SAINTE-BEUVE, Charles Augustin (1804-1869), the most notable critic of our time, was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer on 23d December 1804. He was a posthumous child,—his father, a native of Picardy, and controller of town-dues at Boulogne, having married in this same year, at the age of fifty-two, and died before the birth of his son. The father was a man of literary tastes, and used to read, like his son, pencil in hand; his copy of the Elzevir edition of Virgil, covered with his notes, was in his son’s possession, and is mentioned by him in one of his poems. Sainte-Beuve’s mother was half English,—her father, a mariner of Boulogne, having married an Englishwoman. The little Charles Augustin was brought up by his mother, who never remarried, and an aunt, his father’s sister, who lived with her. They were poor, but the boy, having learnt all he could at his first school at Boulogne, persuaded his mother to send him, when he was near the age of fourteen, to finish his education at Paris. He boarded with a M. Landry, and had for a fellow-boarder and intimate friend Charles Neate, afterwards fellow of Oriel College and member of parliament for the city of Oxford. From M. Landry’s boarding-house he attended the classes, first of the Collége Charlemagne, and then of the Collège Bourbon, winning the head prize for history at the first, and for Latin verse at the second. In 1823 he began to study medicine, and continued the study with diligence and interest for nearly four years, attending lectures on anatomy and physiology and walking the hospitals. But meanwhile a Liberal newspaper, the Globe, was founded in 1827 by M. Dubois, one of Sainte-Beuve’s old teachers at the Collège Charlemagne. M. Dubois called to his aid his former pupil, who, now quitting the study of ...medicine, contributed historical and literary articles to the Globe, among them two, which attracted the notice of Goethe, on Victor Hugo’s Odes and Ballads. These articles led to a friendship with Victor Hugo and to Sainte-Beuve’s connexion with the romantic school of poets, a school never entirely suited to his nature. In the Globe appeared also his interesting articles on the French poetry of the l6th century, which in 1828 were collected and published in a volume, and followed by a second volume containing selections from Ronsard. In 1829 he made his first venture as a poet with the Pie, Poesies, et Pensées de Joseph Delorme. His own name did not appear; but Joseph Delorme, that “Werther in the shape of Jacobin and medical student,” as Guizot called him, was the Sainte-Beuve of those days himself. About the same time was founded the Revue de Paris, and Sainte-Beuve contributed the opening article, with Boileau for its subject. In 1830 came his second volume of poems, the Consolations, a work on which Sainte-Beuve looked back in later life with a special affection. To himself it marked and expressed, he said, that epoch of his life to which he could with most pleasure return, and at which he could like best that others should see him. But the critic in him grew to prevail more and more and pushed out the poet. In 1831 the Revue des Deux Mondes was founded in rivalry with the Revue de Paris, and from the first Sainte-Beuve was one of the most active and important contributors. He brought out his novel of Volupté in 1834, his third and last volume of poetry, the Pensées d'Août, in 1837.
He himself thought that the activity which he had in the meanwhile exercised as a critic, and the offence which in some quarters his criticism had given, were the cause of the less favourable reception which this volume received. He had long meditated a book on Port Royal. At the end of 1837 he quitted France, accepting an invitation from the academy of Lausanne, where in a series of lectures his work on Port Royal came into its first form of being. In the summer of the next year he returned to Paris to revise and give the final shape to his work, which, however, was not completed for twenty years. In 1840 M. Cousin, then minister of public instruction, appointed him one of the keepers of the Mazarin Library, an appointment which gave him rooms at the library, and, with the money earned by his pen, made him for the first time in his life easy in his circumstances, so that, as he afterwards used to say, he had to buy rare books in order to spend his income. A more important consequence of his easier circumstances was that he could study freely and largely. He returned to Greek, of which a French schoolboy brings from his lycée no great store. With a Greek teacher, M. Pantasides, he read and re-read the poets in the original, and thus acquired, not, perhaps, a philological scholar’s knowledge of them, but a genuine and invaluable acquaintance with them as literature. His activity in the Revue des Deux Mondes continued, and articles on Homer, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Meleager were fruits of his new Greek studies. He wrote also a very good article in 1844 on the Italian poet Leopardi; but in general his subjects were taken from the great literature which he knew best, that of his own country,—its literature both in the past and in the contemporary present. Seven volumes of “Portraits,” contributed to the Revue de Paris and the Revue des Deux Mondes, exhibit his work in the years from 1832 to 1848, a work constantly increasing in range and value. In 1844 he was elected to the French Academy as successor to Casimir Delavigne, and was received there at the beginning of 1845 by Victor Hugo.
From this settled and prosperous condition the revolution of February 1848 dislodged him. In March of that year was published an account of secret-service money distributed in the late reign, and Sainte-Beuve was put down as having received the sum of one hundred francs. The smallness of the sum would hardly seem to suggest corruption; it appears probable that the money was given to cure a smoky chimney in his room at the Mazarin Library, and was wrongly entered as secret-service money. But Sainte-Beuve, who piqued himself on his independence and on a punctilious delicacy in money matters, was indignant at the entry, and thought the proceedings of the minister of public instruction and his officials, when he demanded to have the matter sifted, tardy and equivocal. He resigned his post at the Mazarin and accepted an offer from the Belgian Government of a chair of French literature in the university of Liège. There he gave the series of lectures on Chateaubriand and his contemporaries which was afterwards (in 1861) published in two volumes. He liked Liège, and the Belgians would have been glad to keep him; but the attraction of Paris carried him back there in the autumn of 1849. Louis Napoleon was then president. Disturbance was ceasing; a time of settled government, which lasted twenty years and corresponds with the second stage of Sainte-Beuve’s literary activity, was beginning. Dr Véron, the editor of the Constitutionnel, proposed to him that he should supply that newspaper with a literary article for every Monday; and thus the Causeries du Lundi were started. They at once succeeded, and “gave the signal,” as Sainte-Beuve himself says with truth, “for the return of letters.” Sainte-Beuve now lived in the small house in the Rue Mont-Parnasse (No. 11) which he occupied for the remainder of his life, and where in 1850 his mother, from whom he seems to have inherited his good sense, tact, and finesse, died at the age of eighty-six. For three years he continued writing every Monday for the Constitutionnel; then he passed, with a similar engagement, to the Moniteur. In 1857 his Monday articles began to be published in volumes, and by 1862 formed a collection in fifteen volumes; they afterwards were resumed under the title of Nouveaux Lundis, which now make a collection of thirteen volumes more. In 1854 M. Fortoul nominated him to the chair of Latin poetry at the College of France. His first lecture there was received with interruptions and marks of disapprobation by many of the students, displeased at his adherence to the empire; at a second lecture the interruption was renewed. Sainte-Beuve had no taste for public speaking and lecturing; his frontis mollities, he said, unfitted him for it. He was not going to carry on a war with a party of turbulent students; he proposed to resign, and when the minister would not accept his resignation of his professorship he resigned its emoluments. The Étude sur Virgile, a volume published in 1857, contains what he had meant to be his first course of lectures. He was still a titular official of public instruction; and in 1858 his services were called for by M. Rouland, then minister of public instruction, as a lecturer (maître de conférences) on French literature at the École Normale Supérieure. This work he discharged with assiduity and success for four years. In 1859 he was made commander of the Legion of Honour, having twice previously to 1848 refused the cross. During the years of his official engagement his Monday contributions to the Moniteur had no longer been continuous; but in 1862 an arrangement was proposed by which he was to return to the Constitutionnel and again supply an article there every Monday. He consented, at the age of fifty-seven, to try this last pull, as he called it, this “dernier coup de collier”; he resigned his office at the École Normale and began the series of his Nouveaux Lundis. They show no falling off in vigour and resource from the Causeries. But the strain upon him of his weekly labour was great. “I am not a monsieur nor a gentleman,” he writes in 1864, “but a workman by the piece and by the hour.” “I look upon myself as a player forced to go on acting at an age when he ought to retire, and who can see no term to his engagement.” He had reason to hope for relief. Except himself, the foremost literary men in France had stood aloof from the empire and treated it with a hostility more or less bitter. He had not been hostile to it: he had accepted it with satisfaction, and had bestowed on its official journal, the Moniteur, the lustre of his literature. The prince Napoleon and the princess Mathilde were his warm friends. A senatorship was mentioned; its income of £1600 a year would give him opulence and freedom. But its coming was delayed, and the strain upon him continued for some time longer. When at last in April 1865 he was made senator, his health "was already seriously compromised. The disease of which he died, but of which the doctors did not ascertain the presence until his body was opened after his death—the stone—began to distress and disable him. He could seldom attend the meetings of the senate; the part he took there, however, on two famous occasions, when the nomination of M. Renan to the College of France came under discussion in 1867 and the law on the press in the year following, provoked the indignation of the great majority in that conservative assembly. It delighted, however, all who “belonged,” to use his own phrase, “to the diocese of free thought”; and he gave further pleasure in this diocese by leaving at the beginning of 1869 the Moniteur, injudiciously managed by the Government and M. Rouher, and contributing to a
Liberal journal, the Temps. His literary activity suffered little abatement, but the attacks of his malady, though borne with courage and cheerfulness, became more and more severe. Pain made him at last unable to sit to write; he could only stand or lie. He died in his house in the Rue Mont Parnasse on the 13th of October 1869. He had inherited an income of four thousand francs a year from his mother, and he left it six thousand; to the extent of eighty pounds a year and no further had literature and the senatorship enriched him. By his will he left directions that his funeral was to be without religious rites, quite simple, and with no speeches at the grave except a few words of thanks from one of his secretaries to those present. There was a great concourse; the Paris students, who had formerly interrupted him, came now to do honour to him as a Liberal and a champion of free thought—a senator they could not but admit—undeniably, alas, a senator, but oh, si peu! Yet his own account of himself is the best and truest,—an account which lays no stress on his Liberalism, no stress on his championship of free thought, but says simply: “Devoted to my profession as critic, I have tried to be more and more a good, and, if possible, an able workman.”
The work of Sainte-Beuve divides itself into three portions—his poetry, his criticism before 1848, and his criticism after that year. His novel of Volupté may properly go with his poetry.
We have seen his tender feeling for his poetry, and he always maintained that, when the “integrating molecule,” the foundation of him as a man of letters, was reached, it would be found to have a poetic character. And yet he declares, too, that it is never without a sort of surprise and confusion that he sees his verses detached from their context and quoted in public and in open day. They do not seem made for it, he says. This admirable critic knew, indeed, what a Frenchman may be pardoned for not willingly perceiving, and what even some Englishmen try to imagine that they do not perceive, the radical inadequacy of French poetry. For us it is extremely interesting to hear Sainte-Beuve on this point, since it is to English poetry that he resorts in order to find his term of comparison, and to award the praise which to French poetry he refuses. “Since you are fond of the poets,” he writes to a friend, “I should like to see you read and look for poets in another language, in English for instance. There you will find the most rich, the most dulcet, and the most new poetical literature. Our French poets are too soon read; they are too slight, too mixed, too corrupted for the most part, too poor in ideas even when they have the talent for strophe and line, to hold and occupy for long a serious mind.” And again: “If you knew English you would have treasures to draw upon. They have a poetical literature far superior to ours, and, above all, sounder, more full. Wordsworth is not translated; these things are not to be translated; you must go to the fountain-head for them. Let me give you this advice: learn English.”
But, even as French poetry, Sainte-Beuve’s poetry had faults of its own. Critics who found much in it to praise yet pronounced it a poetry “narrow, puny, and stifled,” and its style “slowly dragging and laborious.” Here we touch on a want which must no doubt be recognized in him, which he recognized in himself, and whereby he is separated from the spirits who succeed in uttering their most highly inspired note and in giving their full measure,—some want of flame, of breath, of pinion. Perhaps we may look for the cause in a confession of his own: “I have my weaknesses; they are those which gave to King Solomon his disgust with everything and his satiety with life. I may have regretted sometimes that I was thus extinguishing my fire, but I did not ever pervert my heart.” It is enough for us to take his confession that he extinguished or impaired his fire.
Yet his poetry is characterized by merits which make it readable still and readable by foreigners. So far as it exhibits the endeavour of the romantic school in France to enlarge the vocabulary of poetry and to give greater freedom and variety to the alexandrine, it has interest chiefly for readers of his own nation. But it exhibits more than this. 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 et 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. All his poetry has this stamp of direct dealing with common things, of plain unpretending reality and sincerity; and this stamp at that time made it, as Béranger said, “a kind of poetry absolutely new in France.” It found, therefore, with all its shortcomings, friends in men so diverse as Béranger, Lamartine, Jouffroy, Beyle. Whoever is interested in Sainte-Beuve should turn to it, and will be glad that he has done so.
It has been the fashion to disparage the criticism of the Critiques et Portraits Littéraires, the criticism anterior to 1848, and to sacrifice it, in fact, to the criticism posterior to that date. Sainte-Beuve has himself indicated what considerations ought to be present with us in reading the Critiques et Portraits, with what reserves we should read them. They are to be considered, he says, “rather as a dependency of the elegiac and romanesque part of my work than as express criticisms.” “The Revue des Deux Mondes,” he adds, which published them, was young in those days, “mixed a good deal of its wishes and its hopes with its criticism, sought to explain and to stimulate rather than to judge. The portraits there of contemporary poets and romance-writers can in general be considered, whether as respects the painter or as respects the models, as youthful portraits only; juvenis juvenem, pinxit." They have the copiousness and enthusiasm of youth; they have also its exuberance. He judged in later life Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, more coolly, judged them differently. But the Critiques et Portraits contain a number of articles on personages, other than contemporary French poets and romance-writers, which have much of the soundness of his later work, and, in addition, an abundance and fervour of their own which are not without their attraction. Many of these are delightful reading. The articles on the Greek poets and on Leopardi have been already mentioned. Those on Boileau, Molière, Daunou, and Fauriel, on Madame de la Fayette and Mademoiselle Aïssé, may be taken as samples of a whole group which will be found to support perfectly the test of reading, even after we have accustomed ourselves to the later work of the master. Nay, his soberness and tact show themselves even in this earlier stage of his criticism, and even in treating the objects of his too fervid youthful enthusiasm. A special object of this was Victor Hugo, and in the first article on him in the Portraits Contemporains we have certainly plenty of enthusiasm, plenty of exuberance. We have the epithets “adorable,” “sublime,” “supreme,” given to Victor Hugo’s poetry; we are told of “the majesty of its high and sombre philosophy.” All this is in the vein of Mr George Gilfillan. But the article next following this, and written only four years later, in 1835, is the article of a critic, and takes the points of objection, seizes the weak side of
Victor Hugo’s poetry, how much it has of what is “creux,” “sonore,” “artificiel,” “voulu,” “théâtral,” “violent,” as distinctly as the author of the Causeries could seize it. “The Frank, energetic and subtle, who has mastered to perfection the technical and rhetorical resources of the Latin literature of the decadence,” is a description never to be forgotten of Victor Hugo as a poet, and Sainte-Beuve launches it in this article, written when he was but thirty years old, and still a painter of “portraits de jeunesse” only.
He had thus been steadily working and growing; nevertheless, 1848 is an epoch which divides two critics in him of very unequal value. When, after that year of revolution and his stage of seclusion and labour at Liége, he came back to Paris in the autumn of 1849 and commenced in the Constitutionnel the Causeries du Lundi, he was astonishingly matured. Something of fervour, enthusiasm, poetry, he may have lost, but he had become a perfect critic—a critic of measure, not exuberant; of the centre, not provincial; of keen industry and curiosity, with “Truth” (the word engraved in English on his seal) for his motto; moreover, with gay and amiable temper, his manner as good as his matter,—the “critique souriant,” as, in...
