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Readers now approaching M. Sainte-Beuve for the first time, would hardly surmise that he was, in times past, a devout adherent to the Romantic school. Once he espoused its cause, expounded its beauties, and defended its teachers. But with years that bring the philosophic mind, and that also, be it added, chill the fires and tame the hey-day blood of youth, he has been changed into a veteran of another creed, bound by other canons of taste, and sound in quite other articles of faith. Without venturing to discuss the limitless controversy suggested by such change, involving as it does so manifold an appeal to criticism in its principles, and to the illustrations of French literature at large, we shall content ourselves, at this present, with a cordial expression of interest in M. Sainte-Beuve as one of the most accomplished, graceful, refined, and withal instructive of French critics. And hereby we invite attention to his "Causeries du Lundi,"[1] of which six volumes have now appeared,—reprinted from die pages of the Constitutionnel, where this Monday chit-chat, as he modestly phrases it, has long attracted, and still continues to attract, an extended and well-merited notice. The "Causeries" are, indeed, tolerably known in England; and, where known, are highly relished. We may hope, however, to introduce them to some at least who, with the certainty of relishing, happen as yet not to know them. For their author's privilege it is to
Charm with graceful negligence,
And without method talk us into sense;
And, like a friend, familiarly convey
The truest notions in the easiest way.
Literary portrait-painting has long been a favourite and flourishing art in France. A host of names renowned in the art might be adduced: suffice it to allude to Mdlle. de Scudéry, in her "precious " romances; to Bussy Rabutin (the Sévigné's " most devoted"), pronounced inimitable in the easy grace and originality of his pencil; to Mdme. de Sévigné herself; to La Grande Mademoiselle (Henrietta of Orleans); to the Abbé de Choisy, and Mdme. de Caylus, and Saint Simon, and La Bruyère, and Vauvenargues, and Fontenelle, and successors innumerable, small and great. The France of our own day teems with artists similar in kind, and sometimes vastly dissimilar in degree. Of these, many may surpass M. Sainte-Beuve in boldness, vivid effect, and intensity of colouring. Beside the studies of not a few contemporaries, his own have a pale, sober, almost chilly tint: and admirers of the exaggerated and the pretentious will complain of a comparative absence, in his designs, of glare and glitter, and of those dashing appliances by which adventurous sketehers pander to a popular greed for something ultra. His style, on the contrary, is quiet, mellow, strict, and carefully toned down. Common taste will probably vote it common-place. It eschews meretricious arts; it is true to a self-imposed law of self-restraint Causeur though, he be by profession, M. Sainte-Beuve's causeries have a method, a system, a principle of limitation: the chat
- ↑ Causeries du Lundi, par C. A. Sainte-Beuve, de l'Académie Française.Deuxième édition. Paris: Garnier Frères. 1853.
