and advanced romanticist, is now-a-days the favourite of all the ultra-monarchical and most classical salons, and of all the clever women who reign in those salons? We are told "He has abjured." Precious reason! Ought women ever to come to the aid of those who abjure? . . . This looks of no account; well, it is very serious. All is lost, all is over, in a country where the renegades are protected by the women.'

Buffon, as interpreted by Gibbon, 'fixes our moral happiness to the mature season in which our passions are supposed to be calmed, our duties fulfilled, our ambition satisfied, our fame and fortune established on a solid basis.' Sainte-Beuve fixes our moral unhappiness to this same season

There comes a sad moment in life; it is when one feels that one has reached all that one could reasonably hope, that one has acquired all to which one could reasonably pretend. I am at this point. I have obtained much more than my destiny offered me at first, and I find at the same time that this much is very little. . . .

In youth, there is a world within us; but as we advance, it comes to pass that our thoughts and our sentiments can no longer fill our solitude, or, at least, no longer charm it. . . . At a certain age, if your house is not peopled with children, it is filled with manies or vices.'

Rogers used to say that, if God did not send children, the devil sent nephews and nieces.

As things go, Sainte-Beuve's existence was something more than tolerable, was what might fairly be termed a happy one, when it was suddenly disturbed by the revolution of February, 1848. By an Athenian law, attributed to Solon, neutrality was punished as a crime: and in any country where the form of government is unsettled, as in France, indifference, if not a crime, is a mistake. When bad men conspire, good men must co-operate. You do not meddle with politics, Monsieur. pity you, for some day or other politics will meddle with you.' This remonstrance, addressed by M. Royer-Collard to a pococurante friend, is aptly applied by M. d'Haussonville to SainteBeuve, who had stood aloof, making no effort by tongue or pen to avert the catastrophe which drove him to seek the bare means of livelihood in a foreign land :—

The Revolution of February did not disconcert me, let people say what they will, and found me more curious than irritated. It is only for M. Veuillot, and those who care equally little about truth, to say that I had fears-blue or red. I was present as an attentive

Gibbon's Autobiography, which concludes with this sentence: 'I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.'

observer

observer at all that passed in Paris during the first six months. It was then only that, from the necessity of living and having found the occasion, I went in October, 1848, to lecture at the University of Liége, where I was for a year in the capacity of ordinary professor.'

There is a note to this passage by his last secretary :

'M. Sainte-Beuve has often related to me that, during the insurrection of June, he walked about Paris with his umbrella in his hand (the sole weapon that he never laid aside, even when, at another time, he fought, and fought well, a pistol-duel with M. Dubois), and approached the theatre of insurrection as near as possible to have the news.'

But what did him harm in fair unprejudiced opinion, was not the imputation of cowardice, but the want of earnestness and patriotism, such as he unconsciously betrays in what he meant for a sarcastic account of an interview with Lamartine on the evening of the memorable day at the Hôtel de Ville, when Lamartine, by a wonderful combination of courage and eloquence, so signally defeated the Reds. Sainte-Beuve was stopped by the march of troops on. his way to read a chapter of 'Port Royal' to some friends, and was coming home by a by-street, when he met Lamartine, agitated and exhausted, returning from the Hôtel de Ville. He exhorts his friend to stand firm, and pictures him 'posant as the man who had just been making a hundred speeches and embraced a hundred thousand men, retaining all the time an inviolable confidence in the virtue of the workmen of Paris as well as in the repentance of LedruRollin.' It never crosses Sainte-Beuve's mind that the author, sneaking home with his manuscript in his pocket, is more an object of ridicule than the excited orator escaping from the tumultuous assembly which he had confronted and controlled at the risk of his life.

One of the many troubles brought upon him by the revolution, was an imputation based upon the discovery of his name in the secret service list of the late Government. It eventually turned out that the sum, about 100 francs, had been really allowed for the repairs of the apartment he occupied in the Institute; but the explanation was not forthcoming in the first instance, and Sainte-Beuve was cut to the quick by finding that a charge of corruption, which he knew to be baseless, could be accepted by any decent portion of the public. They are there,'

Souvenirs,' &c. Before going to Liége, he wrote to an English acquaintance (the writer) to inquire whether there was any chance of his being engaged in a similar capacity at the University of Oxford.

he

he truly said, 'attacking me on my strong side.' But he resigned his place rather than provoke a renewal of the attack; and was again left entirely dependent upon his pen under circumstances peculiarly unfavourable to an honourable or profitable employment of it in France. He accordingly left Paris for Liége, pursued by a chorus of reprobation from a portion of the press.

The choice of subject for his course at Liége was unlucky. The time had hardly arrived for an impartial estimate of 'Chateaubriand and his Literary Group,' especially by one who, besides standing in a peculiar relation to the principal figure, had private grudges against some and personal obligations towards others of the group. Chateaubriand had been hardly dead a year, and Madame Recamier was supposed to be dying. That he was bound to spare her feelings is proved by his own repeated letters of grateful acknowledgment. He was one of the favoured few invited to the first reading of the Mémoires d'outretombe,' at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, and the article in which he commemorated the scene abounded in terms of eulogy. When twitted with having been equally prodigal of them in his notice of the 'Vie de Rancé,' he casuistically replied: "The book was manifestly so weak, that the sentiment which made me speak well of it was above suspicion.' Equally above suspicion would be the sentiment that should have induced him to be fair, if not lenient, to the illustrious dead on whose living accents he had so often affected to hang. It was because he had been seen to hang on them in a forced attitude of ill-simulated complacency, because he had occupied a position beneath his pretensions in the group, that (M. d'Haussonville suggests) he seized the first opportunity of indulging a long suppressed spleen. We are not prepared to say that his estimate of Chateaubriand, as a man of letters, is incorrect; but Chateaubriand and his Literary Group' vividly reminded us of Lord Byron and his Contemporaries' by Leigh Hunt; in which much is set down in malice, and from a spirit of wounded self-love, although little or nothing but what is literally true.*

If these Lectures had been delivered at Paris, or at a less preoccupied time, Sainte-Beuve might speedily have seen reason to regret the indulgence of his spleen. As it was, he betrayed an uneasy consciousness of a bad cause, by frequently returning to the charge. So recently as 1862, he seized the opportunity presented by the publication of M. Joubert's letter on Chateau

The character of Chateaubriand is summed up in the twenty-first and concluding lecture, vol. ii., p. 113.

briand,

briand, to reiterate his views in two Nouveaux Lundis, which have an independent value, as containing a detailed account of the method of proceeding which, in his judgment, a critic should pursue :

'It is very useful to begin by the beginning and, when one has the means, to take the superior or distinguished writer in his native country, in his race. If we were well acquainted physiologically with the race, the ascendants and ancestors, we should have a clear light on the secret and essential quality of mind; but most frequently this deep root remains obscure and is lost. In the cases in which it is not entirely hidden, much is gained by observing it.'

M. Taine would insist that the country and the climate are more important than the race. After the ancestors, come the near relatives, the family :

The superior man will be recognised, recovered to a certainty, at least in part, in his parents, in his mother especially, this parent the surest and most direct: in his sisters also, in his brothers, even in his children. . . . This is very delicate ground, and would require to be illustrated by proper names, by a quantity of particular facts. I will indicate a few.'

'Take the sisters, for example. This Chateaubriand, of whom we were speaking, had one sister with imagination based (to use his own phrase) on stupidity (bêtise), which must have approached downright extravagance; another, on the contrary, the divine Lucile (the Amelia of "René "), with exquisite sensibility, a sort of tender imagination, melancholy, without any of that which corrected or distracted it in him: she died mad, and by her own hand. The elements which he united and associated, at least in his talent, and which kept a sort of equilibrium, were distinctly and disproportionately shared between them.'

He was not, he says, personally acquainted with the sisters of Lamartine, but he had heard Royer-Collard speak of them in their first youth as something charming and melodious, like a nest of nightingales. Balzac's sister, Madame Surville, 'whose physical resemblance to her brother is seen at a glance, is also so formed as to give to those who, like me, have the misfortune to admire but incompletely the great novelist, a more advantageous idea which enlightens, reassures, and reclaims them.' The sister of Beaumarchais, again, had all his humour, wit, and sense of fun, which she pushed to the extreme limit of propriety, when she did not go beyond. She was the very sister of Figaro, the same stock, and the same sap.'

His sole instances of brothers are the Despréaux, although many better suited for the purpose lay ready to his hand; e. g. the Mirabeaus and the Dupins: examples rendered familiar

by

by the saying of Mirabeau, that in any other family his elder brother would have passed for a roué and a wit; and the simple inscription on a tomb in Père la Chaise: A la mère des trois Dupins.

A host of celebrities who acknowledged a similar debt to mothers crowd upon us :-Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Victor Hugo, Canning, Brougham, George Selwyn, Curran. These are not so much as mentioned. Madame de Sévigné, I have said it more than once, seems to have divided herself between her two children-the Chevalier, light, giddy, endowed with grace, and Madame de Grignan, intellectual, but a little cold, having taken reason for her share.' Would both her children, added together, have made up Madame de Sévigné? After alluding to some daughters of unnamed poets who had aided him to comprehend their fathers, he proceeds:—

This is enough to indicate my thought, and I will be moderate. When we have learned as much as possible of the origin, parentage and near relatives, of an eminent writer, the next essential point is the chapter of his studies and his education.'

After this comes the set or group to which he belonged at starting, and when we have tracked him step by step so far, we are to get the best answers we can to the questions mentioned in a preceding article (ante, p. 43) touching his religious opinions, behaviour towards women, pecuniary habits and circumstances, mode of living, &c. &c.

Information on all these points might be required for a complete biography, but would be worse than superfluous as a preparation for the critical examination of a contemporary author in his works. If it did not give rise to personality or impertinence, it would mislead, as it misled Sainte-Beuve in his judgment of Chateaubriand, which was mischievously warped by a minute acquaintance with his peculiarities. Are we bound to find melodious versification in a poem because the poet's daughters sang like nightingales, or wit in a comedy because the dramatist had a witty sister? or (reversing the argument) insist that there can be no real genius in an author whose mother or brother was a fool? It is sad enough to have the dark or soiled passages in a great man's life recalled to us when we are filled with honest admiration of his genius-to be reminded of the meanness of Bacon, the morbid selfishness of Rousseau, the irritable vanity of Vol

*The only inheritance I could boast of from my poor father was the very scanty one of an unattractive face and person like his own; and if the world has ever attributed to me something more valuable than face or person, or than earthly wealth, it was that another and a dearer parent gave her child a fortune from the treasure of her own mind.'-Curran.