French Classics Part 32

As to religion, Sainte-Beuve, having had his phase of pietism even, ended by becoming a blank unbeliever. But his own antipathetic personal att.i.tude of intellect and of heart toward Christianity he would not in the least allow to disturb the urbanity and serenity of his tolerance for the most orthodox Christian writers. Such, at any rate, was his standard and ideal.

But at this point, as at all points, the complaisance of Sainte-Beuve's writing is a manner with him, rather than a spirit. It does not penetrate deeply. He loves his "insinuations." That is his own word. He is willing to write a whole essay in criticism for the sake of the "insinuations" which his deceitful blandness will sheathe. Or, rather, he would sooner give up the whole essay than forego a phrase, or perhaps a single word, containing his insinuation. It was partly his critical conscience, no doubt, instinctively nice about shades of opinion and of expression; but then a something very like malice was mingled with his critical conscience. With all that must be conceded to the value of Sainte-Beuve's critical work, readers are conscious, in concluding the perusal of almost any one of his essays, that the result to them is a sapor remaining on their literary palate, rather than substance of nutriment entered into their mental digestion. Their food has been refined into a flavor.

For our ill.u.s.tration of Sainte-Beuve, we go to a paper of his on Bossuet. But we need to prepare our readers. Sainte-Beuve is a writer for the few, instead of for the many. To profit from him requires some effort of attention. One must study a little, as well as simply read.

Sainte-Beuve does not deal in heavy strokes. His lines are most of them fine, many of them hair-lines vanis.h.i.+ng almost into invisibility. He escapes you like Proteus. Very different is he, by this elusive quality of his, from his countryman, M. Taine, whose bold crayon sketches are at once appreciable to all.

In the choice indicated of specimen, we draw from a series of short criticisms which the author called _Causeries du Lundi_; "Monday-Chats,"

Mr. William Matthews, who has a volume of select translations from them, not unhappily renders the t.i.tle. These were originally published as Monday articles in the columns of two Paris journals, the _Const.i.tutionel_ and the _Moniteur_. Mr. Matthews's volume is introduced by a most readable biographical sketch and literary appreciation of Sainte-Beuve himself from the pen of the translator. M. Sainte-Beuve, we ought to say, in addition to his very considerable body of criticism, ranging, as we have intimated, over a wide field of literature, wrote an extended historical monograph on Port Royal, which is constantly referred to by writers as an authority on its subject.

The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding traits:

The simple idea of order, of authority, of unity, of the continual government of Providence, Bossuet, among the moderns, has grasped more completely than any other man, and he applies it on all occasions without effort, and, as it were, by an irrefutable deduction. Bossuet is the Hebrew genius, expanded, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the gains of the human intelligence, but acknowledging something of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely at the point where its light ceases. In mien and in tone he resembles a Moses; there are mingled in his speech traits characteristic of the Prophet-King, touches of a pathos ardent and sublime; there sounds the voice eloquent by eminence, the simplest, the strongest, the most abrupt, the most familiar, the most suddenly outbursting in thunder. Even where he holds his course unbending, in an imperious flood, he bears along with him treasures of eternal human morality. And it is by all these qualities that he is for us a unique man, and that, whatever may be the employment he makes of his speech, he remains the model of eloquence the most exalted, and of language the most beautiful.

Sainte-Beuve is so much a critic that he cannot help criticising by the way, or even sometimes perhaps a little out of the way. But it will be quite to our purpose if we admit here what Sainte-Beuve incidentally says of Lamartine:

[Bossuet] was early distinguished for surprising gifts of memory and of understanding. He knew Virgil by heart, as, a little later, he knew Homer. "Less easy to understand is it," says M. de Lamartine, "_how he was infatuated all his life_ with the Latin poet, Horace, spirit exquisite, but the reverse of spontaneous and natural, who strings his lyre with only the softest fibers of the heart; a careless voluptuary," etc. M. de Lamartine, who has so well discerned the great features of the eloquence and of the talent of Bossuet, has studied a little too lightly his life, and he has here proposed to himself a difficulty which does not exist; there is nowhere mention made in fact of that _inexplicable predilection_ of Bossuet for Horace, _the least divine of all the poets_. M. de Lamartine must have inadvertently read "Horace" instead of "Homer." ... It was Fenelon (and not Bossuet) who read and relished Horace more than any other poet, who knew him by heart.... The great pagan preference of Bossuet (if one may use such an expression) was quite naturally for Homer; after him for Virgil; Horace, in his judgment and in his liking, came far behind them. But the book by eminence which gave early direction to the genius and to the entire career of Bossuet, and which dominated all within him, was the Bible; it is said that the first time he read it he was illuminated and transported by it. He had found in it the source whence his own genius was destined to flow, like one of the four great rivers in Genesis.

Sainte-Beuve speaks of the relation of the Hotel de Rambouillet to the future great man:

The young Bossuet was conducted thither one evening to preach there an improvised sermon. In lending himself to these singular exercises and to these tournaments where his person and his gifts were challenged, treated as an intellectual virtuoso in the salons of the Hotel de Rambouillet and the Hotel de Nevers, it does not appear that Bossuet was in consequence subjected to the slightest charge of vanity, and there is no example of a precocious genius so praised, caressed by the world, and remaining so perfectly exempt from all self-love and from all coquetry.

In the following pa.s.sage, Sainte-Beuve appreciates, not without insinuated criticism, the younger eloquence of Bossuet the preacher.

Conceive this atheist critic, for such in effect Sainte-Beuve was, entering into the spirit of the orthodox Christian, exclusively for the purpose of justly judging and enjoying a strain of pulpit eloquence! But that is Sainte-Beuve:

When he portrays to us Jesus purposing to clothe himself with a flesh like our own, and when he sets forth the motives for this according to the Scriptures, with what bold relief and what saliency he does it! He exhibits that Saviour who above all seeks out misery and distress, shunning to take on the angelic nature which would have exempted him from this, leaping over, in some sense, and tasking himself to pursue, to _apprehend_ wretched human nature, precisely because it is wretched, clinging to it and running after it, although it flies from him, although it recoils from being a.s.sumed by him; aiming to secure for himself real human flesh, real human blood, with the qualities and the weaknesses of our own, and that for what reason? _In order to be compa.s.sionate._ Although in all this Bossuet only makes use of the terms of the Apostle and perhaps of those of Chrysostom, he employs them with a delight, a luxury, a gust for reduplication, which bespeaks vivacious youth: "He has," says the apostle, "_apprehended_ human nature; it flew away, it would have nothing of the Saviour; what did he do? He ran after it with headlong speed, leaping over the mountains, that is to say, the ranks of the angels.... He ran like a giant, with great strides and immeasurable, pa.s.sing in a moment from heaven to earth.... There he overtook that fugitive nature; he seized it, he apprehended it, body and soul." Let us study the youthful eloquence of Bossuet, even in his risks of taste, as one studies the youthful poetry of the great Corneille.

Sainte-Beuve cannot let Lamartine alone. In the clause following, italicized by us, our readers are to recognize an irony on the part of the critic:

M. de Lamartine, who, _with that second sight which is granted to poets_, knew how to see Bossuet distinctly as he was when young, etc.

Having quoted, with significant italics disposed here and there, a highly realistic imaginary picture of the youthful Bossuet from the hand of Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve says:

Here is a primitive Bossuet much toned down and mollified, so it seems to me, a Bossuet drawn very much at will, to resemble Jocelyn and Fenelon, in order that it may be said afterward [by Lamartine]: "The soul evidently in this great man was of one temper, and the genius of another. Nature had made him tender; dogma had made him hard." I do not believe in this contradiction in Bossuet, a nature having the most perfect harmony, and the least at war with itself, that we know. But what for me is not less certain is, that the ill.u.s.trious biographer [Lamartine] here treats literary history absolutely as history is treated in an historical romance; there you lightly invent your character, where your information fails, or where dramatic interest demands it. And without refusing the praise which certain ingenious and delicate touches of this portrait merit, I will permit myself to ask more seriously: Is it proper, is it becoming, thus to paint Bossuet as a youth, to fondle thus with the brush, as one would a Greek dancing-woman or a beautiful child of the English aristocracy, him who never ceased to grow under the shadow of the temple, that serious youth who gave promise of the simple great man, all genius and all eloquence? Far, far from him [Bossuet] these fondlings and these physiological feats of a brush which amuses itself with carmine and with veins....

You feel, with regard to the foregoing criticism, that it is as just as it is penetrative. Lamartine fairly provoked it.

Here is a trait of Bossuet's that pertained remarkably also to Daniel Webster:

Bossuet is not one of those ingenious men of talent who have the art of treating commonplace subjects excellently, and of introducing into them foreign materials; but let the subject presented to him be vast, lofty, majestic, he is at his ease, and, the higher the theme, the more is he equal to its demands, on his proper plane, and in his element.

The Abbe Maury is a critic belonging to the cla.s.sical school of French literature. His best-known work is a treatise on pulpit eloquence. La Harpe is another critic of the same cla.s.s with Maury, who has a considerable work, historical and critical, devoted to French literature in general. To these two writers Sainte-Beuve makes instructive allusion in the following pa.s.sage:

Two opinions found expression when the Sermons of Bossuet were first published, in 1772; I have already indicated that of the Abbe Maury, who placed these sermons above everything else of that kind which the French pulpit had produced; the other opinion, which was that of La Harpe, and which I have known to be shared since by other sensible men, was less enthusiastic and showed itself more sensitive to the inequalities and to the discordances of tone. It would be possible to justify both of these opinions, with the understanding that the first should triumph in the end, and that the genius of Bossuet, there as elsewhere, should keep the first rank. It is very true that, read continuously, without any notice of the age of the writer, and of the place and circ.u.mstances of their composition, some of these discourses of Bossuet may offend or surprise minds that love to dwell upon the more uniform and more exact continuity of Bourdaloue or of Ma.s.sillon.

Victor Cousin is one among the somewhat numerous writers who, within the bounds of this same paper on Bossuet, fall under the touch of Sainte-Beauve's critical lance, that weapon borne ever in rest and ready for any encounter:

A great writer of our days, M. Cousin ... has been disposed once more to despoil Louis XIV. of his highest glory in order to carry it all back to the epoch preceding. M. Cousin has a convenient method of exaggerating and aggrandizing the objects of his admiration: he degrades or depresses their surroundings. It is thus that, to exalt Corneille, in whom he sees aeschylus, Sophocles, all the Greek tragic poets united, he sacrifices and diminishes Racine; it is thus that, in order the better to celebrate the epoch of Louis XIII. and of the regency which followed, he depresses the reign of Louis XIV.

It is Sainte-Beuve's specialty--in aim, whether in achievement or not--to be without the tendency thus charged upon M. Cousin, to violate proportion in his criticism. The insinuating delicacy of his adverse, or at least disparaging, critical judgment toward a distinguished contemporary author is well exemplified in the following pa.s.sage, in which the critic, by his instinct as critic, is irresistibly drawn to make a return to Cousin. The wise reader familiar with Mr. Matthew Arnold will see how exactly the latter caught from his French master the trick of method here displayed:

Ah, I cannot refrain from expressing another thought. When M. Cousin speaks so at his ease of Louis XIV., of Louis XIII., and of Richelieu, confidently attributing superiority to that which he prefers and which he thinks resembles him, I am astonished that he has never once asked himself this question: "What would have been the gain, what the loss to my own talent, this talent which is daily compared with that of the writers of the great age--what would have been gained or lost to that admirable talent" (I forget that it is he that is speaking) "if I had had to write or to discourse, were it but for a few years, in the very presence of Louis XIV., that is to say, of that royal good sense, calm, sober, and august? And that which I should have thus gained or lost, in my vivacity and my eloquence, would it not have been precisely that which it lacks in the way of gravity, of proportion, of propriety, of perfect justice, and, consequently, of true authority?"

Lamartine does not escape still another light thrust from this dangerous delicate lance, aimed yet again, with exquisite accuracy, through an unquestionable joint in the victim's harness:

"These two rivals in eloquence," says M. de Lamartine, speaking of Bossuet and of Bourdaloue, "were pa.s.sionately compared. _To the shame of the time_, the number of Bourdaloue's admirers surpa.s.sed in a short time that of the enthusiastic devotees of Bossuet. The reason of this preference for a cold argumentation above a sublime eloquence lies in the nature of human things. The men of middling stature have more resemblance to their age than the giants have to their contemporaries.

The orators who deal in argument are more easily comprehended by the mult.i.tude than the orators who are fired with enthusiasm; one must have wings to follow the lyric orator." ... This theory, invented expressly to give the greatest glory to the _lyric orators_ and to the giants, is here at fault. M. de Bausset, author of a work on Bossuet, has remarked, on the contrary, as a kind of singularity, that it never entered any man's head at that time to consider Bossuet and Bourdaloue as subject of comparison, and to weigh in the balance their merit and their genius, as was so often done in the case of Corneille and of Racine; or, at least, if they were compared, it was but very seldom.

To the honor and not to the shame of the time, the public taste and sentiment took note of the difference. Bossuet, in the higher sphere of the episcopate, remained the oracle, the doctor, a modern Father of the Church, the great orator, who appeared on funeral and majestic occasions; who sometimes re-appeared in the pulpit at the monarch's request, or to solemnize the a.s.semblies of the clergy, leaving on each occasion an overpowering and ineffaceable recollection of his eloquence. Meanwhile Bourdaloue continued to be for the age the usual preacher by eminence, the one who gave a connected course of lectures on moral and practical Christianity, and who distributed the daily bread in its most wholesome form to all the faithful. Bossuet has said somewhere, in one of his sermons: "If it were not better suited to the dignity of this pulpit to regard the maxims of the Gospel as indubitable than to prove them by reasoning, how easily could I show you," etc. There, where Bossuet would have suffered from stooping and subjecting himself to too long a course of proof and to a continuous argumentation, Bourdaloue, who had not the same impatience of genius, was, beyond doubt, an apostolic workman who was more efficient in the long run, and better fitted for his task by his constancy. The age in which both appeared had the merit to make this distinction, and to appreciate each of them without opposing one to the other; and to-day those who glory in this opposition, and who so easily crush Bourdaloue with Bossuet, the man of talent with the man of genius, because they think they are conscious themselves of belonging to the family of geniuses, too easily forget that this Christian eloquence was designed to edify and to nourish still more than to please or to subdue.

The "bright consummate flower" of Bossuet's eloquence is to be found in his Funeral Discourses. Of one of these, Sainte-Beuve, with a sudden sympathetic swell of kindred eloquence in description, speaks, in a pa.s.sage with quotation from which we close our exemplifications of this famous critic:

The death of the Queen of England came to offer him (1669) the grandest and most majestic of themes. He needed the fall and the restoration of thrones, the revolution of empires, all the varied fortunes a.s.sembled in a single life, and weighing upon one and the same head; the eagle needed the vast depth of the heavens, and, below, all the abysses and the storms of the ocean.

It has been to us some satisfaction that the wrong of distortion by reduction in scale done to the majestic figure of Bossuet in our own treatment of him, and unavoidable there, could thus in a measure be redressed by return to the subject in effective quotation from Sainte-Beuve. Looking back on the extracts preceding, we feel that enough is expressed, or suggested, in them, to justify us in saying, There is Bossuet.

But at any rate we have great confidence in saying, There is Sainte-Beuve.

3. BALZAC.

Honore de Balzac is one of the heroes of literature. He set himself labors of Hercules in literary production, and he toiled at his tasks of will with a tireless tenacity little less than sublime. The moral spectacle of such courageous industry in Balzac, the present writer admires, not the less, but the more, that the intellectual achievement resulting seems to him not commensurately great. Balzac's long "toil and endeavor" was not leavened and lightened and turned into play by that "reflex of unimpeded energy" in him which a lofty philosopher has defined happiness to be. He did his work hardly--with profuse sweat of his brow. His mind did not answer to that definition of genius which makes it a faculty of lighting its own fires. His fires Balzac lighted with late hours, artificial illumination, strong stimulant drinks. He burned himself out early in life--comparatively early, that is to say; he died at fifty-one.

The moral triumph of Balzac we have but half suggested. Not only did he lack the spontaneous joy of genius at work; he lacked also, for many and many a doubtful year, the encouragement of recognition and success.

Book after book of his failed, and still he toiled on. The world was fairly conquered at last. The reverse of Tulliver's experience happened with Balzac. One man, in his case, proved "too many" for the world.

For his own part, he freely confesses, the present writer not only admires; he wonders. Balzac's novels do not please him, either as products of genius or as works of art. They please him solely as monuments of victorious labor. They have to his mind exactly the quality that was to have been expected from the history of their production.

They smell of oil, they smack of sweat. They are full of stimulated, rather than stimulating, thought. So much as one pa.s.sage in which imagination played its magnificent play in easy and easily perfect creation, one pa.s.sage in which the words flowed of themselves, and did not come each pumped with a several stroke of author's will, he cannot remember ever to have found in Balzac. He wonders, therefore, and helplessly wonders, that Balzac should be esteemed, as he is, and that by some good judges, one of the greatest writers in the world.

What Balzac undertook was to write the whole "human tale of this wide world"--that is, to represent in fiction all the manifold phases and aspects of human life and character. He calls the entire series of his novels "The Human Comedy." This t.i.tle, we have seen it stated, was not original with Balzac, but was adopted by him at the suggestion of a friend who hit upon it as a kind of balance and contrast to Dante's expression, "Divine Comedy." It is not quite a cynic conception of human character and human destiny that Balzac intended thus to express. Still, on the other hand, his view of human nature and human life cannot be said to be genial. The disagreeable preponderates in his fiction--the disagreeable one must call it, rather than the tragic. For true tragedy there is not height enough. In reading Balzac, you breathe for the most part an atmosphere of the not merely common, but--vulgar. Of course, the novelist himself would have said, Very well, such is man, and such is life. This one need not deny, but one can say, It was at least not desirable that readers should be obliged to feel the novelist to be himself vulgar, along with his characters. There is such a thing as refined dealing with people not refined.

Realism was Balzac's aim, and realism was the rock on which Balzac suffered double s.h.i.+pwreck. In seeking to be realistic, he became vulgar; and in seeking to be realistic, he became unreal. For there is an air of unreality diffused everywhere over the pages, meant to be realistic or nothing, of this voluminous writer. Balzac evolved the personages of his fiction out of his own consciousness. They are none of them human beings, such as you meet in the real world. They are _simulacra_, images, bodiless projections, of the author's own mind. They move over his canvas like the specters thrown by the magic-lantern on its screen.

Balzac and d.i.c.kens are sometimes paralleled. There certainly is in a number of particulars a superficial resemblance between them. Both undertake to be realists. Both concern themselves chiefly with people of the average sort--sort, perhaps, even tending toward the vulgar. Both exaggerate to a degree that makes them at times almost caricaturists.

Both deal abundantly in minute detail of description. But the contrast too between them is great. Balzac is far less spontaneous than d.i.c.kens.

You feel that d.i.c.kens improvises. You never feel this about Balzac. You can hear Balzac drive his Pegasus with shout and with lash. d.i.c.kens's Pegasus often flies with his bit between his teeth. d.i.c.kens was an observer of men and of things--of books, a student never; there is perhaps scarcely another instance in nineteenth-century literature of an author who owed so little as did d.i.c.kens to study of books. From books, on the other hand, Balzac purveyed a large share of his material.

d.i.c.kens writes as if unconscious that a race of men like the critics existed. Balzac writes in view of the critics. These in fact seem to be his audience quite as much as do the general public. Balzac, beginning that novel of his from which we are presently to draw our sole brief extract to exhibit his manner, enters, according to a fas.h.i.+on of his, upon an elaborate unnecessary description of the house in which the scene of his action is laid. But he prefaces thus:

Before describing this house, it may be well, in the interest of other writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic preliminaries, since they have raised a protest from certain ignorant and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing the generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?

Such a sentence as that--prefatory, but in the body of the text, and not in a formal preface--would have been impossible to d.i.c.kens. In Balzac, it is the most natural thing in the world. And it discloses the secret of the character everywhere stamped on his production. He wrote as a professional writer. He conformed to a law that he himself imposed upon his genius, instead of leaving his genius free to be a law to itself. A real realist, a realist, that is to say, such by nature, and not merely by profession, a realist like De Foe, for example, could never have committed the offense against art of disturbing thus that very illusion of reality which he sought to produce, by exhibiting and defending the method adopted by him to produce it. There could not be a case imposing more obligation on the artist to conceal his art. But Balzac, instead, forces upon his reader the thought of art by calling its very name.

Balzac paints with a big brush and puts on plenty of color. No one need fear in reading him that he will miss delicate shades. There are none such to miss. Balzac does not suggest. He speaks right out. Nay, he insists. You shall by no means fail of understanding him.

But, over against everything that can thus justly be said in diminution of his worth, there remain the unalterable facts, of Balzac's great reputation, just now looming larger than ever, of his voluminous literary achievement, of his population of imaginary personages projected into the world of thought, by actual count more, we believe, than two thousand poll. There is published a portly biographical dictionary exclusively devoted to the characters of Balzac's fiction.

Paralyzed to choose, even to think of choosing, out of the enormous volume of this writer's laborious production, a single page for exemplifying his quality, we pitch desperately upon the conclusion of that story of his called by the accomplished American translator of it, Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, "The Alkahest," "The Search for the Absolute" is the author's own t.i.tle. This work, belonging in the endless series of volumes dedicated to the display of the "comedy of human life"

in all its phases, is a novel which undertakes to ill.u.s.trate the effect on character and destiny of an exclusive supreme absorption in scientific pursuits. The hero has at length reached the catastrophe of his career. He is an old man who has wrecked fortune after fortune in chemical quest of a scientific chimera, The Absolute. A monomaniac before, he is paralytic now, and the last night of his life is slowly pa.s.sing. Balzac:

The old man made incredible efforts to shake off the bonds of his paralysis; he tried to speak and moved his tongue, unable to make a sound; his flaming eyes emitted thoughts; his drawn features expressed an untold agony; his fingers writhed in desperation; the sweat stood in drops upon his brow. In the morning, when his children came to his bed-side and kissed him with an affection which the sense of coming death made day by day more ardent and more eager, he showed none of his usual satisfaction at these signs of their tenderness. Emmanuel [the dying man's son-in-law], instigated by the doctor, hastened to open the newspaper, to try if the usual reading might not relieve the inward crisis in which Balthazar was evidently struggling. As he unfolded the sheet he saw the words, "DISCOVERY OF THE ABSOLUTE,"

which startled him and he read a paragraph to Marguerite [the daughter] concerning a sale made by a celebrated Polish mathematician of the secret of the Absolute. Though Emmanuel read in a low voice, and Marguerite signed to him to omit the pa.s.sage, Balthazar heard it.