SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE SELECT ESSAYS SAINTE- BEUVE Gbiefl Bearing on Englfsb ^Literature TRANSLATED BY A. J. BUTLER LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 37 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C. to th* Inbia [A II rights reserved} OF CAUFORNIg SANTA UAiUiARA TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. A GOOD many years ago the present translator ven- tured to speak a little disrespectfully of a remark of Sainte-Beuve's. When, therefore, in pursuance of a suggestion made by a well-known authority on English literature, who is also great in the councils of Uni- versity Extension, he was asked to undertake the task of producing a translation of such of the eminent French critic's essays as might, it was thought, be of interest to many students of English literature, it seemed that the hand of Nemesis was at work. Nay, it was manifest in the very matter of the penalty. The remark referred to was part of a sentence in which it was said that to read Dante attentively almost in- evitably meant wanting to translate him. Now, to read Sainte-Beuve attentively means inevitably wanting not to translate him. It may be true, as Bonstetten said, that in French you have to reject ten thoughts before coming to one which you can clothe properly ; but when that one is clothed, how well its clothes fit ! ' To read good French,' wrote a master of English once to the present writer, ' almost makes one despair of ever expressing one's self properly.' Still worse is vi TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE the case of him who has to express another man's thoughts in words which he is not allowed to select for himself. It is not so much that there is any difficulty in finding words for their words, though esprit is no doubt as bad as Mr. Courthope rightly holds Pope's wit to be. French has the strength of its weakness. Poor in words, it is forced to use those which it possesses with great precision ; and it is the dexterous arrangement of words in a sentence that forms the translator's pitfall all the more insidious from the very fact that the equivalent words may often stand in just the same order in English without positive violation of grammar, though to the utter detriment of ' style,' and dilution or distortion of sense. Still, it must be admitted that those who deemed the attempt worth making have the author's own judge- ment on their side. It is probably more universally true in France than in England that, as he says, works written in a foreign language are only really read when they have been translated : most of us can read French, though few of us can speak it. But even of the most fluent readers it can hardly be doubted that the vast majority will read yet more fluently and with less waste of power by friction, in their own language, especially when the object is rather to learn what a writer has to say, than how he says it. That what the French critic has to say about English literature will be of interest to English readers, few will deny. A great poet, whom it might be impertinent to call a living case of the converse to the dictum that critics are those who have failed in literature, but who is certainly less great as a judge of other men, has TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE vii thought fit in a recently-published work to assail Sainte- Beuve rather bitterly. The only inference we can safely draw from his language is that Sainte-Beuve is dead ; but on better evidence we have reason to fear that, as often happens, the man deserves less esteem than the work. So far, however, as concerns the work by which he is best known, the two great series, that is, of the Causeries du Lundi and the Nouveaux Lundis, we can safely subscribe to the opinions expressed by Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Saintsbury. The method is not less instructive than the manner is attractive. The critic tries to put himself at the author's point of view ; he allows for the influence of surroundings or, in modern slang, ' environment ' ; he honestly practises his own maxim that a critic's busi- ness is to discover talent. Of course he is not infallible. Even in the few essays which the present volume con- tains some instances of weak criticism may be found. We may question, for instance, the accuracy of his view that the highest degree of sensitiveness to poetic emo- tion is only possible to those who are themselves poets if by poets is meant, as the context would imply, persons endowed with the faculty of writing poetry. Un- doubtedly little or no inference can be drawn from the power of expression to the capacity for feeling, but if there be any relation it is just as likely to be in the other direction. When the two are combined in a high measure we have a great poet. As a critic, Sainte-Beuve seems to claim our grati- tude especially on two grounds. One is his insistence on the value of form. If it was true in the years when he was writing about Pope and Gibbon, Milton and viii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE Cowper, that form and workmanship, orderliness and restraint were no longer reckoned at their true value, surely, in these days of ' naturalism,' ' impressionism ' and what not, the caution is no less needed. When promising young men of letters can satisfy themselves (and editors) by hurling at the public the contents of their notebooks, in which they appear, like the King in Wonderland, to have been trying whether unimportant or important sounds best in the sentence, and rising poets admit into their more serious stanzas such hideous coinages as belletrist and scientist, or the happily ephemeral slang of ' 'Arry,' we do feel that the ' bad time for Pope and Horace,' which the French critic foresaw, has^arrived, and that literature, which they and their like tempered and polished, is for the moment once more seething in the melting-pot, with a good deal of scum on the surface of some of the best metal. The other point for which we have to thank him is his testimony to the great truth that all criticism of art as distinct from craft must be subjective. Seldom do we find him saying, 'this is right;' 'this is wrong.' He lets us see his own preferences, and gives his reasons for them ; but he knows that there are no ' invariable principles of poetry,' more than of any other art, and that of all arguments ' ad hominem,' one of the feeblest is, ' You receive pleasure from A, therefore you cannot receive pleasure from B ' ; or, as it is more often worded, ' A is good, therefore B must be bad.' Let us by all means call upon all people to accept the defini- tions of the (frpovifAos, but always with the understanding that by the (frpovipos, in matters of aesthetic criticism, TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE ix we mean the man who agrees with us. In spite of the etymology of his name, what makes the successful critic is, as Pope saw, not so much the judicial faculty, as the power of expression ; not so much original thought, as the gift of reading the current thought of his moder- ately-educated contemporaries. Let him use this power and this gift with urbanity and good temper, and though his work will not last like the great creative works, he will do service to his generation and make an honest living. The essays that have been included in the present volume are mainly those dealing with English literature. Sainte-Beuve had English blood in his veins, which perhaps accounts for his appreciation of certain points in English poetry which do not as a rule appeal to Frenchmen ; and also for his power of estimating in some measure its literary form. The fragment on Bonstetten and Gray is extracted from a long essay on the rather remarkable career of the former. It should be said that Sainte-Beuve's habit of giving quotations (translated into French) without references, has made the task of identifying them somewhat laborious. It is hoped, however, that with one or two trifling excep- tions all appear as the authors wrote them. In addi- tion to the essays on authors, two, ' Qu'est ce qu'un classique ' and ' D'une tradition litteraire,' are given as generally applicable to all literature. They deal with the same subject, but from slightly different points of view. Notes in square brackets (and perhaps one or two where the brackets have been forgotten) have been inserted by the translator. CONTENTS PAGE WHAT IS A CLASSIC? (1850) - - I OF A LITERARY TRADITION ; AND IN WHAT SENSE THE TERM SHOULD BE UNDERSTOOD (1858) - - 21 LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD TO HIS SON (1850) - 51 WILLIAM COWPER, I. (1854) - - 74 WILLIAM COWPER, II. - - 95 WILLIAM COWPER, III. - - 117 GIBBON, I. (1853) - 139 GIBBON, II. .- - l6l GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE - - 183 BONSTETTEN AND GRAY (1860)- - 204 M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, I. (l86l) - 2IO M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, n. - - 225 M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, in. - - 248 ' M. Sainte-BeuvJs writings are far less known among us than they deseive? MATTHEW ARNOLD. SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE WHAT IS A CLASSIC? THIS is a delicate question, and one of which a good many different solutions might have been given at different periods and seasons. A clever man has this day propounded it to me, and even if I cannot solve it, I want at least to try to examine and discuss it before our readers, were it only to induce them to reply to it themselves, and if I can, to clear up their ideas and mine upon it. And why should not one occasionally venture to treat in criticism of some of those subjects which are not personal, in which not someone, but something is spoken of, and which our neighbours the English have so successfully made into a complete branch, under the modest title of Essays ? It is true that, in order to treat of such subjects, which are always in a measure abstract and moral, one must speak in a calm atmosphere, be sure of one's own attention and that of others, and seize one of those quarters of an hour of silence, moderation, and leisure, which are seldom granted to our beloved France, and which her brilliant genius bears with impatience, even i 2 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE when she is wishing to be good, and has given up making revolutions. A classic, according to the usual definition, is an author of past times, already hallowed by general ad- miration, who is an authority in his own style. The word classic, taken in this sense, begins to appear among the Romans. With them the classici, properly so-called, were not all the citizens of the different classes, but only those of the highest class, who possessed, at least, an income of a certain fixed figure. All those who had a lower income were known by the appellation of infra classem, below the class properly so-called. For example, we find the word classicus used by Aulus Gellius and applied to writers : a writer of worth and mark is classicus assiduusque scriptor, a writer who counts, who has some possessions under the sun, and who is not confounded with the proletariat crowd. Such an expression presupposes an age sufficiently advanced for a criticism and classification, as it were, of litera- ture to have come into existence. For the moderns, the true and only classics were, in the first instance, naturally the ancients. The Greeks, who by rare good fortune had a happy relief to their intellect no other classics than themselves, were at first the sole classics of the Romans, who spent much trouble and ingenuity on imitating them. They in their turn, after the fine ages of their literature, after Cicero and Virgil, had their own classics, and they be- came almost exclusively the classics of the centuries which succeeded. The Middle Ages, which, though not as ignorant as might be thought of Latin antiquity, were wanting in the sense of proportion and taste, con- WHAT IS A CLASSIC? 3 fused the ranks and orders. Ovid was put on a better footing than Homer, and Boethius appeared to be a classic at least equal to Plato. The ' new birth ' of literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came to clear up this long confusion, and then only was ad- miration graduated. The real classic authors of the twofold antiquity stood out for the future on a luminous background, and formed two harmonious groups on their two eminences. Meanwhile, modern literature had been born, and some of the more precocious members of it, like the Italian, already had their own fashion of antiquity. Dante had appeared, and his posterity had lost no time in saluting him as a classic. Italian poetry may have retreated greatly since then, but when she has desired, she has always recovered and always retained some impulse, some reverberation, from this high origin. It is of no slight importance for a poetry thus to take its point of departure, its classic source in a lofty place rather, for example, to descend from a Dante than to issue laboriously from a Malherbe. Modern Italy had her classics, and Spain had every right to believe she was also in possession of hers, when France still had hers to seek. Indeed, a few writers of talent endowed with originality and exceptional raci- ness, a few brilliant efforts isolated and without suc- cessors, shattered immediately and needing always to be begun afresh, do not suffice to confer upon a nation the solid and imposing basis of literary wealth. That idea of a classic implies in itself something which has se- quence and solidity, which forms a whole and makes a tradition, something which has ' composition,' is 4 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE handed on to posterity and lasts. It was only after the brilliant years of Louis XIV. that the nation felt with a thrill of pride that this happiness had come to it. All voices then told it to Louis XIV. with flattery, exag- geration and emphasis, and yet with a certain percep- tion of truth. Then appeared a singular and quaint inconsistency : the men who were most in love with the wonders of that age of Louis the Great, and who went so far as to sacrifice all the ancients to the moderns, those men, of whom Perrault was the chief, tended to exalt and consecrate those very men in whom they found the most ardent and contradictory adversaries. Boileau defended and supported the ancients with anger against Perrault, who cried up the moderns, that is to say Corneille, Moliere, Pascal, and the eminent men of his century, including Boileau as one of the first. The good La Fontaine, when he took Doctor Huet's part in the quarrel, did not perceive that he himself, in spite of his oversight, was in his turn on the eve of waking up to find himself a classic. An instance is the best definition : France possessed her century of Louis XIV., and could consider it at a little distance ; she knew what it was to be classic better than by any reasoning. The eighteenth century, till its upheaval, added to this idea by a few fine works due to its four great men. Read Voltaire's Siecle de Louis XIV., Montesquieu's La Grandeur et la Z)/- cadence des Remains, Buffon's Epoques de Nature, the Vicaire Savoyard, and the fine pages of meditations and descriptions of nature by Jean-Jacques, and say whether the eighteenth century in its memorable past has not known how to reconcile tradition with independ- WHAT IS A CLASSIC? 5 ence and liberty of development. But at the beginning of this century and under the Empire, in presence of the first attempts of a decidedly novel and some- what daring literature, the idea of a classic among some refractory minds, influenced more by vexation than by severity, contracted and shrank strangely. The first Dictionary of the Academy (1694) simply defined a classic author as ' an ancient author, highly approved, who is an authority in the subject he treats of.' The Dictionary of the Academy of 1835 urges this definition much more closely, and makes it exact and even narrow instead of, as it was, somewhat vague. It defines classic authors as ' those who have become models in any language,' and, in the articles which follow, these expressions models, rules established for composition and style, strict rules of the art to which you must conform, are continually recurring. This definition of the classic has evidently been made by our respectable precursors of the Academy, in presence and in sight of what was then called the romantic, that is to say, in sight of the enemy. It seems to me that the time ought now to have come to renounce these restricting and timid definitions and to widen their spirit. *" A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, who has really augmented its treasures, who has made it take one more step forward, who has discovered some unequivocal moral truth, or has once more seized hold of some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and explored ; who has rendered his thought, his observation, or his discovery under no 6 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE matter what form, but broad and large, refined, sensible, sane, and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in a style of his own which yet belongs to all the world, in a style which is new without neologisms, new and ancient, easily contemporaneous with every age. Such a classic may have been revolutionary for a moment, or at least may have seemed to be, but he is not so ; he has not, in the first instance, fallen upon everything around him ; he has overthrown only what was in his way so as quickly to replace the balance in favour of order and beauty. ) You can, if you will, set down some names under this definition, which I would purposely make grand and compendious, or in one word generous. I should place there first the Corneille of Polyeude, of Cinna, ot Les Horaces. I should place there Moliere, the most complete and the richest genius we have had in French. ' Moliere is so great,' said Goethe (that king of criticism), ' that he surprises us afresh every time we read him. He is a man who stands alone; his plays verge on the tragic, and no one has had the courage to imitate them. His Avare, where the vice destroys all affection between father and son, is one of the most sublime of works, and dramatic in the highest degree. Every action in a play for the stage must be important in itself and tend towards a still greater event. Tar- tuffe is a model in this respect. What a setting out of the subject is the first scene ! Everything is highly significant from the beginning, and makes you antici- pate something still more important. The outset of any similar play of Lessing's which may be cited is very fine ; but that of Tartuffe is unique. It is the WHAT IS A CLASSIC? 7 greatest thing of the kind. . . . Every year I read a play of Moliere's, just as from time to time I gaze at some engraving after the old Italian masters.' I do not pretend to say that this definition of a classic which I have just given does not go somewhat beyond the idea one generally forms for oneself under that name. It is especially made to comprise condi- tions of order, wisdom, moderation, and reasonableness, which prevail over and contain all others. Having occasion to praise M. Royer-Collard, M. de Remusat said : ' If he gets from our classics a pure taste, appro- priate terms, variety of phrase, a careful attention in suiting expression to thought, to himself alone he owes the character which he gives to it all/ One sees here that the part allotted to classic qualities seems rather to depend on selection and nicety of meaning, to an ornate and restrained style, and that, too, is the general opinion. In this sense the classics, properly so called, would be writers of the second rank correct, sensible, elegant, always clear, expressing themselves with a passion not devoid of nobility, and a power kept slightly in reserve. Marie-Joseph Che'nier has traced the poetic spirit of these temperate and accomplished writers in these lines, where he shows himself their apt disciple : ' C'est le bon sens, la raison qui fait tout, Vertu, ge"nie, esprit, talent et gout. Qu'est-ce vertu ? raison mise en pratique ; Talent ? raison produite avec e*clat ; Esprit ? raison qui finement s'exprime ; Le gout n'est rien qu'un bon sens delicat ; Et le gdnie est la raison sublime.' In writing these lines he was evidently thinking of SELECT ESSAYS OF SATNTE-BEUVE Pope, Despreaux,* and Horace, the master of them all. The real essence of this theory, which makes imagina- tion and even feeling subordinate to reason, and of which Scaliger, perhaps, struck the first note among modern writers, is, strictly speaking, the Latin theory, and this has also for a long time been the French theory. It has some truth in it if it is only used in the right place, if that word reason is not misused ; but it is evident that it is misused, and that if reason, for instance, can be confused with poetic genius and their union results in a moral epistle, it cannot be the same thing as that genius which we find so varied and so diversely creative in expressing the passions of the drama or the epic. Where will you find reason in the fourth book of the ^neid, and in the ecstasies of Dido ? Where will you find it in the madness of Phaedra? Be this as it 1 may, the spirit which has prompted this theory tends to place in the first rank of the classics those writers who have governed their in- spiration rather than those who have given themselves more up to it, to place Virgil there more certainly than Homer, Racine more than Corneille. The master- piece which this theory loves to quote, and which does indeed unite every condition of prudence, strength, progressive daring, moral elevation and greatness, is Athalie. In Turenne, in his last two campaigns, and Racine in Athalie, we have the great examples of what wise and prudent men can do when they come into possession of the full maturity of their genius, and enter upon their crowning exploits. Buffon in his Discourse on Style, in which he insists on * I.e., Boileau. WHAT IS A CLASSIC? 9 that oneness of plan, arrangement, and execution which is the stamp of really classic work, has said : ' Every subject is one only ; and however spacious it may be it can be comprised in a single treatise. Interruptions, pauses and sections should only be used when different subjects are treated of, or when, having to speak of great, com- plicated, or incongruous matters, the march of genius finds itself impeded by the multiplicity of the obstacles in its way and constrained by the requirements of the circumstances ; otherwise a great number of divisions, far from making a work more solid, destroy its unity ; the book seems clearer at first sight, but the author's intention remains obscure.' And he continues his criticism, having in his mind Montesquieu's I' Esprit des Lois, a book excellent at bottom, but all cut up into segments, into which the illustrious author, worn out before the end, could not breathe all his spirit, nor even to some extent arrange all his matter. Yet I find it hard to believe that Buffon was not thinking in the same place by way of contrast of Bossuet's Discours sur rHistoire Universelle, a subject, indeed, both vast and single, and which the great author has yet been able to comprise in one solitary treatise. Let anyone open the first edition of 1681, before the division into chapters which was introduced later, and which has passed from the margin into the text and cut it up ; everything is there unfolded in one sequence and almost at one breath, and one would say that the orator has here done like the Nature of whom Buffon writes, that he has worked on an eternal plan and has nowhere deviated from it, so far does he seem to have penetrated into the intimacy of the counsels of Providence. io SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE Athalie and the Discours sur I'Histoire Universelle, such are the highest masterpieces which the strict classic theory can offer alike to its friends and its enemies. Yet in spite of all the admirable simplicity and majesty with which these unique productions are executed, we should like for the practical purposes of art to extend this idea a little, and to show that there is room for enlarging it without going so far as to relax it. Goethe, whom I like to quote on such a subject, says : ' I call all healthy work classic, all unhealthy work romantic. The poem of the " Nibelungen " is for me as classic as Homer ; both are healthy and vigorous. It is not because they are new that the works of the day are romantic, but because they are weak, sickly or diseased. It is not because they are old that the works of past times are classic, but because they are energetic, fresh and well-liking. If we were to consider the romantic and the classic from these two points of view, we should soon all be agreed.' And, indeed, I should like every free mind to travel round the world and give itself up to the contemplation of the different literatures in their primitive vigour and their infinite variety before marking down and fixing its ideas on this subject. What would such a mind see? first of all a Homer, the father of the classic world, but himself less certainly a single and very distinct individual than the vast and living expres- sion of an active period and a semi-barbarous civiliza- tion. To make a classic properly so called of him, it has been necessary to attribute to him a design, a plan, literary intentions, qualities of criticism and urbanity as an afterthought, of which he would cer- WHAT IS A CLASSIC? II tainly never have dreamt in the overflowing develop- ment of his natural inspiration. And whom do we see beside him ? imposing and venerable men of antiquity it is true, such as yEschylus or Sophocles, but all muti- lated, and standing there only to represent to us the wreck of themselves, all that remains of many others doubtless as worthy as they to survive, who have perished for ever beneath the ill-treatment of the ages. This thought alone might teach a man of well-balanced mind not to look at literature as a whole, even classic literature, with too simple and too limited a view, and he may learn from it that that exact and well propor- tioned order which has had so much force since, has been introduced only artificially into our admiration of the past. And how would it be when we enter the modern world ? The greatest names we perceive at the outset of literature are those which most shock and disturb certain restricted ideas of the beautiful and the fitting which it has been thought desirable to convey in poetry. Is Shakespeare a classic, for instance ? Yes, he is so to-day, for England and for the world ; but in the time of Pope he was not. Pope and his friends were the only classics in the full sense ; they seemed to become so indubitably the day after their death. To- day they are still classics and they deserve to be ; but they are only in the second rank, and there they may be seen for ever, surpassed and kept in their place by him who has again his place on the topmost skyline. I shall certainly not be the one to speak evil of Pope or of his excellent followers, especially when they are as sweet and natural as Goldsmith ; next to the greatest, 12 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE these, between writers and poets, are perhaps the best fitted for imparting charm to life. One day, when Lord Bolingbroke was writing to Dr. Swift, Pope put a postscript to the letter, in which he said : ' I imagine that if we three were to spend even three years together, the result might be some advantage to our century.' No, we must never speak lightly of those who have had the right to say such things of them- selves without boasting, and it would be much better to envy the favoured and fortunate ages when men of talent could suggest such unions, which were not then chimerical. These ages, whether we call them by the name of Louis XIV. or of Queen Anne, are the only really classic ages, using the word in its limited sense, the only ones which offer a propitious climate and shelter to perfected talent. We here, in our discon- nected period, are but too well aware of it, when talents possibly equal to theirs have got lost and dissipated through the uncertain ties and hardships of the times. Anyway, let us apportion to each kind of greatness its due influence and superiority. The true master genius triumphs over those difficulties which wreck others ; Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton knew how to attain to their supremacy and to produce their imperishable works in spite of obstacles, persecutions, and storms. The opinions of Byron about Pope have been the subject of much discussion, and an attempt has been made to explain that kind of contradiction which has led the singer of Don Juan and of Childe Harold to extol the purely classic school, and declare it to be the only good one, while he himself took so different a course. Goethe has once more said the right word WHAT IS A CLASSIC? 13 about this, when he remarks that Byron, so great in the outburst and spring of his poetry, yet feared Shakespeare, who is more capable than he of creating and putting life into his characters. He would have liked to deny him ; he was irked by that unselfish superiority ; he felt that he could never comfortably display himself beside him. He has never renounced Pope because he did not fear him ; he well knew that Pope was a wall beside him. If the school of Pope had kept the supremacy, and a kind of honorary empire over the past, as Byron wished, Byron would have been the first and only one of his kind ; the erection of Pope as that wall hid Shakespeare's great form from sight, whereas, while Shakespeare reigns and dominates in all his height, Byron is only second. We in France had no great classic before the era of Louis XIV. ; we lacked Dantes and Shakespeares, those original authorities to which one returns sooner or later in the days of emancipation. We have had only, as it were, the rough drafts of great poets, such as Mathurin Regnier and Rabelais, without any ideal, without the passion and the gravity which give consecration. Montaigne was a sort of classic before his time, of the Horatian breed, but one who, for want of worthy sur- roundings, abandoned himself like a strayed child to all the libertine fancies of his pen and his humour. The result is that we have earned less than any other nation the right to claim loudly one day, through our author-ancestors, our literary liberties and charters? and that it has been a still greater difficulty to us to work out our freedom and remain classic. Yet, with 14 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE Moliere and La Fontaine among our classics of the great era, there is sufficient cause for refusing no rights of legitimacy to any who will make the venture with knowledge. The important thing now seems to me to be to pre- serve the notion and the cult, and at the same time to widen it. There is no recipe for making classics ; this point must sooner or later be clearly recognised. To think that by imitating certain qualities of purity, of sobriety, of correctness and elegance, quite indepen- dently even of character and the divine spark, you will become a classic, is to think that after Racine the father there is room for Racine the son ; an estimable and melancholy role which is the worst thing in poetry. Yet more : it is not a good thing to appear too quickly and right off, to one's contemporaries, as a pure classic ; see how faint the colour looks at a distance of twenty-five years ! How many there are of these precocious classics who do not last and are only ephemeral ! You turn round one morning and are surprised to find them no longer standing behind you. They have only been there, in the gay phrase of Madame de Sevigne, as a breakfast for the sun. With regard to classics the most sponta- neous are still the best and the greatest : ask those virile geniuses who are really born immortal and who flourish perpetually, whether it is not so. Apparently the least classic of the four poets of Louis XIV. was Moliere ; he was applauded then far more than he was esteemed ; people enjoyed him without knowing his value. After him the least classic seemed to be La Fontaine ; and see what came of it for both of them two centuries later. Far before Boileau, before even Racine, are they WHAT IS A CLASSIC? (J& not to-day unanimously recognised as the most fruitful writers, the richest as regards the characteristics of universal morality ? (j^fter all, we need really sacrifice nothing depreciate nothing. The temple of taste, I quite believe, needs rebuilding ; but in rebuilding it, it is merely a question of making it greater, and of letting it become the Pan- theon of all the nobility of mankind of all those who have had a notable and lasting share in increasing the sum of the pleasures and possessions of the mincLj As for me, who would in no sense pretend (as is evident) to be the architect or director of such a temple, I will confine myself to expressing some wishes competing for the specification, as it were. Above all, I would exclude no one worthy to enter, and I would give every- one the place due to him, from Shakespeare, the most unfettered of creative geniuses and unconsciously the greatest of the classics, to Andrieux, the very last of the classics in miniature. ' In my Father's house are many mansions.' Let that be no less true of the kingdom of the beautiful here than of the kingdom of heaven above. Homer always and everywhere would be the first in it, the most like a god ; but behind him, like the attendant train of the three kings of the East, would follow those three grand poets, those three Homers long ignored by us, who also themselves have made grand and admir- able epics, the Hindoo poets Valmiki and Vyasa, and the Persian Firdousi. In the realm of taste, it is a good thing to know, at least, that such men exist, and not to split up the human race. Having paid this homage to what it is sufficient to perceive and recognise, we would quit our own boundaries no 16 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE more, and we would divert our eyes with a thousand splendid or agreeable sights, and rejoice in a thousand various and surprising meetings ; yet their apparent confusion would never be wanting in concord and harmony. The most ancient of sages and poets those who have put human morality into maxims and have chanted it in plain-song would converse with each other in rare suave speech, and would not be sur- prised to understand each other at the very first word. Solon, Hesiod, Theognis, Job, Solomon, and why not Confucius himself? would greet the most ingenious modern authors, La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere, who would say to each other as they listened to them : ' They knew all that we know, and we have found nothing new by bringing experience up to date.' On the hill most in sight, with the most easy slopes, Virgil surrounded by Menander, Tibullus, Terence, Fenelon, would abandon himself with them to converse full of charm and a sacred enchantment ; his gentle face would beam with radiance and the hue of modesty, as on that day when, entering the Roman theatre just as they had been reciting his verses, he saw the entire assembly rise in front of him by a simultaneous move- ment and pay him the same homage as to Augustus himself. Not far from him, and regretting to be sepa- rated from so dear a friend, Horace would preside in his turn (so far as a poet and sage so keen of wit can be said to preside) over the group of the poets of civic life and of those who have known how to talk as well as sing Pope and Despreaux, the one grown less irritable and the other less censorious. That true poet, Montaigne, would be there with them, and his presence would WHAT IS A CLASSIC? 17 completely remove all appearance of a literary academy from this charming corner. La Fontaine would forget himself there, and, henceforth less flighty, would be content to remain. Voltaire would pass by, but he would not have the patience to stop, though at the same time delighting in it. On the same hill as Virgil, a little lower down, Xenophon would be seen with an unaffected look very little like a captain, but of a kind to make him rather resemble a priest of the Muses. He would gather around him the Attic minds of every lan- guage and of every country Addison, Pellisson, Vauve- nargues, all who feel the value of suave expression, ex- quisite simplicity, and a sweet, though not unadorned, carelessness. In the centre of the place three great men would often like to meet before the portico of the principal temple (for there would be several within the enclosure), and if those should be together, there would not be a fourth, however great, to whom it would occur to take part in their intercourse or their silence, so great would appear their beauty, their grand propor- tions, and that perfection of harmony which has only once been seen when first the world was young. Their three names have become the ideal of all art Plato, Sophocles, and Demosthenes. And, moreover, having duly honoured these demigods, do you not see yonder a numerous and familiar crowd of excellent spirits, who always prefer to follow Cervantes, Moliere the practical painters from the life those indulgent friends who are still the first of benefactors, who seize the whole man with laughter, pour out experience for him in mirth, and are aware of the powerful influence of rational, hearty, lawful joy ? I will not here go on any longer with this 2 1 8 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE description, which would occupy a whole book if it were complete. Be sure that the Middle Ages and Dante would fill some of the sacred heights ; Italy would wholly unfold herself like a garden at the feet of the singer of Paradise ; Boccaccio and Aristotle would dis- port themselves there, and Tasso would find once more the orange groves of Sorrento. In short, the different nations would have each a special nook kept for it, but the authors would delight in coming out of it, and as they walk about they would recognise, where least they expect it, their brothers or their masters. Lucre- tius, for instance, would love to discuss with Milton the origin of the world and the disentanglement of chaos ; but as they argue each after his manner, they will but agree about the divine representations of poetry and nature. ' These are our classics ; everybody's imagination can complete the sketch, and even choose his favourite group for himself. For there must be choice, and the first condition of taste when all has been surveyed is not to roam ceaselessly, but once for all to stay with a settled opinion. Nothing palls on the mind so much and is so injurious to taste as ceaseless roamings ; the poetic spirit is not the Wandering Jew. Notwith- standing all this, my concluding advice when I speak of choosing and of forming an opinion is not to imitate even those who please us the most among our masters in the past. Let us be satisfied with feeling them, with interpreting them, with admiring them, and for ourselves, late comers that we are, let us try at least to be ourselves. Let us make our choice with our own WHAT IS A CLASSIC? 19 \-gfr' proper instincts. Let us have the sincerity and natural- ness of our own thoughts, our own feelings that always is possible. Let us add to it what is more diffi- cult, a high aim, an impetus towards some lofty ideal ; and while we speak our own language and submit to the conditions of the age in which we are placed, and from which we draw alike our strength and our fail- ings, let us ask ourselves from time to time, while we lift our brow towards the hills and fasten our eyes on the group of revered beings : What would they say of us ? But why do we speak continually of being an author, of writing ? An age, perchance, is coming when there will be no more writing. Happy are those who read and read again, who can obey their free inclinations in their reading ! There comes a period in life when, our wanderings all finished and our experiences all ac- quired, there is no keener pleasure than to study and deepen the things we know, to relish what we taste, just as when you behold again and again the people you love ; purest delight of the mature mind and taste. It is then that this word classic assumes its true mean- ing, and is defined by the irresistible and discerning choice of every man of taste. Taste has now been created, it is formed and defined ; the right meaning is now achieved if we are to have it at all. There is no longer any time to try about, nor any wish to make further discoveries. You stand by your friends, by those who have been proved by a long connection. Old wine, old books, old friends. You say to yourself like Voltaire in those delightful lines : 20} SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE ' Jouissons, e"crivons, vivons, mon cher Horace ! ****** ' J'ai vecu plus que toi : mes vers dureront moins : Mais, au bord du tombeau, je mettrai tous mes soins A suivre les lemons de ta philosophic, A me"priser la mort en savourant la vie, A lire tes Merits pleins de grace et de sens, Comme on boit d'un vin vieux qui rajeunit les sens.' Finally, be it Horace or another, whoever the author is that we prefer, and that gives us back our own thoughts in full richness and maturity, we shall at any rate beg from one of these good and ancient spirits a perpetual entertainment, an unwavering friendship which will never fail us, and that habitual impression of serenity and sweetness, which reconciles us, who so often need it, to mankind and to ourselves. OF A LITERARY TRADITION; AND IN WHAT SENSE THE TERM SHOULD BE UNDER- STOOD* GENTLEMEN, If, as I have been more than once in- formed, you are good enough to wish to see me open this course of lectures, for my own part, believe me, I was no less eager to find myself among you, fulfilling the honour- able and highly-prized duty entrusted to me ; to which I henceforth devote myself unreservedly. But, anxious as I am to attack the detailed study of our literature, and to undertake with you a review of the principal literary works of our most brilliant century, I ought to say a few words to you by way of introduction, relating both to the spirit which I mean to bring to that examination, and to that in which I have to ask that you will be kind enough to hear me. I have written a good deal in the last thirty years that is, I have scattered myself about a good deal; so that before starting upon a course of instruction in the proper sense, and laying down certain rules and principles * A lecture delivered at the opening of the session of the Ecolt Normale, April 12, 1858. Given, as the author tells us, to illustrate the difference between the duties of a professor and those of a critic. The business of the latter is to discover new talent ; that of the former, to maintain a good tradition of taste. 22 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE which will at least indicate the general direction of my thought, I need to gather myself together, in order that there may be no misunderstanding between us, and that, as a consequence, my words may come before you with all the more freedom and confidence. You are the persons who will hereafter have as your special office and ministry to watch over the tradition, the transmission of classical and humane letters, to inter- pret them continually to each fresh generation of young persons ; I, for my part, see myself charged, with a kind- ness which does me honour, and for which I give thanks where thanks are due, under the eyes of my friend the director,* and beside so many excellent masters, whose pupil one would like to have been, or to be about to be I find myself, I say, charged with the duty of preparing you for these worthy and important functions. I find myself naturally led to discuss what especially strikes me in that career which we shall henceforth share, and that of which it most concerns us to make quite sure. There is such a thing as tradition. In what sense must we understand it in what sense is it our duty to maintain it? There is a tradition ; who would deny it ? For us it exists all traced out. It is visible like those immense, magnificent avenues or roads which used to traverse the empire, ending at what was called pre-eminently the City. Descendants as we are of the Romans, or, at any rate, adopted children of the Latin race that race which was itself initiated by the Greeks into the cult of * M. Nisard. A LITERARY TRADITION 23 the beautiful we have to embrace, to understand, never to desert the inheritance received from those illustrious masters and fathers, an inheritance which, from Homer down to the latest classic of yesterday (if there be a classic of yesterday*), forms the brightest and most solid portion of our intellectual capital. This tradition consists not solely in the collection of memorable works which we bring together in our libraries, and which we study a large part of it has passed into our laws, into our institutions, into our manners, into the education which we unconsciously inherit, into our habits, and into all our fundamental conceptions. It consists in a certain principle of good sense and culture which, in the course of ages, has penetrated so as to modify it into the very character of our Gaulish nation, and which entered long ago into the very composition of our wits. All that it concerns us on no account to lose, all that we must never allow anyone to damage, at least without making it known, and giving the alarm as in a common peril, is there. I am not going to establish any comparison between two classes of things profoundly distinct and wholly unlike, but I am going to make my thought more obvious by means of a comparison. M. de Chateaubriand, recalling some fine chapters of the Esprit des Lois, ended his Genie du Christianisme by setting himself this question : ' What would be the state of society to-day if Christianity had never appeared on the earth ?' As may readily be supposed, answers * And why not ? For us the last of the classics was Chateau- briand. 24 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE crowded under his pen, and sprang forth from all sides. A learned English author, Colonel Mure, in his History of Greek Literature, for his part sets himself this question : 'If the Greek nation had never existed, or if the works of its genius had been destroyed by the grandeur and predominance of Rome, would the races which now stand at the head of Europe have raised themselves higher in the scale of literary culture than did the other nations of antiquity before they had been touched by the breath of Hellas ?' It is a grand and beautiful question, one of those which most set us thinking and musing. Gentlemen, I have often mused, I have often asked myself, under all sorts of forms, and taking many special instances, putting myself at every point of view, what would have been the destiny of modern literature (to consider that point only) if the battle of Marathon had been lost, and Greece brought into subjection and slavery, crushed out of life before the age of Pericles ; ev.en at a date when she would have retained in her distant past the broad and incomparable beauty of her first great Ionian poets, but without the reflecting focus of Athens ? Let us never forget that Rome, by dint of her own energy and ability, had, when the second Punic war came to an end, already arrived at the most widely extended political power, and at the ripeness of a great state, without so far possessing anything like a literature properly so called or worthy of that name ; she had to conquer Greece in order to be taken captive, in the person of her generals and her famous chiefs, in order to A LITERARY TRADITION 25 be touched with that noble fire which was to redouble and to perpetuate her glory. How many nations and races, if we except that first Hellenic race so privileged above all others, so singularly endowed, are or have been in this respect more like the Romans that is to say, have of themselves possessed in regard to poetry or literature nothing more than a primary, rudimentary, rustic development, in no way exceeding a first wild growth ? That was sufficient for nomad peoples who had in front of them the green forest or the steppe with its spring blooms something short, simple (or coarse), invented on the spur of the moment, formless and vague, quite close to the earth, or too near the clouds. I hear them coming, it is true, I hear the Northern nations growing and forming themselves with their warlike or festive songs, their mythology, their legends ; I do not deny that there is a poetical faculty up to a certain point universal in humanity. All the nations which have successively gone forth from the central point, the heart of Asia, are recognised to-day as brothers and sisters of the same family, and of a family which has an air of nobility stamped on its brow ; but, in all this numerous family, one brow was chosen among all, one elected maiden, upon whom incompar- able grace was poured forth, who received from her cradle the gift of song, of harmony, of measure, of perfection Nausicaa, Helen, Antigone, Electra, Iphi- genia, Venus in all her noble forms ; and if we suppose this enchanting child of genius, this muse of a noble house, cut down and sacrificed before her time, is it not true that all mankind might have said, like a family when it has lost the daughter who was its joy and its 26 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE honour, * the crown is fallen from our head ' ? If one could, with difficulty, collect all the wild crops, would they be worth one of her garlands? Would all the scattered plunder, all the small change of the others piled and heaped together, be equal in worth and weight to a single one of her golden talents ? I do not fix to one spot, I do not isolate that primary Hellenic beauty, and for that very reason I am not afraid to ascribe so much to it. You know as well as I that Rome, by herself, and if she had not been touched by the golden wand at the very moment when she was breaking it, was in danger of remaining for ever a mere power, lying with crushing weight on the world, whether as senate, camp, or legion. It was the buoyant soul of Greece which, passing into her, and mingling with the firm and judicious good sense of those politicians, those conquerors, produced in the second or third generation that assemblage of genius, of talents, of accomplishments, which makes up the fine Augustan age. Whether directly, or thenceforth by means of the Romans, that buoyant soul, that spark (for a spark is all that is wanted), that fiery or subtle germ of civilization, has never ceased to act at decisive epochs, to give life and be the signal for unexpected bursts of flower, for Renaissances. The very literature of chivalry which we see breaking forth, for the first time, in its precocious and brilliant development in the south of our own France, beside the Mediterranean, seems to have been brushed and caressed by some distant breath from ancient shores, which may have brought with it some invisible seed. Christian antiquity, imperfect from a literary point of view, but A LITERARY TRADITION 27 morally in a high position, had not in those ages ceased to be at once an active vehicle and a fund of wealth. Would Dante have had the idea and the power to compose his monumental poem, belonging so com- pletely to the Middle Ages, if he had not perceived what tradition, incomplete as it was, had transmitted to him, in the way of memories, reminiscences, or fertile illusions, and if he had not literally had Virgil for his guide, support, and half-fabulous patron ? How- ever that may be, Beatrice, and the inspiration whence she issued, were surely a new sentiment in the world, for our tradition is neither locked up nor exclusive ; we are glad to recognise that delicate sentiment of love and courtesy which belongs to chivalry, to see in it yet another ornament added to mankind's crown, side by side with atticism and urbanity. But let us never separate ourselves from atticism, from urbanity, from the principle of good sense and good reason, which in it is combined with grace. What we must never lose sight of is the feeling of a certain standard of beauty suited to our race, to our education, to our civilization. Not to have the feeling for letters, meant to the ancients the same thing as not having the feeling of virtue, of glory, of grace, of beauty in one word, of all that which is really divine upon earth ; let that be still our watchword. There is no question here of distin- guishing between the Greeks and the Latins. For us, their legacy and their benefactions are merged together. Doubtless Grcecia capta ferum is at the bottom of every- thing, that is the starting-point. But the Roman force, the Roman arm, the Roman speech and practice, also pervade everywhere. That has been the great 28 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE instrument to propagate and cultivate. No doubt Isocrates, in his famous panegyric, said, quite rightly at his own date, just before Alexander : " Our city has left the rest of mankind so far behind it in thought and in eloquence, that its pupils have become the masters of others ; she has done her business so well, that the name of Greek seems to be no longer the designation of a single race, but that of intelligence itself, and that we call people Greeks who share rather in our culture than in our nature.' With even more authority, Pericles said the same thing in that admirable pane- gyric of Athens which he introduced so magnificently into his funeral eulogy of the warriors who had died for their country. Never has there been a better descrip- tion of that happy city where no chagrins, no jealousies, no rigid austerities offended the eye or mortified your neighbour's pleasure ; where it was a joy merely to live, to breathe, to walk abroad, and where the mere beauty of buildings and public edifices, the beauty of daylight and a certain air of festivity, drove sadness far from the mind, where it was possible to love beauty with simplicity of life and philosophy without being effemi- nate ; where wealth was used for a practical purpose and not for ostentation ; where courage was not blind like that of the furious Mars, but enlightened and know- ing its own reasons as befits the city of Minerva, the true Athens after the ideal of Pericles, his creation and his work, the school of Greece (E\\aSo