BOOKS.
SAINTE-BEUVE'S LAST VOLUME.*
Os the day following Sainte-Beuve's death was published the eleventh volume of the Nouveaux Lundis, containing the last critical papers we shall ever have from that wonderful pen. It is sad to look upon the familiar type and title-page (there are twenty- six volumes in all, including the two series), and to know that the list breaks off, and that neither in the columns of the news- paper nor in collected pages will Sainte-Beuve speak to us again. If he was the prince of critics, it was because he was the most extraordinarily sympathetic intelligence which the world of literature ever produced. When he took a book in hand, it was to possess himself of its spirit, and of all that was best in it. Inferior works he did not touch ; nor did he dissect, approve, or condemn in our English sense of criticism. He seized the purport of each work, and expressed its juice into the cup which he offered to his weekly readers ; but he did much more than this. He added from the stores of his own immense reading all sorts of supple- mentary matter, and if it was an historical or biographical subject of which he treated, he had almost always fresh details to give which were frequently bestowed upon him from private sources.
This final book contains fourteen papers, of which the principal are the analysis of the Memoires du Comte Beugnot, of the very curious work lately published on Maurice de Saxe (George Sand's great-grandfather), and, above all in interest, of the Correspond- ance of De la Mennais. Among the other eleven, historical in character for the most part, we note a paper on M. Benoist's edition of Virgil, and another on French orthography and the Dictionnaire de Usage.
Beugnot, whose active life extended from the last years of Louis XVI. to the first of the Restoration ; and who was prefet of Lille under Napoleon in 1814, had the luck to find favour during every regime; M. de Talleyrand, knowing his man, fixed upon him for public service during the interregnum preceding the formal abdication of Napoleon. The pliant minister gives lively and mocking descriptions of the scenes which took place in the Hotel de Talleyrand, and at the Tuileries when Louis XVIII., fatigued with the routine of public business, to which he had never in his life been accustomed, looked upon the new man as "a robust workman who had served his apprenticeship under a bad master." At the second Restoration, after the Hundred Days, Beugnot was made Directeur-General des Postes, but it was not long before he was replaced, and he passed the rest of the Bourbon reigns somewhat neglected and discontented, and had to wait long for admission to the Chamber of Peers. He revenged himself by
• Nouveaux Landis. Tome Onzihme. Paris: Michel Lday.
writing of Talleyrand and others of his contemporaries in witty and biting terms, which will remain as an integral part of con- temporary literature. Such is the skeleton of Saint-Beuve's first paper. On Maurice de Saxe he has written one of those delight- ful chapters which are more relished in France than in England. All the living touches which paint the great captain are brought out, and the critic dwells not only on the warlike part of his career, but on the lively zeal with which Maurice pursued to a successful end the marriage of his niece, Marie Josephe de Saxe, with the widowed Dauphin de France. Anybody who cares for the gossip of a royal marriage under Louis XV. will find plenty of it in M. de Sainte-Beuve's paper on "Maurice de Saxe et la Dauphine." The critic loved the old splendour of the Court of France, just as he loved Port Royal and a hundred other circles and sets of people,—and, loving it, he contrived to bring it before his readers with all the vivacity of an eye-witness. To Marie Josephe he is particularly tender, lingering on her fresh Saxon: beauty and many fine qualities. Three of her sons became Kings of France, the last of their long-descended race, and she was the mother of Madame Elisabeth.
But the gem of the volume is the paper upon La Mennais. Here we come into the field of our own times, and of existing interests. Though La Mennais be dead, Montalembert, so inti- mately associated with him at one period, yet lives ; and the generation which possesses France is yet sensible of the in- fluence of the famous abbe ; the Freethinkers rejoice at his adhesion, and the Catholics lament over his fall. To Sainte- Beuve the selection of La Mennais' correspondence (lately published by his sister's son), appears to have come home with peculiar force ; for the two men were intimate in early years ; and at one time it seemed as if Sainte-Beuve was being drawn into the great Catholic reaction of forty years ago. Upon this state of. mind, evidenced by the tone of his earlier writings, La Mennais' defec- tion fell with a heavy disenchantment ; and at the time he wrote some sad and bitter words concerning the "dead bodies left lying in the roadside ditch" by La Mennais, as he went his way. Sainte-Beuve said in after times that he had never been really inclined to the Catholic Church ; that he had only thrown him- self into this sympathy, as into so many others, for the purpose of learning and testing all. But in religious matters such lines of distinction cut fine. Sainte-Beuve was young, and, influenced by a powerfully original nature ; and what he then wrote bore the stamp of a certain amount of conviction. Moreover, it is to be noted that, though he was undoubtedly a complete Freethinker in his later years, and gave distinct orders that he should be carried to his grave without any religious ceremony whatever, (orders punctually adhered to by his executors, who laid him in his grave with the simple words, "Adieu, Sainte-Beuve !") he yet retained to an extraordinary degree the power of intellectual comprehension of, and sympathy with ideas he did not share ; and that the rabid dissonances of a portion of the French Press found no echo in him.
To La Mennais' letters he therefore addresses himself with all the picturesque energy of his pen. Remarking at the commence- ment that the two volumes given to the world by M. Blaise (the nephew) have attracted too little attention in the French Press, he draws from them the very evident and most melancholy fact that La Mennais entered the priesthood unwillingly, drawn in by the unwise zeal of one of those saintly and simple natures which are wholly unfitted to comprehend passionate, uncertain tempera- ments such as his. The Abbe Carron, an emigrant priest, whose name was well known in England in the beginning of the century, was an ecclesiastic of the highest character and most touching benevolence. His labours for the poorer emigrants have given hint an historic name among the French clergy. He was in London during the Hundred Days, and there La Mennais fell in with him, being then thirty-three years old. The younger man was what he ever remained,—ardent, melancholy, and undisciplined ; despair- ing of life, despairing of European society, which he considered was going irremediably to the bad. He writes to his brother, the Abbe Jean, with whom he had long lived in retreat at La Ches- naie, in terms of such terrible misanthropy that one feels him to. have been hardly sane. "My soul," says he, "is used up. I feel it every day. I search for myself, and fail to find. But, once more, what does it matter? I oppose nothing, I consent to all. Let them do with the dead body what they will." Such was his morbid condition when he fell into the hands of the Abbe Carron, who, knowing La Mennais to be at times ardently devout, took that for the natural bent of his tem- perament, and led him into orders with an undoubting sim- plicity of which it is piteous to read. The greatest love existed
between the elder and the younger man. La Mennais thought that the Abbe Carron was an angel sent from heaven to calm his troubled mind. The abbe" loved him as a son, and wrote of " ce bien aime Feli " with an enthusiasm which must have cost him dear in after years. It should be added, in defence of the terrible mistake made not only by IL Carron, but by the Abbe Jean, that La Mennais had had six years previously a conviction that he was himself destined for the ministry, and had actually taken the pre- liminary but not irrevocable steps. His two friends and counsellors therefore, seeing him constantly tossed between fits of piety and the blackest disgust of life, and knowing that he also possessed the most brilliant genius, and was capable of profoundly influ- encing his fellow-men, were convinced that all he wanted was a settled sphere and the carrying-out of his youthful desires. To- gether they pushed him on, and the fatal final step was taken. La Mennais wrote to tell his brother that he had been ordained ; a step, says he, " qui tu'a prodigieusement coate ;" and three months after he pours out his misery to the Abbe Jean in a letter which makes the reader shudder. That he was always feeling thus during the succeeding twenty years passed in the ministry of the French Church is of course untrue. His famous "Essay upon Religious Indifference," which raised him to the highest rank as a Christian author, must have been written in one of his seasons of faith and warmth. Still he was a man in the wrong place. lie needed, as he himself said in after-life, "le grand air, le grand soleil" ; to have had "wife and children," and to have written as he listed. It is a question whether any Christian ministry, even among Protestants, with all the enjoyments of family life, would have been perman- ently possible to him. There was something insubordinate in the nature of his genius ; and when he had seized a new idea he wanted to be free to thunder it forth; and thereby save the world. Such is Sainte-Beuve's liteture of his famous contemporary ; in the Notes and Reflections appended to a new edition of one of his volumes he has been even more severe.
A word must be added upon these Notes and Reflections. Sainte-Beuve's critical papers are divided into two series,—the Causeries da Lundi, published by Messrs. Gamier, and the Nou- veaux Lundis, published by Michel Levy. Now, to Messrs. Gamier, Sainte-Beuve, some two years ago, gave a manuscript containing various private notes upon his contemporaries, dead and living, of the most intimate and frequently caustic sort, giving directions that they should not be published until after his death. By a mis- take of one of Messrs. Garniers' employ, this manuscript, making about 100 pages of print, got appended to a reprint of the eleventh volume of the Causeries. The public seized this nice little dish with avidity. The whole reprint sold off in a few days ; and Sainte-Beuve, seeing that it "took," rubbed his hands maliciously, and said that it was all for the best. But it must have been agree- able for Lamartine to find that De Vigny had said that Jocelyn was composed of "Isles of poesy drowned in an ocean of holy water " ! and to Guizot that Sainte-Beuve really thought him a writer of "elevated mediocrity," and to Madame de Swetchine's friends that she had inspired and shared a " grande passion" in her youth, of which M. de Fallow: don't say a word in his bio- graphy! Balzac, says he, knew better than any other man the corruption of his epoch ; and "ii etait mime homme a y ajouter." Villemain is hit very hard ; Thiers fares better ; but to Lamartine he returns again and again, and seldom pleasantly ; and of La Mennais he writes several bitter things, and much more bitter than in the formal article which we have just quoted at large. In fact, the articles, though true and profound, are naturally and decently varnished. The Notes and Reflections are unvarnished !
Of Sainte-Beuve's way of working many interesting hints have been given in the French papers. It is always worth while to know how a great quantity of intellectual labour has been accomplished. He early settled that his business was critical exposition, and he laid aside so-called original composition (in his youth be wrote some poetry, and a novel, Volupte), and did that splendidly. He was capable of prodigious continuity, and worked on week after week, month after month, year after year, as if he had been a hack, instead of a man of rare and peculiar genius. He did not always select new books for his weekly article, but would fre- quently take an excursion into the past, dig out some rare old biography, and repaint the outlines till they glowed with life and colour. All sorts of private notes and letters were lent him by the families and descendants of his subjects. Sainte-Beuve's study was a receptacle into which poured the gossip of two centuries and six or eight generations of men. From the time of Henry IV. to the present day, it may be safely said that he knew his country men and women as even contemporaries did not always know each other. He will tell you what a courtier said to a maid of honour in one of the double avenues of Manly, and contradict it by a I piece of scandal whispered in a cabinet de toilette at Versailles ; and he will tell you all about Madame du Deffand, or Madame de Stael, or Madame de Sevigne, which they never told about them- selves ; as for the men, their friends and lovers, they are turned inside out. There is one woman, who has been dead this many a day, and of whom nobody in England has ever heard since the reign of good Queen Anne. This was the German wife of the Duke of Orleans, brother to Louis XIV. Sainte-Beuve has taken the trouble to resuscitate her ; and lo ! she is a most interesting individual, and probably the only person who ever slammed the door in the face of the Grand Monarque. He has consecrated a whole paper to her, and if you read it you will know her as if she were your first cousin.
This was Sainte-Beuve's arrangement of his time. Monday, when his article appeared, was his fete, his reception, when he saw all his society. Tuesday found him at work, the door closed, and his table covered with piles of books, collected by ardent friends, who hunted them out of public and private libraries. 1Vednesday and Thursday he wrote on; Friday he dined out, and read his completed paper to one or two chosen critics. On Friday night it was printed ; and Saturday and Sunday were taken up with constant revision, lie was most minute in his corrections. This was his unvarying weekly routine. He did his best, and nothing but his best, and sat upon a secure throne, which bad novelists, and heavy historians, and second-rate poets came not near. lie was followed to his grave by nearly all his literary contemporaries, walking, men and women, in a great crowd together, who listened silently to his only requiem, "Adieu, Sainte-Beuve."
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