indeed almost inconceivable in English, he is still immensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable, to us for that very reason. There is nothing more wholesome than to dip into this strong and steady current of wise judgment. It is good for us to catch the glow of his masterful knowledge of letters and his faith in their supreme interest. His long row of volumes are the scholar's Summa Theologiae. As John Cotton loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve, sure of his never-failing abundance and his ripe intelligence.

THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH HISTORY