BOOKS.

CELEBRATED WOMEN.*

WE can understand these essays being peculiarly attractive to a lady translator, and they are in some sense characteristic of the talent of their author. Many of those little finesses of thought and language at which all French critics aim, but which M. Sainte-Beuve most often reaches, are scattered over the volume. Of the nine women sketched in it three at least have a European • Portraits of Celthraled 1Vomen, By C. A. Sainte-Beuve. Translated from the French by II. W. Preston. London : Low, Soo, and Marston. reputation, and foreigners will be glad to make an acquaintance with the rest, or to complete it if it is begun already. We do not think anything more need be said to give the book a claim to favourable consideration. Yet we think Miss Preston might have been happier in her choice of a subject for translation, and we are sure that M. Sainte-Beuve, though he probably had no choice, might have been more fortunate in his translator. Without taking the trouble to go through Miss Preston's version with the original at our side, we can detect many self-evident inaccuracies. We find Lae translated " brutish " instead of "stupid," and " inedited "standing for "uu-

published." Such words as "tentation," and such phrases as "aside from" instead of "apart from may possibly be correct as Ameri- canisms, but do not add to the elegance of our language. It is impossible to think that we have a clear and logical French writer before us when we read of "an idea which, though incorrect, is so conformable to a widespread prejudice that we feel bound to correct it." M. Sainte-Beuve may well ask his translator how anything which is incorrect can be corrected, and may hint that Miss Preston knows the nature of what is incorrect so thoroughly that she cannot fail to give a satisfactory reason. Perhaps he will refer her to his delicious note on Madame de Kriidener's language, and remind her that carelessness in style is only tolerated in the case of a seer and a divine instrument.

When we say that Miss Preston might have been happier in her choice of a subject, we are not thinking solely of her confessed incapacity to reproduce "the consummate finish of the original style" and the felicities of M. Sainte-Beuve's manner. Even if she had confined herself to this author she might have found works which were better suited for translation. His strength and weakness alike require that his essays should not be read without previous knowledge of their subjects. When their subject is new to us he does not tell us enough. His allusions are often so subtle that we are apt to glide over them as over smooth ice, not seeing what lies below. His whole process of portraiture is of the same character. We may say that he is not a portrait painter like the

old masters, who bring out a whole history in a face, and stamp both indelibly on the memory. But give him a photograph,

where the features and the outlines are marked already, and he

colours it into the very semblance of life. The skilful touches that he lays on one after another almost produce an illusion. He plays round his subject with the grace of summer lightning, but he never reveals anything with one terrible flash. The result is that

he brings known people close to us, while the unknown remain at their former distance. 'Where we feel curiosity we are gratified.

But we are never forced to be curious. We never take up an essay with the question, "Who was this woman ?" and lay it down with a feeling that we know all about her. Such a writer as M. Sainte-Beuve cannot fail to interest us for the time in each of his subjects. Still more do we admire the delicacy of his appreciation and the fine edge of his judgment. But, after all, what have we learnt from such a display of "supreme qualifications as a critic " ? Simply that M. Sainte-

Beuve possesses those supreme qualifications, and that he has exercised them on the lives and works of certain people who are

not well known to us. It may be said that if these people are not known to us, and if we do not care to know them, we are not worthy to read M. Sainte-Beuve. If we do not appreciate him for their sake, we ought to appreciate him for his own. But it is just because we appreciate him for his own sake that we wish to have him always at his best. We do not imply that a razor is blent when we refuse to cut blocks with it.

The essays in this book on Madame de Se'vigmi, MadameRoland, and Madame de Staid come up fully to our requirements. In the other

essays we look more for M. Sainte-Beuve's general reflections than for those which bear directly upon the subject. As most illustrative of his delicate touch, and as throwing most light on the character- istics of his talent, some few incidental remarks may well be separated from their context. A book devoted to celebrated women must necessarily contain much about lady novelists. What will their husbands say to this ?—" Your husband gave you a name, a position, and a suitable and sufficient maintenance. He desired nothing more, and beyond that point no mention was made of him in the life of a celebrated woman. At most, one caught his profile or the outline of his back in some nook of her next romance." A few still happier touches put the novels of Madame .de in Fayette in such a light that it would be superfluous to read them :—

"Zayde occupies a kind of mean between L'Astree and the tales of the Abbe Prevost; it is the connecting link between the two. In both we find sudden and extraordinary passions, incredible personal likenesses, prolonged misunderstandings fruitful in adventure, resolutions formed on the glimpse of a portrait or a bracelet. Unhappy lovers fly the Court , for horrible deserts, where they endure absolute want. They pass the after-dinner hour's in the woods, telling tho rocks the particulars of their martyrdom, and then re-enter the galleries of their mansions adorned with all manner of paintings. On the sea-shore they come unexpectedly upon unhappy princesses, stretched out, apparently lifeless, who have escaped shipwreck, in magnificent clothes, and who inspire them with love as soon as ever they languidly open their eyes. Shipwrecks, deserts, tumbles into the sea, and raptures abound. All is more or less in the style of the old romance of Heliodorus and D'Urfe,—the Spanish roma:league, the style of Cervantes. Madame de Is Fayette's special originality lies in the extreme delicacy of her analysis, and her introduc- tion of the tender sentiments in their utmost subtlety and complexity. Alpbonso's jealousy, which appears so improbable to the contemporary mind, and which Segrais assures us was drawn from the life, but softened rather than exaggerated, is delineated in the height of its irrationality, and followed through its deepest labyrinthine windings. Here we see marks of genius, there traces of acute observation. A fine passage, which has been qualified as admirable by D'Alembert, is the one where the two lovers, who had parted one short month before ignorant of one another's language, meet unexpectedly, approach, and speak each in the other's tongue, which has been acquired in the interval, and then stop short, blushing at the mutual confession."

The criticism of novels in the form of letters is too good to be omitted, though Miss Preston's translation is more stiff and bald than usual :—

" One of the disadvantages of a novel in the form of letters is that the personages are obliged at the very outset to assume a tone too entirely in harmony with their supposed characters. In the first letter of Mathilde, her stern, hard character must needs be outlined ; and there she is, in all her devout rigidity. For fear, however' of a possible mis- understanding, Delphine, in her reply, speaks of that ascetic rule of life, needful, perhaps, to a nature less mild. Now, such things are not spoken or written all at once between people used to the world, like Dolphin° and Mathilde. Leonce, in his first letter to M. Barton, expatiates at length on that prejudice inferrer of honour, which is his distinctive trait. But in real life personal characteristics are revealed by circumstances, gradually and successively, and the opposite fashion imparts to the most entertaining romance an air of mannerism and conventionality. So in the Nouvelle Heloise, all the letters of Claire d'Orbe are rigorously sprightly and playful. Humour is in order from the very Snit line. In a word, the characters in an epistolary romance, from the moment they assume the pen, are always studying to present to the reader their most expressive attitudes and significant profiles, and unless one give himself full scope, and is as deliberate and diffuse as the author of Clarissa Harlowe, the resultant groups are slightly stiff and classical."

We can take no account of M. Sainte-Beuve's infinity of small finesses, such as his comparison of the regular strokes of the guillotine beard from the terraces of Coppet tosthe muffled sound of oars on the lake, and his allusion to Talleyrand's "ingenious portrait of Clary, traced by a hand—/ was going to say a claw— familiar indeed, though seldom engaged in work like this." Of the higher kind of criticism, that which is not only acute in its analysis, but has a direct bearing on the subject, we have an admirable instance in the contrast presented between Madame de Sta61 and Madame Roland. Here M. Sainte-Beuve seems to have put himself on his mettle. In most of his essays he shows us what he can do in personal portraiture, as, for example, when he sketches the appearance of Madame de Kriidener at the grand review of the Russian troops before the Emperor Alexander :— "Bareheaded,—save for a straw hat, which she laid aside at pleasure, her fair hair parted and falling over her shoulders, with a few stray earls gathered up and fastened in the middle of her forehead, clad in a long, dark robe, confined, after the fashion of the day, by a simple girdle, and rendered elegant by her manner of wearing it,—such was the aspect of our heroine on this occasion ; so she arrived on the plain at dawn ; and standing upright while prayer was offered, she confronted the prostrate troops like a new Peter the Hermit."

But the juxtaposition of Madame de Staid and Madame Roland is of a much higher order. The two women are contrasted from so many points of view, the peculiarities of both are so clearly kept in sight, and each one is looked at with such an exclusive regard to her own characteristics, and yet with such an ever present reference to the characteristics of the other, that we seem to assist at that great trial of skill between painter and sculptor which is mentioned in the life of Giorgioue. Most readers, we hope, will remember how Giorgione answered the common objection made against painting, that it could only give one side of a figure. By painting a figure which was reflected partly in a running stream and partly in a mirror, be gave all sides at once, and sculpture had to own itself defeated. It is of this story that we are reminded when M. Sainte-Beuve, not content with painting Madame Roland, reflects her in Madame de Staid. We are sorry that the passage is too long for quotation. But we have given samples enough of M. Sainte-Beuve's style, and it is not our object to avoid exciting the curiosity of our readers. We think we have shown them what they may expect to find in these essays. It is always well to leave some of the best parts of a book for the public itself to dis- cover, pointing out, if need be,-where they are to be found, but not severing them from that of which they are the chief ornaments.