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 Montparnasse
(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 he was nominated to the chair of Latin
poetry at the college of France. His first lecture there (in 1855)
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 Gustave 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 when
at last in April 1865 he was made senator, his health was 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 Ernest 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 the Moniteur at the beginning of 1869, and contributing
to a Liberal journal, the Temps.[1] His literary activity suffered
little abatement, but pain made him at last unable to sit to
write; he could only stand or lie. He died in his house in the
Rue Montparnasse on the 13th of October 1869.
The work of Sainte-Beuve divides itself into three portions—his poetry, his criticism before 1848 and his criticism after that year. is 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, the radical inadequacy of French poetry. 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.”
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, 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 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.” 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, Pierre Daunou and Charles Claude 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, is 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 certain 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.” But the article next
- ↑ This course of action definitely separated him from the Bonapartists and led to a quarrel with Princess Mathilde.—[Ed.]
