SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
SELECT ESSAYS
SAI NTE- BEUVE
Bearing on Englisb OLtterature
TRANSLATED BY
A. J. BUTLER
LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
37 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.
$blislur to tht inbta Office
[A U rights reserved]
FEB 2 5 1960
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 Causer ies 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 <j>p6vipo<i, but always with the understanding
that by the </>/>6i>t/io?, in matters of aesthetic criticism,
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE ; x
we mean the man who agrees with us. In spite of the
etymology of his name, what makes the successful critic
Pope saw, not so much the judicial faculty, as the
ower of expression ; not so much original thought, as
the g,ft of readmg the current thought of his moder-
ely-educated contemporaries. Let him use this power
to gift w ,th urbanity and good temper; and
though his work will not last like the great creative
do service to his
The essays that have been included in the present
ume are mamly those dealing with English literature.
Samte-Beuve had English blood in his veins, which
perhaps accounts for his appreciation of certain points
m English poetry which do not as a rule appeal to
renchmen ; and also for his power of estimating in
some measure ,ts literary form. .The fragment on
onstetten and Gray is extracted from a long essay on
the rather remarkable career of the former. It shouM
be sa,d that Sainte-Beuve's habit of giving quotations
' Sq
,
them somewhat laborious. It
ioped, however, that with one or two trifling excep-
all appear as the authors wrote them. f n add j.
the essays on authors, two, ' Qu'est ce qu'un
.qne and D'une tradition litteraire,' are given as
generally applicable to all literature. They dfal with
> same subject, but from slightly different points of
VZC \y *
e one
where e tV n K Sq T e b u aCketS (and perha P S one or two
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. - - 7
GIBBON, I. (1853) - 139
GIBBON, II. - l6l
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE - - 183
BONSTETTEN AND GRAY (l86o)- - 204
M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, I. (l86l) - 2IO
M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, II. - - 225
M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, in. - - 248
' M. Sainte-Beuve's writings are far less known
among us than they desetve.'
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
ifferent 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
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 whty should not one
occasionally venture to treat in criticism of some of
hose subjects which are not personal, in which not
omeone, but something is spoken of, and which our
neighbours the English have so successfully made into
i complete branch, under the modest title of Essays ?
t 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
hich are seldom granted to our beloved France, and
which her brilliant genius bears with impatience, even
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
tmg than Homer, and Boethius appeared to be a
: at least equal to Plato. The 'new birth' of
literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came
[ear 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
Aground, and formed two harmonious groups on
their two eminences.
Meanwhile, modern literature had been born, and
me of the more precocious members of it, like the
Ban, already had their own fashion of antiquity
had appeared, and his posterity had lost no time
ilutmg him as a classic. Italian poetry may have
Seated greatly since then, but when she has desired,
has always recovered and always retained some
mpulse, some reverberation, from this high origin. It
'f no slight importance for a poetry thus to take its
t of departure, its classic source in a lofty place-
ier, for example, to descend from a Dante than to
laboriously from a Malherbe.
Modern Italy had her classics, and Spain had every
right to believe she was also in possession of hers, when
ance still had hers to seek. Indeed, a few writers of
ent endowed with originality and exceptional raci-
ss, a few brilliant efforts isolated and without sue-
rs shattered immediately and needing always to be
tun afresh, do not suffice to confer upon a nation the
d and imposing basis of literary wealth. That idea
i classic implies in itself something which has se-
quence and solidity, which forms a whole and makes
dition, 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 Sieclc
de Louis XIV., Montesquieu's La Grandeur ct la ZV-
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 Polyeucte, of Cinna, ol
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 Rdmusat
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, genie, 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 g^nie est la raison sublime.'
In writing these lines he was evidently thinking of
8 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Pope, Despreaux,* and Horace, the master of them aH.
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 /Eneid, and in the ecstasies of
Dido ? Where will you find it in the madness of
Phaedra ? Be this as it 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 A thalie, 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 l f 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 stir
VHistoire 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 stir 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 ^Eschylus 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
I 4 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 S6vigne, 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? 15
not to-day unanimously recognised as the most fruitful
writers, the richest as regards the characteristics of
universal morality ?
After 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 mind. As
for rne, 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 Despre"aux, 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? \7
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
i8
SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
description, which would occupy a whole book if it were
complete. Be sure that the Middle Ages and
would fill some of the sacred heights; Italy would
wholly unfold herself like a garden at the feet
singer of Paradise ; Boccaccio and Aristotle would ,
port themselves there, and Tasso would find once moi
the orange groves of Sorrento. In short, the dil
nations would have each a special nook kept for i
but the authors would delight in coming out of it, a
as they walk about they would recognise, where
they expect it, their brothers or their masters. Lucre-
tius, for instance, would love to discuss with Milton t.
origin of the world and the disentanglement of chaos
but as they argue each after his manner, they will
agree about the divine representations of poetry and
nature.
These are our classics ; everybody's imagination c
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 roaming* ;
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.'
proper instincts. Let us have the sincerity and natural
ness of our own thoughts, our own fLling""
cttT L P h Sdble - Let " add t0 " ^ - diffi
'It, a high a,m, an .mpetus towards some lofty ideal
j-raa
t our brow towards the hills and fasten our ay"!
onjhe group of revered beings: Wkat WoM %&
There comes a period in lie wen our
-andenngs all finished and our experiences aU ac
qmred, there ,, no keener pleasure than to study and
pen the th.ngs we know, to relish what we ta
just as when you behold again and again thlp ople
n love; purest delight of the mature mind and Se
t is then that this word classic assumes its true
m 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 legons de ta philosophic,
A m^priser la mort en savourant la vie,
A lire tes e'crits pleins de grace et de sens,
Comme on boit d'un vin vieux qul 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 fccole
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.
2 4 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 ;
even 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
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 Gratia 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
2 g 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 ('JEX\a8o? 'EXXa? AOrjvcu*),
such as he had made it during the long years of his
personal supremacy and potent persuasion ; for we have
* The author apparently intends to refer to the TJJC 'E\Xa6oe
' of Thucydides, II. 41.
A LITERARY TRADITION 29
in Pericles the most noble and brilliant type of the
popular chief, the man who becomes dictator of a
democracy by reason, eloquence, talent, and continual
persuasion. In another very memorable discourse
which Thucydides puts in his mouth, doubtless not
without good cause, Pericles handles the Athenians as
in later days he would have handled the Romans ; he
makes every effort to sustain and fortify them against
the double trial of the war and the terrible plague ; he
lays himself out to breathe into those citizens of a
great city, brought up in ways and sentiments worthy of
it, courage to make head against the greatest disasters.
Speaking to them even then as to a people that were
kings, proving to them that from the moment they had
once been such they could not recoil, but were condemned
to remain so always or to exist no longer, no longer even
to expect if they should fall the usual conditions of
subject-cities, he enunciates for their use the most
decided public and political maxims : ' to be hated, to
be odious at the present time, such has been the lot of
all those who have aspired to empire over others ; but
whoever incurs this odium for great causes takes the
right side, and has no occasion to repent.' And in
truth, if one could always hear the Pericles of
Thucydides, that Demosthenes not in word only but
in action, one would no longer allow the Romans to
boast as they have done that they had added solidity to
the delightful genius of the Greeks.
But the Athenians were only able to accomplish half
his wish, and of this work which Pericles dreamed and
more than dreamed, put before them, the work of
constancy, of lasting energy, and of world-wide political
3 o SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
empire, it was the Romans who undertook the accom-
plishment in proportions of far other breadth, and not
only by sea but by land.
While the Greeks, fallen, cut off from exercising public
virtues, became with few exceptions more frivolous,
more voluble, more sophistical, more sycophantic, more
romancing than they had ever been, the conquerors
seized that precious divine element a portion of the
Promethean fire and animated with it their practical
vigour and their solid good sense in a temperament
which united vivacity and consistence. It matters
little that it was only the picked men among the
Romans who possessed that refinement and that
delicacy, not the whole people as at Athens ; posterity
only knows the picked men. I shall, however, never
admit that Rome, even that Rome of the people which
we have since seen to be possessed of so fine and so keen
powers of raillery, had not, from the moment when she
had leisure and opportunity, acute wits simultaneously
with the gift of agreeable and dulcet language.
This must have become established pretty nearly in
the time of Cicero, both the word and the thing :
Favorem et urbanum, says Quintilian, Cicero nova credit.
By that time, accordingly, we get the other City, pre-
eminently so-called, that in whose light Cicero wished
that he might always live, so as to be the more sure of
never growing rusty the Rome of Catullus and Horace
and onward to that of the younger Pliny. Such are our
fatherlands.
After Trajan's days, when the hour of Roman de-
cadence definitely struck, ecclesiastical literature, which
was about to be born, did not enter as quickly or as
A LITERARY TRADITION 3'
directly into the inheritance of literary beauty as Rome
had done in its first contact with Greece. The torch
was not passed from hand to hand. In Greece alone,
by a singular good fortune, and a remnant of its birth-
right privilege, that sacred literature, in the mouth of
a Basil and a Chrysostom, recovered, without effort,
copiousness and harmony, and almost the accents of
Plato. But at Rome and in Africa the Latin of the
early fathers was harsh, far-fetched, and laboured, even
while the thought was original, excellent, and often
sublime. Christian writers started from a principle too
different, too contrary to external beauty, to be able to
greet it at first sight, or when they met it to refrain from
shocking it. But as ages went on, after revolutions and
cycles laboriously accomplished, the stars came into
conjunction again, and became favourable, harmony
and supreme beauty were rediscovered ; this blazes out
and glows in the world of the Arts, in that kindly
Rome of Raphael and Leo X. ; in a less brilliant, but
perhaps more estimable style, in the style of morality
and of eloquent language, of sincere and convinced
poetry, it reappeared in France in the reign of
Louis XIV. There was a day when Biblical grandeur
and Hellenic beauty met and were fused and mingled
in spirit and in form with a lofty simplicity ; and when
we speak to-day of tradition, and of that which would
have failed if it had been lacking, of what would have
been missing in the most charming stories, in the most
noble pictures of human memory, we have the right to
say, in each case; by an equally incontestable title, there
would have been no Homer or Xenophon, there would
have been no Virgil, there would have been no A thalie.
32 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
But you will say that great men of letters have been
produced entirely outside of this tradition. Name
them. I know one only, and he is great enough, no
doubt Shakespeare. And in his case, are you quite
sure that he is entirely outside ? Had he not read
Montaigne and Plutarch those copious repertories,
nay, rather those reserve hives of antiquity in which so
much honey is stored? An admirable poet, and no
doubt the most natural since Homer, though in such a
different line, of him it has been written with perfect
truth that he had so creative an imagination and that he
paints so well and with such conspicuous energy all his
characters from heroes and kings, down to innkeepers
and peasants ' that if human nature had been de-
stroyed, and that if there remained no other monument
of it than his works alone, other beings might know
from his writings what man had been.' It is not
to you I need say that this man, of all men so
human, was not a savage nor a man of irregular life ;
that we must not confound him, because he has some-
times carried energy or subtlety to excess, or because
he has given in either to the coarseness or the refine-
ments of his own time, with eccentrics and madmen
full of themselves, intoxicated with their own nature
and their own works, ' drunk with their own wine.' If
we could see him appear suddenly and walk in in
person, I imagine him to myself (as an ingenious critic
has shown us*) noble and human of countenance, having
nothing about him of the bull, the boar, or even the
lion ; bearing in his physiognomy, like Moliere, the
most noble features of the species those which speak
* Tieck.
A LITERARY TRADITION 33
most to the soul and the intellect ; moderate, sensible
in talk, and most often, whether through pity or in-
dulgence, smiling and kind; for he has also created
beings who ravish us with purity and kindness, and he
dwells at the centre of human nature. Is it not to
him that we must go to find the very most expressive
word for rendering kindness' the milk of human kind-
5'? a quality which it always seems to me essential
that energetic talents should mingle with their force if
they are not to fall into sternness or into insulting
brutality ; just as in the case of fine talents inclined to be
too kindly I should require, to save them from insipidity,
that there should be added a little of what Pliny and
Lucian call pungency* the salt of strength. Thus it
5 that talents become complete ; and Shakespeare, in
his own way, saving the faults of his time, was complete.
You may reassure yourselves ; great men in every line, and
above all, I will say, in the intellectual order, have never
been crazy or barbarous. If any writer appears to us
in his conduct and in his whole personality to be violent,
unreasonable, given to shocking good sense or the most
natural proprieties, he may have talent, for talent, even
great talent, is compatible with many perversities ; but
be sure he is not a writer of the first quality and of
the highest mark among mankind. Homer sometimes
nods, Corneille in conversation is heavy and nods, La
Fontaine nods ; they have their moments of absence,
f forgetfulness ; but the greater men are never perma-
nently extravagant, ridiculous, grotesque, ostentatious,
oastful, cynical, or unseemly. For my own part, how-
ever large the allowance I may make for natural varieties
: The amarttudo of the Latin author, dpipdrw of the Greek.
3
34 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
and singularities, I shall never fancy to myself the
revered choir of the five or six great men of letters and
of creative genius of whom humanity can boast, and who
after all can only be the five or six leaders among the
honourable folk of the universe, as a band or pack of
crazy maniacs rushing each with his head down after
their prey, on the chance of catching it. No, tradition
tells us, and the consciousness of our own civilized
nature tells us still more plainly, reason always must
have, and definitely has, the first place even among
these favourites, these elect of the imaginative power ;
or if she does not constantly keep the first place, but
allows an access of high spirits to run its course, she
is never far off, as she stands by smiling, awaiting an
hour which is at hand the moment of recovery. This
is the literary religion to which we belong, even though
surrounded by the most lively audacities, and to this
we would always belong.
I, that am a critic, may be allowed to invoke the
example of the greatest of critics, Goethe him of whom
we may say that he is not only tradition but that he is
all traditions united. Which, from a literary point of
view, predominates in him? The classical element. In
him I can see the Greek temple even on the shores of
Tauris. He wrote Werther, but it is Werther written
by one who carries his Homer into the fields, and who
will find him again even when his hero has lost him.
It is thus that he has preserved his lordly serenity ; no
one dwells in the clouds less than he; he enlarges
Parnassus, he makes stages in it, he peoples it at every
station, at every summit, at every angle of its rocks ;
he makes it like, perhaps even too like, that pinnacled
A LITERARY TRADITION 35
rather than rounded hill, Montserrat in Catalonia,
but he does not destroy it. Without that taste for
Greece which chastens and tethers his universal indiffer-
ence, or, if you prefer, his universal curiosity, Goethe
might have lost himself in the indefinite, the indeter-
minate. So many summits are familiar to him, that
if Olympus were not his summit by predilection, where
would he go ? or rather, where would he not go ? he,
the most open-minded of men, and the most advanced
in the direction of the East ? His transformations, his
pilgrimages in the pursuit of the various forms of
beauty, would have had no end, but he came back, he
settled down, he knew the point of view from which to
contemplate the universe that it might appear in its
most beautiful light. As for himself, whenever we
wish to form an image of the critical spirit at its
highest pitch of intelligence, and of considered under-
standing, we figure him to ourselves as an attentive
and watchful spectator, curious from afar off, on the
look-out for every discovery, for all that goes by, for
every sail on the horizon but from the heights of his
Sunium.
He it was, the author of Werther and of Faust, one
who knew what he was talking about, who so justly
said : ' By classic I understand sound, and by romantic,
sickly.' But as the classic, and even the romantic,
form part of tradition, if we are to consider it in its
entire series, and in the full extent of the past, I must
pause at this saying of Goethe's, and I should like, in
your presence, to try to explain it to myself. Well,
then, the classic, in its most general character and in
its widest definition, comprises all literatures in a
36 SELECT ESSAYS OF SA1NTE-BEUVE
healthy and happily-flourishing condition, literatures
in full accord and in harmony with their period, with
their social surroundings, with the principles and
powers which direct society, satisfied with themselves.
Let us be quite clear, I mean satisfied to belong to
their nation, to their age, to the government under
which they come to birth and flourish (joy of intellect,
it has been said, is the mark of strength of intellect ;
that is no less true for literatures than for individuals),
those literatures which are and feel themselves to be at
home, in their proper road, not out of their proper
class, not agitating, not having for their principle
discomfort, which has never been a principle of beauty.
I am not the person to speak evil of romantic literatures,
I keep within the terms of Goethe and of historical
explanation. People are not born when they wish to
be, they cannot choose their moment for hatching out,
they cannot, especially in youth, avoid the general
currents which are passing in the air, and which blow
dryness or moisture, fever or health ; and there are
similar currents for the soul. That feeling of funda-
mental contentment, in which there is, before all
things, hope, into which discouragement does not
enter, where you may say that there is a period before
you which will outlast you, which is stronger than you,
a period which will protect and judge, where you have
a fine field for a career, for an honourable and glorious
development in the full light of day that is what gives
the first foundation, upon which afterwards arise, like
palaces and temples in regular order, * harmoniously
constructed and regular works.
When you live in a perpetual instability of public
A LITERARY TRADITION 37
affairs, when you see society change often before your
eyes, you are tempted to disbelieve in literary immor-
tality, and consequently to grant yourself every license.
Now it falls to nobody's lot to give himself this feeling
of security and of a steady and durable period, one
must breathe it in with the air in the hours of youth.
Romantic literatures, which are above all things
matters of sudden assault and of adventure, have their
merits, their exploits, their brilliantly played parts, but
outside of established rules. They perch themselves
astride of two or three periods, never getting fairly into
the saddle on a single one, uneasy, inquiring, eccentric
by nature, either much in advance or much in arrear,
in other respects wilful and wandering.
Classical literature never complains, never groans,
never feels ennui. Sometimes, in company with sorrow,
and by way of sorrow, one may outstrip it, but beauty
is more tranquil.
The classic, I repeat, possesses among its other
characteristics that of loving its own country, its own
times, of seeing nothing more desirable or more beauti-
ful. It is legitimately for and of these. Its motto
should be ' Activity with tranquillity.' That is true of
the age of Pericles, of the age of Augustus, no less
than of the reign of Louis XIV. Let us hear the
great poets and the orators of those periods speak
under their fair sky, as it were under their dome of
blue, their hymns of praise still resound in our ears :
they carried the art of applause very far. Romanticism,
like Hamlet, has home-sickness, it seeks for what it has
not, seeks it even beyond the clouds ; it dreams, it sees
in visions. In the nineteenth century it adores the
38 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Middle Ages ; in the eighteenth, it was already revolu-
tionary with Rousseau. In Goethe's sense of the word,
there are romanticists of various times. Chrysostom's
young friend Stagirius, or Augustine in his youth, were
of this kind, Renes before their time; sick men, but they
were sick men who might be healed, and Christianity
healed them by exorcising the demon. Hamlet, Wer-
ther, Childe Harold, the true Rene's, are sick men of
the kind who sing and suffer, who enjoy their malady
romantics more or less in a dilettante way ; they are
sick for sickness' sake.
Oh ! if one day in our fair fatherland, in our capital
which grows daily in magnificence, which is for us so
fine a representative of the country, we felt ourselves
happy, honestly happy of belonging to it ; if, above all,
young souls, touched by a kind inspiration, caught by
that praiseworthy and salutary contentment which docs
not engender a childish pride, but only adds emulation
to life, could feel themselves happy to live in an age,
under a social system, which allows or favours all the
finer developments of humanity ; if they would not from
the outset put themselves in an attitude of revolt, of
opposition or fault-finding, of bitterness, of regrets or of
hopes too late or premature ; if they would consent to
spread out and to direct all their powers in the wide
field open before them, then the balance would be re-
stored between talent and its surroundings, between men
of parts and the social system ; we should find ourselves
again in unison, strife and moral sickness would cease,
and literature would again of itself become classical,
both in grandeur of line and in what is essential, its
fundamental basis. It is not that people would have
A LITERARY TRADITION 39
more talent or more knowledge, but more order,
more harmony, more proportion, a noble aim, and
simpler means and more courage to arrive at it ; we
should perhaps begin again to have works that would
last.
It is here no mission, no claim of ours to produce
such ; we have above all to preserve them. What is
the best and surest manner of maintaining tradition ?
In the first place it is to possess it complete, not to
concentrate and crowd it upon certain points too close
together, not to exaggerate it here and overlook it
there. There is no need to tell you these things, since
the models are familiar and present to you, from the
first beginnings, and in different literatures, and your
minds are furnished with true standards of comparison
in every kind. Others have set up the pillars on the
foundation of yourselves, you have the patterns of true
beauty. He who can see Plato, Sophocles, Demos-
thenes, face to face, is under no temptation to grant
too much, even to the most illustrious of the moderns.
That is the weak point of those who only possess one
language and one literature. Frederick the Great
granted everything to Voltaire, even to Voltaire as a
poet, and adjudged to him all the crowns, merely
because he had no sufficient standard of comparison.
Through over-narrowing of tradition, through making
it too cut and dried, many of those who at the be-
ginning of this century claimed the exclusive title of
classics, were, in the strife of that time, those who
could least do so.
As each age renews itself, portions of recent tradition
which are believed well based crumble into ruin after
40 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
a certain fashion, and the only result is, that the inde-
structible marble rock appears all the more in its true
solidity.
In order to maintain tradition, it is not always suffi-
cient to attach it firmly to its most lofty and most
august monuments, it is necessary to verify it and to
check it incessantly at the points nearest to us, even to
rejuvenate it, and to keep it in perpetual relation with
what is living. Here we touch a somewhat delicate
question. It is no business of mine to introduce into
the curriculum too recent names, to go out of my way
to judge the works of the present day, to confuse func-
tions and parts. A professor is not a critic. The
critic, if he does his duty (and where are such critics at
the present day ?) is a sentinel always awake, always
on the look-out ; but he does not only cry ' Who goes
there ?' he gives help ; far from resembling a pirate,
or delighting in shipwrecks, he sometimes, like the
coasting-pilot, goes to the help of those whom the
tempest overtakes as they enter or leave port. The
professor's obligations are smaller, or, I should say,
different. He is bound to more reserve and more
dignity. He must not go far from the sacred places
which it is his part to show and to tend. Still, he
cannot entirely escape all knowledge of novelties, of
arrivals and approaches, announced with all pomp, of
sails which are signalled from time to time on the
horizon as those of invincible armadas. He must know
them, at least the chief of them. He must have his
opinion. In a word, he must keep his eye on the
neighbouring shore, and never go to sleep.
To go to sleep on tradition is a danger with which
A LITERARY TRADITION 41
we are little threatened. We are no longer in the days
when, if you were born in a capital, you never left it.
We have seen classics who have grown feeble in the
second generation, who have become sedentary and
home - keeping. They have acted like the son of
Charles V., of all emperors the most travelled, that
Philip II. who never stirred from his Escurial. Nobody
nowadays has any right to rest so quiet, even in the
best established admirations. One thing or another is
constantly moving as we watch it, and there open, as in
our old cities, long, new vistas which change the most
familiar views. Instruction is bound, whether it will or
not, to take fresh bearings, to reconsider in these things.
There are ways also in which it can renew itself, in
which it can modify the manner in which it does service
to taste, and defends tradition. I will take our seven-
teenth century for example.
Criticism and erudition are guided by the historical
spirit, have devoted themselves for some years past to
a great work which has its value, and the importance
and undoubted utility of which I should be far from
depreciating. There has come a taste for original
sources. People have wished to make a closer acquaint-
ance with everything by the aid of papers and docu-
ments at first hand, and, as far as possible, unpublished.
In this way they have succeeded in penetrating the
secret of many things and the most private opinions
of many persons, to know in almost daily detail the
grounds of their admiration for Henry IV., for Riche-
lieu, for Louis XIV., to count up the hidden springs of
their administration, and to follow all the movements
of their foreign policy. Thanks to this publication of
42 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
diplomatic documents, that which formerly was pos-
sessed by only a few learned men, the private domain
of Foncemagne or of Pere Griffet, has been put at the
disposal of everybody. State secrets of the past have
ceased to exist. Nor have people limited themselves
to the historical figures properly so called ; they have
chosen to go into the inner court, to the private fireside
of men most eloquent either by pen or by word. Their
papers have been examined, their autograph letters,
the first editions of their works, the evidence of their
surroundings, the journals of the secretaries who
knew them best, and in this way notions have been
formed of them somewhat different, and certainly more
precise than could be obtained from the mere reading
of their published works. People of taste in former
times in their literary judgement of works were a little
too indolent, too delicate, too much people of the
world; they stopped at researches of the least difficulty,
and shrank back as from thorns. Even the critics by
profession, elegant as they might be, did not sufficiently
inform themselves beforehand of everything which
might give to their judgement perfect guarantees for
exactitude and truth. We know a good deal more to-
day than they did about many points in the subjects
on which they touched. We have at hand all the
resources that we can desire ; without speaking of
biography, bibliography, that entirely new branch once
held to be not repaying, that science of books of which
it has been said that it too often dispenses people
from reading them, and which our genuine men of
letters used formerly to leave to the Dutch critics, has
become Parisian and fashionable, almost agreeable and
A LITERARY TRADITION 43
certainly easy. The most humble beginner, if he will
only devote two or three mornings to it, can with little
trouble know all that concerns the material part of the
books and the personality of the author upon whom he
is for the moment engaged. Those are the advantages,
the benefit of it ; but, on the other hand, the incon-
veniences of these new methods at a period when there
is too little of the higher criticism to act the part of
watcher and judge, have not been slow in showing
themselves, and if I am not mistaken, we have them on
every side full in our eyes.
Not a day passes without someone announcing a dis-
covery ; everyone wishes to make it his own, everyone
boasts of it, and puffs his wares unchecked. Dispro-
portionate importance and literary value are attributed
to works hitherto unknown. People are proud of
' finds,' merely curious (when they are that), which cost
no thought, no effort of the mind, but merely the
trouble of going and picking them up. One would say
that the era of the scholiasts and commentators was
reopening and beginning anew ; a man gets no less
honour and consideration for this, nay, more, than if he
had attempted a fine novel, a fine poem, or tried the
ways of true invention, the lofty roads of thought.
There has been a change in the level of public approba-
tion, while at the same time the writer's own point of
honour has been displaced, and his ambition has been
perceptibly lowered. It is a very general and very pro-
nounced misunderstanding which has mixed itself up
with a useful thing. As for works which, having been
produced conscientiously and modestly we could quote
examples of them invite esteem, I see the moment at
44 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
hand when there will no longer be crowns enough for
them.
Let us maintain the degrees of art, the stages of
intelligence. Let us encourage all industrious research,
but let us in everything leave the master's place to
talent, to careful thought, to judgement, to reason, to
taste. For example, I esteem highly those dissertations
which we see produced every year on special subjects,
in which the author often seeks to excavate somewhat
further than had already been done, to add something
to what people knew already. I draw instruction from
them ; you will write some yourselves before long, good
ones I hope, even new ones. But must I admit that,
when I see the titles which are far too complacently
affixed to them, the promises, the public pledges of dis-
covery, ' So-and-so from unpublished documents,' I a
little distrust the taste and the perfect accuracy of the
conclusions ? I shall not advise you to put, but I
should be just as glad if people would put, on the title-
page once for all, ' So-and-so according to judicious
ideas and views,' even were they ancient.
You must quite understand the extent of my hesita-
tion. Far be it from me, I say again, to wish to diminish
the esteem due to a fashion of research which has
become general, and which under the slightly confused
and dusty appearance of a big inventory is tending to
renew, perhaps to freshen, in future days the surface of
literary history, although I suspect that literature has
less to gain from it than history may have. If time, the
great devourer, makes the memory of many facts dis-
appear and annihilates the true explanations of them
with their witnesses, it is also in many respects the
A LITERARY TRADITION 45
great revealer. It raises from underground other un-
expected witnesses, and discloses many secrets that
could not have been hoped for. But having said this,
and notwithstanding these supplementary inquiries
which are always being opened, let us, if possible, pre-
serve the light touch, the delicate and prompt im-
pression of good taste ; in presence of living works of
the mind, let us dare to keep our judgement clear and
alive also, sharply defined, unhampered, sure of itself
even without documents to support it.
I am not afraid to vary my examples, my com-
parisons, and to choose those which will bring you
most into touch with my thought. As you know,
Thucydides collected notes to the composition of his
fine, his severely simple, history for twenty years long.
He must have written some sort of memoranda or de-
tailed journals about all the events which he watched
from the retirement of exile. Artist and historian, when
he had once set to work he used them freely, taking or
rejecting as it suited his plan or not, and then de-
stroyed them or never thought of them again. I do
not say that it would not be extremely interesting to-
day to have those notes if by chance they had been
preserved but I do say that in the system which would
tend to prevail, which already does prevail, people
would come to prefer them decidedly to the composition
itself, to that history of the Peloponnesian war that is
so perfect, so epic, or rather dramatic, and in which
there is such an austere unity of action. People would
come on the whole to prefer the materials to the
work, the scaffolding to the monument. Thucydides'
note-books rather than the statue of bronze which
46 SELECT ESSAYS OF SA INTE-SEWE
Thucydides raised ! You who are going to Athens,
who go there day by day, you will resist to the best of
your power this upsetting of the points of view, even
in what belongs to modern times, and if in regard to
these truth at any price (or what is taken for it), if
curiosity decidedly wins the day over art, you will at
least take care that the old method, and what has
sprung from it, shall remain in honour, an object of
worship and of study, present to the memory and to
the meditation of those faithful intellects which can
still be touched by the idea of beauty.
But although this disposition is admitted and
recognised between us, although while we profit as best
we may by the occasionally somewhat cumbrous instru-
ments of modern criticism, we shall retain some of the
customs, even some of the principles of the old
criticism, assigning the first place in our admiration
and our esteem to invention, composition, the art of
writing; sensitive above all to the charm of wit, to lofty
or subtle talent, you will not conclude from this that
we shall necessarily, in regard to celebrated books and
their writers, fall into a monotonous and universal
frame of laudation. The best way not only of appre-
ciating but of getting others to appreciate fine works is
to have no predilection, to give one's self full liberty
every time one reads them or speaks them, to forget, if
possible, that one has possessed them for a long time,
and to begin upon them again as if one had only to-
day made their acquaintance. Thus steeped again in
its source one's opinion, even if it may sometimes
remain inferior to what one had previously formed, at
any rate recovers life and freshness. The man of taste
A LITERARY TRADITION 47
even though he be not destined to teach and have his
full leisure, ought for his own sake, it seems to me, to
return every four or five years upon the best of his old
admirations, to verify them, to put them to the question
again as though they were new that is to say, to re-
awaken and refresh them even at the risk of seeing
them now and then somewhat deranged ; the important
point is that they should be living. But have no
anxiety about the result. All of those admirations
which are well founded, if the reader himself in his in-
most soul has not become in the interval less worthy
to admire beauty, will all or nearly all gain and increase
by this honest review ; as we advance in life really beau-
tiful things appear more and more beautiful proportion-
ately to our greater opportunities of comparison.
We will try, then, not to admire more than we should,
or otherwise than we should, not to give everything to
one century, even to a great century, not to stake
everything at once on a few great writers. In speaking
of them we will try to concentrate our praise upon their
principal merit ; for even in the case of great authors
there is one principal merit. It is only our contem-
poraries who have every merit, the most contradictory
at the same time ; with the ancients, and with the
classics we shall be more sober, and this sobriety will
itself be homage.
And in this matter I am cautioned to be circumspect
when I remember how reserved in eulogy are all the
greatest minds, the steadiest and loftiest intellects
in different lines Laplace, Lagrange, Napoleon
but also how they let their eulogies apply accurately to
the principal point of a man's merits or talents. Then
48 SELECT ESSAYS OF SA1NTE-BEUVE
it needs but one word to stamp him for ever; that
word is fixed and engraved. I know that lower down,
when one belongs to the mere majority of mankind,
there is less need to count one's words or to be cautious
in admiration ; but even so one should know how to
direct one's praises, and not let them go up like a
rocket. Let us leave it to others to excite themselves
with exaggerated imaginations which go to the head,
and are near akin to a gentle intoxication. I know no
more divine pleasure than a clear, distinct, and felt
admiration.
In the case of an author I am not going to praise the
art where the chief features are force and grandeur.
If I praise the art in the Provinciates I shall, in the
same Pascal, praise only the force and moral energy of
the Pensees ; I shall bow down before the grand, mighty,
sublime language of Bossuet, certainly the most
impetuous, the most copious, which has burst forth in
the French tongue ; but if it is a question of elegance
and grace I shall keep the palm for Fe"nelon. When I
come to speak of Boileau I shall only moderately praise
the poetry or the thought of his satires, the thought
even of his epistles. Still we shall very clearly see his
rare merit as a poet in some epistles and in the Luirin.
But above all I shall display him to you as full of sense,
of judgement, of honesty, of sound and piercing words
spoken to the purpose, often with courage a character
armed with reason, and clad with honour, and for this
reason, as much as for his talent, deserving all the
authority which he exercised even within two paces of
Louis XIV.
It may sometimes happen that in this number of
A LITERARY TRADITION 49
successive appreciations and judgements into which I
shall put my best care our measures may differ a
little, that there may be some cases in which you will
find me less keen than you reckoned, and where you
will admire more than I do certain qualities of our
writers. I shall be happy in this as in other things to
be outstripped by you. We shall have to make certain
reciprocal concessions to each other. I have often
remarked that when two good intellects pass totally
different judgements on the same author we may safely
wager that it is because they are not, in fact, fixing their
thoughts, for the moment, on the same object, on the
same works of the author in question, on the same
passages of his works ; that it is because they have not
the whole of him before their eyes, that they are not,
for the moment, taking him in entirely. A closer
attention, a wider knowledge, will bring together differ-
ing judgements and restore them to harmony. But even
in the regular graduated circle of lawful admiration a
certain latitude must be allowed to the diversity of
tastes, minds, and ages.
But I am forgetting. We shall have plenty of oppor-
tunities of together applying and verifying, in assiduous
practice, the various observations which I am here
laying before you, without overmuch order and method ;
the Ars poetica of our master, Horace, having long ago
given us authority for this fashion of free discursiveness
upon matters of taste. Be sure that if on this first
occasion I have brought under your notice so many
recommendations, so many critical remarks, if I have
appeared to be giving you many pieces of advice which
others have already given you much better, it has not
4
50 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
been without addressing much of it to myself first. You
will do me a service, gentlemen, in the first place, by re-
calling them to me ; and still further and this is a
salutary kindness which I expect of you by daily offer-
ing me, from your knots of thoughtful and eager young
men, the best and most living answer to what is too often
the final word, the last barren result, of a life spent in
isolation and too self-centred thought.
As time goes on you will make me believe that I can,
for my part, be of some good to you, and with the
generosity of your age you will repay me, in this feeling
alone, far more than I shall be able to give you in
intellectual direction, or in literary insight. If in one
sense I bestow on you some of my experience, you will
requite me, and in a more profitable manner, by the
sight of your ardour for what is noble ; you will ac-
custom me to turn oftener and more willingly towards
the future in your company ; you will teach me again to
hope.
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD TO
HIS SON.
IN every age there have been essays intended to mould
the polite man, the well-bred man, the courtier (in the
days when people lived only for courts), the accom-
plished gentleman. In all these essays on knowledge
of the world and good manners, if we reopen them
again at a later period, we find, at the first glance,
some features which are as completely gone as the
fashions of our fathers and the cut of their coats ;
evidently the pattern has changed. Yet, if we con-
sider well, we shall still find some advantage in studying
these models which have been set before a previous
generation, if the book has been written by an intelligent
man who has known the real human being. The letters
which Lord Chesterfield addressed to his son, and
which contain a whole school of tact and knowledge of
the world, have this interesting peculiarity, that he has
not thought at all about setting up a model but has only
wished privately to form an excellent pupil. They are
confidential letters which have suddenly been brought
to light, and have betrayed all the secrets and ingenious
artifices of paternal solicitude. If in reading them
at the present day one is struck by the excessive
52 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
importance attached to accidental and temporary
peculiarities, to mere details of costume, one is no less
struck by the permanent part, by that which depends
upon human observation for all time ; and this latter
part is far more considerable than might be supposed
from a first superficial glance. When he was discuss-
ing with the son whom he wished to form, about what is
suitable to the well-bred man in society, Lord Chester-
field did not compose an essay On Duty like Cicero,
but he has left some letters which by their mixture
of accuracy and flippancy, by certain frivolous turns
which join on imperceptibly to the serious graces,
maintain tolerably well a man between the Memoirs of
Count Grammont and Telemaque.
Before speaking of them in any fulness we must know
a little of what Lord Chesterfield was. One of the most
brilliant intellects of his time in England, and one of
those who best know France, Philip Dormer Stanhope,
Earl of Chesterfield, was born in London, September 22,
1694, the same year as Voltaire. Sprung from an illus-
trious race he knew the worth of it, and wished to
maintain its honour ; yet it was difficult for him not to
laugh at genealogical pretensions pressed too far. To
guard himself once for all from this he had placed
among the portraits of his ancestors two old faces of
a man and a woman ; under one was written 'Adam
Stanhope,' under the other 'Eve Stanhope.' In this
way, while he upheld honour, he made short work with
fanciful pretensions.
His father did not concern himself at all with his
education ; he was put under the charge of his grand-
mother, Lady Halifax. He early felt the desire to excel
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 53
and be first in everything, that desire which, later on,
he would have wished to arouse in his son's mind, and
which, for good or for evil, is the secret of all greatness.
As he had no advice given him in his first youth he made
more than one mistake about the objects of his emula-
tion, and acquired a false idea of honour. He confesses
that, during a period of inexperience, he gave way to
excess in wine and to other excesses to which he
was not in truth naturally prone, but his vanity was
flattered at hearing himself called a man of pleasure.
Thus with regard to gambling, which he considered a
necessary ingredient in the composition of a young
man of quality, he plunged into it at first without
ardour but afterwards could not draw back, and through
it compromised his fortune for a long while. ' Take
warning by my conduct,' he said to his son; 'choose
your pleasures yourself, and do not allow them to be
forced upon you.'
This desire to excel and be distinguished did not
always go astray in that way, and he often made a right
use of it ; his earliest studies were the best. Sent to
the University of Cambridge, he learnt everything that
was taught there, civil law, philosophy ; he followed
the mathematical lectures of the blind scholar, Saunder-
son. He read Greek fluently, and gave an account of
his progress in French to his former tutor, M. Jouneau,
a French refugee pastor. Lord Chesterfield had learnt
our language in his childhood from a Norman maid-
servant who had been with him. The last time he
came to Paris, in 1741, M. de Fontenelle, having noticed
something of a Norman accent about his pronunciation,
remarked on it to him, and asked him whether he had
54 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
not first learnt our language from a person from the
Norman province ; which indeed was the case.
After two years at the university he made his tour
round the Continent, according to the custom of young
lords in his country. He went to Holland, Italy, and
France. He wrote from Paris to this same M. Jouneau,
December 7, 1714 :
' I shall not tell you my opinions about the French because I am
often taken for one of them, and more than one Frenchman has
paid me the greatest compliment which they think it possible to
render anyone, namely : Sir, you are just like ourselves. I \\ ill
only tell you that I am insolent, that I talk a great deal, very loud
and with a lordly voice, that I sing and dance when I walk ; and,
in short, am madly extravagant in powder, feathers, white
gloves, etc.'
We here perceive the mocking, satirical, and some-
what insolent spirit which makes its point in the first
instance at our expense ; later on he will do justice to
our solid qualities.
He has described himself in the letters to his son
the first day that he made his entrance into good
society, as still quite covered with his Cambridge rust,
shamefaced, awkward, silent, and at last, plucking up
courage to say to a beautiful lady near whom he was,
' Madam, do you not think it is very hot to-day ?' But
Lord Chesterfield told his son that story so as not to
discourage him, and to show him from what depths one
can recover. He makes a display of his own per-
sonality to give him courage and the better to draw
him to his own level. I should be very sorry to take
him literally in this anecdote. If he was for a moment
\
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 55
confused in society it must have been a very short
moment, and it was not apparent for long.
Queen Anne was just dead; Chesterfield hailed the
accession of the House of Hanover, one of whose open
champions he was to be. He had at first a seat in the
House of Commons, and he began there on a good
footing. Yet an apparently trivial circumstance kept
him in check, it is said, and somewhat paralysed his
eloquence. A member of the House, distinguished by
no other superior talents, had that of imitating and
mimicking to perfection the orators to whom he
replied. Chesterfield feared ridicule, it was a weakness
of his, and he kept silent on certain occasions more than
he would have wished, for fear of giving an opening to
the parodies of his colleague and opponent. He soon
succeeded to his peerage, at the death of his father, and
passed on to the House of Lords, whose setting was,
perhaps, better suited to the grace, refinement, and
suavity of his eloquence. Nevertheless he thought
there was no comparison between the two scenes as to
the importance of the debates and the political influence
that could be acquired there.
' It is inconceivable,' he said later of Pitt, when that great orator
consented to enter the Upper House under the title of Lord
Chatham ' it is inconceivable that a man at the height of his
power, at the very moment when his ambition had just obtained
the most complete triumph, should have left the House which had
procured him this power and which alone could ensure his retention
of it, to retire into the hospital for incurables, the House of
Lords.'
I have not here to estimate Lord Chesterfield's
political career. Yet, if I ventured to hazard a general
56 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE BEUVE
opinion, I should say that his ambition was never
completely satisfied in it, and that the brilliant distinc-
tions with which his public life was filled concealed at
bottom many disappointed wishes and the fall of many
hopes. Twice he failed at the two critical points of
his political life.
When young and in the first ardour of his ambition,
he had early thrown all his weight on the side of the
heir-apparent to the crown, who became George II.;
he was one of those who, on the accession of this
prince (1727), could most count on his favour and a
share of power. But clever as he was, while wishing to
turn towards the rising sun, he could not take his bear-
ings with perfect exactness; he had freely paid court
to the prince's mistress, thinking her influence certain,
and he had neglected the lawful wife, the future queen,
who yet alone had the real power. Queen Caroline never
forgave him ; it was the first check to Lord Chester-
field's political fortune, received at the age of thirty-three
and in the full tide of his hopes. He was too hurried
and took the wrong road. Robert Walpole, apparently
less nimble and less active, had taken his measures and
made his calculations better.
Thrown conspicuously among the opposition, espe-
cially after 1732, when he had to give up his offices
at court, Lord Chesterfield worked with all his might
for ten years to overthrow Walpole's ministry, which
only fell in 1742. But even then power did not come
to him, and he remained outside of the new combina-
tions. And when two years later, in 1744, he had a
place in the Government, first as Ambassador at The
Hague and Viceroy of Ireland, then even as Secretary
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 57
of State and member of the Cabinet (1746-48), it was
rather with a specious than an actual importance. In
a word Lord Chesterfield, always a politician of con-
sideration in his country, whether as one of the chiefs
of the opposition or as a clever diplomatist, was never
a governing minister nor even a very influential one.
In politics he certainly had that far-seeing eye and
those glances into the future which go with width of
mind, but doubtless he had far more of these qualities
than of the persevering patience and practical everyday
firmness which are so necessary to rulers. It would
be true to say of him, as of La Rochefoucauld, that the
special result of politics was to make an accomplished
moralist out of an incomplete man of action.
In 1744, at the age of only fifty years, his political
ambition seemed already partly exhausted ; his health
was sufficiently impaired for him to prefer looking for
retirement. And, moreover, we now know the object
of his secret ideal and his real ambition. Before his
marriage he had had, about 1732, a natural son, to
whom he was attached with extreme affection, by a
French lady (Mme. du Bouchet), whom he had met
in Holland. He wrote in all sincerity to this son :
' From the first day of your life the dearest object of
my life has been to make you as perfect as the weak-
ness of human nature will permit.' All his wishes, all
his affection, all his worldly predilections, had turned
towards the education of this son, and whether Viceroy
of Ireland or Secretary of State in London, he found
time to write him long detailed letters to guide him in
the smallest undertakings, to perfect him in decorum
and politeness.
58 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
The Chesterfield we specially like to study is then
the man of intelligence and experience, who has only
gone into affairs and tried all the parts of political and
public life in order to know its slightest springs and
give us the last word on the subject ; the man who from
his youth was the friend of Pope and Bolingbroke, to
whom England owes the introduction of Montesquieu
and Voltaire, the correspondent of Fontenelle and
Mme. de Tencin, he whom the Academy of Inscriptions
admitted among its members, who united the minds of
the two nations, and who in more than one witty essay,
but especially in his letters to his son, shows himself to
us as a no less amiable than an accomplished moralist,
one of the masters of life. It is the Rochefoucauld of
England that we are studying.
Montesquieu, after the publication of the Spirit of the
Laws, wrote to the Abb6 de Guasco, who was then in
England : ' Tell Lord Chesterfield that nothing flatters
me so much as his approval, but that, as he is reading
me for the third time, he will only be all the more
competent to tell me what there is to correct and
rectify in my work ; his observation and criticism
would teach me more than anything.' It was Chester-
field who, speaking one day to Montesquieu about the
aptness of the French for revolutions, and their im-
patience of slow reforms, uttered this epigram, ' You
French know how to make barricades, but you will
never raise barriers.'
Lord Chesterfield certainly had a taste for Voltaire ;
he said with regard to the Siede de Louis XIV. : ' Lord
Bolingbroke taught me how to read history, Voltaire
teaches me how to write it.' But at the same time,
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 59
with that practical common-sense which never forsakes
the people on the other side of the channel, he felt and
disapproved of Voltaire's imprudences. When already
old and withdrawn completely from the world he wrote
to a French lady :
' Your good authors are my principal resource, Voltaire especially
charms me except for his impiety, with which he cannot help
seasoning everything he writes, and which he would do better
prudently to suppress, as, when all is said, we must not disturb the
established order of things. Let everyone think as he pleases, or
rather as he can, but let him not impart his ideas when they
begin to be of such a nature as to be able to trouble the repose
of society.'
What Chesterfield said here in 1768 he had already
said more than twenty-five years previously in writing
to the younger Crebillon, a curious confidant and cor-
respondent in matters of morality. Voltaire was again
in question on the subject of his tragedy of Mahomet
and the plain speaking which it contains :
' What I cannot forgive him, and what is not excusable,' wrote
Chesterfield to Crdbillon, ' is all the trouble which he takes
to propagate a doctrine as pernicious to civil society as it is
contrary to the general religion of all nations. I very much doubt
whether it is allowable for a man to write against the worship and
faith of his country, even when he is honestly persuaded that it has
errors, because of the trouble and disorder which he might cause
there ; but I am quite sure that he is in no kind of way allowed to
attack the foundations of morality, and to break ties so necessary
and too feeble already to uphold men in their duty.'
When Chesterfield spoke thus he was under no
delusion as to Voltaire's great inconsistency. This
inconsistency may be described in two words : it is that
he, Voltaire, who was willing to look at mankind as mad-
6o SELECT ESSAYS OF SAIXTE-BEUVE
men or children, and could never sufficiently laugh at
them, should, at the same time, put loaded weapons
into their hands without troubling himself as to how
they might use them.
Lord Chesterfield himself, in the eyes of the Puritans
of his country, has been accused, I must admit, of
infringing morality in the letters addressed to his son.
The severe Johnson who, by the way, was not im-
partial with regard to Chesterfield, and who thought
he had reason to complain of him, said, when these
letters were published, that ' they taught the morals
of a courtesan and the manners of a dancing-master.'
Such judgement is supremely unfair, and if Chesterfield,
in the case in question, insists so much on grace of
manner and agreeability at any price, it is because he
has already provided for the more solid parts of educa-
tion, and because his pupil is in no danger of erring
on the side which makes man respectable, but rather on
that which makes him agreeable. Though more than
one passage in these letters might seem strange, as
coming from a father to a son, the whole is animated
by the true spirit of tenderness and wisdom. If Horace
had had a son I imagine that he would not have spoken
to him otherwise.
The letters begin with the A B C of education and in-
struction. Chesterfield teaches and condenses in
French the first elements of mythology and history for
his son. I do not regret that these first letters have been
published ; excellent advice is slipped into them from
the first. Young Stanhope is not eight years old when
his father prepares a little treatise on rhetoric adapted to
his capacity, and tries to instil into him good language
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 61
and a distinguished manner of speaking. He specially
recommends attention in all that he does, and he gives
this word its full value. Attention alone, he says, can
fix things in the memory, ' There is no surer sign in the
world of a little weak mind than inattention ; whatever
is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and nothing
can be done well without attention.'
He repeats this maxim unceasingly, and he varies
the application of it with the growth of his pupil as he
gets more capable of understanding its whole extent.
Pleasure or study, he wants everything that is done to
be well done, to be done completely and at the right
time, without allowing yourself to be distracted by
another : ' When you read Horace pay attention to
the justice of his thought, the elegance of his diction,
and the beauty of his poetry, and do not be thinking
of the De Homine et Give of Puffendorf ; and while you
are reading Puffendorf do not think of Mme. de Saint-
Germain, nor of Puffendorf when you are talking to
Mme. de Saint-Germain.' But this free and strong
disposal of the thought at the orders of the will only
belongs to great, or very good, intellects.
M. Royer-Collard used to say 'that what was most
wanting in our days was respect in the moral and
attention in the intellectual order.' Lord Chesterfield
with his lighter touch would have been capable of that
saying. He had not been long in perceiving what was
wanting to that child whom he wished to form and
whom he had made the aim and business of his life :
' In the strict scrutiny which I have made into you, I
have (thank God) hitherto not discovered any vice of
the heart, or any peculiar weakness of the head ; but I
62 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
have discovered laziness, inattention, and indifference,
faults which are only pardonable to old men, who, in
the decline of life, when health and spirits fail, have
a claim to that sort of tranquillity. But a young man
should be ambitious to shine and excel ; like Caesar,
Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum /' Now,
it is just this sacred fire, this spark which makes
Achilles, Alexander, or Caesar, being first in whatever you
undertake, this motto of great souls which is the motto
of eminent men of every kind, that nature had, in the
first instance, neglected to put into the honest but
fundamentally mediocre soul of young Stanhope. ' You
seem to want,' says his father, ' that vivida vis animi
which spurs and excites most young men to please, to
shine, to excel.' * When I was of your age,' he says
elsewhere, * I should have been ashamed if any boy of
that age had learned his book better or played at any
play better than I did, and I would not have rested a
moment till I had got before him.' All this little course
of education by letters affords a kind of continuous
dramatic interest ; you can trace in it the efforts of
a fine, distinguished, energetic nature such as Lord
Chesterfield's was, grappling with a disposition naturally
good but indolent, with a soft and not quickly responsive
clay from which it will, at any price, extract an original,
accomplished, admirable masterpiece, and out of which
it only succeeds finally in making a kind of sufficiently
praiseworthy copy. That which supports, I may
almost say affects the reader in this struggle, where so
much art is lavished and where the eternal advice
returns perpetually the same under so many variations,
is the true paternal affection which animates and
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 63
inspires the delicate and excellent master, now as
patient as he is vivacious, stupendous in resources and
skill, never discouraged, sowing elegances and graces
untiringly on this ungrateful soil. Not that this son,
who was the object of so much care and zeal, was in
anything unworthy of his father. It has been said that
no one could be more heavy, more sullen than he, and
a harsh saying of Johnson's is quoted to this intent.
These are caricatures which go beyond the truth. It
seems, from fairer testimony, that Mr. Stanhope, without
being a model of grace, had in reality all the appearance
of a well-brought-up, polished, and decorous man. But
do not we feel that it is this that was so hopeless ? It
would have been almost better to fail entirely and only
to succeed in making an original in a contrary direction,
whereas to have only managed with all this care and
trouble to produce an insignificant and commonplace
man of the world, one of those on whom the only judge-
ment to be passed is to say there is nothing to say about
them, was a reason for being really in despair and, if you
were not a father, being sorry for your own work.
Lord Chesterfield had at first thought of France for
unstiffening his son and giving him that suppleness
which cannot be acquired later. One can see that he
had thought of sending him there from childhood by
some intimate letters to a lady at Paris who I think*
was Mme. de Monconseil. He writes to this friend :
' I have a lad who is now thirteen years old. I will confess to you
that he is not legitimate, but his mother is a person of good family,
* Since the publication of Lord Mahon's edition of the letters
(London, 1847), which I had not seen when I wrote this, the surmise
has become certainty.
64 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
who has been kinder to me than I deserved. As for the boy, I
may not be impartial, but I find him lovable. He has a pretty face
and much brightness, and is, I think, clever for his age. He
speaks French perfectly, he knows a good deal of Latin and Greek,
and he has ancient and modern history at his fingers' ends. He
is now at school ; but as people here have no notion of forming the
morals or manners of young persons, and these are, with few
exceptions, clumsy and unpolished blockheads, such in short as
you see when they come to Paris at the age of twenty or twenty-
one, I do not wish my boy to stay here long enough to get warped
in the wrong direction. Therefore, when he is fourteen, I propose
to send him to Paris. As I have an unbounded love for the child,
and am keen to make something good of him since I believe the
stuff is there, my idea is to combine in his person what I have
never so far found in one and the same person. I mean all that is
best in the two nations.'
And he goes into detail about his plans and the
means he intends to adopt : an English master every
morning, a French tutor for the afternoon, with the
help above all of good society and good company.
The war which occurred between France and England
deferred this plan of a Parisian education, and the
young man only came out at Paris in 1751, at the age
of nineteen, after having finished his tours in Switzer-
land, Germany and Italy.
Everything has been arranged by the most attentive
of fathers for his success and welcome in this new
scene. The young man lodges with M. de La
Gueriniere at the Academy ; he pursues his studies in
the morning and the rest of his time he is to devote to
society. ' Pleasure is now the last branch of your
education,' writes the indulgent father ; ' it will soften
and polish your manners ; it will lead you to seek and
at length to acquire the graces.' But he shows himself
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 65
exacting and uncompromising on this point. The
graces, that is always what he comes back to, for without
them every effort is in vain. ' If they do not come to
you, ravish them,' he cries. He talks of them very
calmly, as if it were not necessary to have them before
you can know how to carry them off.
Three of his father's lady friends are specially
entrusted to watch over and guide the young man
at starting ; they are nominally his governesses, Mme.
de Monconseil, Lady Hervey, and Mme. Du Bocage.
But these introducers seem only essential in the early
days ; afterwards the young man is to go, of his own
accord, and to choose some fair guide on more intimate
terms. Lord Chesterfield breaks the ice about this
delicate matter of women : ' I will not address myself
to you on this subject either in a religious, a moral,
or a parental style. I will even lay aside my age, re-
member yours, and speak to you as one man of pleasure,
if he had parts as well, would speak to another.' And he
expresses his opinion accordingly, instigating the young
man as much as he can towards honourable arrangements
and refined pleasures, so as to turn him away from
promiscuous and coarse habits. His principle is ' that
an honourable arrangement well becomes a man of
gallantry.' His entire morality in this matter may be
summed up in this verse of Voltaire's :
' II n'est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie.'
These are the places where the grave Johnson's
modesty has hidden its face ; ours is satisfied with
smiling.
Seriousness and frivolity are intertwined every instant
5
66 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
in these letters. Marcel, the dancing-master, is often
recommended, Montesquieu no less often. The Abbe
de Guasco, a kind of complaisant of Montesquieu's, is
a useful person to serve here and there to give intro-
ductions : ' Give the enclosed to the Abbe" de Guasco,
of whom you make good use, to go about with you,
and see things. Between you and me, he has more
knowledge than parts. Mais un habile homme s$ait tirer
parti de tout; and everybody is good for something.
President Montesquieu is, in every sense, a most useful
acquaintance. He has parts joined to great reading
and knowledge of the world. Puisez dans cette source
tant que vous pourrez*
Of authors, those that Chesterfield recommends most
at this time, and which most frequently are referred to
in his counsels, are La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere.
' If you read in the morning some of La Rochefoucauld's
maxims, consider them, examine them well, and compare
them with the real characters you meet in the evening.
Read La Bruyere in the morning and see in the evening
whether his pictures are like.' But these excellent guides
are themselves to have no further use than that of a
geographical map. They would be useless and would
even lead astray, just as a map might do if you expected it
to give you a complete knowledge of towns and countries
without personal observation and experience. It is
better worth while to study one man than ten books.
The world is a country which no man has ever known
through descriptions ; each of us has to traverse it in
person if he would become initiated in it.
Here are a few maxims or observations which are
worthy of the aforesaid masters of human ethics :
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 67
' The most material knowledge of all I mean the knowledge of
the world is never to be acquired without great attention ; and I
know many old people, who, though they have lived long in the
world, are but children still as to their knowledge of it, from their
levity and inattention."
'Human nature is the same all over the world ; but its operations
are so varied by education and habit, that one must see it in all its
dresses in order to be intimately acquainted with it.'
' Almost all people are born with all the passions, to a certain
degree ; but almost every man has a prevailing one, to which the
others are subordinate. Search everyone for that ruling passion ;
pry into the recesses of his heart, and observe the different work-
ings of the same passion in different people. And when you have
found out the prevailing passion of any man, remember never to
trust him where that passion is concerned.'
' If you would particularly gain the affection and friendship of
particular people, whether men or women, endeavour to find out
their predominant excellency, if they have one, and their prevail-
ing weakness, which everybody has ; and do justice to the one,
and something more than justice to the other.'
' Women have, in general, but one object, which is their beauty ;
upon which scarce any flattery is too gross for them to swallow.'*
' Women who are either indisputably beautiful or indisputably
ugly are best flattered upon the score of their understandings.'
With regard to women again, if he sometimes seems
very contemptuous, he makes them amends elsewhere,
and especially does not allow his son to speak too much
against them, whatever he may think himself :
' You seem to think, that from Eve downwards they have done a
great deal of mischief. As for that lady, I give her up to you ;
but since her time, history will inform you that men have done
much more mischief in the world than women ; and to say the
truth, I would not advise you to trust either more than is absolutely
necessary. But this I will advise you to, which is, never to attack
* [So in the French. The edition of 1845 has ' follow.']
68 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
whole bodies of any kind. . . . Individuals forgive sometimes, but
bodies and societies never do.'
In general, Chesterfield recommends circumspection
to his son, and a kind of prudent neutrality, even with
regard to the cheats and fools with which the world
swarms : ' Next to their friendship, nothing is more
dangerous than to have them for enemies.' It is not
the morality of Cato or of Zeno, it is that of Alcibiades,
Aristippus, or Atticus.
About religion, he says in reply to a few trenchant
opinions which his son had expressed : ' Every man's
reason is, and must be, his guide ; and I may as well
expect that every man should be of my size and com-
plexion as that he should reason just as I do.' In all
matters he recommends knowing and preferring the
right and the good ; but not setting up as the cham-
pion of it before and against all. Even in literature
one must be able to tolerate other people's weaknesses.
* Let them enjoy in peace their errors of taste no less
than those of religion.' How wide is the distance
between wisdom such as this and the pungent trade of
critic as we practise it !
Yet he does not recommend untruth ; he is strict
about that. This is his maxim : not to tell all, but
never to tell lies. ' You may always observe,' he says,
' that the greatest fools are the greatest liars. For my
own part, I judge of every man's truth by his degree of
understanding.' One perceives that he easily mingles
serious matters with agreeable ones. He is perpetually
requiring from the wit something stable, yet free, sweet-
ness of manner, with a foundation of energy.
Lord Chesterfield felt thoroughly the serious side of
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 69
France, and all that the eighteenth century contained,
both fruitful and terrible. According to him, M. Duclos
observes, and I think very justly, * qu'il y a a present en
France une fermentation de la raison universelle qui tend
a se developper.' It is a safe prediction, he adds, that
before the end of the century, the trades of king
and priest will have lost more than half their value.
The Revolution is clearly foretold by him as early
as 1750.
First of all, he warns his son against the idea that
Frenchmen are purely frivolous : ' The colder northern
nations generally look upon France as a whistling,
singing, dancing, frivolous nation. This notion is very
far from being a true one, though many petits maitres,
by their behaviour, seem to justify it ; but those very
petits maitres, when mellowed by age and experience,
very often turn out very able men.'
In his opinion the ideal would be to unite the good
qualities of the two nations ; but in this mixture he still
seems to lean towards the side of France : ' I have often
said, and do think, that a Frenchman, who, with a fund
of virtue, learning and good sense, has the manners and
good breeding of his country, is the perfection of human
nature.' He himself unites pretty well the advantages
of both nations, yet with one feature which is his purely
from his stock. He has imagination in his very wit.
Hamilton himself has this distinguishing feature, and
carries it into his French wit. Bacon, the great
moralist, is almost a poet in expression. We cannot
say so much of Lord Chesterfield, and yet there is
more imagination in the sallies and expressions of his
wit than one meets with in St. Evremond, and most of
7 o SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
our clever moralists. In this matter he takes after his
friend Montesquieu.
If, without being strict, one can notice some points
of a slightly tainted morality in these letters to his son,
we must indicate by way of compensation some very
serious and entirely admirable passages, when he speaks
of the Cardinal de Retz, of Mazarin, of Bolingbroke,
Marlborough, and many others. It is a rich book. You
cannot read one page of it without having to remember
some happy observation.
Lord Chesterfield intended this beloved son for diplo-
macy, and at first he found some difficulties in the
way of his views on account of reasons due to the
illegitimacy of his birth. To cut these objections
short, he made his son enter Parliament ; it was the
most certain means of vanquishing the scruples of the
Court.
In his maiden speech Mr. Stanhope hesitated for a
moment and had recourse to his notes. He did not
a second time undergo the ordeal of a public speech.
He seems to have succeeded better in diplomacy, in
those secondary positions where solid merit is sufficient.
He filled the post of Envoy-Extraordinary at the Court
of Dresden. But his health, always delicate, had de-
teriorated before its time, and his father had the grief
of seeing him die before him, scarcely thirty-six years
of age (1768).
At this period Lord Chesterfield lived completely
alienated from society by his infirmities, the most
distressing of which to him was complete deafness.
Montesquieu, whose sight was failing, had said to him
in other days, ' I know how to be blind. 1 But he owned
himself that he could not say so much ; he did not
know how to be deaf. He wrote more about it to his
friends, even to those in France : ' The exchange of
letters,' he observed, 'is the conversation of deaf people,
and the only bond of their society.' He found his last
consolations in his pretty country house at Blackheath,
to which also he had given the French name of Babiole.
There he employed himself in gardening and cultivating
his melons and pineapples ; he liked to vegetate in their
company.
' I have vegetated here all this year,' he wrote to a lady friend in
France (September, 1753), ' without pleasures and without troubles;
my age and my deafness forbid me the former ; my philosophy, or
perhaps my temperament (for one is often mistaken about this),
insure me the latter. I always make the most I can out of the quiet
amusements of gardening, walking, and reading, and meanwhile /
await death without either wishing for it or fearing it.'
He undertook no long works, which he felt would be
too much for him, but he sometimes sent agreeable
essays to a modern periodical publication, the World.
These essays well maintain his reputation for delicacy
and suavity. Yet nothing comes up to the work which
was no work for him, to those letters which he reckoned
no one would read, and which now are the basis of his
literary wealth.
His somewhat premature old age dragged on a long
time. His wit played in a hundred ways on this sad
theme ; speaking of himself and of one of his friends,
Lord Tyrawley, who was equally old and infirm, he
said : ' It is now two years since Tyrawley and I died,
but we did not want anyone to know it.' Voltaire,
who, while he claimed to be always dying, had kept
.
72 SELECT ESSAYS OF SA1NTE-BEUVE
much younger, wrote him this pretty letter, October 24,
1771, signed 'The sick old man of Ferney' :
' . . . . Enjoy an honourable and happy old age, after having
passed through the trials of life. Enjoy your mind and preserve
the health of your body. Of the five senses which we share you
have only one failing, and Lord Huntingdon assures me that you
have a good digestion, which is well worth a pair of ears. Perhaps
I am the man to decide which is the most melancholy to be deaf
or blind, or not to digest ; I can judge between these three con-
ditions with a knowledge of the facts ; but it is a long time since I
dared to decide between trifles, far less between such important
matters. I confine myself to believing that if you have sunshine
in the beautiful house you have built, you will have some tolerable
moments ; it is all one can hope at our age. Cicero wrote a beau-
tiful treatise on old age, but he did not prove his book by facts ;
his last years were very unhappy. You have lived longer and more
happily than he. You have had to do neither with perpetual dic-
tators nor wild triumvirs. Your lot has been, and still is, one of the
most desirable in that great lottery where good tickets are so rare,
and where the great lot of continual happiness has never yet been
won by anyone. Your philosophy has never been disturbed by
chimaeras which have sometimes made a mess of pretty good
brains. You have never been in any sense either a quack or the
dupe of quacks^ and I count that as a very uncommon merit ; it
contributes to the flicker of felicity which one may taste in this
short life.'
Lord Chesterfield died March 24, 1773. In drawing
attention to his course of social education, we have not
thought it inappropriate to take lessons in tact and
politeness, even in a democracy, and to receive them
from a man whose name is so closely bound up with
those of Montesquieu and Voltaire ; who more than
any of his fellow countrymen in his time evinced a
singular predilection for our nation ; who relished,
perhaps almost unreasonably, our amiable qualities ;
LETTERS OF LORD CHESTERFIELD 73
who perceived our serious qualities, and of whom
one might say, as sufficient praise, that his is a French
intellect, if he had not transported into the very sparkle
and vivacity of his wit that something imaginative and
strongly marked which leaves him with the stamp of
his race.
WILLIAM COWPER.
I.
THE life of this poet, original, yet at the same time
grave and charming, is of the most singular kind ; out-
wardly quite simple, it is within strewn with shoals and
rocks. The way by which he came to compose such moral
and fascinating works is very indirect, very far removed
from the ordinary course, and not one which he would
have recommended to anyone else. We have at the
present time all the information we require about him.
Southey, poet and critic, published in 1835 an ample
biography of Cowper at the beginning of an edition
of his works ; it is all being reprinted at the present
time.* This edition of Cowper and biography by
Southey, and further the edition prepared by the Rev.
Mr. Grimshawe (1850) provide documents for a complete
study. Or rather this study has already been made by
Southey himself; but Cowper's Correspondence, which
equals his poetic works in merit and thought, and
which is even more natural and certainly more easy,
affords matter for reading where everyone can choose
his subject for reflection and his points of agreement.
It is astonishing that no one has thought of translating
* [London : H. G. Bohn, 1854 ; in 8 vols.]
WILLIAM COW PER 75
it, of extracting from it materials to form two volumes
in French, which would be something quite new and
afford innocent entertainment of the best kind.
William Cowper was born November 26, 1731, from
a highly respectable family which had even produced
illustrious members. His father was in orders, and
rector of Berkhamstead when William entered the world
there. His mother, Anne Donne, a lady of good family,
died young in 1737, leaving two sons. William was then
only six years old, but he preserved a vivid and deep
memory of the first years of his childhood and of
his mother's tenderness, all the more graven on his
heart by the totally different rule to which he was
subjected from the day of her death ; he consecrated
this memory more than fifty years later in some
verses composed by him on receiving the portrait
of his mother from a cousin (1790). As we read
them, we find not only the affectionate emotion which
would be in the heart of many sons at the con-
templation of that which recalls happy years to them,
but we also recognise there the socially pathetic, ten-
derly sensitive and sorrowful part of that nature of
Cowper's, which required beyond everything the warmth
and shelter of the domestic nest :
' O that those lips had language ! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine, thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me ;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
" Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away !"
The meek intelligence of those dear eyes
(Blest be the art that can immortalize,
The art that baffles Time's tyrannic claim
To quench it !) here shines on me still the same.
7 6 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Faithful remembrancer of one so dear,
welcome guest, though unexpected here !
Who bidst me honour with an artless song,
Affectionate, a mother lost so long,
1 will obey, not willingly alone,
But gladly, as the precept were her own ;
And, while that face renews my filial grief,
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief,
Shall steep me in Elysian reverie,
A momentary dream that thou art she.
My mother ! when I learned that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed ?
Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life's journey just begun ?
Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss ;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss ;
Ah, that maternal smile, it answers yes !
I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day,
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away,
And, turning from my nursery window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu !
But was it such ? It was. Where thou art gone
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown.
May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore,
The parting word shall pass my lips no more !
Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern,
Oft gave me promise of thy quick return.
What ardently I wished I long believed,
And disappointed still, was still deceived ;
By expectation every day beguiled,
Dupe of to-morrow even from a child.
Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went,
Till, all my stock of infant sorrows spent,
I learned at last submission to my lot,
But, though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot.
Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more,
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor ;
And where the gardener Robin, day by day,
Drew me to school along the public way,
WILLIAM COW PER 77
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapt
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capped,
'Tis now become a history little known,
That once we called the pastoral house our own.
Short-lived possession ! But the record fair,
That memory keeps of all thy kindness there,
Still outlives many a storm that has effaced
A thousand other themes less deeply traced.
Thy nightly visits to my chamber made
That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid ;
Thy morning bounties ere I left my home,
The biscuit, or confectionery plum ;
The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed
By thine own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed ;
All this, and more endearing still than all,
Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,
Ne'er roughened by those cataracts and breaks,
That humour interposed too often makes ;
All this still legible in memory's page,
And still to be so to my latest age,
Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay
Such honours to thee as my numbers may ;
Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere,
Not scorned in heaven, though little noticed here.
Could Time, his flight reversed, restore the hours,
When, playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers,
The violet, the pink, and jessamine,
I pricked them into paper with a pin,
(And thou wast happier than myself the while,
Wouldst softly speak, and stroke my head, and smile,)
Could those few pleasant days again appear,
Might one wish bring them, would I wish them here ?
I would not trust my heart ; the dear delight
Seems so to be desired, perhaps I might.
But no ; what here we call our life is such,
So little to be loved, and thou so much,
That I should ill requite thee to constrain
Thy unbound spirit into bonds again.'
7 8 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
The death of his mother delivered the young child
into the hands of strangers ; his father, a worthy man,
did not pay the attention he ought to have done to his
delicate and timid boy. At a boarding-school, where
Cowper was sent, he was the victim of the tyranny of
one of his companions, older than himself, who seeing
him so timid and sensitive, made him the object of his
cruelty. A malady of the eyes interrupted his studies
for a time; then he was put to Westminster School,
where some distinguished fellow scholars, who became
well known later, were his friends ; he stayed there till
he was eighteen years of age. As he subsequently ex-
pressed himself at every opportunity against the evils
of a public school education, especially as it then was,
people have tried to explain this opinion, which other-
wise agrees well with his whole manner of feeling
and fearing, by the circumstances of his early years.
Yet to see him as he was at first, and as he must have
been before the mishaps which darkened his thoughts,
he must have had many hours of gaiety, joy, and the
most delightful intercourse ; he excelled in the games
proper to his age, and especially cricket and football.
When he left Westminster, he read with a lawyer, and
spent three years with him ; he says he never seriously
did any work there, and lost all that time in laugh-
ing and playing practical jokes from morning till
night with his fellow-student the future Lord Chan-
cellor Thurlow. The latter, with all his nonsense,
failed not doubtless to prepare himself for the career of
actual work where his talents soon found useful and
illustrious employment. Cowper greatly reproached
himself for the loss of these decisive years, which he
WILLIAM COW PER 79
compared, in the language of agriculture, to seed-time ;
it is only with this cost that later on the sheaves are
obtained : ' The colour of our whole life,' he thought,
* is generally such as the three or four first years in which
we are our own masters make it. Then it is that we
may be said to shape our own destiny, to treasure up
for ourselves a series of future successes or disappoint-
ments.' When he left Mr. Chapman's chambers (that
was the lawyer's name) he took rooms in the Temple,
and while living there alone, he felt the first touches of
the illness which in one form or another returned with
cruel persistency at the different periods of his life. It
was a condition of dejection, despair and terror, which
left him a prey to the most sinister thoughts and to lugu-
brious imaginations. All pleasant studies became im-
possible to him, and his favourite subjects for reading
brought him no relief. The religious idea then awoke
in his soul ; he approached God by prayer. Finding
himself at Southampton, where the doctors had sent
him for change of air and distraction, there was an
hour, a moment when, walking in the neighbourhood
with some friends one splendid morning, and having sat
down on an eminence which commanded a view of the
sea and the wooded shores of the coast, he suddenly
felt as if a new sun had risen in the sky and lighted up
his horizon : ' I felt the weight of all my misery taken
off; my heart became light and joyful in a moment ; I
could have wept with transport had I been alone.'
We may often notice in the case of conversions which
have taken long to reach their final accomplishment,
these precursory signs and first attempts, these first sun-
strokes so to speak, of Grace. Cowper, then twenty-two
8o
SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
years old, took no account of what he judged later to
have been a call and a warning; he soon attributed the
improvement in his condition to the simple change
air and amusements of the place, and he returned to
London to resume his life, which, though not licent
was devoted to gay dissipation and varied frivolities.
He became a briefless barrister, and was very mti
mate with some of the men of letters of his age, an<
belonged to a club with them ; he wrote verses am
satirical moral essays which appeared in the papers
and reviews of the day. These early productions of
Cowper's have been collected carefully ; even then we
find them distinguished by a note of shrewdness, by
sarcastic observation and the tendency to moralize
which he was to develop later, but as yet there was no
personal stamp, no originality.
Passion does not seem to have disturbed him muc
he loved one of his first cousins, who returned his affec-
tion, but the young girl's father opposed the marriage,
and Cowper does not seem to have suffered much,
continued to live this life without system and without
apparent excess, an amateur literary man, agreeable t
his own associates, fond of a joke, with a sharp and
lively wit, seeming to have taken for his motto the
poet's words : Dilecto volo lascivire sodali, in a word the
most amiable of companions, when the great event
happened which snatched him from society, plunged
him into inexpressible woe, and gradually brought him
through grievous trials to a state of renewed youth, and
of maturity from which the productions of genius
issued.
He had lost his father some years previously, and
WILLIAM COW PER 81
was gradually dissipating his patrimony, when feeling
the need of what is called a position, he had recourse
to a friend, a relation with influence, who got him a
nomination as clerk in the House of Lords. There
were at the same time two of these clerkships vacant,
one of which necessitated appearing and reading in
public more than the other. After much perplexity,
Cowper decided for the place of clerk of the journals,
the less lucrative, but the one which he thought would
not require him to appear in person. Anyhow, an
opposition having sprung up in the House about his
nomination, he saw that he should have to appear at
the bar and undergo a kind of examination as to his
fitness and capabilities. The very idea of it was
enough to upset his whole machinery ; he tried in vain
to make an effort to prepare himself and get into the
right frame of mind; he had undertaken something
beyond his strength: 'They,' he said, 'whose spirits
are formed like mine, to whom a public exhibition of
themselves on any occasion is mortal poison, may
have some idea of the horrors of my situation ; others
can have none.' Months were spent in this painful
struggle and suspense, which he compared to that of
a condemned man who sees the day of his execution
drawing near. In this interval he tried various forms
of suicide, and on the very morning when they came to
fetch him to conduct him to his examination at West-
minster, they found he had attempted the desperate act
of strangling himself: he had to be carried off to an
asylum. He was then thirty-two years old.
He had to go through many crises and moral trials
before he arrived at a kind of cure, during more than
6
82 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
eighteen months' sojourn in this asylum of Dr. Cotton's
at St. Albans (December, 1763 June, 1765). His
faculties had returned with sufficient completeness by the
end of the eighth month, after a visit which he received
from his brother, the Rev. John Cowper, a learned and
moderate churchman who had come from Cambridge
to see him in July, 1764. Yet he was continually
under an impression of terror and fright : this over-
whelming impression only ceased suddenly one day
when, reading the Scriptures, his eye rested on a verse
of the third chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the
Romans. He felt such consolation from it, and the
insight of his faith became so full and luminous, that
the doctor feared lest this abrupt transition from despair
to joy should bring a fresh crisis in its turn. Cowper
says admirably in one of his best poems :
' Man is a harp whose chords elude the sight,
Each yielding harmony disposed aright ;
The screws reversed (a task which if He please
God in a moment executes with ease),
Ten thousand thousand strings at once go loose,
Lost, till He tune them, all their power and use.'
Convalescence being maintained, Cowper resolved to
change the whole tenor of his life, and giving up
London which he called the scene of his abominations,
though it was rather that of his frivolities for ever, he
commissioned his brother to find him a country retreat
in some little town not far from Cambridge. His
brother took a lodging for him at Huntingdon, and
Cowper went there in the month of June, 1765, with
one servant who accompanied him. He lived there for
several months almost alone, avoiding visits, eluding
WILLIAM COWPER 83
neighbourly advances, and only wishing to hold inter-
course, as he said, with his God in Jesus Christ. Poor
wounded bird, he was trying to cower there, to repair
himself little by little, to be healed of his wound in
silence, and to calm his too protracted, too piercing
terrors. So solitary a life would doubtless before long
have produced a relapse into melancholy, if he had not
had the idea, which he thought an inspiration from on
high, of drawing nearer to a family whose acquaintance
he had made a few months before. One morning, on
coming out of church, young Unwin, the son of a
clergyman in the place, an amiable young man of
twenty-one, had approached Cowper, who was walking
alone in a melancholy manner under a row of trees ; he
made some advances to him and invited himself to tea
with him in the afternoon. As Cowper talked with
this young man he recognised with inexpressible joy a
soul nourished with the most lively conceptions of
Christianity, as he himself imagined it ; he was soon
introduced into the family, and from that time a friend-
ship began which decided the poet's whole life, and one
may say all his faculties and talents.
The Unwin family consisted of the father, of Mrs.
Unwin, who was seven years older than Cowper and
became a kind of mother to him, of the son just
mentioned, and of a daughter.
' The most agreeable people imaginable ; quite sociable, and as
free from the ceremonious civility of country gentlefolks as any I
ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation than a
stranger, and their house is always open to me. The old gentle-
man carries me to Cambridge in his chaise. He is a man of learn-
ing and good sense, and as simple as Parson Adams. His wife has
a very uncommon understanding, has read much to excellent
8 4 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
purpose, and is more polite than a duchess. The son who belongs
to Cambridge, is a most amiable young man, and the daughter quite
of a piece with the rest of the family. They see but little company,
which suits me exactly : go when I will, I find a house full of peace
and cordiality in all its parts, and I am sure to hear no scandal,
but instead of it such discourse as we are all bett
Shy and easily frightened as he was, he had always
prayed Heaven when he came away from St. Albans, that
Providence might be pleased to procure for him this
kind of support and assistance, a mother in short
How happy it is,' he cried, ' to believe with a steadfast
assurance that our petitions are heard, even while we
are making them !' and this intercourse seemed to him
like the accomplishment and final touch which 1
Almighty would give to his spiritual cure and conver-
sion. The intimacy growing soon more close, and the
inward need more pressing, Cowper went to live wit
the Unwins, and from the first day was rather
permanent member of the family than a lodger. In a
letter to a female relation he has described the way his
days were arranged in the early times of this inter-
course, and how life was spent there almost as if in
convent : breakfast between eight and nine ; from ther
till eleven reading of the Bible or of a sermon ; at
eleven o'clock divine service, which took place twic
every day. From twelve to three everybody went his
own way, and had leisure for his own tastes and amuse-
ments ; he employed this interval either in reading in
his room, or walking, or even riding or working in th<
garden. After dinner, which occurred at three o'clock,
they went out in the garden if the weather permitted,
and there he conversed on serious and Christian sub-
jects with Mrs. Unwin and her son till tea-time. If it
WILLIAM COWPER
rained or was too windy to go out, the conversation
took place indoors, or else they sang a few hymns
which Mrs. Unwin accompanied on the piano, and
of each it was the heart that did its part the best in
this little concert of souls. After tea they went out in
earnest for a good walk. Mrs. Unwin was an excellent
walker, and Cowper and she generally did four miles
before coming home. In the short days the walk took
place between noon and dinner. As to the evening, it
was spent before and after supper as the morning had
begun, with serious conversations and reading aloud,
and it was concluded by a prayer in common. This
half-monastic life went with inward joy and true cheer-
fulness; it was certainly the most in accordance with
what was then needed to restore tone to Cowper's
sensitive mind and so recently shaken senses.
A misfortune came across their path at the beginning
of the second year. Mr. Unwin, the head of the family
was thrown from his horse and died. His widow was
induced to change her abode ; she decided on the pretty
village of Olney, where the presence of Mr. Newton, a
man revered by a select flock, attracted her. Cowper,
whose fate could henceforth not be separated from
Mrs. Unwin's, went accordingly to live with her at
31ney in the autumn of 1767. It has been asked
whether he had at no time any idea of marrying
Mrs. Unwin now she was a widow ; it seems that such
an idea never presented itself to the heart or mind of
either one or the other : he was for her only an elder
son, and a sick man, all whose painful delicacy she
understood, and to whose service and care she en-
tirely devoted herself, now that she had become more
86 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
lonely; she was for him only the most tender and intelli-
gent of mothers.
3 Cowper's malady still continued to take a religious
form, and he often felt terrors which his friends did all
they 'could to combat and cure, but which nevertheless
their rigid doctrine of Predestination and Grace was too
prone to foster. ' He is always formidable to me/ he
said of God, 'save when I see Him disarmed of His sting,
having sheathed it in the body of Christ Jesus.' These
images of judgement and condemnation pursued him,
therefore, and still controlled his thoughts, even when
he thought he had conquered them. During the first
years of this sojourn at Olney, Mr. Newton tried to
occupy Cowper's imagination and to turn it into a still
religious yet poetic vein by setting him to write some
hymns for the little local community, in collaboration
with him. These hymns, which were only completed
and published in 1779, and without any mark except an
initial to distinguish Cowper's own compositions in the
collection, began to occupy his leisure as early as
1751. Here is one of the best known, in which it will
be seen that he tries to combat and beat back his
own terror, to reassure himself against his habitual
fears :
' God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform ;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
*****
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.
WILLIAM COW PER g ?
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace ;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour ;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.
Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan His work in vain :
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.'
A thought which naturally occurs in studying this
digious malady of Cowper, is that it would have been
?ood for him if he could have seen clearly and given him-
self some reassuring resting-place, between a God so
powerful and so mysterious even in His mercy and His
prostrate creature, either by means of a visible Church
with authority and power, or by friendly intercessors
ch as the Virgin and saints are for pious souls- but
embarked as he was alone on that unfathomable ocean
tempests and Divine decrees, he was bewildered in
spite of himself, and adore as he might the tree of
salvation, he could not believe, trembling and timid
pilot that he was, that he was not doomed to an in-
evitable shipwreck.
The cure, which seemed progressing so favourably
when he came to Olney, suddenly retrograded, and a
trouble shook his quick and incisive intellect to
foundations. The year 1773 was almost as fatal for
Cowper as 1763 had been. Mrs. Unwin watched over
>im, drew him out of himself as much as she could and
ounded his long and gradual convalescence, which
88 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
was the work of many seasons, with angelic attentions.
In 1774 he was better, but incapable of any reading
and of any of the distractions of society, and yet it
was absolutely necessary he should have something to
occupy him, but without straining his attention. It
was then that he thought of taming young hares,
while he spent a great part of the day in the garden.
' I undertook the care of three, which it is necessary that I should
here distinguish by the names I gave them : Puss, Tiney, and Bess.
Notwithstanding the two feminine appellations, I must inform you
that they were all males. Immediately commencing carpenter, I
built them houses to sleep in. ... In the daytime they had the
range of a hall, and at night retired each to his own bed, never
intruding into that of another.
'Puss grew presently familiar, would leap into my lap, raise him-
self upon his hinder feet, and bite the hair from my temples. He
would suffer me to take him up, and to carry him about in my arms,
and has more than once fallen fast asleep upon my knee. He was
ill three days, during which time I nursed him, kept him apart from
his fellows that they might not molest him (for, like many other
wild animals, they persecute one of their own species that is sick),
and by constant care, and trying him with a variety of herbs,
restored him to perfect health. No creature could be more grate-
ful than my patient after his recovery, a sentiment which he most
significantly expressed by licking my hand, first the back of it,
then the palm, then every finger separately, then between all the
fingers, as if anxious to leave no part of it unsaluted a cere-
mony which he never performed but once again upon a similar
occasion.
' Finding him extremely tractable, I made it my custom to carry
him always after breakfast into the garden, where he hid himself
generally under the leaves of a cucumber vine, sleeping or chewing
the cud till evening ; in the leaves also of that vine he found a
favourite repast. I had not long habituated him to this taste of
liberty before he began to be impatient for the return of the time
when he might enjoy it. He would invite me to the garden by
WILLIAM COW PER 89
drumming upon my knee, and by a look of such expression as it
was not possible to misinterpret. If this rhetoric did not imme-
diately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his
teeth, and pull it with all his force. Thus Puss might be said to
be perfectly tamed, the shyness of his nature was done away, and
on the whole it was visible by many symptoms, which I have not
room to enumerate, that he was happier in human society than
when shut up with his natural companions.
' Not so Tiney ; upon him the kindest treatment had not the
least effect. He too was sick, and in his sickness had an equal
share of my attention ; but if, after his recovery, I took the liberty
to stroke him, he would grunt, strike with his forefeet, spring forward
and bite. He was, however, very entertaining in his way ; even his
surliness was matter of mirth, and in his play he preserved such an
air of gravity, and performed his feats with such a solemnity of
manner, that in him too I had an agreeable companion.
' Bess, who died soon after he was full-grown, and whose death
was occasioned by his being turned into his box, which had been
washed, while it was yet damp, was a hare of great humour and
drollery. Puss was tamed by gentle usage ; Tiney was not to be
tamed at all ; and Bess had a courage and confidence that made
him tame from the beginning. I always admitted them into the
parlour after supper, when, the carpet affording their feet a firm
hold, they would frisk, and bound, and play a thousand gambols,
in which Bess, being remarkably strong and fearless, was always
superior to the rest, and proved himself the Vestris of the party.'
Of the three hares Puss is the one which Cowper has
taken most pains to immortalize. He kept him for
nearly twelve years, and celebrated him in one of the
books of the Task, congratulating himself on having
completely gained the creature's confidence and de-
stroyed all fear in him.
' If I survive thee I will dig thy grave,
And when I place thee in it, sighing say,
I knew at least one hare that had a friend.'
90 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
In his papers a memorandum was found with the
date and circumstances of the death of poor Puss.
He remarks in another place that
'It is no wonder that my intimate acquaintance with these
specimens of the kind has taught me to hold the sportsman's
amusement in abhorrence ; he little knows what amiable creatures
he persecutes, of what gratitude they are capable, how cheerful they
are in their spirits, what enjoyment they have of life, and that,
impressed as they seem with a peculiar dread of man, it is only
because man gives them peculiar cause for it."
Timid himself, and subject to fear, Cowper felt a
natural attraction between these animals and himself;
he applied the merciful and humane axiom of the poet
to them non ignara mali and he would willingly also
have said with the Eastern poet : ' Hurt not the ant
who drags a grain of corn, for she has a life, and this
sweet life is dear to her.'
During the six following years (1774-1780) Cowper's
mind and his distracted faculties are collected and re-
paired little by little, till he imperceptibly succeeds to
the possession of them in their full force and grace,
and in finding for the first time (singular phenomenon !)
all his poetic flower and fruit united with unhoped-for
illumination, at the age of fifty.
The power of reading and the faculty of composition
only came back to him little by little ; manual occupa-
tions prevailed for a long time with him. Cowper says,
' Rousseau would have been charmed to have seen me
so occupied, and would have exclaimed with rapture
that he had found the Emile whom he had supposed
to subsist only in his own .idea.' The chisel and saw
were his principal tools, and he made ' tables such as
WILLIAM COW PER 91
they were, and joint-stools such as never were.' When
talking gaily, later on, about the various occupations he
invented at this time when he must at any cost escape
from the inconvenience and dangers of doing nothing,
he says :
' Many arts I have exercised with this view, for which Nature
never designed me ; though among them were some in which I
arrived at considerable proficiency, by mere dint of the most heroic
perseverance. There is not a squire in all this country who can
boast of having made better squirrel-houses, hutches for rabbits, or
bird-cages, than myself, and in the article of cabbage-nets I had
no superior. I even had the hardiness to take in hand the pencil,
and studied a whole year the art of drawing. Many figures were
the fruit of my labours, which had, at least, the merit of being un-
paralleled by any production either of art or nature. But before
the year was ended, I had occasion to wonder at the progress that
may be made, in despite of natural deficiency, by dint alone of
practice ; for I actually produced three landscapes, which a lady
thought worthy to be framed and glazed. I then judged it high
time to exchange this occupation for another, lest, by any subsequent
productions of inferior merit, I should forfeit the honour I had so
fortunately acquired. But gardening was, of all employments, that
in which I succeeded best ; though even in this J did not attain
perfection. I began with lettuces and cauliflowers ; from them I
proceeded to cucumbers ; next to melons. I then purchased an
orange-tree, to which, in due time, I added two or three myrtles.
These served me day and night with employment during a whole
severe winter. To defend them from the frost, in a situation that
exposed them to its severity, cost me much ingenuity and much
attendance. I contrived to give them a fire heat ; and have waded
night after night through the snow, with the bellows under my arm,
just before going to bed, to give the latest possible puff to the
embers, lest the frost should seize them before morning. Very
minute beginnings have sometimes important consequences. From
nursing two or three evergreens I became ambitious of a green-
house and accordingly built one ; which, verse excepted, afforded
92 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
me amusement for a longer time than any expedient of all the
many to which I have fled for refuge from the misery of having
nothing to do.'
Poetry began to have a share in him ; he fell back
upon it from time to time, but only when he had some-
thing special and more intense to express, which would
have seemed exaggerated in prose ; verses then seemed
to him ' a suitable vehicle for the most vehement
expressions my thoughts suggest to me.' He only set
himself short subjects which referred to current events,
sometimes to politics (for it was the time of the
American war, and Cowper in many respects was an
Englishman of the old type), but generally his verses
were about the occurrences in his garden. He wrote
Latin verses that showed a good deal of study, and
generally little moral fables in English. Here is one
for instance :
THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE GLOW-WORM.
' A Nightingale that all day long
Had cheered the village with his song,
Nor yet at eve his note suspended,
Nor yet when eventide was ended,
Began to feel, as well he might,
The keen demands of appetite ;
When looking eagerly around,
He spied, far off upon the ground,
A something shining in the dark,
And knew the glow-worm by his spark ;
So stooping down from hawthorn top,
He thought to put him in his crop ;
The worm, aware of his intent,
Harangued him thus right eloquent :
" Did you admire my lamp,'' quoth he,
" As much as I your minstrelsy,
WILLIAM COW PER 93
You would abhor to do me wrong,
As much as I to spoil your song ;
For 'twas the self-same power divine
Taught you to sing, and me to shine,
That you with music, I with light,
Might beautify and cheer the night."
The songster heard his short oration,
And warbling out his approbation,
Released him, as my story tells,
And found a supper somewhere else.
Hence jarring sectaries may learn,
Their real interest to discern :
That brother should not war with brother,
And worry and devour each other,
But sing and shine by sweet content,
Till life's poor transient night is spent,
Respecting in each other's case
The gifts of nature and of grace.
Those Christians best deserve the name,
Who studiously make peace their aim ;
Peace, both the duty and the prize
Of him that creeps and him that flies.'
At first he wrote verses only by way of amusement,
as he made cages, cultivated flowers, drew the landscape,
but still always with energy ; he had moods for each of
his tastes, and when one held him the others had to
give way for a time. He enjoyed nothing by halves ;
he says, ' I never received a little pleasure from any-
thing in my life ; if I am delighted it is in the extreme.'
He began, too, to write pretty, elaborate letters to some
of his friends elegant letters, ingenious yet natural.
His mind, aroused and in some respects amended by so
long a rest, tormented him by fits, and he did not know
what to do with it. His physique, however, was not
strong enough to bear a long strain, and he compares
94 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
the network of the fibres of his brain to a spider's web :
' when a long thought finds its way into them, it buzzes
and twangs and bustles about at such a rate as seems
to threaten the whole contexture.' But genius was
growing stronger and feeling her wings: 'Alas!' he
cried, the day when he sent that fable of the Nightingale
and the Glow-worm to a friend, ' what can I do with my
wit ? I have not enough to do great things with, and
these little things are so fugitive that while a man
catches at the subject, he is only filling his hand with
smoke. I must do with it as I do with my linnet : I
keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then
set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a
little, and then shut him up again. My whisking wit
has produced the following. . . .' And that was the
fable which he sent. Everywhere in his letters, in his
verses of this period (1780) the most delicious gaiety
appears in the middle of the serious parts. You catch
yourself saying, What a bright nature, full of fun, full
of charm, inquiring and open to all impressions when
it is not gloomy ! The spring causes him a kind of
gentle intoxication ; there is something of the squirrel
about him in the mirth with which it inspires him.
But the great and serious sides are sure to reappear ;
for this lovable being has a side that has been smitten
with the thunderbolt.
WILLIAM COWPER.
II.
WHEN Cowper was feeling better and stronger in his
mind, he had begun a Correspondence with a small
number of friends, and he carried it on without inter-
ruption for several years ; it is by this especially that
we get to know him and to penetrate into the mysteries
of his sensitive mind. He writes first to Mr. Unwin,
that pleasant son of the house who had become a
minister in another place ; he writes to Mr. Newton,
who in 1779 had left Olney to become rector of the
parish of St. Mary Woolnoth in London. From time
to time, too, he has little letters for Joseph Hill, the
only one that he has kept of his earliest friends and the
school companions of his youth, reminding him of the
time when in their walks, ' lying at full stretch upon
the ruins of an old wall by the seaside, you amused
yourself with Tasso's Jerusalem and the Pastor FidoC
In the retired life which he leads he has little to relate ;
he talks of himself, of his reading, which was slight at
first, of the little accidents which hardly vary this quiet
home. There were some painful and deep-seated
wounds which were never completely healed in him ; he
avoids touching them, and reveals himself rather on
96 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
the bright, clever, affectionate, and merry side. There
is one of these letters where he begins by saying he has
nothing to say, and with this protest goes on to say very
pretty and very sensible things ; he gives the whole
theory of familiar correspondence between friends, how
one should write without stopping, one word pursuing
the other, and let the pen run on without always think-
ing about it, just as the tongue goes when you talk, and
the feet when you walk.
In the midst of a thousand graces there are a few
oddities in these letters. Cowper's taste is rather bold
and original than trustworthy. He is a refined man,
but a refined man who has had such exceptional and
sharp experiences, that he will venture to any extent
when it is a question of expressing vividly his manner
of being and thinking. He has some astonishing
images, strange similes which he keeps up and draws
out with a somewhat attenuated or long-winded refine-
ment. He rejects none of those that take his fancy :
thus in a letter to Mr. Newton we shall find him com-
paring the state of his mind to a plank under the plane ;
the first thoughts that come to him, the upper thoughts,
are the shavings, etc. In these places he may appear
subtle and far-fetched ; but more generally the unex-
pectedness of his illustrations only adds another charm
to their exactness. He has some of those deep-piercing
ironies which belong to sad and timid natures endowed
with a finer organization, and which the uncouthness
or clumsiness of other people shocks without their
having an idea of it. Here is a little mocking letter,
quite perfect in the way it is turned, worthy indeed of
the younger Pliny :
WILLIAM COW PER 97
To the Rev. John Newton.
'OLNEY, April 16, 1780.
' Since I wrote my last we have had a visit from . I did not
feel myself vehemently disposed to receive him with that com-
placence from which a stranger generally infers that he is welcome.
By his manner, which was rather bold than easy, I judged that
there was no occasion for it, and that it was a trifle which, if he did
not meet with, neither would he feel the want of. He has the air
of a travelled man, but not of a travelled gentleman ; is quite
delivered from that reserve which is so common an ingredient in
the English character, yet does not open himself gently and gradu-
ally, as men of polite behaviour do, but bursts upon you all at once.
He talks very loud, and when our poor little robins hear a great
noise, they are immediately seized with an ambition to surpass it ;
the increase of their vociferation occasioned an increase of his, and
his in return acted as a stimulus upon theirs ; neither side enter-
tained a thought of giving up the contest, which became continually
more interesting to our ears during the whole visit. The birds,
however, survived it, and so did we. They perhaps flatter them-
selves they gained a complete victory, but I believe Mr. could
have killed them both in another hour. 1
By the side of this pretty note we can place another
letter written some years later (March, 1784), in which
Cowper narrates the visit, or rather the irruption one
day after dinner into his peaceful dwelling at Olney, of
a candidate for Parliament, at the very hour when the
hare Puss was frolicking in the drawing-room, and when
he himself was winding wool between Mrs. Unwin and
another friend, who were both knitting or netting.
Candidates in England used to pay their visits with much
noise, accompanied by friends, and with a band of
children, and the populace at their heels : the house there-
fore was simply invaded. This tumultuous entry, the
candidate's solicitations, the assurance given to Cowper,
7
9 8 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
who denies it as best he can, that he has influence, a great
deal of influence, the hope that he will use it in the man
favour, who thanks him whether or no ; the handshaking
and embraces of the whole house, including the servant
all this little picture makes a most spicy page, and one
that is usually quoted* when Cowper's Correspondence
is discussed. But the ordinary thread of his letters
smoother, and spun out with slender details touched
with delicacy, and which would lose by being detachec
part of the charm is in the sequence itself, and in
effect of the whole thing. In the same breath with z
joking letter telling Mr. Newton about the escape am
flight of his favourite hare, which one evening dunr
supper breaks the lattice-work, takes its flight through
the town, and is only caught after a whole Odyssey
of adventures, we shall read a very grave letter ft
of very lofty sentiments to a lady of rank, one
cousins,t whom he had not seen for several years,
who had been very beautiful, and to whom high
and serious thoughts were familiar. What impress*
has Time produced on her in this long interval ?
marked her in the face with his claws, or has he sparec
her and marked her with his velvet paw as he likes t<
sometimes ? Cowper writes to her :
' But though an enemy to the person, he is a friend to the mind,
and you have found him so. Though even in this respect his
ment of us depends upon what he meets with at our hands. . . .
It is well with them who, like you, can stand on tiptoe on
mountain-top of human life, look down with pleasure upoi
* As for instance by Jeffrey, in his article on Hayley's Life of
Cowper, in the Edinburgh Review for June, 1804.
f Lady Hesketh.
99
The charm of Cowper's Correspondence is in this
success of images, thoughts and shades which un"
old themselves w,th varied vivacity, but pursue a call,
roetrToflr; Y U aPPrehend the *ue sources oft
poetry, of the true poetry of the home and of private
-best m his letters: the affectionate rallying the
S?f de f ses nothing f any inte -' - ?
ratherwithVT,, r ' ^ by SUe Wlth loftiness > *
r with depth. Let us not forget either the irony
pieT-n trrr 3 '^ fine and gentie m *y ^
r in the letters I have quoted
felt *7 a '? dy SaM that a ' ime Came whe Cowper
that making cages, greenhouses, or drawings was
no longer sufficient for him; he betook himselfagZ
to poetry, and to a poetry which had its birth in his
very life, and the circumstances which surrounded him
robd H' ' n wc
ns and goldfinches played a part, and brought in
always humane and sensible, though puritan
moral. He worked at these amusements of his leisure
with a special care, and he was only satisfied when he
had brought them to perfection: 'To touch and re!
:h, he says somewhere, 'is, though some writers
of negligence, and others would be ashamed
to show the lr foul copies, the secret of almost all god
writing, especially in verse.' Whatever is short ' he
ag " Sh uld be *. masculine, and c'om?
Pact . cune, an com
5 men are so, and little poems should be
1 [Letter to Mr. Unwin, July 2, 1780.]
loo SELECT ESSAYS OF SAIXTE-BEUVE
so.
But evidently he was still in search of subjects,
and the new and curious form of this dawning talent
did not know where to apply itself with sustained vigour.
Here we find one point in common (a single one
it is true) between Cowper and La Fontaine : like the
latter, Cowper's genius needs to be aroused, maintained
by friendship ; he must have a guide, someone to point
him out his subjects, as some beauty, a Bouillon or a
La Sabliere, almost always bespoke verses of La Fon-
taine. Nearly everything that Cowper did thus had a
determining motive in some wish or desire of people
who were dear to him ; if he took part in the Olney
Hymns it was at Mr. Newton's request ; if he wrote
his first collection of poems it was Mrs. Unwin who
encouraged him and urged him to it ; if he wrote his
masterpiece, the Task, it was, as the name indicates,
because Lady Austen, a new friend, set it for him and
desired it.
The winter of 1780-1781 marks the time when Cowper
betook himself decidedly to work and 'commenced
author.' The spring offered too many distractions to
allow of much contemplation ; he preferred enjoying it
with the bee and the bird; but in the winter evenings
with his intelligent and silent friend, in that sweet
domestic comfort he has so well described, with the
kettle singing close to him, and his cup full of the
beverage which ' cheers but not inebriates,' he applied
himself for the first time to the treatment of fairly long
themes in verse, quite serious and almost theological
at first, showing by their very titles the ground of his
thoughts : The Progress of Error, Truth, Hope, etc. He
inserted and cleverly mingled some gayer passages of
WILLIAM COW PER
101
rather amusing satire with them which he tried to
adapt to the taste of society. I have already quoted
and analyzed the poem Retirement* the best and finest
of this first collection of Cowper's poetry, and I shall
not speak of it here. These first flowers of poetry are
still winter flowers ; this is a little too perceptible in the
moral and austere complexion which is spread all over
them, but it will not be the case with his second
collection, or with his chief and charming poem.
Cowper's first volume appeared towards the begin-
ning of 1782. It had little commercial success, and
was only appreciated by friends. Franklin, to whom a
friend sent it at Passy, where he then was, says, that he
found in it ' something so new in the manner, so easy
and yet so correct in the language, so clear in the ex-
pression, yet so concise, and so just in the sentiment,'
that he read the whole with great pleasure (rare praise
for verses, especially from one who had left off reading
them), and he even read several pieces more than once.
Such a suffrage was well-adapted to console Cowper for
not having more like it. He had wanted to be useful
and to give pleasure at the same time, so as better to
inculcate his morals and advice upon the world; he had
only half succeeded; he told himself that one day
perhaps he would succeed better. The newspapers and
Reviews of the day had not all spoken well of him.
That redoubtable king or tyrant of criticism, Samuel
Johnson, then at the end of his career, kept silence, and
Cowper congratulated himself on it. This poetry was
too new to be quite understood at first, and there were
* [In the Causerie entitled De la Potsie de la Nature, which
immediately preceded these on Cowper.]
102 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BE U VE
as yet not enough fresh open glades or living pictures
to single out and captivate in it. Yet among the
testimony of the critics, to which he paid but moderate
attention, and was not very sensitive, there was one
which the poet had set his heart on gaining, that of
the Monthly Review, the best known of the literary
papers of the time. This, however, was long in giving
an opinion. Cowper wrote to a friend (June 12, 1782) :
' What will that critical Rhadamanthus say, when my shivering
genius shall appear before him ? Still he keeps me in hot water,
and I must wait another month for his award. Alas ! when I wish
for a favourable sentence from that quarter (to confess a weakness
that I should not confess at all), I feel myself not a little influenced
by a tender regard to my reputation here, even among my neighbours
at Olney. Here are watchmakers, who themselves are wits, and
who at present perhaps think me one. Here is a carpenter and a
baker, and, not to mention others, here is your idol, Mr. Teedon,
whose smile is fame. All these read the Monthly Review, and all
these will set me down for a dunce, if those terrible critics show
them the example. But oh ! wherever else I am accounted dull,
dear Mr. Griffith, let me pass for a genius at Olney !'
Some seasons of joy and sunshine were at last going
to shine for Cowper ; a brilliant sunbeam was going to
enter his life. It is no longer by the fireside in winter,
but in summer, in his green arbour, in his framework
of jessamine and honeysuckle so often described, in his
greenhouse, where one sees him seated with myrtles for
blinds, that he was in future to compose his verse-
serious still, but fresh, animated and brightened by an
unexpected light. A charming fairy had crossed his
shadow, and let herself into his life for a moment.
One day when he was at the window he saw a lady,
known to him and Mrs. Unwin, enter a shop opposite
WILLIAM COW PER 103
with a stranger who was no other than this lady's
own sister, lately come to the neighbourhood. There
was something so attractive and so charming about her
at first sight, that Cowper, timid as he was, immediately
wished to know her. She was Lady Austen, the widow
of a baronet. Scarcely had she been admitted to this
select household than she received as much pleasure as
she gave ; she brought in what had hitherto been want-
ing there, novelty and fancy. This remarkable person
was endowed with the most happy gifts; she was
neither very young nor in the flower of her beauty ; she
had what is better, a power of attraction and fascination
which depended on the transparency of her soul, a
faculty of gratitude and of sensibility to every mark of
kindness of which she was the object, at times moving
her even to tears. Everything in her was expressed by
a pure, innocent, tender vivacity. She was a sympathetic
creature, and she might quite well in the present
instance justify that maxim of Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre : ' There is in woman a cheerful gaiety which
dispels man's sadness.'*
But if Lady Austen momentarily eclipses Mrs.
Unwin, she does not efface her or ever diminish her
influence. Let us not misapprehend her sterling
qualities ; the friend of Cowper for sixteen years already
at this time (1781), she had been always the same in
her care and tenderness ; she had sacrificed her health
in watching over his gloomy and funereal hours ; in
happier hours she had given him most judicious advice
and good aims for his work. She was the personifica-
* [A similar sentiment, it will be remembered, was expressed
by Captain Macheath some years before Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
was born.]
104 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUTE
tion of sense and judgement. In literary matters her
taste was sound and true : ' She is a critic by nature
and not by rule,' said Cowper, ' and has a perception
of what is good or bad in composition that I never
knew deceive her ; insomuch that when two sorts of
expression have pleaded equally for the precedence in
my own esteem, and I have referred, as in such cases I
always did, the decision of the point to her, I never
knew her at a loss for a just one.' The whole time that
Cowper was with these two women (for soon Lady
Austen became their near neighbour, and they spent
the day together), he had all that he required for his
talent as poet, namely impulse and criticism. Southey
says very judiciously : 'Had it not been for Mrs.
Unwin, he would probably never have appeared in his
own person as an author ; had it not been for Lady
Austen he would never have been a popular one.'
Let us hasten to add (for we are not attempting to
sketch a biography, and we only desire to make the
man and the poet known by his principal features), that
as soon as Cowper perceived that Lady Austen's
presence might after a time annoy Mrs. Unwin, and
that the charming fairy brought into their ordinary
intercourse an element of too keen sensitiveness or
maybe of touchiness which might trouble their unan-
imity, he did not hesitate for an instant, and with no
solemn struggle, without affectation, by a plain, irre-
vocable letter, he sacrificed the agreeable and the
charming to the necessary, and tender imagination to
the unswerving friendship.
But before that there were hours that stood out
among a thousand, when, stimulated into confidence, he
WILLIAM COW PER 105
enjoyed an unexpected youth at this belated age in this
gay company, and his talent and his heart both at
length opened out. So let us not always imagine
Cowper wrapped up in that odd sort of nightcap that
his portraits invariably represent him with. He tells
us himself that now when he was past fifty he looked
rather less than his age ; he had kept his bright young
man's look ; he had not grown so much gray as
bald, but a wisp of hair (as it is called), a well-placed
wisp, filled the void and curled a little at his ear ; in
the afternoon with his bag and black ribbon he might
look quite the gallant. One day in summer when it
had rained, the following little scene took place between
the ladies and him in the garden (Mary is Mrs. Unwin ;
Anna is Lady Austen) :
'THE ROSE.
' The rose had been wash'd, just wash'd in a shower,
Which Mary to Anna convey'd ;
The plentiful moisture encumber'd the flower,
And weigh'd down its beautiful head.
The cup was all fill'd, and the leaves were all wet,
And it seem'd to a fanciful view,
To weep for the buds it had left with regret
On the flourishing branch where it grew.
I hastily seized it, unfit as it was
For a nosegay, so dripping and drown'd,
And swinging it rudely, too rudely, alas !
I snapp'd it ; it fell to the ground.
And such, I exclaim'd, is the pitiless part
Some act by the delicate mind,
Regardless of wringing and breaking a heart
Already to sorrow resign'd.
io6 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
This elegant rose, had I shaken it less,
Might have bloom'd with its owner awhile ;
And the tear that is wiped with a little address,
May be follow'd perhaps by a smile.'
This exquisite little piece tells everything, Cowper's
joy and pure emotion between these two women, their
transitory and fragile union, and the rose which is
broken by accident before one of them has finished
offering it to the other.
The charm of poetry had entire possession of Cowper
during these years (1782-1784). The composition and
publication of his first volume had only animated him
and put him in the mood ; he felt that it was only by
writing, and by writing verses, that he could entirely
escape from his melancholy. In his letters from this
time onward we find constant allusions to the respite
from the anxieties of life which the labour of poetical
composition could afford. He expresses the same feel-
ing in the Task :
' There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know. The shifts and turns,
The expedients and inventions multiform
To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms
Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,
To arrest the fleeting images that fill
The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast,
And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off"
A faithful likeness of the forms he views,
Then to dispose his copies with such art,
That each may find its most propitious light,
And shine by situation, hardly less
Than by the labour and the skill it cost,
Are occupations of the poet's mind
So pleasing, and that steal away the thought
WILLIAM COW PER 107
With such address, from themes of sad import,
That lost in his own musings, happy man !
He feels the anxieties of life, denied
Their wonted entertainment, all retire.'
At this time when, striking a new vein of com-
position, he really came into full possession of his
talent, and when as he said in a word the offshoot had
become a tree (fit surculus arbor], Cowper recalled, with
the pride of an author aware of his originality, the fact
that he had read no English poet for thirteen years,
and only one at all for twenty years, and that for
that reason he was safe from that inclination to imitate
which his solid candid taste held in abhorrence more
than anything. ' Imitation, even of the best models, is
my aversion,' he said ; ' it is servile and mechanical, a
trick that has enabled many to usurp the name of
author, who could not have written at all if they had not
written upon the pattern of somebody indeed original.'
It is in this way that, while he created a style of
his own in accordance with his thoughts, and a form in
accordance with the subject, this sensitive and delicate
invalid, at once keen and clever, has been one of the
fathers of the revival of English poetry.
He was to become popular at a time and in the way
he dreamt of least. One afternoon that Lady Austen
noticed he was sadder than usual, and ready to fall
back into his gloomy moods, she conceived the idea of
telling him a very funny and comical nurse's story
which she knew from childhood, to cheer him up, The
Diverting History of John Gilpin, showing how he went
farther than he intended, and came safe home again.
Cowper listened, laughed a great deal, thought about it
io8 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
all night, and the next morning he had made his ballad
or elegy (he had a particular gift for ballads), which
set the little audience at the breakfast-table laughing
till they cried. He sent this trifle to his friend Mrs.
Unwin, who had it printed in a magazine ; the author's
name was not known at first, and nobody cared much
about it. The piece slept two or three years. But the
next thing was that Henderson, a celebrated actor and
Garrick's successor, who was giving lectures in public
before the best society, having come across a number
of the magazine containing John Gilpin, thought good
to give a comic recital of it at one of his lectures.
From that time it became fashionable and was all the
vogue ; nobody talked of anything but John Gilpin for
some time ; it was reprinted separately and thousands
of copies were sold ; fancy caricatures illustrated his
adventure ; and by the irony of fate Cowper, the
moralist and severe poet who had aimed at reforming
the world, suddenly found himself in the fashion and in
favour in drawing-rooms for a freak which, except for
greater innocency and perfect decency, might just as
well have been some pleasant drollery, so to say a
Cadet Buteux, or a Monsieur et Madame Denis, by
Desaugiers.
John Gilpin is a good citizen, a ' linendraper bold '
of Cheapside, esteemed by all, and ' a trainband
captain eke was he of famous London town.' It is
the day before the anniversary of his wedding-day,
contracted just twenty years before. It is a question
of having a little feast, and Mrs. Gilpin, although of
' frugal mind,' is the first to propose going to dine at
Edmonton at the sign of the Bell. She will go in the
WILLIAM COW PER 109
post-chaise with her sister and her * sister's child,' her-
self and ' children three ' ; her husband is to follow
behind on horseback. Gilpin replies to his wife's pro-
posal :
i
' I do admire
Of womenkind but one,
And you are she, my dearest dear,
Therefore it shall be done.
I am a linendraper bold,
As all the world doth know,
And my good friend the calender
Will lend his horse to go.'
They agree also that they will take their own wine
with them, because wine is dear that year.
' The morning came, the chaise was brought,
But yet was not allowed
To drive up to the door, lest all
Should say that she was proud.'
Then follow the accidents of the journey : at the
moment when the post-chaise is starting, Gilpin, all
ready to follow and even in the saddle, sees ' three
customers come in ' ; customers are never refused, and
he gets down to serve them. Then they tell him the
wine has been forgotten and he takes charge of it,
hanging the stone bottles by their handles to the
leathern belt of the sword in which he does his parade
exercise : a fine red cloak covers and hides all. Now
at last he starts, and wishes to catch up the carriage by
galloping. Now the great accidents begin : the horse
goes faster than he ought, the stone bottles swing
about, the horse runs away, hat, wig and cloak are
carried away by the wind. The turnpike men, seeing
no SELECT ESSAYS OF SA1XTE-BEUVE
such a gallop, and the stone bottles swinging, think it
is a race, and that he is a jockey carrying weight for a
bet, and consequently all the gates on the road (there
are numbers of them in England) are opened for him.
But let us hear the ballad itself :
' The dogs did bark, the children scream'd,
Up flew the windows all,
And every soul cried out, " Well done !"
As loud as he could bawl.
Away went Gilpin who but he ;
His fame soon spread around
He carries weight, he rides a race,
'Tis for a thousand pound.
And still as fast as he drew near,
'Twas wonderful to view
How in a trice the turnpike-men
Their gates wide open threw.
And now as he went bowing down
His reeking head full low,
The bottles twain behind his back
Were shatter'd at a blow.
Down ran the wine into the road
Most piteous to be seen,
Which made his horse's flanks to smoke
As they had basted been.
But still he seemed to carry weight,
With leathern girdle braced,
For all might see the bottle necks
Still dangling at his waist.
Thus all through merry Islington
These gambols he did play,
And till he came unto the Wash
Of Edmonton so gay.
***#*
WILLIAM COW PER in
At Edmonton his loving wife
From the balcony spied
Her tender husband, wondering much
To see how he did ride.
" Stop, stop, John Gilpin ! Here's the house "-
They all at once did cry ;
" The dinner waits and we are tired :"
Said Gilpin " So am I."
But yet his horse was not a whit
Inclined to tarry there,
For why ? his owner had a house
Full ten miles off at Ware.
So like an arrow swift he flew
Shot by an archer strong,
So did he fly which brings me to
The middle of my song.'
The return journey is not more fortunate ; fresh
ludicrous accidents bring a fresh race the opposite way,
and Gilpin, still on horseback and still run away with,
but merry and not too much upset, gets back to London
without his dinner as he set out : thus his wedding-day
is spent. All this should be seen in the original, with
the humour that belongs to it and indeed you cannot
enjoy the full flavour of it unless you are of the soil.
I wanted only to give an idea of this very English,
and for us very unexpected, side of Cowper's genius.
Let us return to his serious side, the only one on
which we can reach him. It may be imagined that
when a few months after the wild success of John
Gilpin, the publication of a touching, familiar, natural
and lofty poem, The Task, was announced by the same
author (1784), everybody wanted to read it. The
H2 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
famous involuntary horseman had served as a herald to
prepare the way for more delicate and severe work.
It was to Lady Austen again that Cowper owed its
first idea and starting-point. One day when she was
advising him to write blank verse, verse without rhyme,
which is very agreeable to the genius of the English
language, he replied that to do that he only wanted a
subject. ' Oh,' she said to him, ' you can never be in
want of a subject ; you can write upon any ; write
upon this Sofa.'
The fairy had spoken, and Cowper set to work,
giving his poem the title The Task. Only about a
hundred lines of the first book refer to the Sofa, after
which the author passes on to his favourite subjects,
the country, nature, religion, and morals. In six books
or cantos he goes over a series of the most varied sub-
jects or views, without any definite composition, but
with the unity of the one mind and one intention. Let
us simply take the beginning of the first canto of the
poem. This beginning, of which the Sofa is the text, is
only very ingenious and elegant banter. The author
indicates the origin of the poem :
1 The theme though humble, yet august and proud
The occasion, for the Fair commands the song.'
He recalls the time when the rude ancestors of the
English, the Picts and Britons, reposed on the hard
ground at the edge of torrents, their heads resting on
the rock. The invention began, coarse and heavy in
its infancy ; they had three-legged stools, and the
massive table which served for a seat : the immortal
Alfred had no other throne, and from thence, sceptre
WILLIAM COW PER 113
in hand, he administered justice to his ' infant realms.'
The poet follows the different steps towards perfection,
and shows at his leisure the tapestry with which the
wooden seats of ancient days are soon clothed, ' tapestry
richly wrought
' And woven close, or needlework sublime.
There might ye see the piony spread wide,
The full-blown rose, the shepherd and his lass,
Lap-dog and lambkin with black staring eyes,
And parrots with twin cherries in their beak.'
All these nothings are agreeably detailed and relieved
with colours, as the Abbe* Delille could do if wanted,
or as some witty Jesuit would not fail to do, in Latin
verses. I will pass rapidly over these prettinesses, the
progress of the chair which the Indian cane has made
more flexible, to which arms are added, and the perfect
and comfortable curve is not given all at once even to
these arms : in the arts of life nothing is discovered
at the first attempt. You have here every degree of
transition from the chair to the sofa, and from the
double sofa or settee to the couch and the Sofa, that
final throne of luxury and ease. The first hundred
lines of the first book are in the most brilliant style of
Chinese cabinet-work. But the real Cowper only re-
appears and depicts himself entirely in the lines which
immediately follow :
' Oh may I live exempted (while I live
Guiltless of pamper'd appetite obscene)
From pangs arthritic that infest the toe
Of libertine excess. The SOFA suits
The gouty limb, 'tis true ; but gouty limb,
Though on a SOFA, may I never feel :
ii 4 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth close cropt by nibbling sheep,
And skirted thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs ; have loved the rural walk
O'er hills, through valleys, and by the river's brink,
E'er since a truant-boy I pass'd my bounds
To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames.
And still remember, nor without regret
Of hours that sorrow since has much endear'd ;
How oft, my slice of pocket store consumed,
Still hungering penniless and far from home,
I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws,
Or blushing crabs, or berries that emboss
The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.
Hard fare ! but such as boyish appetite
Disdains not, nor the palate undepraved
By culinary arts unsavoury deems.
No SOFA then awaited my return,
Nor SOFA then I needed. Youth repairs
His wasted spirits quickly, by long toil
Incurring short fatigue ; and though our years,
As life declines, speed rapidly away,
And not a year but pilfers as he goes
Some youthful grace that age would gladly keep,
A tooth or auburn lock, and by degrees
Their length and colour from the locks they spare ;
The elastic spring of an unwearied foot
That mounts the stile with ease, or leaps the fence,
That play of lungs inhaling and again
Respiring freely the fresh air, that makes
Swift pace or steep ascent no toil to me,
Mine have not pilfered yet ; nor yet impaired
My relish of fair prospect : scenes that soothed
Or charm'd me young, no longer young, I find
Still soothing and of power to charm me still.
And witness, dear companion of my walks,
Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive
Fast lock'd in mine, with pleasure such as love
WILLIAM COW PER 115
Confirm'd by long experience of thy worth
And well-tried virtues could alone inspire,
Witness a joy that thou hast doubled long.
Thou knowest my praise of nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjured up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine, and art partner of them all.
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slacken'd to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene
Thence with what pleasure have we just discern'd.
The distant plough slow-moving, and beside
His labouring team, that swerve not from the track,
The sturdy swain diminish'd to a boy !
Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast rooted in his bank,
Stand, never overlook'd, our favourite elms
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut ;
While far beyond and overthwart the stream
That as with molten glass inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds ;
Displaying on its varied side the grace
Of hedgerow beauties numberless, square tower,
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the listening ear ;
Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote.
Scenes must be beautiful which daily view'd
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.'
There is here what is not always met with in Cowper,
a general view, gradation, perspective. Compared with
Thomson, he possesses the art of noticing particular
features and the curious detail of things more than the
ii6 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
latter ; his exactness is almost minute. It has been
remarked that in his religious view-point, a little detail
seems actually as important to him as a great object :
all are equal in relation to God, who shines and reveals
Himself as marvellously in one creature as in the others.
But the result is also that Thomson describes with a
wider view and as a painter who has a comprehending
glance ; Thomson has masses. Yet here, in this perfect
description we have just read, Cowper has known how
to reconcile the two kinds of qualities, the fineness and
relief of each detail (I will even say brilliancy on one or
two points), and the gradation and airy flight of per-
spective. This scene might be copied with a paint-
brush.
I have more to say ; I should like to notice the
affinity of Cowper's circumstances with those of Pascal,
his resemblances to natural contrasts with Rousseau,
to speak a little of ourselves and our poetic attempts
in the same line ; in a word, to come back to France.
WILLIAM COWPER.
III.
ONCE more, I have no wish to depreciate the Abbe
Delille.* He was too much beloved, too much relished,
too much applauded by those who knew him, not to
have possessed many graces and the spell of talent.
In his poem L'Homme des Champs, in Imagination (more
than in Les Jar dins), there are certainly bits which
deserved all the success they got when that kindly and
active intellect was there to support them with his
presence and his delivery, as he recited them to the
audience for whom he had composed them. Even
when we read them to-day they give pleasure ; above
all, they show how much the public taste has changed,
and how much less often than formerly authors are
called upon for the kind of verses which were called
witty. Let us quit these useless comparisons. I will be
content to suppose that my readers have a general and
sufficient idea of the Abbe Delille's manner when he is
happiest, and I will select rapidly from the Task the
passages which point to other sources of inspiration in
the English poet.
Cowper loved the country dearly ; he loved it as a
* [This is in allusion to some remarks in the Causerie De la
Poesie de la Nature. '.]
n8 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
place to live in, to dwell in, never to grow tired of, at any
age or in any season. In his first canto, after the walk
with Mrs. Unwin which I have quoted, and that perfect
description of the landscape, he does not stop at that.
As a poet, he has written his piece ; as a lover of
nature, how much more has he to say ! So, having
finished his picture, he at once begins again. This time
it is not in company with his friend, but alone, at a less
fair season, when a feminine foot might not so easily
extract itself from a bit of bad ground, that he makes
his excursions to explore the country. He describes the
whole lie of it for us; he strews his less restricted
path with a thousand impressions, suggested either by
the casual features of the rural ground, or by the sounds
which he hears he was highly sensitive to sounds or
by the varied colours of the trees, of which he dis-
tinguishes and specifies all the tints. We can perceive
life-interest, a tender and deep-seated passion, under all
these descriptions. One cannot call it his amusement ;
it is rather his enjovment. In the course of his long
walks after climbing TiilTs, descending steep slopes,
crossing brooks, swollen or shrunk, according to the
season, he comes to some nobleman's park, across
which he may find a short cut. He does not act like
Rousseau, who doubtless would have avoided passing
across it, and would rather have gone all the way round
in the sun than have been in any way indebted to the
rich and powerful. The lord of the fenced-in domain
has given Cowper leave to cross it when he likes has
given him the key, in short. Cowper leaves the open
country, enters the lofty avenues, and finds in them
coolness and shade :
WILLIAM COW PER 119
' Where now the blazing sun ?
By short transition we have lost his glare,
And stepp'd at once into a cooler clime.
Ye fallen avenues ! once more I mourn
Your fate unmerited, once more rejoice
That yet a remnant of your race survives.
How airy and how light the graceful arch,
Yet awful as the consecrated roof
Re echoing pious anthems ! while beneath
The chequer'd earth seems restless as a flood
Brush'd by the wind. So sportive is the light
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,
And darkening and enlightening, as the leaves
Play wanton, every moment, every spot.
And now, with nerves new-braced and spirits cheered,
We tread the wilderness, whose well-roll'd walks,
With curvature of slow and easy sweep
Deception innocent give ample space
To narrow bounds. The grove receives us next ;
Between the upright shafts of whose tall elms
We may discern the thresher at his task.
Thump after thump resounds the constant flail,
That seems to swing uncertain, and yet falls
Full on the destined ear. Wide flies the chaff,
The rustling straw sends up a frequent mist
Of atoms sparkling in the noonday beam.
Come hither, ye that press your beds of down
And sleep not see him sweating o'er his bread
Before he eats it. 'Tis the primal curse,
But soften'd into mercy ; made the pledge
Of cheerful days, and nights without a groan."
These lofty avenues ; these mighty elms, and in the
distance the atom sparkling in the sun ! There you
have all the variety, all the contrast of the picture.
One of the older writers would, perhaps, have finished
120 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
upon this last touch and the image ; but Cowper does
not stay there. He introduces the thought natural to
a son of Adam, of labour as a penalty and chastise-
ment, but become a means, or a pledge, of redemption.
Cowper is profoundly Christian ; austerity, indeed, from
the point of view of taste and moderation, predominates
too much in him. He has a side almost Hebraic in its
rigidity, its awe ; and from his shrubbery, his study
among the greenery, as he sees through the leaves the
threshers at the farm, he at times has simultaneously a
sudden view, a vision of Sinai.
Cowper is, moreover, a patriot and an excellent
Englishman, not omitting the prejudices and pre-
possessions. To read him aright, and fully catch all
his tones, as well as to explain the great success of his
poem from its first appearance, we must recall the
events of those years, the American War, with its
issue humiliating for England, the passionate debates
in Parliament, the triumphs won and crimes committed
in India, the first efforts of Wilberforce for negro
emancipation, the dissoluteness and disorder prevailing
in the highest ranks of society, the misconduct of the
Prince of Wales. As he composed the Task, Cowper
watched all this from afar, seeing only the broad out-
lines, but full of eagerness and curiosity. ' Tis pleasant,'
he says,
' Through the loop-holes of retreat
To peep at such a world. To see the stir
Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd.'
But he was too sensitive, too patriotic, too full of
human and Christian feeling, to remain in this attitude
of an amused spectator. Every instant he breaks out
WILLIAM COW PER 121
into transports or outcries of grief, such as may nowa-
days seem on the verge of declamation, but which if
rightly taken at the moment of their outburst were
pieces of well-timed eloquence. Thus, the first book,
which, as we saw, begins with those pretty, almost
finikin ingenuities about the Sofa, ends with this tirade
or harangue, in which patriotism combines with the
rustic note :
' God made the country, and man made the town,
What wonder then, that health and virtue, gifts
That can alone make sweet the bitter draught
That life holds out to all, should most abound
And least be threatened in the fields and groves ?
Possess ye therefore, ye who borne about
In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue
But that of idleness, and taste no scenes
But such as art contrives, possess ye still
Your element ; there only can ye shine,
There only minds like yours can do no harm.
Our groves were planted to console at noon
The pensive wanderer in their shades. At eve
The moonbeam sliding softly in between
The sleeping leaves, is all the light they wish,
Birds warbling all the music. We can spare
The splendour of your lamps, they but eclipse
Our softer satellite. Your songs confound
Our more harmonious notes. The thrush departs
Scared, and the offended nightingale is mute.
There is a public mischief in your mirth,
It plagues your country. Folly such as yours,
Graced with a sword, and worthier of a fan,
Has made, which enemies could ne'er have done,
Our arch of empire, steadfast but for you,
A mutilated structure, soon to fall.'
Who does not feel here the grief of the old-fashioned
122 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Englishman, at the moment when North America, that
magnificent region of British territory, is cutting itself
loose ?
The second book of the poem is entirely devoted to
public misfortunes, or, rather, to the physical and
natural calamities which burst upon the world in the
year 1781-1783 ; terrible storms, earthquakes, first in
Jamaica and the adjacent islands, later, in Sicily and
elsewhere. Cowper, with his tendency to vivid imagin-
ation, saw in these not only Divine warnings and
chastisements inflicted on the world, but also signs of
the approaching end of the world and the Last Judge-
ment. As a rule, the title of each book is suggested by
its opening passage, or by the most conspicuous bit of
description in it ; thus, one is The Garden, one, The
Winter Evening, another, The Winter Morning Walk, yet
another, Winter Walk at Noon. But the second book is
headed The Timepiece, though there is no reference in it
to anything of the sort ; it is a mystic, symbolical title,
equivalent to ' The Signs of the Times.' We do not
ask from the poet either the exact observation of
physical science, or the methodical reasoning of philo-
sophy. The opening of this book is admirable in its
rhythm and its tenderness :
' Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more ! My ear is pain'd,
My soul is sick with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man. The natural bond
WILLIAM COW PER 123
Of brotherhood is sever'd as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colour'd like his own.'
He continues to enumerate all his griefs and his
sufferings as Englishman, Christian, and human being.
The whole book, with its sombre moral tone, is like a
series of outbursts, mystic, biblical, patriotic, human,
brotherly. It is an objection to it that it more than
once resembles a versified sermon ; but it has a spirit, an
ardour, quite sufficient to show how superior Cowper
is to the ordinary run of descriptive and picturesque
poets.
The third book, called The Garden, brings us back to
more familiar, gentler scenes. In the very first page
we find a charming invocation of domestic happiness.
Doubtless Cowper enjoyed this but imperfectly ; but
with what a pious, what a chaste delicacy does he
appreciate it !
c Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall !
Though few now taste thee unimpair'd and pure,
Or tasting, long enjoy thee, too infirm
Or too incautious to preserve thy sweets
Unmix'd with drops of bitter, which neglect,
Or temper, sheds into thy crystal cup ;
Thou art the nurse of virtue. In thine arms
She smiles, appearing, as in truth she is,
Heaven-born and destined to the skies again.
Thou art not known where Pleasure is adored,
That reeling goddess with the zoneless waist
And wandering eyes, still leaning on the arm
Of Novelty, her fickle frail support ;
For thou art meek and constant, hating change,
124 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
And finding in the calm of truth-tied love
Joys that her stormy raptures never yield.
Forsaking thee, what shipwreck have we made
Of honour, dignity, and fair renown.'
This book, to justify its title, treats of flowers and
the labours of gardening. ' Who loves a garden, loves
a greenhouse too.' There are most minute precepts on
the art of raising gourds ; the poet speaks from his own
experience, and like one who has put his hand to the
spade and the spade into the ground. A sensation of
happiness permeates these kindly yet learned descrip-
tions, and shows Cowper in his most smiling aspect :
' Had I the choice of sublunary good,
What could I wish, that I possess not here ?
Health, leisure, means to improve it, friendship, peace ;
No loose or wanton, though a wandering, muse,
And constant occupation without care.
Thus blest, I draw a picture of that bliss.'
It is, however, in Book IV., The Winter Evening, that
he has succeeded best in depicting himself to us, set in
his favourite frame, amid all the charm of an innocent,
yet accomplished and refined society. The opening of
this book is celebrated. The postman arrives with the
letters. ' Hark ! 'tis the twanging horn ! o'er yonder
bridge.' Careless himself, the messenger brings in his
bag, which he throws carelessly down, joys or griefs,
births or deaths, fortune or ruin, and departs, whistling
as he goes. Pretty as they are, these finished pictures
(of which one might find in Delille more than one counter-
part no less full of spirit, though executed with a less
certain touch) are not what please one most in Cowper.
I prefer him when, after completing his enumeration of
WILLIAM COW PER 125
all the matters of public or private news which lie
jumbled up together in the postman's bag, he con-
tinues :
' Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.'
In the occupations of the evening, which he is about
to follow into their minutest details, and which he
brings every moment before our eyes, he is mindful of
Horace's : nodes cenceque Deum ! but he puts in
his own originality and adds his own flame a moral
and religious sentiment which never deserts him, a
flash of St. Paul and the Apostles; always with due
appreciation of a comfort and an ease which the
Apostles never knew. He is inexhaustible on this sub-
ject, this ever-renewed theme, the tranquil beatitude of
the domestic hearth. He applies to it a thoroughly
modern, thoroughly English, elegance of treatment
which at times makes some half-page resemble a
vignette by Westall in all its sparkling prettiness.
Collins has an ode to Evening full of imagination and
lofty fancy ; Cowper, in the following passage, recalls
Collins, with less of lyric power, and more that is
orderly and familiar, but with a no less lively imagin-
ative touch :
' Come evening once again, season of peace,
Return, sweet evening, and continue long !
Methinks I see thee in the streaky west,
With matron-step slow-moving, while the night
126 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Treads on thy sweeping train ; one hand employ'd
In letting fall the curtain of repose
On bird and beast, the other charged for man
With sweet oblivion of the cares of day :
Not sumptuously adorn'd, not needing aid
Like homely-featured night, of clustering gems,
A star or two just twinkling on thy brow
Suffices thee ; save that the moon is thine
No less than hers, not worn indeed on high
With ostentatious pageantry, but set
With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,
Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.
Come then, and thou shall find thy votary calm,
Or make me so. Composure is thy gift.
And whether I devote thy gentle hours
To books, to music, or the poet's toil,
To weaving nets for bird-alluring fruit ;
Or twining silken threads round ivory reels,
When they command whom man was born to please,
I slight thee not, but make thee welcome still.'
One has to recognise that wit and talent have their
different families, and, so to say, their different races.
Cowper, though he was neither husband nor father, is
the poet of the family, of the house, the well-ordered
household, its purity, its gentle cheerfulness, of the
shrubbery at the end of the garden, of the fireside.
Stormy, audacious poets like Byron, lively worldlings
like Thomas Moore or Hazlitt, naturally cared little for
him. Byron, in a moment of ill-humour, called Cowper
a ' coddled poet.' Moore laid down the principle that
genius and domestic happiness are two antipathetic and
mutually exclusive elements. Someone was inquiring
one day of Wordsworth if it were necessarily so, and the
stern poet of the Lakes answered : ' No man can claim
indulgence for his transgressions on the score of his
WILLIAM CO W PER 127
sensibilities, but at the expense of his credit for intel-
lectual powers. All men of first rare genius have been
as distinguished for dignity, beauty, and propriety of
moral conduct. . . . The man of genius ought to learn
that the cause of his vices is, in fact, his deficiencies,
and not, as he fondly imagines, his superfluities and
superiorities.'*
I am sorry to have to recall that Montaigne was not
of this opinion, but inclined to the side of irregularity.
He quotes the sonnets of his friend Etienne de la Boetie,
and decides that those which were composed for the
mistress are worth more than those addressed to the
lawful wife, which have a touch of * I know not what
marital chillness. And I am one of those whose
opinion is, that Divine Poesy doth nowhere fadge so
well, and so effectually applaudeth, as in a youthful,
wanton, and unbridled subject. 't We have in France
been only too mindful of this dictum of Montaigne's,
and have let ourselves go after this wanton ideal.
To return to Cowper. We need not disguise from
ourselves the fact that he might not perhaps have so
succeeded in expressing to the life the poetry of these
tranquil conditions, to which custom has rendered most
people insensible, if he had not also had his strange
inward storms and profound upheavals. The sixth
book of the Task opens with a passage that is cele-
brated, and unquestionably charming :
* The sentiment is much the same as Homer's, when he makes
Ulysses tell Nausicaa that nothing is better or nobler than when a
man and a woman keep house, being of one mind one with another
(Odyssey vi. 182-84).
t [Essays, Book I. Chap, xxviii. (Florio). ' Fadge ' = ' fit.' The
original has ' ne rid point ailleurs.']
128 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
' There is in souls a sympathy with sounds,
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs or martial, brisk or grave.
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
How soft the music of those village bells,
Falling at intervals upon the ear
In cadence sweet ! now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again and louder still,
Clear and sonorous as the gale comes on.
With easy force it opens all the cells
Where memory slept. Wherever I have heard
A kindred melody, the scene recurs,
And with it all its pleasures and its pains.
Such comprehensive views the spirit takes,
That in a few short moments I retrace
(As in a map the voyager his course)
The windings of my way through many years.'
He proceeds in similar fashion, and by an insensible
chain of association he arrives at the reminiscence of
certain moving events in his past life. A direct
allusion takes us back to the loss of his father, whose
affection, under a certain outward severity, he re-
proaches himself with having never duly appreciated :
' Some friend is gone, perhaps his son's best friend,
A father, whose authority, in show
When most severe, and mustering all its force,
Was but the graver countenance of love.'
Then suddenly, without any other transition, he
begins to draw that exquisite and memorable picture,
which gives the book its title The Winter Walk at Noon.
It is the last extract which I shall give from the Task ;
let us lose none of this painting, finished as a pearl, yet
WILLIAM COW PER 129
so living and natural. The Flemish artists have found
their match in poetry :
' The night was winter in his roughest mood ;
The morning sharp and clear. But now at noon
Upon the southern side of the slant hills,
And where the woods fence off the northern blast,
The season smiles, resigning all its rage,
And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue
Without a cloud, and white without a speck
The dazzling splendour of the scene below.
Again the harmony comes o'er the vale,
And through the trees I view the embattled tower
Whence all the music. I again perceive
The soothing influence of the wafted strains,
And settle in soft musings as I tread
The walk, still verdant under oaks and elms,
Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.
The roof, though moveable through all its length
As the wind sways it, has yet well sufficed,
And, intercepting in their silent fall
The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.
No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.
The redbreast warbles still, but is content
With slender notes and more than half suppress'd ;
Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light
From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes
From many a twig the pendent drops of ice,
That tinkle in the wither'd leaves below.
Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,
Charms more than silence. Meditation here
May think down hours to moments. Here the heart
May give a useful lesson to the head,
And learning wiser grow without his books.
Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,
Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men,
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
*****
1 30 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much ;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
Books are not seldom talismans and spells,
By which the magic art of shrewder wits
Holds an unthinking multitude, enthrall'd.
Some to the fascination of a name
Surrender judgement, hoodwink'd. Some the style
Infatuates, and through labyrinths and wilds
Of error, leads them by a tune entranced.
While sloth seduces more, too weak to bear
The insupportable fatigue of thought,
And swallowing, therefore, without pause or choice,
The total grist unsifted, husks and all.
But trees and rivulets, whose rapid course
Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer,
And sheepwalks populous with bleating lambs,
And lanes in which the primrose ere her time
Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root,
Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth,
Not shy as in the world, and to be won
By slow solicitation, seize at once
The roving thought, and fix it on themselves.'
Cowper lived fifteen years after the publication of the
Task, not dying till April, 1800. But after that excellent
poem he undertook no other original work of any
length. Long ago he had been struck by the beauties
of Homer, and, dissatisfied with the inaccuracies of
Pope, he applied himself once more at Lady Austen's
instigation to making a complete and faithful trans-
lation into blank verse of the Iliad and Odyssey. The
work occupied many long years. He was next engaged
upon an edition of Milton, with an English translation
of the Latin works ; but he was ill-suited to the duties
of editor. About two years after the publication of the
Task he left Olney, which had become less agreeable as
WILLIAM COW PER 131
a place of residence. His kind cousin and friend in
childhood, Lady Hesketh, with whom he had renewed
acquaintance, and who was very well off, furnished a
comfortable house for him and Mrs. Unwin at Weston,
near Olney, one of the prettiest villages in England.
She herself spent several months of every year there.
His malady, which had only slept in a fashion during
his cheerful hours, attacked him again in 1787. He
again recovered, but dejection and melancholy became
his constant and habitual condition after 1793. He
had been smitten by the greatest disaster that could
have befallen him ; Mrs. Unwin, his domestic angel,
was struck with paralysis. She outlived her own self
for a while, but preceded him to the grave by four
years. This latter part of Cowper's life is sad,
humbling for the human intellect, and calculated to
give cause for reflection to anyone who is tempted to
think highly of himself. Still, he had up to the end
affectionate friends and relatives, who took it by turns
to be with him and competed for the honour of
tending him and sheltering him in his last tedious
sufferings.
Even through eclipse and shadow the flash of poetry
and genius still gleamed from time to time. ' Man's
mind,' he replied to one who regretted that he under-
took no more original work, ' is not a fountain, but a
cistern ; and mine, God knows, is a broken cistern.'
But he still found quick, if brief, inspirations, in which
his heart welled up. In England everyone knows his
piece addressed to Mrs. Unwin, then ill and infirm. It
is called To Mary ; and though I meant to quote no
more, I cannot resist giving a few stanzas of this
1 32 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
tender, incomparable lament, written as it were with
tears. In the first verse Cowper alludes to his great
relapse into melancholy in the year 1773, his first after
taking up his abode with Mrs. Unwin :
TO MARY.
' The twentieth year is well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast ;
Ah, would that this might be the last !
My Mary !
Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow ;
'Twas my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary !
Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary !
Thy indistinct expressions seem
Like language utter'd in a dream ;
Yet me they charm, whate'er the theme,
My Mary !
Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,
Are still more lovely in my sight
Than golden beams of orient light,
My Mary !
* * * * #
Partakers of thy sad decline,
Thy hands their little force resign ;
Yet gently prest, press gently mine,
My Mary !
WILLIAM COW PER 133
Such feebleness of limbs them prov'st,
That now at every step thou mov'st,
Upheld by two, yet still thou lov'st,
My Mary !
And still to love, though prest with ill,
In wintry age to feel no chill,
With me is to be lovely still,
My Mary !'
The most important piece which he composed in
these later years, Yardley Oak (1791), is full of imagina-
tion no less powerful than lofty. It was suggested by
an ancient oak which he had seen in his walks round
Weston, and which was reputed to date from the
Norman Conquest. The piece bears the stamp of his
most vigorous manner, with all its merits and defects.
The style is unequal, the thought involved, but there
is a grandeur which reveals in one who is generally
considered the poet of mediocrity, an energetic disciple
of Milton.
Cowper's moral malady, of which I have spoken
somewhat indefinitely, was of a special and extremely
singular nature. He believed himself to be for ever
cast out and reprobate ; and he held this belief with a
consistent and persistent obstinacy that amounted to
mania. His disorder has no resemblance to Pascal's,
who, though he might at times have visions and halluci-
nations, as a rule kept the state of his nerves in sub-
jection to his intellect. It has been said that in his
later years Pascal used to see an abyss yawning close by
him ; if this is correct, it was a mere physical sensation.
It did not deceive him, and his intelligence rejected it.
134 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Cowper did not see the open abyss ; he saw himself,
felt himself, to be fallen morally to the bottom of the
abyss, without hope or succour. He seemed, amid all
his meditations and spiritual soliloquies, always to hear
a voice speaking from the depths of his nature, which
cried, ' It is all over with thee ; thou art lost.' Nothing
could console him, nothing undeceive him on this point.
In his better moments and happier intervals the voice
became more distant or fainter ; but he was never able
to stifle it entirely, and in critical hours it became again
threatening and ceaseless. He imagined himself to
have committed some sin, I know not what, the only
one that was unpardonable ; and that this had separated
his soul from God's side. To all Mr. Newton's obser-
vations and instances of cases more or less like his own,
in which the patients had been completely restored to
health, he would answer that his malady was somewhat
different, that he was an exception. In this utter
hopelessness for himself, seeing his name definitively
struck out of the Book of Life, a religious Christian as he
was, we can judge what must have been his anguish, his
deadly depression. Nay, further, in the worst of his
distress and spiritual destitution he judged himself un-
able and unworthy to pray. His soul was as though
dead. It was from the depths of this habitual state of
inward distress, as if to escape from himself, that he used
to betake himself so keenly to those literary and
poetical occupations wherein he found the charm of
happiness, and has rendered it for us in such lively
imagery. Never did anyone struggle with more con-
stancy, more persistence, than he against an ever-
present and no less persistent madness ; one of the
WILLIAM COW PER 135
fiercest tempests, as he says, which ever was let loose
on a human soul or disordered the navigation of a
Christian sailor. One of his last pieces, called The
Castaway, describes a seaman who has fallen overboard
during one of Anson's voyages ; he struggles to swim
after the vessel ; his comrades vainly throw ropes to
him, and the storm sweeps him away. In this Cowper
sees a melancholy image of his own destiny.
We may perhaps better compare Cowper's malady
with the vein of insanity which existed, during his later
years, in the mind of Rousseau ; in both cases it was
compatible with proofs of an admirable talent. Just as
Rousseau saw in himself the object of a universal
conspiracy, so did Cowper imagine himself devoted
to eternal reprobation. Indeed Cowper, who was also
like Rousseau in the late development of his powers,
speaks of him more than once, knowing of what he
speaks. He had read him, at least his greater works ;
and about the time when he settled at Huntingdon
near the Unwins, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hill :
' You remember Rousseau's description of an English
morning; such are the mornings I spend with these
good people.'* In another place Cowper is evidently
thinking of Rousseau, though he does not mention him
by name. In Book V. of the Task, when he has
occasion to combat the arguments of the hardened
Epicurean who openly abandons himself to the natural
appetites, the bonds of the flesh, and avowedly enjoys
the prospect of death as a sleep :
* The allusion is to a phrase in the Nouvelle Htfoise, Part v.,
Letter iii.
1 3 6 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
' Haste now, philosopher, and set him free !
Charm the deaf serpent wisely. Make him hear
Of rectitude and fitness ; moral truth
How lovely, and the moral sense how sure
* * * * -it-
Spare not in such a cause. Spend all the powers
Of rant and rhapsody in virtue's praise,
*****
And with poetic trappings grace thy prose,
Till it out-mantle all the pride of verse.
*****
The still small voice is wanted. He must speak,
Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect,
Who calls for things that are not, and they come.'
It seems to me that in this passage Cowper is thinking
of the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith, and that he
has touched it on the side where it and Rousseau's
eloquent apostles no less is weak and defective. It
lacks the ' still small voice ' which can change the
heart.
Rousseau is certainly the first French writer of the
eighteenth century who felt and passionately preached
that love of the country and of nature which Cowper
in his tender fashion so fully shared. So far, we have
no cause to envy our neighbour. Thus, when I ex-
pressed a regret* that France had not at that time a
school of poetry like the English, and comparable to it,
I was thinking not so much of the direct representation
of nature considered in itself, a representation of which
our more elevated prose presents such . magnificent
examples, as of the union with the poetry of nature of
[See the opening of the ' Causerie ' referred to above, p. 230.]
WILLIAM COW PER 137
that dealing with the family and the domestic hearth.
In Rousseau this union is essentially lacking, and that
for reasons of many kinds painful to his admirers. He
paints in broad and powerful colours, while living and
dwelling among inward pollution. Moreover, there is
about him an indelicacy, natural or acquired, which
often violates that modesty which ranks first among
the tutelary deities of the hearth. Further profound
differences may be found between Rousseau and
Cowper. The one aims at independence of others,
affects to isolate himself and to be in a state of war, or
divorce, as regards mankind, while the other on the
contrary loves to be indebted to others, to those whom
he loves, and to feel himself under obligation to them.
Even when he is saying as hard things of London as
did Rousseau of Paris, through his fervent anathemas
we can see that he and his doctrines are sociable.
Save in a few rare moments of misanthropy, he
wishes his abode to be not too secluded, nor out of
reach of the resources and advantages of society.
Once upon a time in his walks round Olney, he comes,
at the top of a steepish hill, upon a cottage hidden in a
clump of trees. He calls it ' the peasant's nest,' and
dreams of settling and living like a hermit there, enjoy-
ing his own poetic imaginations and undisturbed peace.
But he soon observes that the situation is inconvenient,
that everything is lacking to it, that it is hard to be
alone. All things considered, he prefers his summer
study, his greenhouse with its simple yet graceful
comfort, and says to the wild, picturesque hut :
' Be still a pleasing object in my view,
My visit still, but never my abode.'
138 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Our own Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has often mingled
lively pictures of domestic life and happiness with de-
scriptions of nature ; but, I know not why, our versified
poetry in this respect remained in arrear. In our own
days attempts have been made in this intimate, familiar
and yet lofty style of art, which of all others demands
careful detail and finish. These attempts, none of
which equals the Task in excellence or in popularity,
will require an attentive examination and a thoroughly
worked-out chapter. Here I will only remark that in
England private life is more shut in, more sheltered,
better set in its whole frame, better adapted in its spirit
to the general character of the race and the nation.
Thus adorned and preserved, thus half-wrapped in its
own mystery as the cottage in its roses, or the nest in
its bush, it contributes all the more to that gentle
poetic ardour which it inspires, and of which in all its
purity we have just seen so many examples. That is
all which I wish to say here ; but I do not deny that,
with differences enough to give talent scope for origin-
ality, we may by dint of application and good luck
succeed in our turn in the same line.
GIBBON.
I.
IN certain respects Gibbon is a French writer, and he
has a right to have his place marked out in our
eighteenth century. During his stay at Lausanne,
when a youth of sixteen to twenty-one years, he taught
himself so completely to think in French that his
letters of that period, written in English, are those
of a man who has ceased to be a master of his
own language. The first essay that he published
after his return later on to England, is written in
French.* Urged by his call to be a historian, and
still in search of his subject, he undertook, in company
with his friend Deyverdun, a general history of the
Swiss Republic, the same heroic theme as Johan von
M tiller was presently to handle, and had gone so far as
to write the introduction in French. The illustrious
historian, David Hume, had to recall him to his native
tongue, in the words of Horace to those Romans who
wrote in Greek,
' In silvam non ligna feras insanius.'
In the final years of his life, when he had returned to
* ' Essai sur 1'Etude de la Literature.'
140 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
live at Lausanne, he conversed habitually in French,
and he expresses a fear that the later volumes of his
history which were composed during this period may
bear the marks of it. ' The constant custom,' says he,
' of speaking one language and writing in another may
well have infused into my style some mixture of
Gallicism.' If in the eyes of Britons of pure blood
this may entail upon him some loss of credit, perhaps
even some blame, in ours, at any rate, let it be a reason
for concerning ourselves with him, and for doing him
especial justice as an eminent author who has in part
belonged to us.
When one speaks of Gibbon, even in France, one has
an unfavourable impression to get over. He has spoken
of Christianity in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters
of his first volume with an affectation of cold im-
partiality, which is very like secret hostility. Even
looking at the thing from a simple historical point of
view he lacks a certain delicacy of feeling, both in
regard to the basis of the Christian idea, and in respect
of the proprieties which he was bound to observe
towards his own contemporaries. Gibbon judged others
too much by himself, and also by the tone of the Paris of
his time, so that he believed that the world had arrived
at a complete state of indifference and scepticism. When
he saw the scandal which his two chapters had caused,
especially in England, among pious, timid or, as he
would have called them, prudent people, he was sorry
for it, and he admits that if it were to do again he
would take more care; for Gibbon, though anything
but a religious man, was still less a sectary or propa-
gandist of infidelity. In his defence he confined himself
GIBBON 141
to what was strictly necessary, and avoided everything
inflammatory. When, in the later years of his life, he
was a witness of the French Revolution, it pleased him
to give his complete adhesion to Burke's profession of
faith : ' I admire,' said he, ' his eloquence, I approve
his policy, I adore his chivalry, and can almost excuse
his reverence for religious establishments.' He adds
that he had sometimes thought of writing a dialogue
of the dead, in which Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire
would have confessed to each other, and recognised
the danger of shaking old-established beliefs by banter-
ing them in front of a blind multitude. All these
recantations of Gibbon's are doubtless made exclusively
from a political and social point of view, and even here
his words contrive to be imbued with a secret contempt
for what he does not believe. You must not ask of him
any warmth or sympathy for sentiments or truths of this
class: he judges religions after the manner of a Chinese
literate.
Nor does he apparently import more warmth into
the consideration of the political movements of man-
kind, or into his conception of history. Yet here his
love of antiquity and his classical taste saved him from
unfairness. He is charmed with the noble self-esteem
and the generous struggles of Cicero. He nourishes
himself unceasingly upon the talent and the works
of ' this great author,' as he calls him, ' a whole library
of good sense and of eloquence.' Essentially unfitted
as he was for public speaking, Gibbon took part as
a member of Parliament in the debates of his country,
and, in the eight sessions which he passed there, he
found, as he says, a school of civic prudence ; the first
142 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
and most indispensable quality of a historian. There
was a moment, amid the dangers of the Seven Years'
War, when he became an Englishman once more at the
call of Pitt. He commanded a company of militia, and
seemed to kindle with a flash of patriotic enthusiasm.
As a general rule, when he has his pen in hand, it is
true to say that this sort of emotion and inspiration is
foreign to him. His favourite ideas of government
agree with those of Horace Walpole. Like him he
prefers to fix his historical golden age in the marvellous
period, the Elysian era of the time of the Antonines ; ' in
which the world saw an uninterrupted succession of
five good monarchs.'* From Augustus to Trajan
Gibbon found the form of empire to which his
reason and the instinct of his mind most naturally
drew him. In his first writing, the essay above
mentioned, fifteen years before he published his great
historic work, he already revealed his preference
for that great continuous and pacific whole of the
Roman Empire. He places it almost on a level
with what Europe subsequently became. He further
remarks in favour of that ancient state of the world, that
countries, at the present day barbarous, were then en-
lightened and in the enjoyment of the benefits of civiliza-
tion. ' At the time of Pliny, Ptolemy, and Galen,' he
says, ' Europe was as much the abode of the sciences
as it is now; but Greece, Asia, Syria, Egypt, Africa,
countries teeming with wonders, were filled with eyes
worthy to see them. All that vast body was united
by peace, by laws, and by language. The African and
the Briton, the Spaniard and the Arab, met in the
* Horace Walpole to Gibbon, February 14, 1776.
GIBBON 143
capital and taught each other mutually. Thirty of the
first men in Rome, often themselves enlightened, always
accompanied by persons who were so, left the capital
every year to govern the provinces ; and even if they
were not themselves curious their authority smoothed
the way for science.'
Without, perhaps, going as far as Montesquieu, who
saw in Trajan * the most accomplished prince of whom
history has ever told us, possessing all the virtues with-
out going into extremes in any, in short, the man most
fitted to honour human nature, and to represent the
Divine ;' without, perhaps, pronouncing so gorgeously,
and reserving his judgement of Trajan as a man of peace
in view of his wars and his ambition of conquest.
Gibbon was willing to place in that epoch his ideal of
the highest grandeur of an empire and of the happi-
ness of the human race. Starting from that age, which
was crowned by the reigns of Antoninus and Marcus
Aurelius, the decline begins, and Gibbon traces the
history of it with exactness, but with regret, holding
fast to all that delays it, revolting from all which
hastens it a fine history, in which the genius of order,
of method, of good administration, predominates, a nar-
rative invested with every steady, consistent and solid
quality, until even in the successive and inevitable
degradations, as we pass through the times of barbarism,
it resembles a broad Roman highway.
Thus Gibbon, who had been present in the flesh during
the period of the Chathams, favoured the period of the
Trajans by taste and temperament, as well as by study.
The more one considers his nature and his private life,
the better can one understand this preference. Sprung
144 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
from a good old Kentish family, and having a Tory
father and grandfather, he was born at Putney, in
Surrey, the ayth of April, 1737. One of his first plea-
surable feelings is of gratitude towards the goodness
of Nature in having while she might just as well
have made him be born a slave, a savage, or a boor-
placed his cradle in a free and civilized country, in
an age of science and philosophy, and in a family
of gentle birth, suitably endowed with the gifts of
fortune. This moderate feeling of content will animate
Gibbon's whole life, and will hold him at an equal
distance between enchantment and despair, even in
his brief passions. He was the eldest of five brothers
who died in infancy, and of a sister who lived a little
longer, and whom he knew well enough to regret her.
He himself had a delicate constitution, which for a long
time gave cause for anxiety; it seems that he was taken
more care of by a maternal aunt full of affection and
goodness, than by his somewhat indifferent mother. He
drew from this aunt ' that early and irresistible love of
reading, which he would not exchange,' he says, ' for the
treasures of India.' At the age of seven he was put
under the charge of a tutor, an excellent country parson
named John Kirkby, about whom he has left some
touching words. At nine years old he was sent to
school at Kingston, but he did not gain much advan-
tage there on account of the interruptions necessitated
by his weak health. Eighteen months later he was
recalled by the death of his mother ; he profited little
more from Westminster School, from which he was fre-
quently absent taking the waters at Bath, or staying at a
physician's house. During this period he read somewhat
GIBBON 145
at haphazard all the books which came into his hands
and which took his fancy, already aroused by curiosity ;
this was especially the case with historical knowledge,
and some critical instinct also urged him rather towards
the original sources. When he was approaching his
sixteenth year, Nature made an effort in his favour and
employed her hidden forces ; his nervous attacks disap-
peared, and he attained tolerably good health, with which
he never took liberties.
His father decided to place him at Oxford, and entered
him as a gentleman-commoner at Magdalen College.
When casting a glance backwards and reviewing all this
period of his early years, Gibbon takes care to point out
that he left there nothing delightful, nothing even to
regret : that the much vaunted golden age of the dawn
of life did not exist for him, and that he never knew
the happiness of childhood. I have already made this
remark in Volney's case : that those who have missed
this mother's care this first pillow and flower of tender
love, this mysterious and convincing charm of the
earliest impressions, are more easily than others stripped
of sentiment and religion.
Gibbon has left a description of the education which
men received, or rather did not receive, at Oxford, in his
time, which in the coldness of its irony is the most trucu-
lent satire. Oxford, like all rich institutions not under
control, and which are their own masters, had fallen
little by little into a thousand evils, which we are assured
have since then been in part corrected or diminished.
Gibbon declares that he acknowledges no obligation to
the university of Oxford, and he talks of it, indeed, as
a most ungrateful son. As the restraints of study
10
146 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
amounted to almost nothing, he continued the course
of his own private studies during the vacation ; and
at that time he began to make attempts at a strange
subject, one which was premature, both for him and all
the men of his time, the age of Sesostris ; he tried to
reconcile by means, it must be admitted, of ingenious
hypotheses the different systems of chronology. Before
he had finished his work he was fitted to criticise the
imperfections and gaps in it: 'The discovery of my own
weakness,' he said, 'was the first sign of my taste.' But
the great fact, the memorable event of Gibbon's sojourn
at Oxford, is his temporary conversion to the Roman
Catholic religion. He had loved discussions on re-
ligious matters from his childhood ; he had a taste for
argument and reasoning; he read books of theology
and controversy Middleton, above all, Bossuet, whom
he declares to be the great master in this kind of
contest. His conversion was begun by the Bishop of
Meaux, in the Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique, and
the Histoire des Variations finished it. 'I surely fell,' he
said, 'by a noble hand.' This solitary conversion,
solely through books, is very characteristic of Gibbon.
Hardly did he feel he had achieved it, when he resolved
to proclaim and make his profession of it : ' Youth,' he
says, ' is sincere and impetuous, and a momentary glow
of enthusiasm had raised me above all temporal con-
siderations.'
The scandal may be imagined : an Oxford student
perverted to Popery ! Gibbon's father took steps
promptly ; he resolved to expatriate his son and send
him abroad for a few years to Lausanne, to the house
of a simple country minister, Pastor Pavilliard. There
GIBBON , 47
it was that Gibbon, after seventeen months, finally
rejected his new faith and returned to his former
communion, owing far less to any outside suggestions
than to fresh studies, fresh reasonings and arguments
which he made up on purpose for his own use. So it
was that, converted at Oxford to the Roman Catholic
ith in June, 1753, at the age of sixteen years and two
months, he recanted at Lausanne in December, 1754,
at the age of seventeen years and eight months. It
was exactly, to within a few years, what Bayle had
done in his youth. In Gibbon's case it had all taken
place in his brain, and in the lists of dialectic; one
argument had brought him his new creed, the next
took it away. He could say for his own satisfaction
that he owed the one and the other change only to
his solitary reading and meditations. Later, when
he flattered himself he was strictly impartial and in-
different to all faiths, it is allowable to suppose that
even without admitting it to himself, he cherished a
secret and chilling rancour against religious thought,
as against an adversary who has once touched you and
wounded you at a weak place in your armour.
M. Pavilliard has spoken of his astonishment at
first during the discussions which he waged with his
young guest, when he saw before him ' this little thin
person with a large head, disputing and urging with
the greatest ability the best arguments that have ever
been used in defence of Popery.' As years went on,
Gibbon became grotesquely fat and bulky; but the bony
framework was as thin and fragile as possible in him.
All the world knows the silhouette of him, the profile
cut out in paper which stands as frontispiece to his
I 4 8 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Memoirs, in which he is represented rubbing his pinch
of snuff between his fingers. There is the portly round
body borne on two slender legs, the little face almost
lost between the high forehead and the double chin,
the little nose almost obliterated by the prominent
cheeks. We may add with Suard that his pronuncia-
tion of French was affected, and that he spoke in a
falsetto tone, though with wonderful correctness, and
like a book. From his youth, then, he was singular in
face and figure, and he was in some degree aware of it.
When relating his journey to Turin, and his presenta-
tion there at Court at the age of twenty-seven, he
would complain of the unsociableness of the Pied-
montese ladies, and say : ' The most sociable women
whom I have met with are the king's daughters ; I
chatted for about a quarter of an hour with them,
talked about Lausanne, and grew so very free and easy,
that I drew my snuff-box, tapped it, took snuff twice (a
crime never known before in the presence chamber),
and continued my discourse in my usual attitude of my
body bent forwards, and my forefinger stretched out.'*
There is the man, the very same young man who was
first the lover of Mile. Curchod, the future Mme. Necker,
and afterwards captain of Grenadiers.
I shall not dwell much on Gibbon's first and only
love affair, a passion which was only natural at the
moment, but which seen from afar may seem a joke.
* [' This attitude continued to be characteristic of Mr. Gibbon.
The engraving in the frontispiece of the " Memoirs " is taken from
the figure of Mr. Gibbon cut with scissors by Mrs. Brown thirty
years after the date of this letter. The extraordinary talents of
this lady have furnished as complete a likeness of Mr. Gibbon as
to person, face, and manner, as can be conceived ; yet it was done
in his absence.' LORD SHEFFIELD'S NOTE.]
GIBBON 149
During his stay at Lausanne, he saw Mile. Curchod,
the daughter of a neighbouring minister, handsome,
learned and virtuous. He fell quite sincerely in love
with her, obtained her acceptance of his suit, and did
not despair of gaining his father's consent. But on
returning to England, he met with a complete obstacle
in the paternal will, and after a painful struggle
resigned himself to his destiny. He ' sighed as a lover
and obeyed as a son.'* Even when he is most in love,
Gibbon retains the stamp of his essentially well-
balanced nature. He accommodates himself to his
misfortune without too much emotion ; even in his
hours of passion he is at bottom gentle and calm.
The letters of love and of grief which he wrote to her
for whose hand he had hoped end almost invariably
with these words : * I have the honour, Mademoiselle, to
be, with feelings which form the despair of my life, your
most humble and obedient servant.' In later days
remembering this ill-starred love affair, he was far from
experiencing any emotion of trouble or regret. He
feels rather some pride mingled with surprise at having
been capable once of so pure and so lofty a sentiment.
But during his stay of nearly five years at Lausanne,
he acquired intellectual habits which decided his
literary career, and which he was never to lose.
Among the number of good or harmful results which
he sets down, he reckons that of having ceased to be
an Englishman, that is to say, an islander with the
stamp of his nation on a corner of him, and cast in an
indelible mould. This stamp was effaced in his case at
that time, and never afterwards recovered more than
* See on this subject a letter of Rousseau to Moulton, June 4, 1763.
ISO SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE -BE UVE
partially. For example, when he saw Voltaire, who
was at Lausanne during these years, personally per-
forming in tragedy, while admitting that his declama-
tion was more emphatic than natural, Gibbon feels his
taste for the French theatre strengthened, 'and this
taste,' he confesses, ' has, perhaps, abated my idolatry
for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is incul-
cated from our childhood as the first duty of an
Englishman.' On other points the advantages which
Gibbon gained from his exile are less contestable.
He went into the world, became accustomed to the
society of ladies, and got rid of his original awkward-
ness. He extended his vision and the circle of his
horizon. He re-educated himself with freedom and
method, he broke himself into writing correctly, both
in French and Latin, and while acquiring an equal
facility for expressing himself in different languages, he
did not so much lose originality of expression, for which
indeed he appeared little adapted, as he acquired that
elegance, lucidity and clearness which were to become
his recognised merits. He steeped himself in the
genius of Cicero and Xenophon ; he set himself to read
all the Latin classics methodically, dividing them by
styles ; he stopped at any difficulties of detail which
presented themselves, whether philological or historical,
and in endeavouring to solve them, he began thence-
forward to correspond with various learned men
CreVier at Paris, Breitinger at Zurich, Gesner at
Gottingen ; he propounded to them his doubts or his
ideas, and had the pleasure of seeing more than one of
his conjectures accepted. We already know that he
was fond of discussion and argument, we may add that
GIBBON 151
he was no quibbler, and that he always surrendered to
an argument which seemed to him good. When he
left Lausanne, April n, 1758, at the age of twenty-one
to return to England after an absence of nearly five
years, he was a young man of the first distinction, and
needed only to persevere in the way he had chosen.
On returning to his native country, and to his father,
who had married again, he continued to the best of his
ability his life of study, coupled with moderate daily
exercise. Amid the dissipations of London he retained
the healthy habits of Lausanne. He found, at first,
difficulty enough in entering English society, less freely
open and less ready to receive than that of Switzerland
or of France. Gibbon needed all his reputation as an
author to find his proper place in his own country.
His sickly infancy, his foreign education, and his
reserved character were a bad preparation for a man of
the world ; yet no Englishman was ever less disposed
than he, even in the solitude of his youth, to ennui, to
hypochondria, or to spleen. During the seasons which
he passed at Buriton, his father's country house, he
took as many hours as he could from social duties and
neighbourly obligations. ' I never handled a gun, I
seldom mounted a horse, and my philosophic walks were
soon terminated by a shady bench where I was long
detained by the sedentary amusement of reading or
meditation.' The sentiment of rustic nature is quite
familiar to Gibbon. There are two or three passages
in his * Memoirs ' which offer occasion for reverie : for
example, the passage which I have just quoted, all that
page which gives us such a pretty picture of English
life, of the composed, regular, studious English life.
1 52 SELECT ESS A YS OF SA INTE-BE U VE
There is another passage which he has the good taste
to quote from his first teacher, John Kirkby, in which
we see that excellent, though not wealthy, country
curate walking on the sea-shore, ' one while viewing at
large the agreeable prospect which surrounded me,
another while admiring the vast variety of beautiful
shells thrown upon the beach, some of the choicest
of which I always picked up to divert my little ones
on my return.' Lastly, one passage which is well-
remembered and has been often quoted, is that in
which Gibbon describes how, having just finished in
his garden at Lausanne the closing lines of his great
History, he laid down his pen, took a few turns in his
acacia walk, gazed at the sky and the moon which was
then in full beauty, and the fair lake in which she was
reflected, and bade a melancholy farewell to the work
which had been for so many years so faithful and
agreeable a companion to him. But in all these
passages it is always the student in Gibbon who has
the taste for nature, and whether he is speaking in his
own name, or thinking of his worthy tutor, he only
allows rustic distractions to come in in the intervals of
reading, when he has, so to say, his book open on the
table. It is then that he permits himself to take a view
of nature, and soberly enjoys the sentiment of it, which,
however, was with him genuine and very sweet.
During this stay at Buriton he took command of his
father's library, which, in the first instance, had been
put together with great want of method. He carefully
increased and enriched it, and by degrees formed a
collection which was at once copious and well-selected,
the base and foundation of his future works, and
GIBBON 153
destined henceforth to be the most secure enjoy-
ment of his life, whether at home or abroad. It is
delightful to see the pleasure for him epoch-making
with which on the first opportunity he exchanged a
twenty-pound note for a copy of the collected transac-
tions of our Academy of Inscriptions. That Academy
of Inscriptions and Literature was in truth Gibbon's in-
tellectual father-land ; he dwelt there in thought, he
studied its original and solid works, produced with
accurate scholarship, and at times in a readable form ;
he forms an estimate of his discoveries, ' and above all
that which is hardly second to discoveries,' as he says,
with genuine Attic wit, ' a modest and learned ignorance.'
In the matter of books Gibbon is of the elder Pliny's
opinion, namely, that there is none so bad that it has
no good passage. About this time, as though he felt
that he ought to begin his reconciliation with his native
language, and to direct his course towards the mark
whither his hidden talents summoned him, he again
took to reading English authors, and especially the
more recent ; those, namely, who, having written since
the Revolution of 1688, combined purity of diction with
the spirit of reason and independence, such as Swift
and Addison. When he comes to the historians it is
fine to hear the reverence with which he speaks of
Robertson and Hume, with whom he is one day to
be joined. * The perfect composition, the nervous
language, the well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson
inflamed me to the ambitious hope that I might one
day walk in his footsteps. The calm philosophy, the
careless inimitable beauties of his friend and rival, often
forced me to close the volume with a mixed sensation
154 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
of delight and despair.' These words are quite those of
a man of taste who appreciates Xenophon. It has
been so often declared in recent years that David Hume
has been outdone and superseded, that I am glad to
recall a testimony so keenly felt and so delicately stated.
The misfortune of modern historians, which the ancients
escaped, is that new documents are perpetually turning
up, and that the merits of form and of art are no longer
reckoned at their due value. The last comers, though
often no better, appear to be better armed at all points,
and in this way stifle and crush their predecessors.
The little work that Gibbon published in French
was composed as early as 1759, when he was but
twenty-two years old. He printed it two years later,
with a dedication in respectful terms to his father.
Placing it under the auspices of an estimable man of
letters, the son of a refugee, named Matz, who wrote
an introductory letter to it, this Essai sur Vetude de la
litterature is only of interest to-day as evidence of the
early maturity of Gibbon's reflection, and of his original
tendencies. It is not easy reading, and is in places
obscure. The sequence of ideas is sometimes hidden
owing to over conciseness, and the young author's
desire to work in, in a compressed form, the greater
part of his notes. The French is that of one who has
read a good deal of Montesquieu and is imitating him,
correct but artificial. The author's principal aim is to
vindicate classical literature and learning from the con-
temptuous tone with which d'Alembert had treated
them. Gibbon piques himself on proving that, pro-
perly understood, learning is not a simple matter of
memory, and that all the faculties of the mind cannot
GIBBON 155
but profit by the study of ancient literature. He
demonstrates very plainly that the ancients may still
be read, but are no longer studied, and he is sorry for
it. He makes it clear that a genuine knowledge of
antiquity is the result of very various and very detailed
factors, without which one can only get a glimpse of
the beauties of the great classics. ' The knowledge of
antiquity is our true commentary, but what is yet more
necessary is a certain spirit which results therefrom, a
spirit which not only makes us know the facts, but
which familiarizes us with them and makes us look
upon them with the eyes of the ancients.' He cites
some examples from the famous quarrel of the ancients
and the moderns, proving how far intelligent people
like Perrault, for want of that general and preliminary
knowledge, have decided in the fashion of blind men
about what they did not understand.
On the way we meet with some new views, in which
we can trace the historian. According to Gibbon, the
Georgics of Virgil were written for a great purpose under
Augustus ; with their charm is mingled a political and
patriotic aim. It was a question of breaking in veteran
soldiers, who had come into possession of land and
had with their habits of license some difficulty in tying
themselves down to the labours of peace and of attach-
ing them to agriculture. ' What could be better
adapted to the gentle policy of Augustus, than the
employment of his friend's harmonious strains ' (his
friend is a somewhat youthful and a somewhat senti-
mental expression), ' in reconciling them to their new
condition ? So he advised him to compose that work.
' " Da facilem cursum atque audacibus annue caeptis." '
i$6 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
The idea, as may be seen, is ingenious, and even
though no more than a conjecture, deserves an approv-
ing smile. In this view Virgil in his Georgics is some-
thing more than a poet ; he rises to the functions of a
civilizer, and goes back to the primitive part of an
Orpheus by softening the fierceness of the brave. In
passing he touches upon the works of Pouilly and
Beaufort, who long before Niebuhr had raised questions
about the first periods of Roman history, and strives to
find an answer or a plausible explanation which may
remove objections, and maintain the truth of tradition.
' It has been a pleasure,' says he, ' to defend a useful
and interesting history.' The future expounder of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire here finds
himself as it were instinctively defending and main-
taining the origin and outset of the Roman system. In
regard to the use which poets have a right to make of
great historic personages (for Gibbon in this essay
touches on everything), he knows quite well where to
draw the line between the respect due to truth and
the liberties permitted to genius. As he says, 'the
characters of great men should be sacred, but poets
may write their history, less as it was than as it ought
to have been.' In considering matters which are more
and more positive as he goes forward, and where he
already has his foot on his own ground, his views are
sound and his instances new. A presentiment of his
true vocation is disclosed when, in speaking of Augustus
and regretting that the variety of his subjects prevents
him from making a complete study of him, he says, ' I
regret that it does not allow me to give a thorough
picture of that refined government, those chains which
GIBBON 157
men bore without feeling them, that prince lost in the
crowd of citizens, that senate respected by its master.'
Elsewhere he speaks of ' the tranquil administration of
the laws, of those salutary decrees which, issuing from
the study of one man or from a council of few members,
go to spread happiness among an entire people.' The
historian of the imperial era is obviously trying his
strength, and is at the point to be born.
That which comes out especially in this essay, and
which was to be the very spirit of Gibbon's method, is
that one class of facts is never sacrificed to another,
that no undue authority is allowed to a prominent
accident, and that there is an equal abstention from a
compilation which stitches together texts in succession,
and an absolute system which slices them up at
pleasure. ' The critical spirit is for ever comparing the
weight of opposed probabilities, and drawing from
them a combination which is its property.' ' It is only
by putting things together that one can judge.' ' It
does not follow that because two things exist together
and appear to be intimately connected one owes
its origin to the other.' Such are some of Gibbon's
maxims; in a word, we find everywhere in this essay
a foretaste of that critical spirit which was to be the
exact opposite of Mably's rigid and slashing method.
The publication of the essay, which had more success
in France than in England, was followed by a singular
episode in Gibbon's life. He had gone to press chiefly
in obedience to his father's wishes. As at that time
some overtures for peace were going on, and he would
have liked to enter the diplomatic career, he allowed
himself to be persuaded that this public proof of his
158 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
talent would aid the efforts of his friends. But the war
continued, and the patriotic sentiment stimulated by
Pitt prevailing in England, a national militia was
formed for defence in case of an invasion. The country
gentlemen enrolled themselves in numbers ; Gibbon
and his father were among the most zealous in their
county, and gave in their names without knowing
exactly to what they were committing themselves.
But this militia was a serious affair ; it was persevered
with, and had almost the consequences of a voluntary
enlistment. The South Hampshire battalion formed
a little corps of four hundred and seventy-six men,
including officers, commanded by a lieutenant-colonel
and a major, Gibbon's father. Gibbon himself with
the rank of captain was first at the head of his own
company and then of the Grenadier company ; after-
wards, in the absence of the two field officers, he found
himself actually entrusted by his father with the duty
of giving orders and drilling the battalion. The little
corps did not remain confined to its own county ; in
the course of two years and a half it was encamped in
many various places at Winchester, on the coast of
Dover, on Salisbury Plain. There were manoeuvres
morning and evening, they aspired to equal the regular
troops, and in the general reviews they did not cut a
bad figure ; another year's training and they would be
as good as the regulars. As Gibbon tells us this a flash
of enthusiasm passes over his face ; it is not without
some secret satisfaction that he recalls those years of
active service. He is not sorry when it comes to an
end, but he is glad that it has happened. The chief
benefit that he owed to the militia was the mingling
GIBBON 159
with men, getting a better knowledge of mankind in
general, and of his compatriots in particular ; the
becoming once more an Englishman, which he had
ceased to be, and of learning what a soldier is. He was
to write the history of the most warlike of nations, and
he had a practical knowledge of the details of the
track. He had earned the right thereafter to talk
about the Legion. ' The captain of the Hampshire
Grenadiers,' says he, anticipating the reader's smile,
' has not been altogether useless to the historian of the
Roman Empire.'
In him the man of letters never allows himself to
be forgotten. We have a commonplace book of his
reading during his leisure time in camp ; a good
number of the extracts are in French. He read all
Homer, and mastered Greek thoroughly for the first
time. He was always on the look-out for a historical
subject, still distrusting his powers and feeling all the
dignity of that branch of literature. ' The historian's
is a fine part, but that of a chronicler, or a compiler of
newspaper cuttings, is contemptible enough.' The
crusade of Richard Creur de Lion attracts him for a
moment ; but on reflection those barbarous ages, those
motives so foreign to him, cannot fix his attention, and
he feels as if he would be rather on the side of Saladin.
The history of Swiss liberty, the history of the republic
of Florence under the Medici tempt him by turns, and
he even makes a little progress with the first. He
depicts himself to the life, and without flattery, in his
journal at the age of twenty-five (May, 1762) : of
honourable character, even virtuous, incapable of a base
action, perhaps formed for generous actions, but proud,
160 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
stiff, having much to do before he could be agreeable
in society, steadily taking pains with himself. Of wit,
properly so called wit with dash and spurt he has
none. His imagination is rather strong than amiable,
his memory wide and retentive. Extent and penetra-
tion are the pre-eminent qualities of his understanding,
but he lacks vivacity and has not yet acquired the
exactitude at which he aims to make up for it. This is
the very same man, who, judging himself in after-times
at the age of fifty-four, almost at the limit of his career,
still said of himself : ' The primitive soil has been con-
siderably improved by cultivation, but one may ask if
some flowers of illusion, some agreeable errors, have not
been rooted up with those ill weeds which are called
prejudices.' Culture, sequence, order, method a fine,
cold, delicate intellect, always exercised and sharpened
moderated and constant affections, but no sacred spark,
no thunder peal these are the traits which Gibbon
shows us throughout, and from his earliest youth.
All that has been said above is merely extracted and
condensed from his ' Memoirs.' I have only tried to
reproduce them with somewhat fresher and more
marked outlines after the fashion of the present time.
GIBBON.
II.
As soon as he was free from his militia service,
Gibbon obtained his father's leave to travel for some
years. He saw Paris for the first time in January, 1763,
Switzerland and Lausanne once more, and devoted an
entire year to visiting Italy. On approaching Rome,
the sight of it made his heart beat fast, and aroused
an enthusiasm which he takes the trouble to note as
unusual with him. After a sleepless night, he hastened
first to the Forum. He passed several months in
acquainting himself with those memorable spots. ' It
was at Rome,' he says, ' on October 15, 1764, as I sat
musing among the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-
footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of
Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of
the city first started to my mind.' But his plan was at
first confined to the decline of the city itself rather
than to that of the empire, and it was only subsequent
meditation and reading that enlarged his plan and gave
him his whole subject.
One can easily see that if an august and magnificent
idea has the chief place in Gibbon's inspiration there is
an epigrammatic intention beside it. He conceives the
II
162 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
ancient Roman system, he reveres and admires it ; but
he will not do justice to that not less marvellous system
which succeeded to it in the course of centuries, that
unbroken spiritual power of aged pontiffs, that policy
which knew how to be by turns intrepid, imperial, and
superb, and most often prudent ; he will not enter into
it. From time to time as his solemn History goes on,
one will seem to hear coming back, as if by contrast,
that vesper chant of the first day, that depreciatory
impression which he will record below his breath.
For the general view of this History I cannot do
better than shelter myself under the authority of a man
who has studied it profoundly, who revised and anno-
tated it in the French translation, who unites in short
all the conditions required to make him a good judge.
M. Guizot tells us that he passed successively through
three phases of feeling in regard to Gibbon's work.
After a first rapid perusal which allowed him to feel
only the interest of a narrative always animated in spite
of its length, always clear and limpid in spite of the
variety of its subjects, or, as we may say, the quantity
of its tributary streams, M. Guizot admits that when he
came to examine it more closely on certain points there
were some mistakes ; he met with some blunders,
whether in quotations or in facts ; but above all, in
places, certain views, certain general shades of partiality
which had almost led him to form a severe opinion.
Nevertheless, on a third complete and consecutive
reading the first impression, corrected doubtless, but
not destroyed by the second, came to the surface and
prevailed, and M. Guizot declares that, subject to
certain restrictions and persistent reserves, he continued
GIBBON 163
to appreciate in that vast and able work, ' the im-
mensity of the research, the variety of the knowledge,
the breadth of the light, and, above all, that truly
philosophical accuracy of mind which judges the past
as it would do the present,' and which through all
extraordinary and unexpected forms of morals, customs
and events, has the art of finding in all times the self-
same men.
The first volume in quarto of Gibbon's History
appeared in 1776, when the author had been member
of Parliament for a year. This first volume was
followed by five others, of which two appeared in 1781
and the last three in 1788. The work maintained itself
to the end in public esteem and favour, but the first
volume had the most fashionable success. The first
edition was exhausted in a few days, the second and
the third were scarcely enough to meet the demand,
and it was twice pirated in Dublin ; the book was on
every table, almost on every dressing-table. Better
still, the most important voices were united in adjudging
to Gibbon the rank of a classic historian. We have
the letters which Hume, already on his deathbed,
Robertson, Ferguson, Horace Walpole wrote to him
on the subject ; all alike approve the work as a whole
and the talent with which it is executed. Horace
Walpole outdoes all the others in the liveliness of his
sympathy and praise. Gibbon would have liked to
have had M. Suard, who already had the right of trans-
lating Robertson, as his translator in France, but at
first he had only Leclerc de Septchenes ; it has since
been known that the translation to which Septchenes
put his name was partly the work of Louis XVI.
164 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
In this first volume the historian displayed and
developed in the greatest detail the position and con-
stitution of the empire under the Antonines. He
carried his explanations back to the policy of Augustus,
he depicted in general outlines the reigns and the
minds of the five Emperors to whom mankind owed its
last great century, the finest and perhaps the most
happy of all those which history has recorded ; then
starting from Commodus he entered upon the unbroken
course of his story. The first volume alone con-
tained much matter of different kinds, reflexions
remarkable for their arrangement and extent ; rapid
narratives : the cruelties and strange atrocities of
Commodus, Caracalla, Heliogabalus ; the useless
virtues of Pertinax, Alexander Severus, Probus ; the
first great effort of the barbarians against the Empire,
with a digression upon their manners ; Diocletian's able
and courageous defence, his new policy which, always
keeping an eye on the frontiers, gradually detaches itself
from Rome, and which, with a forecast of the act
solemnly performed by Constantine, looks to transport-
ing the seat of empire elsewhere ; and finally the two
chapters relating to the establishment of Christianity
and its condition during those first centuries. There
was thus an extreme variety of subjects which the
author had brought together into one clever tissue, and
rendered in a careful and studied style, the elegance
of which sometimes reached the point of foppery. In
the succeeding volumes the historian relaxed a little
and developed more and more ; he did not reject any
branch of events and of facts which lay in his way over
his immense field. His main line is as far as possible
GIBBON 165
Roman, afterwards Byzantine, but there comes a point
when by dint of prolonging it he loses it. Think merely
that this History which is in contact with Augustus,
and actually begins with Trajan, does not end till the
fourteenth century, with Rienzi's tribunitian parody and
classical revival. Yet Gibbon treats successively and in
detail of Goths, Lombards, Franks, Turks, Bulgarians,
Croatians, Hungarians, Normans, and twenty races
besides ; it is the most comprehensive history ever seen.
In proportion as the river grows smaller and goes on
to lose itself in the sand, it keeps receiving some new
and disastrous torrent which completes the destruction
of its bank, but at the same time maintains it and feeds
it a little longer. The calm and tranquil historian
notes all this, accepts and measures it. In these
accessory parts he will, as a matter of course, be some
day surpassed by those who will make a special study
of those devastating races, and will go back to their
roots and sources in Asia. Where he remains original
is in his setting out of the last great Roman or Byzan-
tine reigns ; when he speaks of Diocletian, Constantine,
Theodosius ; of heroic souls born after their time like
Majorian, of Justinian and of Belisarius. Considered
from this point of view, his history is like a fine long-
continued retreat before swarms of enemies ; there is no
impetuosity, no fire, but there are tactics and order.
He encamps, halts and deploys wherever he can.
I confine myself to rendering the impression which a
continuous perusal makes on me, and extracting from it
the essential quality of the author's talent and wit. I
will say then also that in many cases Gibbon does not
produce a perfect light ; he stops short of the summit
166 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
where perhaps it shines. He is excellent at analyzing and
bringing out the complicated parts of his subject, but
he never brings them together under one swift glance
or in one outflow of genius ; it is all rather intelligent
than elevated. Faithful to his humour, even in the
processes of his intellect, he levels everything too much.
May I make a joke which is suggested to me by him-
self? When he has the gout, it never takes him
in fits, but treats him very much as it did Fontenelle : it
follows a slow and regular course. Similarly, his History
goes on uniformly with an even step, without fitfulness,
without violence. If a great revolution takes place
anywhere in the human soul he will not feel it, he will
not call attention to it by lighting a beacon on his
tower or sounding a stroke of his silver bell. That is
the historical complaint which people have to make
against him in regard to his explanation of Christianity.
He does not understand that at that moment a wholly
new moral view, a new virtue, was coming to birth.
That regular, customary, indolent slavery which was
the law of the old world and which Gibbon palliates
as much as he can, appeared all of a sudden horrible to
certain people, and little by little they inoculated nearly
all with this horror. The easy tolerance which the
ancients had for different opinions and religious beliefs,
a tolerance which Gibbon makes so strong a point of
displaying, was more than compensated by the slight
regard in which people then so usually held human life.
Something incomplete comes in even among the just
notions which Gibbon enunciates on that subject.
In a word, if he has very well displayed and explained
to us the nature of Cicero's, of Trajan's, of Pliny's
GIBBON 167
tolerance a disposition doubtless humane, but still
born of or accompanied by a profound indifference and
a secret contempt for the objects of a worship which
among the ancients was a matter of custom and exterior
form, not of opinion or belief he has not in the same
degree comprehended the new feeling which faced and
fought that tolerance, and was in the end to wear it
out. Christianity has in fact, and there lies its innova-
tion in morals, implanted in men a livelier and more
absolute feeling for truth ; it is a religion which takes
possession of the whole being. One must, in order to
be tolerant, invest oneself with something more, and
then one is so in virtue of a principle quite different
from that of the ancients, in virtue of charity. Why
did not Gibbon, who did justice to the soul of the
ancients, do as much for that of the Christians ?
Why, when he was wholly occupied with defending
and justifying the ancient police administration of the
Emperors and the methods of the Roman magistrate,
did he overlook the introduction into the world and
the establishment in men's hearts of a new heroism ?
He took warning by the effect of his fifteenth and
sixteenth chapters, and was in other respects very much
more moderate and restrained in the remainder of his
History. Robertson, who awaited with some dread his
treatment of Julian's reign, congratulates him on having
so well touched and characterized in this famous
example that grotesque mixture of pagan fanaticism
and philosophical fatuity, associated with the merits of
a hero and a superior mind. In the portraits of Chris-
tians, even of the greatest during these ages, Gibbon is
content to be never quite clear. He does not present
i68 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
them on their greater sides, and, as a learned eccle-
siastic of our days has remarked, ' his work swarms
with equivocal portraits.' Gibbon dwelt with a surely
malicious complacency on the wretched theological
subtleties, on the infinite division of the sects which
divided men's minds during the lower Empire, but he
does not approach them in the fashion of Voltaire.
Voltaire has a sarcastic laugh and outbreaks of his
grin, Gibbon's laugh is composed and silent. He
slips it in at the bottom of a note, as for instance
that which ends what he says of St. Augustine ; like
Bayle, he delights, but always in a note, to quote certain
passages of erudite and cold indecency, and he com-
ments upon them with an elaborate elegance.
Irony, caustic reserve, comprehensive penetration,
easy and natural explanation of many facts which, extra-
ordinary as they seemed, he reduces to an appearance
of simplicity, such are his qualities, and many of them
go near to be faults. He more than once invokes
Montesquieu. He says that at a certain period of his
life he read the Provinciates every year, but he does not
give the same stimulus as Montesquieu and Pascal ; he
never gives his reader's mind the unexpected impulse
which awakens it, transports it, and excites it to dis-
covery. He writes in his armchair and leaves you in
yours while you read him ; or if he gets up it is only to
take two or three turns about his room, while he is
arranging his phrase and settling his expression.
Mirabeau was not of this sort, it is well known, and I
should not remark upon it if it had not happened that one
day, out of patience at this coldness, he launched a vehe-
ment tirade against Gibbon and his History. This out-
GIBBON 169
break was not in the tribune, but in a letter. Mirabeau
was in London in 1785, he was dining at the Marquis
of Lansdowne's with several distinguished Englishmen,
and by a curious misunderstanding he thought that he
there saw and heard Gibbon in person, though Gibbon
was at that time living in Switzerland. It does not
matter whom he took for him, nor does it matter to
know if the whole thing is not a little invention on his
part ; what is positive is his letter, which we have, and
which was addressed to Samuel Romilly. Mirabeau
inveighs against the person whom he supposes to be
Gibbon, and against the discourse which he says he
heard from his mouth. He asserts that he was on the
point of answering him ; he remembered in a moment
his History, that elegant and cold History in which is
drawn ' so odiously false a picture of the happiness of
the world ' during that crushing period of the Roman
establishment. He adds, ' I have never been able to
read his book without being astonished that it was
written in English, and at each instant I was tempted
to address Mr. Gibbon and say to him, " You an
Englishman ? not a bit of it." This admiration for an
empire of more than two hundred millions of men, in
which there is not a single man who has the right to
call himself free, this effeminate philosophy which gives
more praises to luxury and pleasure than to the virtues,
this style always elegant, never energetic, proclaim at
best the slave of an Elector of Hanover.' Evidently on
that day Mirabeau felt a need to be the orator, and to
give himself an adversary whom he might treat with
invective. He imagined to himself that Gibbon was
before him, and uttered his apostrophe. In any case he
170 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
has overshot the mark and has only been declamatory,
and while displaying in turn his own defects he has
merely proved to us how entirely the family of minds
to which he belongs is opposed to that of Gibbon.
It would not be fair, before quitting the History, if we
were not to call attention to some places of a thoroughly
literary character and of a happy wealth of matter, in
which the author is quite free to apply his natural
qualities, and to employ his talent. For example, a
carefully written passage on the schools of Greek
philosophy at the moment when the edict of Justinian
suppressed them, and again, quite at the end of the
work, to considerations on the Renaissance in Italy,
on the arrival of the scholars from Constantinople, at
the regret with which Petrarch received a Homer
which he could not read in the original, and on the
good luck of Boccaccio, more learned in this respect,
and more favoured by fortune. These are fine chapters
treated with a sort of predilection, and giving evidence
to the very end of copious fertility. Far from ending
abruptly, he well enjoys prolonging it. He finishes
his long course almost as if it were a walk, and at the
moment of putting down his pen, he halts to consider
the final surroundings of his subject, and takes his rest
in it. He has nothing like Montesquieu's panting cry
on reaching the shore, but no more had he his dash,
his discoveries of ideas in every direction, or his
genius.
On his return to Italy, in October, 1765, Gibbon had
passed through Paris. There he had found Mme. Necker,
lately married, and she had given him a good welcome ;
but it was in 1777, after the publication of his first
GIBBON 171
volume, that he made his longest and most agreeable
stay with us. It only depended on him to be quite the
fashion there, as David Hume had been some time be-
fore. M. Necker was minister. Mme. Necker's house was
for Gibbon like his own. His old friend had forgiven
him everything, and Gibbon, who did not think himself
so much to blame, enjoyed that social intimacy with a
tranquil gratitude, without remorse and without surprise.
During the six months that he stayed in Paris he made
a conquest more difficult than had been that of Mme.
Necker. He earned the goodwill of Mme. du Deffand,
susceptible as she was when a bore was concerned, and
she found his conversation charming and easy. That
is the general effect of the impression he made on her,
for there were days when it varied in degree. Here is a
little consecutive report which gives the measure and
the degree of Gibbon's amiability during this stay in
Paris. I take it from Mme. du Deffand's letters to
Horace Walpole :
May 18, 1777. ' I am very well pleased with Mr. Gibbon during
the week that he has been here. I have seen him almost every
day. He converses easily, and speaks French very well. I hope
that he will be a great resource to me.'
May 27. ' I have not answered you about Mr. Gibbon. I was
wrong. I think he has much intelligence. His conversation is easy
and full of matter. He pleases me much, all the more so that he
does not embarrass me.'
June 8. ' I am getting more and more at my ease with Mr.
Gibbon. He is indeed a man of intelligence, and takes every tone
easily. He is here just as French as M. de Choiseul, de Beauvau,
and the rest. I flatter myself that he likes me. We sup together
almost every day.'
At this point there is a slight movement downwards
i;2 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
a slight impression of weariness, which from the
reading of the book has almost passed to the author :
Augttst 10. ' I will whisper in your ear that I do not at all like
Mr. Gibbon's work. It is declamatory, oratorical. That is the tone
of our fine wits. There is nothing but ornament, decoration, tinsel,
and no bottom. 1 am only in the middle of the first volume of a
translation, which is a third of the quarto, at the death of Perti-
nax. I dropped this reading without difficulty, and it cost me
a little effort to resume it. I find the author amiable enough ; but
he has, if I am not mistaken, a great ambition to be celebrated.
He solicits with undisguised efforts the favour of all our clever
men, and it seems to me that he is sometimes mistaken as to the
verdicts which he gets. In conversation he wishes to shine, and to
take what he believes to be our tone, and there he succeeds pretty
well. He is kind and well-mannered, and I believe him to be a good
fellow. 1 should be very glad to have more acquaintances like
him, for, all things considered, he is superior to most of the people
with whom I live.'
Even when he is below par, Gibbon still keeps his
position in Mme. du Deffand's mind. It is a good
sign, for she is a severe judge. On certain points con-
cerning him she does not vary :
September 21. 'Mr. Gibbon has the greatest success here.
People are fighting for him. He behaves very well ; and without, I
think, having as much wit as the late Mr. Hume, he does not fall
into the same absurdities.'
Lastly, in the following passage, written by Mme. du
Deffand just after he had taken leave of her, we have
her very exact, very judicious conclusion, and the final
word :
October 26. ' As for Gibbon, he is a very reasonable man,
who has plenty of conversation, infinite learning you would add,
perhaps, infinite wit, and perhaps you would be right. I have not
GIBBON 173
made up my mind on that head. He makes too much of our appro-
bation, and he has too much desire to gain it. It has always
been on the tip of my tongue to say to him Do not disturb your-
self you deserve the honour of being a Frenchman. In my own
private case, I have all sorts of grounds for being pleased with
him, and it is quite true that I am very sorry at his departure.'
There was a success, and it represents to us in
summary Gibbon's success in Paris. In the House of
Commons, of which he was a member, Gibbon got
nothing so flattering. He never spoke. He had
entered Parliament with very positive views, of which
he makes no disguise. ' You have not forgotten,' he
wrote some years later to a Swiss friend,* 'that I
entered Parliament without patriotism, without am-
bition, and that my views were entirely limited to the
comfortable and respectable place of a Lord of Trade.'
At the worst, if he did not get a place, the House of
Commons seemed to him an agreeable kind of coffee-
house, an instructive club, a good school for the his-
torian. The great and stormy discussions on America
were at their height ; Gibbon supported the policy of
the Government with his vote, and once with his pen.
He belonged to Lord North's faithful mute battalion.
In the 'Life of Fox' we find a lively anecdote and
some satirical verses on Gibbon's versatility on his
Parliamentary decline and fall. There is no versatility
about a man who expresses himself as we have just
seen him doing ; he is a Ministerialist born, and if he
finds himself thrown for an instant into opposition, it
is only, so to say, by physical force. Gibbon got the
post of Lord Commissioner of Trade, to which he
* [To Deyverdun, May 20, 1783.]
174 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
aspired, and kept it for three years (1779 1782), with
a salary of 750 a year ; but on the abolition of the
Board of Trade, rinding himself straitened in income,
he began to think of leaving the public life, to which
he was so ill-adapted, of recovering his independence,
and retiring to Switzerland to complete his History.
He wrote to consult his old friend, Deyverdun, at
Lausanne, sounding him on the subject, in order to see
if, as two old bachelors, they might not fill out their
unmated lives by wedding them together.
Deyverdun kindled at once, and answers him on
June 10, 1783, by a sketch of a happy life, the very
thing to tempt. He knows his friend well ; he wishes
to withdraw him from a political existence not suited to
him, in which his real nature must inevitably have been
injured. ' Remember, my dear friend,' he says, ' that
I was sorry to see you enter Parliament, and I think
that I was only too true a prophet. I am sure that
that career has caused you more deprivation than
enjoyment more pain than pleasure. I have always
thought, since I have known you, that your destiny was
to make your life happy through the pleasures of the
study and of society ; that any other step was a departure
from the way of happiness, and that nothing but the
combined qualities of man of letters and agreeable man
of society could earn for you fame, honour, pleasure,
and a continuance of enjoyment.' Then he shows him,
as through a glass, a pretty house just outside Lausanne,
opening on the road down to Ouchy eleven rooms, large
and small, facing east and south, a terrace, a trellis, the
famous alley or covered acacia walk, all the features of
grounds pleasantly diversified to the eye, the wealth of
GIBBON 175
an ' English ' garden, and an orchard ; above all, the
view of the lake, and the mountains of Savoy opposite.
Gibbon was entrapped. He had a good deal of trouble
in breaking his London engagements, and cutting loose
from his friends, especially from one who was dear
to him, Lord Sheffield. He overcame these, how-
ever, arrived at Lausanne, and, after a few small and
inevitable preliminary mishaps, soon found himself
master of himself, his whole time, his studies, his friend-
ship, and of an earthly paradise.
Here it was that he wrote the later volumes of his
History, and enjoyed his escape from those public
contests in which he was only an often-wearied looker-
on, or an actor without distinction and without solid
merit. There are some charming letters to this effect
from him to his friend, Lord Sheffield, still in the thick
of the fight ; most often rallying him pleasantly, pitying
him for being always in that pandemonium, the House of
Commons. There are some letters which, in their open-
ing, might be those of Atticus (if we had them) to
Cicero. Thus :
' LAUSANNE,
' November 14, 1783.
'Last Tuesday, November n, after plaguing and vexing your-
self all the morning about some business of your fertile creation,
you went to the House of Commons, and passed the afternoon, the
evening, and perhaps the night, without sleep or food, stifled in a
close room by the heated respiration of six hundred politicians, in-
flamed by party and passion, and tired of the repetition of dull
nonsense which in that illustrious assembly so far outweighs the
* [Ste-Beuve renders 'apres avoir bien pest '; not quite the same
thing.]
176 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
proportion of reason and eloquence. On the same day, after a
studious morning, a friendly dinner, and a cheerful assembly of
both sexes, I retired to rest at eleven o'clock, satisfied with the
past day, and certain that the next would afford me the return of
the same quiet and rational enjoyments. Which has the better
bargain T
As it was, each was taking his own line, and Gibbon
had no intolerance about ways of being happy ; he
knew that every nature has its own. Lord Sheffield,
given up by preference to the active life of public affairs,
was in some repects more difficult of the two to satisfy ;
he required the resources of a world which Gibbon could
do very well without. ' You are,' writes Gibbon in
May, 1784, just after Sheffield had lost his election
* You are in search of knowledge, and you are not
content with your company, unless you can derive from
them information or extraordinary amusement. For
my part, I like to draw information from books, and I
am satisfied with polite attention and easy manners.'
Earlier in the same letter he had said : * If this repulse
should teach you to renounce all connection with king
and ministers, and patriots and parties, and Parlia-
ments, for all of which you are by many degrees too
honest, I should exclaim with Teague,* of respectable
memory, " By my shoul, dear joy, you have gained
a loss." '
He takes further pleasure in demonstrating to his
friend that his corner of Switzerland is not so destitute
of good society and conversation as people at a
distance might think. He writes, on October 22, 1784 :
* [Or, as we should now say, Paddy. It has puzzled the French
critic, who writes T*****.]
GIBBON 177
' A few weeks ago, as I was walking on our terrace with M. Tistso,
the celebrated physician, M. Mercier, the author of the Tableau
de Paris, the Abb Raynal, Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoi-
selle Necker, the Abb de Bourbon, natural son to Lewis XV.,
the hereditary Prince of Brunswick, Prince Henry of Prussia, and
a dozen counts, barons, and extraordinary persons, among whom
was a natural son of the Emperor of Russia Are you satisfied
with this list ?'
As for the town itself, after having seen it in all
seasons, in its coquettish hours of glorious springtime,
no less than in those of isolation and winter retirement,
Gibbon declares that his taste for it has never weakened.
He says so in charming phrases such as his corre-
spondence is everywhere strewn with :
' Of my situation here I have little new to say, except a very
comfortable and singular truth, that my passion for my wife or
mistress (Fanny Lausanne"), is not palled by satiety and possession
of two years. I have ^een her in all seasons, and in all humours,
and though she is not without faults they are infinitely overbalanced
by her good qualities. Her face is not handsome, but her person
and everything about her has admirable grace and beauty.'
(Letter of September 5, 1785.)
And he goes on following up his metaphor, dandling
it even a little too long. In spite of this little touch of
affectation, the whole correspondence never ceases to
have a gentle, yet sufficiently keen, charm. Even merri-
ment finds its way in.
Gibbon was, indeed, not formed for serious love-affairs,
but he was essentially fitted for the intercourse of friend-
ship, and he experienced all its moods. On his return
from a journey which he made to England in 1788, with
a view to the publication of his final volumes, he found
his friend Deyverdun ill. He was attacked by fits of
12
178 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
apoplexy which soon carried him off,* and it took
Gibbon a long time to recover his satisfaction in the
charming abode for ever widowed of his friend. Every
spot, every walk, every bench recalled pleasant hours
spent in converse with him who was no more. ' Since
the loss of poor Deyverdun,' he exclaims in a letter
of May, 1790, ' I am alone ; and even in Paradise
solitude is painful to a social mind.' About this time
he had serious thoughts of marriage, or, at least, of
adopting one of his younger relatives Miss Charlotte
Porter, his first cousin, if I mistake not. ' How happy
should I think myself,' he wrote to this young lady's
mother, ' if I had a daughter of her age and disposition,
who, in a short time, would be qualified to govern my
family, and to be my companion and comfort in the
decline of life !' He recognised when it was too late
that, ' as we descend into the vale of years, our in-
infirmities require some domestic female society.' But
Mme. Necker, to whom he did not fear to disclose his
sorrows, and in whom, towards the end, he found his
last, as she had been his first, friend of her sex, said
to him : ' Be sure that you do not form one of those
late attachments ; the only marriage which can afford
happiness in mature life is one which was contracted in
youth. It is then alone that union is perfect, that there
is an exchange of tastes, a response of sentiments, a
community of ideas, a mutual moulding of the intellec-
tual faculties : the whole life is doubled, and the whole
life is a prolongation of youth.'
Failing this impossible happiness, Mme. Necker
sometimes tried to suggest to him other sources of
* July, 1789.
GIBBON 179
consolation, and the sovereign remedy against isolation
of the affections. She made him promise to read her
husband's work on the ' Importance of Religious
Opinions,' and took the same occasion of saying some
kind and delicate words, which Gibbon, at least, did
not repel, on the subject of Christianity and the unseen
world.
The French Revolution, the first developments of
which had sent so many exiles from France to the shores
of the Lake of Geneva, was the subject that pre-
occupied Gibbon during his last years. He, who was
astonished by so few things in history, was astonished
by this. He judged it from the very first without any
illusions, nor did this require any considerable retracing
of his steps. He was essentially a Conservative, and had
never had any taste for tribunes or innovators.* At any
rate, the Revolution produced upon him the somewhat
strange effect, which was yet, when one thinks of it,
natural enough, of restoring, or rather giving him a
little of that patriotism, of which, up till then, he had
possessed so small a share. When he saw the excesses
which were dishonouring a cause that might have been
so fine when he considered the boundless field of
anarchy and of adventure upon which men were blindly
setting out, he came back to love for that English Con-
stitution towards which he had always been lukewarm
enough : he felt a new pride in what he called the good
sense of his country, and in her consciousness of the
* Remembering, apropos of this, his historic attack on Christi-
anity, he said in justification and explanation of it : ' The early
Church, which I have handled with some freedom, was itself in its
own day an innovation ; and I was attached to the old Pagan
establishment.'
i8o 'SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
advantages which she enjoyed. He writes to Lord
Sheffield in August, 1790 :
' The French spread so many lies about the sentiments of the
English nation, that I wish the most considerable men of all parties
and descriptions would join in some public act, declaring themselves
satisfied, and resolved to support our present Constitution. Such
a declaration would have a wonderful effect in Europe ; and were I
thought worthy, I myself would be proud to subscribe it. I have
a great mind to send you something of a sketch, such as all
thinking men might adopt.'
He returns more than once warmly to this idea. It is
curious to see Gibbon becoming as ardent as Burke,
and raising his hand for the Ark of the Constitution
like Fox or Macaulay.*
This man, who, with all his habitual moderation and
fairness, was far from being cold-blooded, died partly a
victim to his zeal in friendship. In the spring of 1793,
he heard that his friend, Lord Sheffield's wife, had just
died. He did not hesitate to hasten to him, starting
for England by way of Germany, a journey which he
had for some time been putting off, and which present
circumstances and the declaration of war rendered then
more difficult. His ailments increased, and after a few
months' stay in his native land, he died there on
January 16, 1794, aged nearly fifty-seven. His friend,
Lord Sheffield, has raised the most worthy and most
durable monument to him by the publication of his
letters. We can guess from them that Gibbon's con-
versation was, in truth, superior both in interest and in
charm to his writings, and that in him the profound and
* See, for instance, the considerations which conclude the first
portion of Mr. Macaulay's fine History of England.
GIBBON 181
accomplished man of letters was never divorced from
the most agreeable man of society.* Some of the
latest letters, indeed, have an accent of emotion that
one would not expect. That which he wrote to Lord
Sheffield at the first news of his sorrow, and just as he
was starting to join his friend, is beautiful and touching;
one would almost say that a flash of religion had passed
over it. Another letter, written some days later, and
with an increasing sense of anxiety for the bereaved
family, ends with these words : ' Adieu ! If there be
any invisible guardians, may they watch over you and
yours. Adieu !' Thus the social, and even the moral,
character of the man gains by being viewed in this
combination of relations, and presents itself under a
fresh light. That is the evidence given by the most
refined and most worthy of respect among his con-
temporaries when the letters were published. Those
too, of to-day, who have by reading them lived, were it
but, like myself, for a fortnight, in that discreet and
polished intimacy, will understand that Gibbon, with-
out belonging to the class of geniuses, without even
being of those who have the talent to stir men or rouse
their enthusiasm, has had his faithful admirers and his
affectionate pilgrims. Byron wrote from Ouchy, near
Lausanne, to his publisher, Murray, on June 27, 1816 :
' I am thus far (kept by stress of weather) on my way back to
Diodati (near Geneva), from a voyage in my boat round the lake ;
* [Lord Sheffield says it in so many words : ' Those who have
enjoyed the society of Mr. Gibbon will agree with me, that his
conversation was still more captivating than his writings. Perhaps
no man ever divided time more fairly between literary labour and
social enjoyment.']
182 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
and I enclose you a sprig of Gibbon's acacia, and some rose-leaves
from his garden, which, with part of his house, I have just seen.
You will find honourable mention, in his Life, made of this "acacia,"
when he walked out in the night of concluding his History. The
garden and summer-house, where he composed, are neglected, and
the last utterly decayed ; but they still show it as his "cabinet,"
and seem perfectly aware of his memory.'
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE*
GREAT works written in a foreign language are only
really read when they have been translated. Learned
men do without translations and despise them ; they
read the originals, and if they were candid most of them
would confess that they refer to them even more than
they read them. But a long, unbroken, complete
course of reading is only possible to the greater number
of even educated people when it is easy, and one of the
causes which have most delayed the introduction among
us of fundamental ideas from abroad has been the
slowness of translations and importations. A useful
and capacious library will shortly supply this want, this
intellectual demand. The Librairie Internationale has
undertaken to give us a collection of all the great foreign
contemporary historians. We already have, or we shall
have very soon, in whole or in part, Buckle's History
of Civilization in England, the History of the Fourteenth
Century, by Gervinus, Prescott's History of Philip II.,
the Revolution of the Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century,
by Motley, Mommsen's Roman History (a different trans-
lation to that which is being published concurrently in
* Translated by M. de Sadous.
184 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
France) ; finally we shall be able to read this History
of Greece, by Mr. Grote, one of the foreign associates of
the French Institute, whose work is among the monu-
mental creations of our time. Some contemporary
critics, M. Me'rime^ and M. Lo Joubert, gave some
time ago, in our principal reviews, selections from it
which have whetted the appetite of all cultivated
minds.
M. de Sadous, the translator to whom this great
work has been confided, is a learned professor, an
Oriental scholar who has translated some fragments of
the Mahdbharata from the Sanskrit, and to whom we
owe a translation of Weber's History of Indian Literature.
It was important that Mr. Crete's work, lined as it is
with learned notes and escorted, so to say, at every
step by original texts, should reach us under the charge
of a translator familiar with the Greek language ; and
for every Indian scholar, initiated into Sanskrit, Greek
is only a comparatively easy development, and like a
collateral branch derived from his former high linguistic
studies.
That which characterizes Mr. Grote's work in the
highest degree, in the first volume which I have been
studying, is a straightforward good sense and good
judgement which, free from all preconceived ideas and
traditional superstition, examines, balances, and dis-
cusses, asserting nothing which does not seem probable
or possible. Where he doubts he says so, and because
there is uncertainty everywhere in this origin of Greek
history, which begins in mythology, he offers us neither
explanation nor interpretation ; he confines himself to
laying before us each mythical story, fully and with
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 185
its variations, just as the Greeks related it amongst
themselves.
His treatment in these first volumes of his history is
absolutely novel, and, in my opinion, the only one that
is satisfactory. I still remember the impression I in-
variably felt in my childhood at the outset of all these
histories of Greece, when I opened them at random, an
impression of uncertainty, doubt, disappointment, the
absence of any sure indication and of any firm ground
amid these clouds and gilded mists. What truth is
there at the bottom of all these heroic legends about
Inachus and lo, Danae and the Danai'des, Perseus,
Hercules, Prometheus, Jason and Medea ? How much
that is fabulous or non-fabulous is there in the expedi-
tion of the Argonauts, in the misfortunes and atrocities
of the house of Peleus, in the Cretan legend of Minos
and the Minotaur, Ariadne and Theseus, in the Theban
legend of Lai'us and (Edipus ? Is there an historical
basis to them ? Is it not merely in some cases, as has
been recently maintained about Lai'us and CEdipus, an
astronomical legend, a solar myth sprung from the
same source as the most ancient Vedas ? These are
obscure questions, doubtless without a solution, in
which learning and ingenuity can vie with one another
ad infinitum, and even make conjectures with every
kind of industry and skill, but in which precise and
clear minds, those who ' take evidence for their law,'
the minds of the type of Locke, of the family of Gibbon
and Hallam, will find no sound ground nor place to
set their feet. Mr. Grote has taken his side firmly :
in his eyes those times, and the stories of every kind
which filled them, had nothing to do with history ; he
1 86 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
has been satisfied with setting them out in detail as the
earliest authors have handed them down. He has
been right, in my opinion, to take his own line in this
matter, and he has set a tardy example by which all
the other historians, worthy of the name, should have
begun. It is all very well to say that it is strange if
real positive facts are not concealed beneath these fables,
that there is never all that smoke without fire, that it is
almost impossible there should not have been some
nautical expedition which has given a pretext for the
story of the Argonauts, that certainly some great
expedition of the Greeks on the coast of Asia has
given rise to the legend of Troy; if the general fact is
granted will the cause of history proper be any the
more forwarded ? I should like to know, supposing we
had lost all certain testimony about Charlemagne and
were reduced to the romances of chivalry, to the
Chansons de Geste in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
in order to reconstruct him and his period, where
would be the star and compass for getting our
bearings ? Should we succeed, even with the most
sagacious spirit of divination, in disentangling anything
reasonable and really worthy of history amid these
disfigured narratives twenty times transformed and
distorted ? Mr. Grote has been the first to feel the
difficulty in its full extent, and he has accepted it
completely and entirely. He has read all the Greeks,
yet he confines himself to representing and summing
up for us all the different versions in which Gratia
mendax delighted ; embroidering again and again at
her pleasure over those earliest periods in which fable
shows itself inextricably mixed with a few intangible
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 187
traces of truth. He must be heard for himself when he
justifies the method he has pursued and very cleverly
lays bare his thought to us :
' The times which I thus set apart from the region of history are
discernible only through a different atmosphere that of epic poetry
and legend. To confound together these disparate matters is, in
my judgement, essentially unphilosophical. I describe the earlier
times by themselves, as conceived by the faith and feeling of
the first Greeks, and known only through their legends with-
out presuming to measure how much or how little of historical
matter these legends may contain. If the reader blame me for
not assisting him to determine this if he ask me why I do not
undraw the curtain and disclose the picture I reply in the words
of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to
him, on exhibiting his masterpiece of imitative art : " The curtain
is the picture." What we now read as poetry and legend, was once
accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first
Greeks could conceive or relish of their past times ; the curtain
conceals nothing behind, and cannot by any ingenuity be with-
drawn. I undertake only to show it as it stands not to efface,
still less to re-paint it.'
These fine words of an excellent and great intellect,
who can employ an image and figure worthy of Bacon,
are sufficient to show how little Mr. Grote is a mere
positivist about history, and how, though so scrupulous
in examining and admitting evidence, he is by no
means exclusive in that matter, nor insensible to those
undefined glimpses which, even if they are never to be
probed or verified, are, none the less, the necessary
horizon of history at its dawn and rising.
Applying his method to the greatest event of those
mythical and heroic ages, the Trojan war, Mr. Grote
encounters in this aspect the Homeric poems, the Iliad
i88 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
and the Odyssey, and he reaches conclusions which
have pleased me much by their moderation and plausi-
bility, and have seemed to me to bring a certain repose,
a conciliatory mediation, into what one may call the
state of trouble and divisions in which the last
Homeric battles, waged for more than fifty years
among the learned men beyond the Rhine, have been
fain to leave us in France.
In this case, as elsewhere, in all that concerns the
distant and misty ages where all historical landmarks
are wanting, Mr. Grote has not concerned himself to
seek for any solid kernel which might exist under the
brilliant fiction. According to him the only certainly
true part of a poetic legend is the colour, and even this
local colour, this true account of society and morals,
is not that of the heroes and times represented ; it only
belongs to the age of the poet who relates and sings.
It is thus that our ancient Chansons de Geste where
Charlemagne and Alexander figure, teach us nothing
about the heroes themselves or the state of society in
their time, and they would be only misleading if one
consulted them with a view to such information ; but
they do represent for us with simple truth the manners
of the feudal age when the troubadours set to work
upon those ancient outlines and went on with them for
the benefit of their contemporaries. In the same way
the customs described in the Homeric process tell us
nothing absolutely certain about the manners of society
at the time of the siege of Troy, if there really was such
a siege ; they only belong to the age of Homer himself,
and in that sense they are perfectly true.
What, then, is the age of Homer ? What was the
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 189
method of those who sang in it and charmed the most
heroic of peoples as they emerged from infancy ? Who
really was Homer, and what originally were the poems
attributed to him and which, after having formed ' the
dignity and charm of their legendary period ' have
become the honour and the very heritage of the human
race ? These are all questions which Mr. Grote has
taken up without any bias for or against ; which he has
treated afresh with a full knowledge of the subject and
as a real critic, only giving himself out modestly as a
faithful and discreet narrator. It is a pleasure to see
in his hands the boldness and incomparable originality
of German criticism tempered and corrected by the
practical English spirit.
Let us here recall the exact terms of the question as
it was put seventy years ago by the writing of Wolf,
called simply Prolegomena ad Homerum (Introduction
to Homer).
One of the most learned of French scholars, but one
who had even more erudition than judgement, d'Ansse
de Villoison, discovered in 1781, in the library of St.
Mark's at Venice, and published in 1788, a text of
the Iliad, with a tremendous apparatus of grammatical
explanatory notes which initiated the learned reader
into all the domestic labours, and, so to speak, into the
kitchens of the Alexandrian critics ; you took part in
their differences, their doubts as to the authenticity of
such or such a line ; you were introduced into the very
study and laboratory of Aristarchus. This learned
Villoison, who had published the Venice manuscript,
thought he had only brought one treasure more, and
that the richest of all, into the temple consecrated to
J9o SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
old Homer ; in reality he had brought an arsenal, a
fire-ship, a bomb a whole army of assailants emerged
from this edition as from the wooden horse. As for
him, he would never believe his eyes, and he died in his
classic blindness, maintaining that such a sacrilege,
such a monstrous absurdity as that of the men who
denied Homer, did not even deserve to be confuted.*
Whatever opinion one finally comes to on this great
case, Wolf is more than an ingenious and clever man
of learning ; he is one of those men endowed with the
critical faculty that Germany is wont to produce, and
who, with their first fresh and deep intuition, create a
science and found a study. He gave a fresh start, as
soon as he undertook it, to the whole study of Homer.
This preface of 280 pages was a revolution (1795).
No doubt before Wolf more than one doubt had
arisen about the origin and the first form of the Iliad
or the Odyssey, about the unity both of the composition
and the author, as applied to long poems come from
such a distance and handed down through the ob-
scurity of ages ; but these had only been hints, words
dropped in passing, whims of clever men of no
authority, such as the Abb6 d'Aubignac, some saga-
cious and penetrating phrase of Bentley, some philo-
sophical idea of Vico. Wolf was the first who gave
its full value to the question, gave himself up to
a methodical demonstration by confining it within
* Villoison was a mine of knowledge, but he had a somewhat
undigesting appetite for rubbish. It seems, moreover, that he was
a great chatterbox what they call a mill of words. Mr. Fox, who
saw him during his journey in France, in 1802, wrote to a friend
about his volubility. He is said to have died of a liver complaint
caused by over-eating and drinking.
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 191
narrow limits, and laid a regular siege to the fortress.
While apparently only proposing as his object to
compile a good text of Homer, he had been led on to
asking himself from a historical point of view what
such long-sustained poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey
could have been, and even if they really could have
existed and stood in a complete form, at a time when
writing did not exist, where nothing could be fixed or
committed to papyrus or anything else ; when, there-
fore, songs alone floated on the lips and in the
memories of men, at the good pleasure of improvisators
and bards, and in presence of eager listeners who could
only hear them in parts. What would have been the
use of great poems arranged and connected when there
was no public to demand them or capable of appreciating
them as such ? What would have been the good of a
plan, of a general scheme, of a far-sighted conception
to a shifting audience satisfied with varied and dis-
jointed episodes, with touching rhapsodies not sub-
ordinated among themselves ? What would have been
the good, even had it been possible, of putting a ship
of the line on the stocks whilst navigation was in its
infancy ? Why go and build it high on the land when
there are no means of launching it, and when even the
sea-dock where it could be tried is wanting ? Equally
repaying would it be to take the trouble to make
beforehand a complete comedy or tragedy when there
are neither actors to put it on the boards nor an
amphitheatre to hold the spectators !
It follows from this, according to Wolf, that Homer's
poems as they existed originally in the primitive
Homeric state were and ought to be as different as
192 SELECT ESSAYS OF SA1NTE-BEUVE
possible from the poems of an Apollonius of Rhodes,
of a Virgil, of a Milton, of any other epic poet destined
to be read ; that they floated separately, like living
members, in a creative atmosphere impregnated with
germs of poetry ; but that in the form in which we
have them and read them to-day, they date only from
the time of Solon, or rather of Pisistratus, when the
permeating atmosphere being at an end, and the art of
writing having come into use, the need was felt of
gathering up these public treasures, this inheritance
from legendary times ; of making to some extent a
complete inventory of it, and supplying it with order
and connection before it had run the risk of being lost
or dispersed. The connecting epic link which since
then we have seen and admired in it would only date
from that time.
The hypothesis of Wolf, which restored truth to all
that belonged to the general Homeric atmosphere, to
the inspiration which had animated the bards, and
to the wholly poetic credulity of the listeners, was
carried to excess when it denied, however, for the
whole duration of the pre-historic period, the possi-
bility of the composition of the poems, and the pro-
bable predominance of two or three superior spirits
who must have taken hold of current materials to
make from them real works. Ingenious and learned
disciples of Wolf pushed to extremes the consequences
of this negative system, and declared they had left no
corner of refuge for the ancient faith. Yet private
opinion, though in great straits and driven as it were
from position to position, still held out ; there were
animated protests from an opposite point of view
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 193
which were in favour of a certain pre-existing unity.
Learning, in search for some points of support, found
them. Certain worthy adversaries of Wolf, with
Ottfried Miiller at their head, won back some ground
and held the field valiantly. And in this way a
Homeric war was waged then and for several years in
Germany, of which we in France were too inattentive,
too disinterested spectators.
What occurred then has often been seen : our
educated men, our professors in the time of the Empire
and of the Restoration, even our academicians were
hardly aware of these learned debates. For one
Guigniant, for one Viguier, for one Cousin, who in
their youth and ardour went exploring, the larger
number held the received opinion and continued to live
as good and loyal rhetoricians and humanists. They
had the Homeric faith, they believed in tradition, they
did not examine the evidence. It seemed to them at
first sight as absurd to say there is an Iliad without a
Homer as to say there is a world without a Creator
and without a God. We in France had a Homer
deism, whilst in Germany they had got to a plurality
of Homers, or to an infinity of Homerides, to poly-
theism or pantheism in this matter. Our type of
intellect, aided by a certain indolence, held out.
Sainte Croix was the first who at the mere announce-
ment of Wolfs system, and before he even knew him
well, hastened to denounce the paradox, and he said
as early as 1797 :
' One has only to hearken to and obey one's own imagination,
without any effort of mind, to be firmly convinced that the Iliad
and the Odyssey both issued from the head of Homer, as com-
13
194 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
plete as Minerva from the brain of Jupiter. The contrary opinion
is truly an outrage to the memory of Homer, who thereby is worse
treated than was the body of Hector in the plains of Troy.'
This was our French creed. We stopped short
there for five-and-twenty years at this kind of religious
horror. Boissonade's witty saying has often been
quoted. When he published his edition of Homer
(1823), not consenting to admit Wolf's arguments yet
not feeling himself strong enough to combat them, he
entrenched himself behind Aristophanes, and said with
I forget who in the comedy : ' No, you will not per-
suade me, even when you have persuaded me.' He
thus withdrew his ball from the game. All the same
this little joke concealed a secret reason. There was
something true in this inward feeling, this resistance of
the literary conscience. Goethe himself was not a
stranger to it. He had at first given in fully to Wolfs
theory, he was wedded to it ; then on reflection he
detached himself from it, and said in one of those
epigrams which on his lips are as the smile and flower
of a deep thought :
' HOMER HIMSELF AGAIN.
'Acute as you are, you emancipated us from all reverence,
and in full freedom we recognised that the Iliad is nothing but
patchwork.
' May our desertion give offence to no man ! Youth has power
to kindle us, till we would rather think of him as a whole,
joyously feel him a whole.'
* Scharfsinnig habt ihr, wie ihr seid, von aller Verehrung uns
befreit, und wir behunnten iiberfrei, dass Ilius nur ein Flickwerk sei.
Mag' unser Abfall niemand Kranken ! denn Jugend weiss uns zu
entziinden, dass wir Ihn lieber als Ganzes denken, als Ganzes
freudig Ihn empfinden.
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 195
He said again, but in prose this time, and with an
effort to account to himself for this involuntary reaction,
this to-and-fro in his impressions :
'Among the books which employed me in 1820, I will mention
Wolfs Prolegomena. I took it up again. The works of this
man, with whom I was on intimate terms, had for a long time
thrown light on my path. By studying this work I reflected back
upon myself, and I observed the working of my thoughts. I
noticed in myself a continuous systole and diastole. I was accus-
tomed to consider each of Homer's poems as a whole, and there I
saw them separated and dispersed ; and while my mind agreed
with this idea, a traditional feeling brought everything on a sudden
back to a single point a certain acquiescence which all really
poetic productions inspire in us, made me pass over with indulgence
the gaps, the contradiction and the faults which were pointed out
to me.'
But was it only a delusion and an acquiescence of
the will, as Goethe seems to think? Having myself
formerly experienced a similar impression at more than
one reading of Homer at a time when I had leisure to
attend to those noble studies, in which alas, I have
only been able to dabble, I was agreeably surprised at
finding that Mr. Grote reconciled these different points
of view, and presented a combined solution which
reasonably answers all demands.
Mr. Grote quite allows with Wolf that Homer's
poems neither were nor could have been put into
writing during a long lapse of time, which hardly can
have been less than two or three centuries ; but this
absence of anything written is not a sufficient objection
for not admitting that there were long, very long
poems : that is the whole difficulty. The fidelity of
a practised memory is extreme ; it is difficult to assign
196 SELECT ESSAYS OF SA1NTE-BEUVE
limits to it, and when there is any need to remember
one does remember. Even in our days and in our
classical ages, we have some remains, some vestiges of
these extraordinary memories, and that without it being
necessary. One knows, for instance, that Piron com-
posed all his tragedies by heart, and that he repeated
them from memory to the actors. The same with
Casimir Delavigne : that poet, exact, scholarly, unho-
meric as he was, composed by heart, reconstructed
whole scenes from memory, and they even say that he
thus carried away with him an almost finished tragedy
when he died. One of our generals, a disciple both of
Xenophon and Virgil, M. de Fezensac, has such a
memory that he repeated at a bivouac in Russia to the
officers of his regiment a sermon of Massillon's, which
he had remembered from childhood ; and one day when
he was relating this anecdote in a drawing-room and
was asked whether he could still repeat it, he declared
that he still knew it by heart. They immediately fetched
the volume of Massillon out of the library, and the
learned warrior began to recite this harmonious but
somewhat ornate prose without making a mistake.
And even now if Moliere had not been printed would
he not live on intact, and would he not have been
handed down for two hundred years in the memory of
the actors of the Com&iie-Frangaise ? A time there
was, we can imagine, when repetition finding itself the
only method of publication was marvellously durable in
extent and fidelity, and there is nothing improbable in
allowing that there may have existed from that time
long poems, which have been handed down and pre-
served.
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 197
The Odyssey for example to begin like Mr. Grote
with the least complicated case and the one which is
open to least objections the Odyssey is manifestly a
poem which is based and always must have been based
on, and held together from the beginning by, a series of
adventures directed toward one common point ; which
is the return of Ulysses, his recognition by his own
people, and his victory over the suitors. The contra-
dictions, the slight discrepancies which are pointed out
in it are not among those which would be incompatible
with unity of authorship. Some parts of the Odyssey
must no doubt have been recited separately, but if you
give several days running to one bard, or if you suppose
(what took place at public feasts and assemblies) a
succession of bards who followed one another and
relieved each other for recitation, there is nothing to
prevent one imagining that even without any writing
the Odyssey may have been handed down entire, in
complete integrity, except perhaps an unconnected
episode here, and a passage or scene there, which may
have slipped in as an after-thought : but the first
cementing, the crystallization, so to speak, of the poem
must date from the legendary period, from the creative
and inspired age, from the very epoch of the bards.
If this is the case with the Odyssey, why not also
with the Iliad ? Here, however, the difficulties are
greater, and the objections have more force. Mr.
Grote recognises this : but nevertheless he refuses to
believe that the structure of the Iliad as we have it
dates only from the time of Pisistratus, and is due to
a kind of literary and grammatical Commission of the
period. The intervention of Pisistratus presupposes on
198 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
the contrary a certain existing and recognised aggrega-
tion, whose principal features were familiar to the
Greek public, although in practice a good number of
the bards might often depart from it. It was precisely
these corruptions which it became urgent to rectify by
going back to a primary and general type ; there was
no question before this Commission of constructing an
Iliad for the first time, which would have been a very
audacious innovation, but simply of uniting the ' dis-
jointed limbs of a sacred Homer,' the allied portions
of a previously existing poem.
Even before Pisistratus, Solon, thinking a good deal
about these immense poetic riches floating in the air
and about their preservation, so dear to a Greek heart,
had laid down a settled order of recitation for the bards
of the Iliad, for the feast of the Panathenaea. He not
only ordered them to recite the epics in their natural
sequence without omission or alteration, but he estab-
lished a prompter or censorial authority to ensure
obedience to his orders ; which implies the existence
of a regular whole or aggregation generally recognised
and revered, and also the existence of certain manu-
scripts.
In spite of all, the Iliad, not read as Ronsard read it,
in three days, with the heat and interest which is
attached to any more or less consecutive reading, but
examined and read again with hostile eyes, with critical
eyes armed with the microscope, shows many contra-
dictions, in fact incongruities, things entirely beside
the mark, excrescences and patches more or less
cleverly adapted. The setting out of the plan does not
seem to have been produced as in the case of the
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 199
Odyssey at one heat or one stroke. The wrath of
Achilles, which is announced at the outset as the sub-
ject of it, seems to be forgotten and laid aside after
Book II. ; it is only recalled with difficulty and as a
salve to the conscience in the subsequent books, it is
only seriously presented to the mind in the course of
Book VIII., and reappears in Book IX. merely to dis-
appear once more in the canto which follows, and
it only resumes in an uninterrupted manner from
Book XL to the end. The five books which follow the
catalogue of ships belong to the Trojan war proper ;
and one would say there had originally been an Iliad
and an Achilleid quite distinct, which were united later
and melted into a single, more comprehensive poem.
The Achilleid, which can be traced and followed up
in the first song, in the eighth, the ninth, and, starting
from the eleventh, up to the end, scarcely lent itself to
separate episodes or rhapsodies ; the action hurries on.
The Iliad, on the contrary, composed of special scenes
and exploits, of fights and duels between the principal
heroes, offers ' a splendid picture of the Trojan war in
general,' and corresponds exactly with the more exten-
sive title under which the poem has become immortal.
The fatal consequences of the wrath of Achilles do not
appear before the end of Book VIII., and are only
declared at the moment that the Trojans, favoured by
Jupiter, seize the victory decidedly. Book IX., which
shows Agamemnon resigned to yield everything to
Achilles, nevertheless seems premature and anticipates
the catastrophe too soon; it comes without prepara-
tion ; it looks like a later addition which they did not
wish to leave out, ' and which harmonizes in no sense
200 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
with that grand sequence of the Achilleid which
flows from the eleventh to the twenty-second book.'
Mr. Grote draws our attention to the fact that there
are in the eleventh and following books several passages
which, strictly speaking, are contrary to the chief event
of that eleventh book, in which one has been a witness
to the deep humiliation, the full and complete repent-
ance of Agamemnon. The Achilles of the latter cantos
does not seem to bear in mind those offers of redress
which have been made to him, but seems to be still
expecting them. In short, and to prolong no farther a
detail of discussion which is out of place here, it seems
to Mr. Grote that everything would be explained if one
could admit that a Homer or a Homerid, taking posses-
sion of the fragmentary epics before the Iliad and of
an embryonic or elementary Achilleid, has fused, re-
handled, and enlarged the two subjects, has brought
them into relation one with another, and has produced
an intense, poetic, inspired work, whence has issued the
poem much as we have it now, excepting always three
or four songs which are obviously in the way, or
evidently useless, and of which one takes small count ;
all the rest belongs to a sufficiently single and master
thought. The real author of the Iliad would be the
poet of this thought, this genius of a Homerid.
Although Mr. Grote sees no reason for placing the
Odyssey necessarily at a later date, and giving it a more
recent moral colour, it is probably the work of another
Homer, no less a maker and a man of genius.
And all this (this is the essential point) took place
before Solon, before Pisistratus, before the age of the
writers, from time immemorial, in that legendary
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 201
creative and spontaneous period when the Muse dic-
tated her songs to her favoured ones before an agitated,
credulous, passionate, simple audience, without any
criticism, without any standard except its own curiosity
and pleasure. It has been possible in these latter
times to distinguish various stages in this period, by
analogy with other better known legendary epochs ;
there was probably first the age of narrative songs of
slight extent, what was called epos : the age of epic
poetry followed, in which these simpler songs were gone
over again, handled afresh, and carried new inspiration
into wider, and by this time learned compositions.
The genius of Homer is not so divided and separate
as has been said : it is doubtless a vast and exuberant
poetic spirit, but suited also for a set order, and still
preserving at this second stage that freshness of obser-
vation and that vivacity of detail which constitute the
charm of the ballad, of the saga, of the primitive epos.
1 There is nothing in the Odyssey or the Iliad in which
the modern spirit can be detected, when this term is
applied to the age of Pisistratus,' and the name of
Homer has every right to be attached personally to
this first great work of epic composition.
A corporation of bards, a whole brotherhood founded
in the Ionian island of Chios, soon made the patronymic
and sacred name of the whole family of the Homerides
out of this name of the great blind man : every great
creation and even every indifferent production* that
* For instance, the Hymns attributable to Homer, several of
which go back to a great antiquity. They have just been the
subject of a learned study, and a real critical examination on the
part of one of the young representatives of the French school
Des Hymnestomeriques, par M. H. Hignard, Docteur es Lettres.'
202 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
issued from his breast, and was propagated by its
members with a filial piety, excluded all else for them
and was placed under the generic and semi-divine
name of Homer : all other personality had disappeared.
There was the school, the house, the temple of Homer.
The authenticity of the text was religiously preserved
and guaranteed there.
Old Homer, thanks to these explanations and com-
promises to good sense, to sentiment and to science,
we have not entirely lost thee ; thou hast not perished,
thou hast only been eclipsed and somewhat shorn.
O noble demi-god ! we have found thee again at last
in part. It is true that the single Homer, the simple
individual Homer similar to an early Milton has ceased
to be possible : since Wolf, since Lachmann, those
Strausses of Homeric lore, there is no way of retriev-
ing all : at least we have left instead a Homer in two
or three persons, in two or three spirits. Nature is no
miser ; there are happy and fruitful ages favoured by
her where general currents of poetry prevail in the air.
Even if we keep to the distinctly literary periods, what
might we not observe about the neighbour - geniuses
almost simultaneous or closely succeeding one another,
about the kindred geniuses whom one might call blood-
relations; in classical Greece, around Pericles, ^Eschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides ; in the Italy of the Renaissance
Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, Ariosto ; they follow one after
another like stroke upon stroke in a series ; 'tis who
will outbid the other. In our days has not the genius
of Walter Scott straightway called up the brother
spirit of a Fenimore Cooper ? These are some
analogies. All the more reason is there for this obser-
GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE 203
vation in the full heroic and legendary circle and the
full Homeric vein. I imagine that according to Mr.
Grote there must have been to begin with a primary
Homer of the Achilleid, another Homer of a first and
restricted Iliad ; then came a greater and more ample
Homer, the real one, embracing them both and en-
closing them with his powerful waves like the Ocean
stream ; then there was yet another Homer more
gentle, more peaceful, slower, more like the setting sun
of which Longinus speaks, the Homer of the Odyssey.
And from far, at our present distance and at that of
Solon or Pisistratus, these two great Homers made but
one and the same luminary, one single star : it has
taken modern instruments to reduce them to their
component parts, to discover that what appeared
simple from afar, and which still seems so to the naked
eye, is only a conjunction, a meeting of two heavenly
bodies, a double star.
There would still be much to say about these first
volumes of Mr. Crete's, about his Lycurgus and
his Solon. I shall perhaps return to it another
day.*
* [If he did, the essay does not seem to have been republished.]
BONSTETTEN AND GRAY.
*****
HAVING vainly tried to acclimatize his son to Berne,
Treasurer Bonstetten allowed him to go to the
university of Leyden in Holland, but with the express
condition that he was not to study philosophy there.
He was afraid that the habit of introspection might
injure his observation of external facts; but Bonstetten
was sufficiently wide awake to embrace both points
of view. He observed Holland very well, and yet he
found it tedious. Being of a communicative nature
he needed movement and response around him. He
obtained permission from his father to visit England,
and there at any rate he was to find a world to his
liking, one of his intellectual homes. He was twenty-
four years old, of pleasing appearance and good
birth ; he spoke English with ease and even liked to
write it : * For this language,' he said, ' lends itself to
everything, whereas in French you always have to
reject ten thoughts before coming across one that
you can clothe properly.' He immediately made some
close friendships, saw the best society, was presented
at Court, and, what interests us more, was admitted at
Cambridge to intimacy with the charming poet Gray.
BONSTETTEN AND GRAY 205
1 1 have never,' he said, ' seen anyone who gave one
the idea of a perfect gentleman so much as Gray.'
We have an account by Bonstetten of those months of
sojourn at Cambridge. He amused himself in con-
trasting Gray's melancholy disposition with the serenity
of soul of his other friend, the German poet Matthisson,
whom later on he had as a guest at his country-house
at Nyon during the time when he was prefect. I think
I shall be excused for giving a verbatim transcript of
this page, which is as pleasant as it is little known :
'Eighteen years before my stay at Nyon, I had spent some
months at Cambridge with the celebrated poet Gray, in almost
as close an intimacy as I had with Matthisson, but with this dif-
ference, that Gray was thirty years older, and Matthisson sixteen
years younger than I was. My lightheartedness and my love for
English poetry, which I read with Gray, had, as it were, subjugated
him to such a degree that the great difference in our ages was no
longer felt by us. At Cambridge I lodged in a coffee-house close
to Pembroke Hall ; Gray lived then buried in a sort of cloister
still tenanted by the fifteenth century. The town of Cambridge
with its solitary colleges was nothing but an assembly of conventual
establishments, where mathematics and a few sciences had taken
the form^ and the costume of the theology of the Middle Ages.
Beautiful monasteries, with long, silent corridors, recluses in black
gowns, young lords turned into monks with square caps, every-
where recollections of monks beside the glory of Newton. No
honest woman comes to cheer the life of these bookworms in
human shape. Learning sometimes prospered in this desert of
the heart. Thus I saw Cambridge in 1769. What a contrast
between Gray's life at Cambridge and Matthisson's at Nyon !
When Gray condemned himself to live at Cambridge, he forgot
that the poetic genius languishes where the heart is dry.
' The poetic genius of Gray was so much extinguished in his
dark mansion at Cambridge, that the recollection of his poems
was odious to him. He never allowed me to speak of them.
206 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
When I quoted a few of his lines to him, he held his tongue like
an obstinate child. I sometimes said to him : " Will you answer
me?" But no word came out of his mouth. I saw him every
evening from five o'clock to midnight. We read Shakespeare,
whom he adored,* Dryden, Pope, Milton, etc., and our conver-
sations, like all those of friendship, never reached the bottom of
our thoughts. I told Gray about my life and my country, but the
whole of his life was closed to me ; he never spoke to me about
himself. For Gray, an impassable gulf lay between his present
and his past ; when I wanted to approach it dark clouds came to
hide it. I believe that Gray had never been in love that was the
key to the riddle ; from this had resulted a poverty of heart, con-
trasting with his ardent and deep imagination, which, instead of
being the happiness of his life, was the torment of it. Gray had
cheerfulness in his mind and melancholy in his disposition. But
this melancholy is only the unsatisfied longing of a sensitive
nature. With Gray it came from the quality of his ardent soul
relegated to the arctic pole of Cambridge.'
I do not know whether Bonstetten guessed rightly,
and whether the secret of Gray's melancholy was this
* In a letter written at the same time [January 6, 1770], Bon-
stetten gave the following account of his studies to a friend : ' I
am in a hurry from morning till evening. At 8 o'clock I am roused
by a young square Cap [a student], with whom I follow Satan
through Chaos and Night [reading Milton]. He explained me, in
Greek and Latin, the sweet, reluctant, amorous Delays of our
Grandmother Eve. We finish our travels in a copious breakfeast of
muffins and tea. Then appear Shakespair and old Linneus Gray
worked a good deal at botany and Linneus, strugling together
as two ghost would do for a damned Soul. Sometimes the one
get the better, sometimes the other. Mr. Gray is so good as to
show me Macbeth, and all witches, Beldams, Ghosts and Spirits,
whose language I never could have understood without his Inter-
pretation. I am endeavouring now to dress all those people in
a french dress, which is a very hard labour. ... I should think
not, indeed. It is now nearly a hundred years that they have
tried, without success, to suit these geniuses of a braver language
than ours, and to give them a French dress. They have not dared
till recently to exhibit them in such fashion : Chateaubriand was
the first who set the example with Milton with many faults and
shortcomings, but in the right way. 1
BONSTETTEN AND GRAY 207
want of love ; I should rather look for it in the barren-
ness of a poetic gift so distinguished, so rare, yet so
niggard. Far better do I understand with this inter-
pretation the obstinate moody silence of some pro-
found poets who have reached a certain age and run
dry, this still loving rancour towards what one has
loved so much and which will never return, this sorrow
of a soul bereft of poetry and which will not be
comforted Gray and Uhland !
We have as a counterpart to Bonstetten's story,
Gray's own testimony on this young friend, a living
testimony given during his stay. Gray added as a
postscript to a letter of Bonstetten's,* written from
Cambridge, January 6, 1770, to his friend Nicholls, who
had brought about their acquaintance : ' I never saw
such a boy : our breed is not made on this model. He is
busy from morning to night ; has no other amusement,
than that of changing one study for another, likes no-
body that he sees here, and yet wishes to stay longer,
though he has passed a whole fortnight with us already.
His letter has had no correction whatever, and is
prettier by half than English.' But if Bonstetten gave
Gray a great deal of pleasure by his vivacity, he gave
him at least as much uneasiness. The poet does not
explain himself very clearly about this ; if Bonstetten
believed in some mystery to account for Gray's sadness,
he in turn seems to have sought with some anxiety the
secret of Bonstetten's oddness. He was, said Gray, the
most extraordinary person he had ever met. The lovable
Bernese had quite bewitched him, and Gray could talk
of nothing else. He remains mysterious on one point,
* The same that is quoted in the preceding note.
208 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
and dares not trust himself to a letter. He seems to
have feared that so much agitation of ideas might end
by upsetting his mind. Just when his young friend
was starting for France he writes to their common
friend Nicholls : ' My solitary evenings hung much
lighter on my hands, before I knew him. This is your
fault ! Pray let the next you send me be halt and blind,
dull, unapprehensive, and wrong headed. For this (as
Lady Constance says) Was never such a gracious creature
born ! And yet but no matter ! burn my letter. . . .
You will think I have caught madness from him (for he
is certainly mad), and perhaps you will be right.' The
last time there is anything about Bonstetten in a letter
of Gray's (May 3, 1771), there is a very legitimate feel-
ing of uneasiness ; Bonstetten had then returned to his
" hell," Berne :
'Three days ago I had so strange a letter from B. I hardly
know how to give you any account of it, and desire you would
not speak of it to anybody. That he has been le plus malheureux
des hommes, that he is cUcidt d. quitter son pays, that is, to pass the
next winter in England : that he cannot bear la morgue de 1'aris-
tocratic et Vorgueil armt des loix ; in short, strong expressions of
uneasiness and much confusion of mind, so as to talk of un
pistolet et du courage, and all that without a shadow of a reason
assigned. He is either disordered in his intellect (which is too
possible) or has done some strange thing, that has exasperated his
whole family and friends at home, which (I'm afraid) is at least
equally possible. I am quite at a loss about it. You will see and
know more ; but by all means curb these vagaries and wandering
imaginations, if there be any room for counsels. . . .'
Let us hasten to say that this Wertherian
Bonstetten goes far beyond the natural usual
Bonstetten, the one who will last, flourish, and be
BONSTETTEN AND GRAY 209
fresh to the end, and who, after being such a seductive
young man, appeared to all so agreeable an old man.
With regard to the Bonstetten whom Gray has just
shown us in all his impetuosity and charm, and whom
he fears even while he delights in him, let us picture
him to ourselves as Zschokke described him many years
after, ' his figure a little below the middle height but
strongly built, betraying by the grace and nobleness
of his manners that he is accustomed to a select
society, the face full of expression, fresh, almost femi-
nine, colouring, a high philosophic brow, eyes full of
a smiling sweetness, the very thing to engage you ; in
one word, such that, having once seen him, one never
forgot him.'*
* Bonstetten lived to be the friend of Mile, de Klustine, who was
afterwards, as Mme. de Circourt, the close friend of Cavour. He
died in 1832, aged eighty-seven.
M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH
LITERATURE.
I.
I HAVE allowed myself to be dragged, towed, as it were,
into talking of this important book. The truth is, that
in spite of my desire to do it every justice, I felt that
I was incompetent to criticise it pertinently, and with
full knowledge of the subject ; to examine it and grasp it
in fit measure throughout its various parts. However,
after frequent and repeated castings of my sounding-
line, I will say what I have gathered with most
certainty or most probability. Taking everything into
account it is a great book ; and one which, even if it
should not attain more than a quarter of its purpose,
carries the matter a step forward, and will not leave
things where it found them. It is the most daring
attempt that has yet been made in this branch of
literary history, and we cannot be astonished that it
should have aroused so many objections, so much
resistance, among prejudiced minds accustomed to
earlier ways of looking at things. You cannot dis-
lodge old methods, old routines, in a single day. The
author might, perhaps, have reduced the number of his
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 211
opponents if he had given his book its true title : A
history of the English race and its civilization in the
light of its literature; in which case all fair-minded
readers would, for the most part, have needed only to
approve and to admire the cogency and ingenuity of
his demonstration. Literature is, in fact, to M. Taine
only an apparatus, more delicate and more sensitive
than another, for measuring all the steps and variations
of the same civilization, for grasping all the character-
istics, all the qualities, all the shades of national
thought. But when he approaches the history of
literary works, and their authors, straight from the
front, his downright scientific method has frightened
timid people, and set them trembling. The rhetori-
cians have fallen back in disorder to the rear of the
philosophers, self-styled ; and these have for greater
security rallied under the guns* of orthodoxy. They
have all seen in the author's method some threat or
other aimed at morality, at free-will, at human respon-
sibility, and they have been shrieking aloud.
Yet there can be no doubt that, whatever may be a
man's will to act, or think, or (as we are here talking
about literature) write, he is more or less closely
dependent on the race from which he springs, and
which has supplied the basis of his nature ; that he is
no less dependent on the surroundings of the society
and civilization in which he has been nurtured and
formed, and also upon the moment, that is, the hazard
of circumstances and events which occur day by day
in the course of his life. So true is this that the
admission of it slips from us all involuntarily in
* [ In the original, canon; a just untranslateable pun.]
212 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
our philosophic and rational moments, or through the
effect of simple good sense. Lamennais, fiery, sub-
jective, obstinate, as he was, believing as he did that
the individual will is all-sufficing, could not refrain
from writing once : ' The further I go, the more I
marvel to see how dependent are our deepest-rooted
opinions upon the age in which we have lived, the
society into which we have been born, and a thousand
equally ephemeral circumstances. Think only what our
own would have been if we had come into the world
ten centuries sooner, or in the present century, but at
Teheran, Benares, or Tahiti.' It is so evident that to
contradict it would seem ridiculous indeed. Hippo-
crates in his immortal treatise Concerning Air, Water,
and Locality, has drawn in broad strokes this influence
of climate and surroundings on national and individual
character. Montesquieu* has imitated and followed
him, but flies too high, like a philosopher who is neither
a physician by profession, nor enough of a naturalist.
Now, M. Taine has only tried to study methodically
these deep-reaching differences, brought about by race,
surroundings, moments, in the composition of wits, the
form and direction of talents. But, it will be said, his
success is inadequate ; it is all very well for him to give
a wonderful description of the race in its general traits,
its fundamental features ; all very well to trace and set
out in all the relief of his powerful colouring the char-
acter of time's revolutions and the moral atmosphere
prevailing at certain historic seasons ; all very well to
disentangle adroitly the complication of public events
and private adventures in which some person's life is
* [Aristotle, too, follows him. Politics, vii. 1327 B.]
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 213
involved as in a system of cog-wheels. But still some-
thing eludes him, that something which most vivifies
the man, to which it is due that out of twenty, or a
hundred, or a thousand men, subject, as it would
appear, to almost precisely the same conditions
internal and external, no two are alike, while among
them all there is one only who combines excellence
with originality.* In short, he has not touched the
very spark of genius in its essence, nor does he show
it to us in its analysis : he has only laid out before us,
drawn out thread by thread, fibre by fibre, cell by cell,
the fabric, the organism, the parenchyma call it what
you will in which that soul, that life, that spark, when
once it has entered in, plays, goes freely (or as it were
freely) through its changes, and wins its triumphs.
Is not this a fair statement of the objection ? Do
you not recognise the argument of the sagest
opponents ? Well, what does it prove ? Just that the
problem is difficult ; insoluble, perhaps, with ultimate
precision. But, I ask in turn, is it nothing to set the
problem as our author does it, to grapple so closely
with it, to close it in on every side, to reduce it to its
only final and simplest expression, to allow us better
to weigh and reckon all its data? After making all
allowances, and giving their full share to general or
special elements, and to circumstances, there still
remain around men of talent sufficient room and space
* A similar objection seems to have occurred to Theophrastus,
who opens his Characters (or rather the dedicatory preface) with the
remark : ' I have often wondered, and shall never cease wondering,
how it happens that whereas all Greece lies in the same climate,
and all Greeks are similarly brought up, we do not all of us order
our ways alike.'
214 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
to allow them full liberty of moving and turning round.
Moreover, were the circle drawn round each a very
narrow one, every man of talent, every genius, through
the very fact of his being in some degree a magician and
an enchanter, has a secret belonging only to himself
for working prodigies and bringing miracles to pass
within that circle. Even if M. Taine has too much
the appearance of neglecting this power, I do not see
that he contests or denies it ; he limits it, and by limit-
ing it he allows us in many cases to define it better
than had been done. Of a certainty, whatever they
may say who would gladly have rested content with
the former state of vagueness, M. Taine will have
given a great impetus to literary analysis ; and who-
ever shall study after him some great foreign writer,
will not set about it in the way that he would have
done, nor so lightly as he would have done the day
before M. Taine's book appeared.
I should like to be able to apply M. Taine's own
method to himself, in order to present and explain him
to the best of my power to my readers.
He was born at Vouziers in the Ardennes, in 1828.
And here, at the very outset, I could wish I were like
him, a painter, a landscape-painter, to be able to
describe the Ardennes and all the lasting and deep im-
pressions of childhood which he may have owed to that
great forest-country. Did those Ardennes, mighty and
vast, that great surviving fragment of the ancient
primitive forest, those wooded hills and valleys in-
cessantly recurring, where you go down hill only to go
up again, as though lost in the uniformity of their
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 215
folds ; those grand, desolate, melancholy prospects
full of majestic vigour, did they in truth do their part
in filling, in furnishing from the first the imagination
of the serious child ? What is certain is, that in his
talent we come across masses a little too solid, trains
of thought a little too close and unbroken, of which
even the brilliance and magnificence do not save us
from fatigue. We admire that sturdy vegetation, that
verdant, inexhaustible sap, the marrow of a generous
soil ; but we could wish for a few more openings and
clearings in his rich Ardennes.
His family surroundings were simple, moral, affec-
tionate ; of a modest and wholesome standard of culti-
vation. His grandfather was sub-prefect at Rocroi in
1814-15 under the first Restoration. His father, an
attorney by profession, was a student by predilection ;
he was his son's first tutor, and taught him Latin. An
uncle returned from America taught him English when
quite a child, sitting on his knee. His father died at
the age of forty-one, he himself being but twelve. His
mother, who was his father's cousin, is a person of
remarkable kindness, and the sole object of her son's
affection. There are two married sisters. This man,
of so bold a spirit as a thinker, so firm and unflinching
as a teacher, appears in the domestic circle as the
gentlest and tenderest soul living.
In 1842 he came to Paris with his mother, and
studied as a day-scholar at the College Bourbon, enter-
ing in the third class. In his competition he won the
first prize in rhetoric, and two second prizes in philo-
sophy. He entered the Ecole Normale in 1848, the
first man of his year, which was also that of Edmond
216 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
About. Prevost-Paradol was one year junior, Weiss
one year senior. The three names followed close upon
each other ; for a moment they met in the three years'
course of study which the school embraces. M. Taine
alone could relate all that he and his friends found
means of packing into those three years. In those
days students enjoyed great freedom in the arrange-
ment and the details of their work, so that M. Taine
with his extraordinary facility did five or six weeks'
tasks in one, and the remaining time could thus be
devoted to private work and reading. He read all that
is to be read in philosophy from Thales to Schelling ;
in theology and patristic study from Hermas to
St. Augustin. So absorbing, so devouring a course
produced its natural effect on young and vigorous
brains. They lived in a state of perpetual excitement
and eager discussion. That nothing might be lacking
in the way of contrast and antagonism, there were
among the pupils some fervent Catholics who have
since entered the Oratory ; so there was a daily
struggle, a first dispute, a hurly-burly of politics,
aesthetics, philosophy, of the most furious kind. The
tutors, broad-minded or very easy-going men, allowed
all these emulous or rival intellects to course un-
checked in their presence, and set no obstacle, no veto,
in the way of the controversies. Besides M. Dubois,
of the Lower Loire, the head and administrator of
the school, there were M. Vacherot, more specially
director of studies, and MM. Havet, Jules Simon,
Geruzez, Berger, head-lecturers.* These gentlemen,
agreeably to their title, gave few lessons properly so-
* Maitres de Conferences.
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 217
called, but they made the students give them, and
subsequently criticised ; they really did confer. The
head-lecturer attended the pupils' lesson as arbiter or
umpire. One professor, a friend of mine,* with his
half-closed eyes and his shrewd smile, a man of semi-
Gaulois taste, contrived to be at the same time easily
indolent and yet stimulating withal. What we know
of more than one of those pupils, since famous, may
give some idea of the piquant and lively effect of those
veritable tournaments. Imagine Edmond About giving
a lesson on the policy of Bossuet before sincere
Catholics who smarted under it, but took their revenge
when their turn to talk came at the next lecture.
M. Taine had to give a lesson among others on
Bossuet's mysticism. The professor, after hearing all
the pleadings, got off with giving a summary of the
discussion, like the presiding judge in Court.
It will easily be believed that the summary deter-
mined nothing ; the tumult of opinions persisted.
Among those youthful heads, so learned, so intoxicated
with their own ideas, so well equipped with words, it
was inevitable that there should be plenty of intoler-
ance and overweening pride ; they called each other
bad names, but there was no hatred. The recreations,
demanding as they did movement and exuberant
physical powers, put everything right, and sometimes
of an evening they would all dance together while one
played the violoncello or another the flute.
In short, they were good, inestimable years; and it
will be imagined that all who passed through them
have preserved the stamp of them on their minds, and
* M. Gdruzez.
218 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
gratitude in their hearts. The advantages of such
a gymnasium of learning, such a seed-ground for the
intellect, are beyond what one can express. This is
the judgement which must be formed of it by those
especially who have gone without this privileged form
of higher culture, this incomparable training, those
who as ordinary warriors have entered into the battle
without having been fed on lion's marrow and bathed
in Styx. Besides the merits and the excellences, there
are some obvious disadvantages, which are perceived
in a moment. You cannot with impunity be trained
amid the cries of the school ; as Boileau said, the taste
for hyperbole is acquired there. In the life which I
1 have described, people inevitably contracted a touch of
violence, of intellectual pride, over-reliance on books,
on what is written, over-confidence in the pen and
what comes from it. If they knew the ancients well,
they also paid too much deference to certain modern
authors, whose importance was exaggerated when they
were viewed from afar and through grated windows ;
works combining with their wit and talent a large share
of pretentiousness and small quackeries were taken too
seriously and literally ; the reader imported into them
his own honesty, earnestness, depth of thought. Even
at this day, after all these years, something of the kind
remains even in their maturer judgements.
Small disadvantages, these ! The benefits far out-
weighed them, and we know how strong, how brilliant
were the picked men that came out of that fertile,
turbulent, eminently French education. None of them,
after gaining his freedom, has remained more faithful
to it than M. Taine ; none does more honour to the
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 219
severity of his early training. When he left the school
in 1851, changes great no doubt, but such as had
become necessary, were taking place ; and as usually
happens, the passage was from one extreme to another ;
reaction was in full swing. A worthy director of the
school, M. Michelle, was engaged in putting down, in
extinguishing with all the cold that was in him, every
spark of fervour, all the conflagrations which had been
kindled within by the touch of the breath from without
upon the fuel of intelligent minds. The method
of pushing a man on, and letting him have his head,
had been carried too far ; now the line was to deaden
everything to their hearts' content. Straightway
the brilliant young generation was scattered. Edmond
About, with better judgement, went off to Greece, and
continued a course full of animation, of breadth, and of a
vanity no less amusing than instructive. Many went
into provincial schools ; others sent in their resigna-
tion. The only favour that M. Taine, after innumer-
able interventions on his behalf, could obtain was to be
sent first to Nevers, where he remained for four months,
as a substitute in philosophy, then to Poitiers, where
he remained another four months, as a substitute in
rhetoric.
We pass over the dulness, the discomforts, the little
vexations. On his return to Paris, when he was
reckoning on a third-class teacher's place in the
provinces, surely no excessive ambition, he found him-
self appointed to a temporary mastership of the sixth
class at Besan9on. He did not go, and begged to be
put on the unattached list. One might ask if it is
worth while to train and board young giants at a great
220 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
cost, when you are going to set them not to split oaks,
but to tie faggots. M. Taine then preferred to remain
at Paris as a student ; and what a student ! He set
to work at mathematics and science, especially physi-
ology. During his stay at Nevers he had thought out
a whole new psychology, an exact and profoundly-
reasoned description of the faculties of man and the
forms of thought. He soon understood that it is not
possible to be a real psychological philosopher without
knowing on one side the language of mathematics,
that most flexible, most penetrating of all forms of
logic, and on the other, natural history, the common
basis of all life ; a twofold source of knowledge which
was lacking to all the half-philosophers, in other respects
so distinguished, of the eclectic school. He set to
work then, for a period of three years, upon mathe-
matical analysis (though he did not carry it as far as
he would have liked), and followed diligently the
courses of the medical school, combining them with
those of the museum. At this tough job he became
what he is above all things and fundamentally, a savant,
a man who has a general conception, and an exact,
categorical, concatenated system ; which he applies to
everything, and which guides him in his most distant
excursions into literature. Everything with him starts
from and is attached to a primary action ; nothing is
allowed to chance, to fancy, nor, as with us triflers, to
mere amenity.
His thesis on La Fontaine in 1853 attracted much
attention. The form, the substance, all was original
to the point of apparent singularity. He has since
retouched it, and brought it much nearer to perfection,
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 221
thereby showing how docile he is to criticism, at all
events to such as concerns the form, and does not
touch too much the basis and essence of the thoughts.
About the same time he prepared for the Academy his
work on Livy, which was crowned in 1855. He
suffered from overwork, and had to make a tour in the
Pyrenees. It was on this occasion that he wrote that
Voyage which Dore illustrated, in which he showed
himself a word-painter of the first rank. Since then
he has entirely rewritten and recast the Voyage, as
he did his thesis on La Fontaine. This man, who
when one reads him one would think so dogmatic, is
the kindest, most amiable, most tolerant man in all
the relations of life, even of the literary life, the one of
all authors who takes direct and point-blank contra-
diction the best ; I mean honest and not captious con-
tradiction.
From that time on he began to write in reviews and
journals. An article on the philosophy of Jean
Reynaud, entitled del et Terre, marked his start in
the Revue des Deux Mondes ; in the Revue de V Instruc-
tion Publique he made his beginning with an article
on La Bruyere ; in the Journal des Debats with three
articles on ' St. Simon.'
He had established himself everywhere. He does
not in any way modify his manner according to the
place or the surroundings ; it is almost indifferent to
him whether he writes here or there; it is the same
philosophy and different applications of it, different
aspects of the same thought, fragments of the same
whole which he ever distributes. He judges himself
admirably with a charming modesty, and what I am
222 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
about to say sums up his own thoughts almost as much
as mine.
Belonging as he does to a generation formed by
solitude, by books, by science, he has not like us, who
are weaker but more crossed, more mixed, received
a consecutive tradition. That generation had to refind
everything, to begin everything afresh on their own
account ; they missed that unfelt habit of comparisons,
of conciliatory combinations, of acquisition by meeting
and by social relations ; shades and qualifications did
not enter into their first manner ; they are abrupt
and crude. Their thoughts emerged from their brain
one day full armed like Minerva, and, like her, by
dint of an axe stroke. Still M. Taine obtained some
share of that contemporary information which puts
things straight or cuts them short from M. Guizot,
whom he was fortunate enough to see betimes, and
also from M. Dubois ; but this has not been suffi-
ciently frequent or habitual with him. He belongs
to a generation which did not waste enough time in
going into society, floating about and listening. If
he has asked questions, as he is fond of doing, it has
been in a hurried fashion with a definite purpose, and
towards an end in order to correspond to the thought
which he already had in his mind. He has chatted, he
has discussed with friends of his own age, with artists,
with doctors. In long conversations of two he has
exchanged an infinite number of views on the basis of
things, on the problems which seize and take possession
of young and lofty intellects. He has not seen enough
of actual men belonging to different generations,
different schools, opposite principles ; above all, he has
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 223
not taken account of the relation or of the distance
which exists between books or ideas and living people,
including authors first of all. That is not done in
one day or in a few meetings, but by degrees and as
it were by chance. Often the decisive word which
exhibits to us a man's nature, which judges and defines
it, is not dropped until the tenth or twentieth meeting.
To compensate for this, learning, the country, solitary
nature have acted powerfully upon him, and he has
owed to them his most contrary, most lively sensations.
When he used to come out of that intellectual furnace
of the Ecole Normale and return to his own Ardennes in
the autumn, what an abrupt, profound and renovating
impression he must have received, what a bath of open
air and wild healthiness ! He has often expressed the
soul and the genius of such natural landscapes with
colours that have a savour rough but refreshing. From
the complete point of view of ethics and of experience,
what seems above all to have been lacking to those
deserving and austere lives, which by its absence has
somewhat disturbed their balance, was that society
which is of all the most pleasant, that which causes
the greatest loss of time in the most agreeable manner,
the society of women ; that sort of more or less
romantic ideal which we caress in a lazy fashion,
and which repays us in a thousand unconscious graces.
These laborious, eloquent and eager devourers of
books were never in a position to cultivate betimes
that art of pleasing and making one's way which
teaches more than one secret useful in the practice
and the philosophy of life. By this abstinence they at
least saved themselves from becoming, as others have
224 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BE U VE
done, enervated and shattered in their tender years.
Not for them, as for men of earlier generations, did a
great, an integral part of their days pass in barren
regrets, in vague desires of anticipation, in the melan-
choly and languor which follows pleasure. Their
active brain-power remained entire. They had at the
outset a great weight to lift ; they put themselves
wholly into it and succeeded ; the weight once lifted,
they might believe their heart to be grown old, them-
selves weary ; the bloom of youth was fled, the ply was
taken ; it was the ply of strength and virile austerity,
and was purchased at some sacrifice.
When, after reading M. Taine, one has the pleasure
of making his personal acquaintance, one finds a special
charm in him which distinguishes him from all the
studious, thoughtful young stoics ; with all his pre-
cocious ripeness he has succeeded in combining a real
spotlessness of heart, a certain moral innocence which
he has preserved. He suggests to me an image quite
contrary to that of the poet who speaks of ' a fruit
ripe already upon a young and tender stalk.' Here we
have a tender and delicate flower on a somewhat
rugged branch.
[The remainder of this section is of little interest to English
readers, and is therefore here omitted.]
M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH
LITERATURE.
II.
THE History of English Literature is a book which
holds together from end to end. It was conceived,
constructed, executed without a break ; the first and last
chapters correspond. Saxon barbarism, or semi-civi-
lization, crossed with Norman ability and shrewdness,
the whole shut up and packed in its island, and, as the
author has so well shown us, worked, ground, kneaded,
and ripened for centuries, reappears in the sequel
in the condition of the strongest, most solid, most
sensible, best behaved, best ballasted, most positive,
and most poetical of free nations. All the great monu-
ments of literature, all the works of any significance
which indicate the different stages and the progress of
that civilization, have been examined and described by
him in the interval from the first barbarous biblical
singer, the harper Caedmon, down to Lord Byron.
Until after the Norman Conquest and the epoch in
which the new language was formed we have only
abrupt and fragmentary indications. The conquest of
England by the Normans in 1066 was the latest in
226 SELECT ESSAYS OF SA1NTE-BEUVE
date of the great territorial invasions which everywhere
preceded the Middle Age ; and when it took place, the
Middle Age had already begun everywhere else. The
English language, and consequently the literature which
it was to bring forth, thus found itself belated in regard
to the other literatures of the Continent, especially
the French. From this it got its first inspiration, its
first impregnation, and it was only with time that it
acquired its right blend, its own flavour. Chaucer, the
earliest of English poets and storytellers, is a disciple of
the trouveres and the writers of fabliaux ; yet in his set-
ting and his fashion he adds to them something that is
quite his own. He possesses already what was one day
to be called humour and a great natural vivacity of
description ; he has been happily compared to a sparkling
morning in a forward spring.
What we notice from an early period in the oldest
of our neighbour's productions is the way in which the
Saxon character offers a firm resistance in the matter of
language and literature, just as it did on behalf of its
political constitution ; it preserves its tastes, its tra-
ditions, its tone, its vocabulary, underlying its surface
brilliancy. M. Taine compares the Robin Hood ballads
with our fabliaux, and contrasts them with productions
of French origin, clearly bringing out the difference be-
tween the two intellects, between the two races, which
were in no way blended by the Norman Conquest.
' What is it that amuses the people in France ? The fabliaux,
the cunning tricks of Reynard, his dodges for making a fool of his
lord Ysengrim, for taking his wife, swindling him out of his dinner,
getting him a thrashing at the hands of someone else without
danger to himself ; in a word, the triumph of clever poverty over
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 227
stupid power. The popular hero is even at this date the shifty,
rollicking, gay plebeian, who will later on develop into Panurge and
Figaro.'
In place of all this of these practical jokes which
have so ancient an origin these knaveries of a Villon,
or a Patelin, which move our rustics, our populace to
such laughter, what is it that delights the English
populace, and makes them inattentive to everything,
even the sermon ? It is the jolly forest outlaw, the
king of poachers, Robin Hood ; the stout-hearted
gossip, who is never gayer or in better spirits for sword
or staff play than when the coppice is bright and the
grass is high.
' Robin Hood is the national hero ; in the first place a Saxon,
and in arms against constituted authority, " against bishops and
archbishops"; generous, moreover, giving a poor ruined knight
clothes, a horse, and a sword to go and redeem his land pledged
to a grasping abbot ; withal sympathetic and kind towards the poor
folk, ordering his people to do no harm to yeomen or labourers ;
but above all, enterprising, bold, proud, ready to draw his bow
under the eyes of the sheriff and in his despite, and prompt at
blows, whether to pocket or return them.'
Everywhere, from end to end of M. Taine's book,
there breathes the spirit of whatever is robust, solid,
saucy, gay, racy, honest, upright in that country, even
amid violence and the excess of power. That is true, and
we shall find it true in England from the days of Robin
Hood to Lord Chatham or Junius ; and even when the
days of elegance and fine drawing-room manners arrive
in the eighteenth century, and we have our bouts of
conversation and witty sayings with them, our most
renowned wits, our Nivernais, our Boufflers, will seem
to them very thin, very flat, limp, and insipid, beside
228 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
their merry roysterers with their flashing sallies, their
' high spirits.' If you doubt, ask that fair-minded judge
who knew society so well in both countries : I mean
Horace Walpole.
Pope, for whom my taste is stronger than M. Taine's,
because I do not study him simply from the point of
view of his nation, marked the various epochs of English
poetry by four names four bright beacons : Chaucer,
Spenser, Milton, Dryden. Between Spenser and Milton
we have to place Shakespeare at the head of his mighty
constellation of dramatists. Pope himself would deserve
to give its name to a sixth epoch, and the seventh, or
modern period, acclaims Byron as the first, among so
many others, by right of brilliancy and strong flight.
But we no longer write the history of poetry and litera-
ture by means of individual names : the brilliant indi-
vidual, the genius, is only the standard - bearer and
spokesman, the gatherer up of all the feelings and
thoughts which float and circulate vaguely around him.
I shall not say with a poet, and a most original poet of our
own day, ' What is a great poet ? A passage through
which the wind blows.' No ; the poet is not so simple a
thing as that ; he is not a resultant, nor even a mere
focussing reflector; he has a mirror of his own, his own
unique and individual monad. He has his plexus, his
organ, through which everything that passes is trans-
formed, and which, in sending it forth, combines and
creates ; but the poet creates only with that which he
has received. At this point, as I think, I once more
fall into entire agreement with M. Taine.
His book has in its composition the merit of especially
throwing light upon the most difficult and most arduous
A/. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 229
portions of the study of English literature its distant,
earlier periods. The Renaissance is admirably treated.
In England this followed other lines than with us ; it
did not put an end abruptly to the Middle Ages. It did
not produce a 'topsy-turvy,' a destructive inundation
in art, poetry, the drama ; it formed a rich, solid foun-
dation, here as elsewhere offering a stout resistance.
This it overlaid in places, combining and mingling with
it. M. Taine makes us understand, and by the affec-
tionate and enraptured manner in which he speaks of
them, almost love, the first movers and heroes of
the English literary Renaissance : in prose, Philip
Sidney, a D'Urfe who preceded our own ; in poetry,
Spenser, the poet of fairy -land, whom he admires
beyond all. In his manner of describing and depicting
Spenser, he seems to be swimming in a wide lake, or
floating like a swan in its element. In truth, he loves
strength, even in grace ; he has no dislike for redun-
dancy and excess. He might astonish Englishmen
themselves by the vigour of his impression, which has
a resolute confidence in its own reading. M. Taine
has the courage of his own judgements to the full. He
eludes nothing ; he troubles himself about nothing but
his object. He betakes himself directly to the author
whom he is reading, with all the strength of his intelli-
gence, and gets from him a clear and firm impression, at
first hand, by direct inspection ; from this he draws a
conclusion flowing fresh from its source, bubbling up
and running over. This leads him in certain cases to
go outside of established judgements, to quash some
which usage has consecrated, or to introduce some
that are new, at the risk of surprising and shocking.
230 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Little does he care ; he goes straight on his road, and
takes no heed. He abases or exalts, according as he
feels ; he will think poorly of Butler for his much-
lauded Hudibras ; he will glorify the fanatic Bunyan
for his Pilgrim's Progress. When I say ' glorify,' I go
too far ; he describes him and his work, but he describes
both in such sort that his words produce a picture
capable of bringing the impression of them home to
you, of touching you to the quick.
In picturesque description or analysis his close, com-
pressed style, progressing in regular steps, in ordered
rank and file, with quickly following strokes, with phrases,
which recur again and again, as it were short, sharply
etched lines, has caused a critic of the old school to say
that he seemed to hear the hail falling and leaping hard
and thick on the roof :
c Tarn multa in tectis crepitans salit horrida grando.'
This style ultimately produces on the mind a certain
inevitable impression which sometimes acts on the
nerves. This is a point at which the man of knowledge
and energy has to beware lest he distress the men of
taste.
I know the doctrine of excess, of so-called legiti-
mate exaggeration, even of the monstrous, regarded as
a mark of genius, is the order of the day. I ask to have
nothing to do with it, save with all reserves ; I prefer to
live on this side of it, and my old literary habits have
made me retain the need of not overtiring myself, and
even the desire to take pleasure in what I admire.
As for him, force and greatness suit him, and he
clings to them with obvious satisfaction. He has ex-
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 231
cellently reproduced for us the English theatre of the
sixteenth century : the tumultuous stage and audience,
mingled, made for each other ; that constellation of
vigorous dramatists, among whom Shakespeare was but
the greatest, which includes Marlowe, Massinger, Ford,
Webster, and others. They have formed the object of
recent studies among us, and a laudable emulation in
literary work,* but they have nowhere been so ener-
getically explained and rendered as by M. Taine. He
sets them again, as if alive, on their feet, in full working.
The translations which are incorporated in his text are
the very essence of the originals the flesh and blood
of their dramas.
I leave to specialists in the subject his detailed ex-
planation of Shakespeare's genius and of that which he
recognises as Shakespeare's master-faculty ' imagina-
tion or pure passion.' For my own part, I confess that
expositions of this sort about great men of genius, taken
a priori as absolute types and symbols, not exactly
overwrought, but generalized more and more, and
idealized, as it were, till they are above their own work,
strong and great as it may be in itself these considera-
tions, dear to the higher criticism of our times, remain,
in my view, necessarily conjectural. They are eternal
problems which remain open to competition to which
people from time to time recur, and over which each in
turn breaks a lance. It is well, indeed, that every
critic who comes to close quarters with one of these
masters of genius and tries to get a grasp of him
* The allusion is to M. A. Me"zieres' Prfdecesseurs et Contempo-
rains de Shakespeare (Charpentier, 1863), and M. E. Lafond's trans-
lation of Ben Jonson and others (Hetzel, 1863).
232 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
should say with all boldness what he has to say-
should, in judging, judge himself, and that every
explanation should go forth and be spread abroad.
To say the truth, these are not so much explanations
as exercitations, but it is, at any rate for the coming
race, the noblest and most generous of disputes, a per-
petual tournament around the great minds.
The prose writers of the Renaissance, of whom
Bacon is the most celebrated, though others have
recently come back into favour and acquired a rich
accession of renown, find their due place in M. Taine's
book and show out well from their setting. Robert
Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, Thomas
Browne, a man of no less quaint learning, an encyclo-
paedic and yet poetic inquirer, are outlined for us in
such a manner as to ensure them a place in our
memory. The last-named, Browne, while in certain of
his views he is modern and stimulating, has his relapses
into a fine melancholy and a profound scepticism over
the wrecks of the past.*
' But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals
with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.
Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids ? Herostratus
lives that burnt the temple of Diana ; he is almost lost that built
it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded
that of himself. . . .
* But all was vanity, feeding the wind and folly. The Egyptian
mummies, which Cambyses or Time hath spared, Avarice now
consumeth. Mummy is become merchandize, Mizraim cures
wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams. . . .
' The greater part must be content to be as though they had not
been, to be found in the register of God, and not in the record of man.
* \Um Burial, ch. v.]
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 233
Twenty-seven names make up the first story before the Flood,
and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century.'
A memorable thought, and one which we must repeat,
even in presence of Science and her lawful pride, as
she wins back the past in fragments, but in fragments
only. Yes ; even yesterday, as I came away from
reading M. Rough's interesting and instructive report on
Egyptian antiquities, on a few more names snatched
from oblivion, I could not refrain from repeating those
words to myself. What blanks in truth there are out
of all proportion to what we know or ever shall know ;
what immense, irreparable gaps !
O, Chance, Chance ! if we will be honest, we shall
never assign a large enough share to thee; we shall
never strike the knife deep enough into every philosophy
of history !
The finest poetical genius of England and the most
difficult to explain Milton has been estimated and
unfolded by M. Taine as he has never, to my know-
ledge, been until now. He appears just at his proper
moment, and after a well-marked picture of the Chris-
tian Renaissance, that puritanism of which he is the
sweet and graceful flower and the sublime, if slightly
quaint, crown. His moral complexity, his unity the
contradictions which he gathers up and co-ordinates in
himself, the steady balance of his soul and his genius
all is depicted, analyzed, reproduced in more than a
hundred pages, which, in thought as well as in tone,
are most beautiful and quite up to the level of their
subject. I extract some typical touches :
' Vast learning, close logic, and 'passion with grandeur these
form his capital. He has a clear mind and a limited imagination.
234 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
He is alike incapable of perturbation and of variation. He
conceives the highest of ideal beauties, but under one form only.
He was not born for the drama but for the ode. He does not create
souls, but he constructs trains of reasoning and feels emotions.
Emotion and reasoning, all the forces and all the actions of his
soul, are gathered and ranged under one solitary sentiment, that of
the sublime ; and the broad stream of lyric poetry flows forth from
him impetuous, coherent, splendid as a sheet of gold. . . .
'He was brought up on the reading of Spenser, Drayton, Shake-
speare, Beaumont, of all the most brilliant poets ; and the golden
flood of the preceding age, though impoverished all around him, and
slackened in himself, spread out like a lake where it came to a
halt in his heart. . . .
'When still quite young, on leaving Cambridge, his bent was
toward the magnificent and grandiose ; he wanted a great rolling
verse, an ample and sonorous strophe, long periods of fourteen or
twenty-four lines. He did not study things face to face and on the
ground, like a mortal, but from above, like the archangels. ... It
was not life that he felt, like the master of the Renaissance, but
grandeur, after the fashion of yschylus and the Hebrew prophets ;
men of masculine and lyric genius like his own, who, nurtured
like him in religious emotions and unbroken enthusiasm, dis-
played, like him, a priestly pomp and majesty. To embody a
feeling like this imagination and poetry, which addresses itself to
the eye only, were not enough ; there needed also sounds and
that deeper poetry which, purged of all bodily representations,
reaches the soul. He was a musician and an artist ; his hymns
march with the unhasting pace of a recitative and the gravity of a
declamation. . . .
' He makes us understand the saying of his master, Plato, that
virtuous melodies teach virtue.'
And one phrase more : ' Milton's landscapes are a
school of virtue.'
Milton's virtue could adapt itself to Cromwell. You
ask, How ? I will try to answer. The truth is, that
Cromwell was not, either at first or at all, what we
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 235
have grown accustomed to see through the eyes of
Bossuet, or following those notions of monarchical
reaction which we reserve for our neighbours even
when we have got rid of them for ourselves. Cromwell
was for long the bulwark of all that was energetic,
virtuous, religious, upright, fundamentally English in
the nation.
Milton, though from afar he looks to us isolated,
was not the only one of the poetic crew who celebrated
him ; and if we look closely we shall see further that, if
by reason of the stormy times there was no constella-
tion around Milton as around Shakespeare, there were,
nevertheless, other vigorous poets, his competitors and
his rivals.
There exists an Ode of Andrew Marvell* belonging
to the same movement of Christian and patriotic
revival. It is in the form, almost in the rhythm, of the
odes in which Horace celebrates the return of Augustus
after some victory. Its subject is the return of Crom-
well from his expedition to Ireland in that memorable
year 1649 ; it predicts the exploits of the coming year,
and shows us Cromwell hasting to accomplish his
destiny, though still submissive to the laws. Never
did the fire of enthusiasm for the commonweal or the
grand, yet terrible, emotions inspired by these revolu-
tionary saviours, these men of sword and steel, find
accents more resonant or more true. They flow in
hurrying waves from a sincere heart :
* It long remained unknown among the English themselves. It
will be found on p. 50 of a charming little book, The Golden
Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, collected by Mr. F. T. Palgrave.
This little collection is indeed a treasury of poetry, both strong and
sweet.
236 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Tis madness to resist or blame
The face of angry heaven's flame ;
And if we would speak true,
Much to the man is due
' Who from his private gardens, where
He lived, reserved and austere
(As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot),
' Could by industrious valour climb
To ruin the great work of time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mould.'
Here one feels how meagre a covering is the classical
imitation for English sincerity and frankness of tone-
how these, as it were, pierce and crack their Horatian
wrappings.
The poet compares Cromwell, still humble, as he
affirms, and proud only of obeying the Republic and
the Commons, to the generous bird of prey, docile to the
falconer and staining the air with blood for him alone :
' So when the falcon high
Falls heavy from the sky,
She, having killed, no more does search,
But on the next green bough to perch,
Where, when he first does lure,
The falconer has her sure.'
Thus is the Commonwealth sure of its Cromwell.
Compare with this ode the generous and fervent
sonnet which Milton addressed to Cromwell about the
same time :
' Cromwell, our chief of men, who, through a cloud,
Not of war only but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 237
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed ;
And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud
Hast reared God's trophies and His work pursued.
******
New foes arise,
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains ;
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.'
The sentiment is the same as in Marvell more
heroic and martial in him, more purely Christian in
Milton. Cromwell, I repeat, was in truth the bulwark
and buckler of all men of conscience and unenslaved
faith.
You cannot judge a man of this kind upon inci-
dentals. He is among the most complicated and com-
plete examples of his type, perhaps the most complete,
most squarely based that has ever lived. Chateau-
briand says of him that he had in him a priest, a
tyrant, and a hero ; but he adds : ' He ruined the
institutions which came in his way or which he wished
to replant, as Michael Angelo broke the marble under
his chisel.' Cromwell did not break the character of
the nation he kneaded it ; he cemented and con-
solidated it. They owed him something better than a
code or than legislation : he founded a policy ; he pre-
pared the elements for a glorious and definitive revolu-
tion in 1688, and he alone rendered possible the orderly
triumph, when the hour came, of the patriots of that
epoch. More than any king of that realm did the
Lord Protector contribute to make the haughty char-
acter of the nation pass into its foreign policy, to make
it what it so long boasted of being the arbiter and
moderator of the tempest, the sovereign of the seas.
238 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Celsa sedet JEolus arce. He defied the world, not as
king- slayer, but as Englishman. His sombre character,
whether in gloom or coarse gaiety the tint of the
fanatic or visionary which he put on, which covers the
solid kernel and hides from superficial eyes the sanest
and best-balanced common-sense all this puts him
apart from those heroic figures which are of a kind to
attract the French genius. All the more radically is
he in agreement with the genius of his own race ; he is
like an energetic incarnation of it. No one is embedded
more profoundly in the mosaic of English greatness.
I have said enough and too much of him for the mo-
ment, but Milton is my excuse ; Milton was his poet.
After Milton, Dryden, the many-sided, the prolific,
the flexible, the unequal, the man of transition and
half-and-half, the first in date of the classics, but still
broad and mighty. He has not much cause to com-
plain of M. Taine. The critic makes us understand
well that mixed laborious life that talent which, like
the life, goes somewhat at random, but is ample, abun-
dant, imaginative, vivified by a vigorous sap, nourished
and watered by a copious vein of poetry.
It is rather the great poet of the next age, the classic
in all his correctness and concise elegance Pope who
has grounds for dissatisfaction ; and as one must, under
pain of being monotonous, vary praise with a little
fault-finding, I am going to allow myself to contradict
M. Taine a little on this point.
It is not indeed his elegance and politeness which
displease M. Taine in Pope's person and talent. No
man has better than himself appreciated Addison, the
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 239
prime type of English urbanity, so far as urbanity there
is ; he forms an excellent judgement of Addison, and
his moderate, discreet, moral, well-mannered style, the
quid deceat which he was the first to teach his com-
patriots. He does full justice to the various personages
so well sketched in the Spectator, and always so
English in physiognomy. But when Pope is in question,
M. Taine does not make the effort which a historian of
literature should on occasion exercise upon and against
himself, and it is with a marked disfavour and dislike
that he introduces to us the poet who was long es-
teemed the first of his nation, whom Byron saluted as
still holding that rank.
Nothing is easier than to caricature Pope; but
nothing is more unfair than to take great wits ex-
clusively by way of their defects, or upon the petty
and weak sides of their nature. Ought we to see in
Pope at the first view no more than ' a dwarf four feet
high, crooked, hump-backed, lean, valetudinarian, one
who, when he grew up, seemed hardly capable of living' ?
Is it seemly to begin by abusing his bodily infirmities
to the detriment of his charming wit, and to say, ' He
cannot get up of himself ; a woman has to dress him ;
his legs are so thin that he must have three pairs of
stockings, one over another ; then his body must be
laced up in canvas stays, that he may hold himself
straight, and a flannel waistcoat must be put on
over all ' ? I am not one who would blame a
critic for telling us even in detail something of his
author's constitution ; his good or bad health, which
surely have an influence on his tone and his talent ; but
the fact is, that Pope did not write with his muscles,
240 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
and employed only his unalloyed wit. In the descrip-
tion which I have quoted in an abridged form, I am
shocked only by the words chosen, and by the rough,
discourteous way in which he is treated ; a way which
tends to make him ridiculous in the reader's mind.
Let us leave this style to those writers who care only
to amuse, or to abandon themselves recklessly to their
antipathies. If one had known Horace, I imagine it
would be possible to make some kind of caricature of
him, for he was short of stature, and in his later days
of very full habit. Once more let us come back to
the truth, to that literary truth which never forgets
humanity, and comports with a certain sympathy for all
that deserves it. If we can be just towards the ex-
tinker Bunyan, who in his fanatical visions shows force
and imagination, do not let us, on the other hand,
crush that charming, witty creature, that quintessence
of soul, that drop of keen wit wrapped in cotton-wool,
Pope. Let us not treat him roughly, but as we take
his hand to seat him in our consulting perhaps
operating chair, let us do nothing to make him cry out,
were he yet living. In literature, I should like always
to proportion our method to our subject, and to sur-
round with quite special precautions him who invites
and deserves them.
The natural history of Pope is very simple. Delicate
persons are said to be unhappy, and he was delicate
twice over ; delicate of intellect, delicate and infirm of
body, he was doubly irritable. But what grace, what
taste, what quickness to feel, what accuracy and per-
fection in expressing !
It is true that he was precocious. Is that a crime ?
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 241
Endowed in early childhood with a sweet expression,
and above all with a sweet voice, he was called ' the
little nightingale.' His first teachers were of small
account ; he educated himself. At twelve years he
learned Latin and Greek simultaneously, almost with-
out a tutor ; at fifteen he resolved to go to London, in
order to learn French and Italian sufficiently to read
the authors. His family, retired tradespeople, and by
religion Roman Catholic, were at this time living at a
place in Windsor Forest. This fancy of his was treated
as a strange whim, seeing that his health did not at
that moment allow him to go from home. But he
persevered and accomplished his purpose; he thus
learnt almost everything for himself, wandering among
the authors as he liked, making his own grammars, and
delighting to translate in verse the finest passages
which he came across in Greek or Latin poets. By
sixteen, he says, his taste was as much formed as it
ever became.
In all this I see nothing ridiculous, nothing that does
not do honour to that young and prolific intellect. If
there is such a thing as the literary temperament, no
one ever possessed it drawn in sharper characters or
more clearly defined than Pope. Generally, people
become classicists by the facts of their training and
education ; he was, so to say, called to it, and became
so by a natural and original bent. With the poets, he
read also the critics, and prepared to say his word after
them. He had an early taste for Homer, and read him
in the original ; among the Latins he liked Statius
next to Virgil. At that time he preferred Tasso to
Ariosto, a preference which he always retained.
16
242 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Owing to his position as a papist, he was not
educated at the University, and could not follow the
common road or the ordinary methods of study. But
his precocity as an author brought him at an early age
into contact with poets and persons of renown. He
did no more than see Dryden, who died in 1701, just
before Pope completed his thirteenth year. But the
wonderful child had, from reading him, formed so lofty
and so cherished an idea of him, that he prevailed on
some friends to take him to the coffee-house which
Dryden frequented, and returned overjoyed at having
seen him. He could say with Ovid, Virgilium vidi
tantum. He never spoke of that illustrious predecessor
without complete reverence, and repudiating all notion
of rivalry. ' I learnt versification,' he says, ' wholly
from Dryden's works ; who . . . would probably have
brought it to its perfection, had not he been unhappily
obliged to write so often in haste.' Pope had that
characteristic mark of literary natures, the faithful
adoration of genius.
If he had too keen a dislike for dull authors and bad
poets, he had all the more admiration for the good and
great. He combined the qualities of Boileau and
Malherbe ; it was a bold importation, and something
quite new transplanted on to a free soil. Exposed as
he was to many perils in his childhood, and more than
once in danger of death from accidents, or in conse-
quence of his naturally frail constitution, touching
instances have been preserved of his tender and lasting
gratitude towards those who had shown interest in him
or had aided in preserving him. Whatever may be
said about his critical irritability, and the regrettable
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 243
excesses into which it led him, he had a humane soul,
formed for friendship. Certain facts which were
brought to light after his death, in the attempt to
blacken him, have since been explained to his credit,*
and, taken as a whole, his work speaks for him.
Following the advice given him betimes by a friend,
the poet and critic Walsh, whose acquaintance he
made when he was about fifteen,^ he said to himself
that after all that had been done in poetry, only one
road to excellence was left for him. ' Walsh used to
tell me that . . . though we had several great poets,
we never had any one great poet that was correct, and
he desired me to make that my study and aim.' Pope
followed this advice, and his whole life of fifty- six years
was devoted to this study ; to this noble aim, which he
was able to attain and fulfil.
Can we reproach or blame him for the pains which he
took to this end, to make himself capable, with his weak
health, of this difficult and immortal task ? Yes, he was
attentive to everything, even in conversation ; ay, when a
happy, delicate, or striking thought or expression came
before him or entered his mind, he was in a hurry to
gather it in ! Always striving after improvement and
excellence, he built it up bit by bit, and never voluntarily
suffered the abstraction of a single fragment. He wore
himself out in the work. He rose at night if necessary,
and as he could not wait on himself, he made his atten-
dants rise, even in winter, to write down some thought
which he feared to lose, and which would have escaped
him when he awoke again, for many of our thoughts,
f* See, for instance, Mr. Courthope's Life, pp. 346, 397.]
[t Really seventeen, i.e., in 1705.]
244 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
of our best thoughts, are often drowned and swallowed
up for ever between two sleeps, as effectually as ever
the Egyptians in the Red Sea. I am quite ready to
smile at these excessive pains at this febrile and parsi-
monious carefulness ; but let us smile indulgently, as
befits minds humanized by the practice of letters, who
have themselves known the sweet madness. Let us
not have two weights and two measures. I would say
to M.Taine: You admire Balzac; you quote him more
than once ; you like to bring him in among these
English authors, even when he has no business there.
I take him, then, as an instance familiar to you. I
remember some interesting revelations which I heard
one day about his extraordinary absence of mind and
his egotism when engaged as an author in composing.
How often did he turn up in the middle of the night at
the bedside of the sleeping Jules Sandeau, who was
then living in the same house, and rouse him pitilessly,
with a start, to show and read to him what he had just
produced, all smoking hot ! He had turned life inside
out; for him the reality was the dream.
Perhaps we think this fine, from the point of view of
inspiration and dash ; at all events, it is original, and
shows a singular and powerful faculty of shifting one's
position, which we must admire. Well, when we leave
the creative class, with its blind and, in this instance,
somewhat smoky creations, and deign to enter the serene
and temperate sphere of moral ideas, accurate and lucid
thoughts, lofty or subtle reflections which form the
proper object, and, as Montaigne would say, the quarry
of philosophers and sages, let us not be too severe on
this painstaking and amiable Pope for having so care-
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 245
fully listened to the voice of his own peculiar demon
and genius for having lent an ear to the purely ab-
stract and spiritual inspirations which arise in the
solitude of the study or in the conversation of two
persons strolling in some garden-walk of Tibur or Tus-
culum, when the mind, remaining all the while calm,
feels itself stimulated by the emulation or gentle contra-
diction of a friend. Let us not be scandalized if he
himself, with a sort of ingenuous haste to initiate us
into his constant absorption in letters, makes some con-
fidence like the following :
' When Swift and I were in the country for some time together, I
happened one day to be saying, " That if a man was to take notice
of the reflections that came into his mind on a sudden as he was
walking in the fields, or sauntering in his study, there might be
several of them perhaps as good as his most deliberate thoughts."
On this hint we both agreed to write down all the volunteer re-
flections that should thus come into our heads, all the time we
stayed there. We did so, and this was what afterwards furnished
out the maxims published in our miscellanies. Those at the end
of one volume are mine ; and those in the other, Dr. Swift's.'
These are ingenious pastimes the games played by
men of wit and letters. We are, no doubt, a long way
from Shakespeare, even from Milton ; but I see nothing
in this to give so much scope for ridicule, and in a
history of literature, the literary part, properly so-
called, even when it suggests something a little self-
conscious and artificial, has a right, it would seem, to
find both place and grace. If we come to that, it was
just thus that the younger Pliny and Tacitus, finding
themselves together at the villa on the Lake of Como
or in that house at Laurentum, of which we have so
good a description, might for weeks together have
246 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
jousted and tilted over philosophy and ethics. The
great era of inspiration is past, but the age of calm and
of decadence admits yet of abundant pleasures, and
even, as Tacitus and Swift have shown, of genuine
eloquence.
I have yet one thing more to say, which I think may
be of use, respecting Pope. That name, which repre-
sents ethical poetry poetry correct and ornate in all
its finish, all its charm of diction is, as may well be
imagined, a pretext and a favourable opportunity for
me to maintain a view, which to-day is threatened and
unduly depreciated, after having had too much defer-
ence paid to it. The historical manner of looking at
things has invaded letters at all points ; it now domi-
nates all study, presides over all reading. I do not
combat M. Taine's book on this account ; it is rather a
supplement which I ask him to give with some cautions
for the future. This book of original and audacious
criticism has sprung up like a tree in the open, throw-
ing out all its branches in the direction and to the
benefit of the Anglo-Saxon sap. From this point of
view, Pope's poetry must assuredly look like an aborted
branch : it is the least Anglo-Saxon of all English poetry.
But that is no reason for cutting it off as it stands.
In general, I will say, let us combine our forces, not
oppose them, and let us destroy nothing. By force of
talent you invite us, you compel us to march towards
the grand, the strong, the difficult, towards which,
without you, we should not have progressed so far;
but do not suppress our customary, our pleasant
points of view our Windsor landscapes and our
Twickenham gardens. Let us exalt ourselves on the
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 247
side of the high valleys, the high lands, but let us also
keep our cheerful estates !
In one word, let us not justify that pessimist who
said to me no longer ago than yesterday : ' The
moment is not good for Pope, and it is beginning to
be bad for Horace.'
M. TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH
LITERATURE.
III.
IT must be well understood that when I lay deliberate
stress, supporting it by instances, on the merits of Pope,
I am only indirectly rinding fault with M. Taine. He
has, in fact, recognised all the merits, all the distinctive
features of that fine talent, and one might even borrow
phrases from him to define them ; but his attitude
towards Pope is not what it has been towards the
other great poets whom he has come across up to this
point. He does not take pleasure in replacing him
among his surroundings; he rather depreciates and be-
littles him on the whole, and if he is forced to recognise
a good quality in him, he does not throw his best light
upon it.
I press this point, then, because the danger to-day
lies in the direction of sacrificing those whom I will call
the restrained writers or poets. For a long time they
held the advantage, and all the honours ; one had to
plead for Shakespeare, for Milton, for Dante, even for
Homer. There was no occasion to plead for Virgil,
Horace, Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope, Tasso ; they
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 249
were allowed and recognised by all. Now the cause
has been entirely won for the former, and things are
completely reversed ; the greatest, the primary, reign
and triumph ; even those who are second to them in
invention, but yet are simple and original in thought
and expression. Regnier, Lucretius, are restored to
their proper rank, while it is the restrained, cultivated,
polished, the classics of former days, whom there is a
tendency to class in a lower order, a disposition, if care
be not taken, to treat a little disrespectfully ; relatively
speaking, a certain degree of disdain and contempt is
going near to fall upon them. It seems to me that
there is room enough to contain all, without sacrificing
any ; and that while we render full homage and
unstinted reverence to those great human forces, which
resemble the powers of nature, and like them break forth
in a fashion somewhat rude and uncouth, we should not
cease to honour those other more restrained powers,
which express themselves in a manner less akin to an
explosion, and are clad in elegance and gentleness.
The day that a critic appears possessing the deep
historical and vital feeling for literature which M. Taine
possesses, capable, like him, of pushing his roots down-
ward to the very sources, and in the other direction
spreading open boughs to the sun, but who, at the
same time, will not put in the background I should
rather say, will continue to respect and inhale the
scent of that sober, delicately-perfumed flower which is
Pope's, Boileau's, Fontanes' on that day the perfect
critic will be found ; the reconciliation of the two
schools will be effected. But I am asking for an
impossibility ; it is easy to see that this is a dream.
250 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Pope, meanwhile, remains a true poet ; and under all
his physical defects one of the most refined and beauti-
fully organized men of letters whom the world has yet
seen. It is difficult, I know, to deal with him at the
present day, without meeting many objections. To
begin with, he translated Homer, travestied him, say
some ; and thereupon they crush him with a comparison
to La Motte.* You may take two or three passages of
the original text, and give yourself the honour of an
easy victory. Observe that you are sure beforehand of
gaining this victory, for whatever it is worth, over each
and every translator of Homer. In justice, we ought to
begin by saying that Pope had a perfect feeling and
admiration for Homer ; that his preface is excellent
criticism for his day, and still good to read in ours ;
that he has comprehended admirably the grandeur, the
invention, the fertility of the original, that mighty
primeval universality from which every subsequent
class of poetry has taken its rise. As for his method of
translation in rhyming verses and the way in which he
has executed it, it is of supreme elegance, and that in
itself is a kind of unfaithfulness. Rhyme has led him
into those oppositions, those balanced antitheses within
the turn of measured phrases, which are his own strong
point, but contrary to the broad Homeric manner, to
that full natural river, with all its waves flowing,
continuous, spreading, sonorous. Nor, so far as that
goes, does it seem that William Cowper, with his blank
verse, akin to Milton's somewhat elaborated rhythm,
* [Antoine Houdarde la Motte (1672-1731) produced an abridged
translation of the Iliad in twelve books, prefaced by an essay in
which he sought to prove that Homer was an overrated poet.]
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 251
has, in his turn, succeeded any better in rendering,
not the continuity, but the rapidity of the Homeric
flow.*
The truth is, that a verse translation of Homer is
impossible. It is therefore natural enough that Bentley
should have said, on seeing Pope's Iliad, ' You must
not call that Homer.' None the less is Pope's work
a marvellous performance in itself, and the man who
executed it deserves to be spoken of, even in this
connection, with all respect and a fair share of eulogy.
Pope may have shown himself too artificial in trans-
lating Homer ; but what was not artificial was the
sincere emotion with which he read him. He said one
day to a friend : * I always was particularly struck with
that passage in Homer where he makes Priam's grief
for the loss of Hector break out into anger against his
attendants and sons ; and could never read it without
weeping for the distress of that unfortunate old prince. '*f
The narrator adds, ' He read it then, and was inter-
rupted by his tears.'
No example can show better than his how active a
faculty is that of emotional, delicate criticism. Those
who have nothing to show for it cannot feel and
perceive in this fashion. There is a story that when
Shelley first heard Christabel recited, a certain magnifi-
cent and dreadful passage caused him to swoon with
terror. In that swoon was the whole of A lastor. Pope,
* I borrow these judgements from one of the most subtle and
accurate of English critics. See Mr. Matthew Arnold's Lectures
on Translating Homer ; the final word on Pope's translation will be
found there.
t [Spence, from whom the other anecdotes of Pope are taken.
The passage is Iliad ii., 239, sqq.~\
25 2 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
no less sensitive in his own way, could not reach the
end of that passage in the Iliad without bursting into
tears. No man can be a critic to this point without
being a poet.*
He gave a good proof of this in the Essay on Criticism,
composed at the age of twenty-one, but kept in his desk
for several years. To my thinking, it is quite as good
as the Epistle to the Pisones, which we call Horace's Art
of Poetry, or as Boileau. Speaking of Boileau, are we
to accept that extraordinary verdict of a clever man,
that contemptuous opinion for which M. Taine, by
quoting it, makes himself responsible, and which he
does not shrink from endorsing as he goes along:
' There are two kinds of verse in Boileau ; the more
numerous might be those of a good fourth-form boy,
the less numerous those of a good pupil in the rhetoric
class ' ? The clever man who speaks thus it is
M. Guillaume Guizot does not feel the poetry of
Boileau. I will go further, he cannot feel any poet qua
poet. I can understand a refusal to make the crafts-
manship everything in poetry, but I cannot at all
understand, when an art is in question, the refusal to
take the art into consideration at all, and the deprecia-
tion to this extent of those perfect workmen who excel
therein. The shortest way would be to suppress at one
stroke all versified poetry ; if not, speak with respect of
those who have possessed the secret of versification.
Boileau was of that small number, and Pope no less.
How many judicious and subtle remarks, containing
* I avail myself here of an interesting work which I have just
received, Mr. Edward Dowden's Considerations on the Critical
Spirit in Literature.
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 253
eternal truths, do I gather as I read him ! With what
terseness, conciseness, elegance, are they expressed,
and once for all ! I will point out a few :
' In Poets, as true Genius is but rare,
True Taste as seldom is the Critic's share ;
Both must alike from heav'n derive their light,
These born to judge, as well as those to write.
* * * * *
Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past,
Turned Critics next, and prov'd plain fools at last.'
Here is an answer in advance to those artists eaten
up with pride and vanity, impatient of any remarks,
such as we have known ; who mix up everything, and
have only one definition to give of a critic : ' What is a
critic ? An incapable person who has failed to be an
artist.' For every overweening artist this definition of
the critic had only too much interest ; and the result
during many years was complete licence, a kind of
debauch of talent.
Speaking of Homer and his relation to Virgil, Pope
fixed the true line, the right road for classical talent,
which loves to abide by traditional order :
' Be Homer's works your study and delight,
Read them by day and meditate by night ;
Thence form your judgment, thence your notions bring,
And trace the Muses upwards to their spring.
Still with itself compared, his text peruse,
Or let your comment be the Mantuan Muse.
When first young Maro sung of kings and war,
E'er warning Phoebus touched his trembling ears,
Perhaps he seemed above the Critic's law,
And but from Nature's fountains scorned to draw ;
But when t' examine every part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.'
254 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
Surely the poetry of the second period, the period
of polish and smoothness, has never been better
expressed and exemplified. The poet-critic attributes
even a little too much to Homer, when in connection
with his subject he recollects, in order to refute, a dictum
of Horace, and says that where we see a fault or a want
of care, there is, perhaps, only an artistic stratagem :
' Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.'
Pope has, in many passages full of a noble fire,
defined and traced out the fine part which the true
critic should play :
' A perfect Judge will read each work of wit
With the same spirit that its author writ,
Survey the Whole^ nor seek slight faults to find
Where nature moves, and rapture warms the mind ;
Nor lose, for that malignant dull delight,
The gen'rous pleasure to be charmed with wit.'
Or take this fine portrait, ideal of its kind, which every
professional critic ought to frame and hang up in his
study :
*
' But where s the man, who counsel can bestow,
Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know ?
Unbias'd, or by favour, or by spite ;
Not dully prepossess'd, or blindly right ;
Tho' learned, well-bred ; and tho' well-bred, sincere ;
Modestly bold, and humanly severe :
Who to a friend his faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the merit of a foe ?
Blest with a taste exact, yet unconfin'd ;
A knowledge both of books and human-kind ;
Gen'rous converse ; a soul exempt from pride ;
And love to praise, with reason on his side?
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 255
To be a good and perfect critic, as Pope knew well,
it is not enough to cultivate and extend the intelligence,
the mind must also be purged of every bad passion, of
every equivocal sentiment ; the heart must be kept
sound and honest.
No man can be so keenly, so delicately sensitive to
beauty, without being terribly shocked by evil and
ugliness. Exquisite enjoyment must be paid for. The
man whose heart is as open, as sensitive to beauties as
was Pope's, even to the point of being moved to tears
by them, is equally sensitive to faults, to the point of
annoyance and irritation. He who most keenly enjoys
the perfume of the rose will be the first to be offended
by evil odours. There has thus, perhaps, been no one
who has felt and suffered from literary folly in so high
a degree as Pope. But what was he to do in presence
of bad authors, such as in our own day we no longer
dare to call simply fools, and who in truth have a suffi-
cient tincture of the universal cleverness to save them
from being more than half-fools ? Pope, who, like so
many moralists, does not always follow his own maxims,
has given us in his Essay some excellent precepts on
this subject. He tells us that the better course is often
to withhold criticism, to let the fool have his fling, and
expatiate at his ease :
1 'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain,
And charitably let the dull be vain :
Your silence there is better than your spite,
For who can rail so long as they can write ?'
A warning to us, the impatient and susceptible, when
we pause to attack one of those insipid, self-contented,
256 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
inexhaustible scribes, whom we have no wish even to
name.
Pope sums up for us his whole theory, which is that
of Virgil, of Racine, of Raphael, of all those who in
matters of art are not for realism, for frankness at any
price, even that of crudity, for force at any price, even
that of violence :
' True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft' was thought, but ne'er so well express'd ;
Something, whose truth convinc'd at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of the mind.'
He is in favour of selection, not of excess ; even excess
of wit or talent.
' For works may have more wit than does 'em good,
As bodies perish through excess of blood/
Pope's economy of words is not less remarkable than
the elegance of his versification. Of him, as of Mal-
herbe, it may be said :
' He showed what power well-ordered words possess.'
But he has over Malherbe, as over Boileau, the
advantage of writing in a language very rich in mono-
syllables. By his fashion of using these little words he
shows himself very English in style ; and I think I may,
without going too far, say that his vocabulary, though
* It is curious to see how we now stand in regard to Pope and in
opposition to his theory of poetry. Men of powerful talent have not
hesitated to rank exaggeration as a virtue. Balzac would not allow
that Pascal had a right to look for balance or a mean between
contrary extremes, in the minds of great men ; and only the other
day a disciple of Balzac was trouncing Vauvenargues for saying
that faculties were not enough, one should know how to economize
them.
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 257
containing more abstract terms than is usual with other
poets, is based on the best and purest vernacular. He
knew well, moreover, that this attempt at regularity,
this exact codification of taste, was a new thing unprac-
tised and long unheard-of among his own people. ' In
France,' he tells us :
' The rules a nation born to serve obeys,
And Boileau still in right of Horace sways.
But we, brave Britons ! foreign laws despis'd,
And kept unconquer'd, and unciviliz'd,
Fierce for the liberties of wit, and bold,
We still defyd the Romans^ as of old.'
This had at any rate been true, quite recently, until
Dryden came. He ends modestly by saying that his
Muse will be :
' Content, if thence th' unlearn'd their wants may view,
The learn'd reflect on what before they knew :'
a sentiment that has been rendered in a single excel-
lent Latin verse, which might be taken for Horace :
' Indocti discant, et ament meminisse periti.'
In this Essay of poetic and critic art, I have passed
over certain charming models of versification and imita-
tive poetry which the poet has so well coupled with
his teaching, that the precept bears the example with it.
Among them is a celebrated passage, perhaps the most
perfect of its style in modern poetry. Addison quotes
it approvingly in No. 253 of the Spectator.
' 'Tis not enough, no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows ;
17
258 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labours, and the words move slow ;
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.'
Such bits, it will be easily understood, are untrans-
latable. When Delille, with all his ability, imitating
this passage in the fourth book of his Homme des
Champs, gives us :
' Peignez en vers Idgers 1'amant le*ger de Flore ;
Qu'un doux raisseau murmure en vers plus doux encore. ..."
he misses at the outset the precision and restraint which
makes Pope say simply ' Zephyr,' and not ' Flora's
lover.' Pope must no more be confounded with Delille,
than Cresset with Dorat. It is as with wines, there is
' bouquet ' and * bouquet.' The bouquet is a small
thing in itself, but to the taste it is everything.
As may well be supposed, I have no intention of
going all through Pope's principal works. What I
wish to remark, following Campbell, is that if he is not
a universal poet in that sense of the term which most
strikes us at the present day, he is none the less truly a
poet, even though he belongs to a less stormy, less
passionate, less dazzling order, and employs an ornate,
accurate, and pure style. In range of ideas he is far
superior to Boileau, no less than in taste for the pic-
turesque ; but some have found the same faults in him
as we ourselves, with all the first impertinence of
beginners, once charged against Boileau. A poet, who
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 259
thought it his duty to edit Pope, or at any rate wrote a
preface to him, the Rev. W. L. Bowles, one of the
precursors of the romantic movement in England, has
picked many quarrels with his author, and cast many
shortcomings in his teeth.
' No one,' he says, ' can stand pre-eminent as a great poet unless
he has not only a heart susceptible of the most pathetic or most
exalted feelings of Nature, but an eye attentive to, and familiar with,
every external appearance that she may exhibit, in every change of
season, every variation of light and shade, every rock, every tree,
every leaf, in her solitary places. He who has not an eye to observe
these, and who cannot with a glance distinguish every diversity of
every hue in the variety of her beauties, must so far be deficient in
one of the essential qualities of a poet.'
Pope is assuredly not without a sense of the pic-
turesque ; he had a feeling for nature : he loved it and
described it in his Windsor Forest. Condemned by his
health to a sedentary life and unable to travel to the
grander scenes, he had the taste for rural nature as it
displayed itself, smiling and fresh, around him ; he even
drew and painted landscapes. For a year and a half
he took lessons from his friend Jervas ; and when asked
one day, 'Which gives you the most pleasure, poetry
or painting ?' he replied : ' I really can't well say ;
both of them are extremely pleasing.' Still there is no
doubt that he was far from fulfilling the detailed pro-
gramme which Bowles sets out for the poet, or the
picturesque conditions which he requires. Words-
worth alone, since his day, has been equal to that.
Bowles himself composed some charming sonnets in
this line, of great variety ; and he did not observe
that he was erecting his own taste and personal gift
26o SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
into a general law and theory. As often happens,
he took himself for a type.
Let us confound neither styles nor natures, nor de-
mand from one organization the fruits of another. Let
us apply to Pope that equitable precept of his own :
' In evYy work regard the writer's End,
Since none can compass more than they intend.'
Though a friend of Bolingbroke aud Swift, Pope
does not follow their philosophy or their bold specu-
lations to the end. When versifying Bolingbroke's
ideas in combination with those of Leibnitz, he does
not go beyond the limits of a benevolent and intelligent
deism. The Essay on Man, as it came forth from his
thought and from his hand, in its honourable mode-
ration, its incompleteness, its ornate gravity, has long
been a possession of French literature, and is familiar
to us by Fontanes' translation and the fine preface which
he has put to it. How many accurate definitions, how
many proverbs in verse have been taken from it ! But
it is not my favourite among Pope's works. Where he
is at his best, with full originality and without leaving
what was his true field of observation, is in the Moral
Epistle. M. Taine has rightly called special attention
to that in which he treats of men's characters and the
ruling passion.* Pope has therein, after the manner of
La Bruyere, but with the added difficulty, no less than
charm, of rhyme, constantly packed the maximum of
thought into the minimum of space. This is the prin-
ciple of his method.
The Epistle in question shows us, by a string of
* The Epistle to LordCobham.
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 261
examples or aptly chosen remarks, that whoever would
thoroughly know a single man, an individual, is liable to
be deceived at all points : to mistake appearance, habits,
opinions, language, even actions, which often are directly
contrary to the motive of them. There is only one
thing which never deceives ; it is, when you can seize
it, the secret spring in each case, the ruling and domi-
nant passion, when such exists in him. Then indeed
you have the key to everything. And in a series of
examples he shows us each man remaining as he grows
older more and more faithful to this secret informing
force, which survives everything, and drops the mask as
years go on, which is the last thing to become extinct
in us, and which, as it were, sets its seal on our last
breath.
' Time, that on all things lays his lenient hand,
Yet tames not this ; it sticks to our last sand.
Consistent in our follies and our sins,
Here honest Nature ends as she begins.'
Pope's political views were cool and indifferent
enough, but above all, respectable and eminently
literary. Thrown much with party - men, Tories and
Whigs, and on intimate terms with the former, he
did not take up any subject of debate very keenly. He
has expressed his teaching in the famous lines :
' For forms of government let fools contest ;
Whate'er is best administer^, is best.
Thus in later days we shall find the sceptic Hume, with
allusion to Claudian's lines :
' Nunquam libertas gratior exstat
Quam sub rege pio,'
262 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
observing that ' the best of republics is after all a good
prince.' Pope spoke of Cromwell as an illustrious
criminal ' damn'd to everlasting fame.' The sphere of
ideas in which he lived pleasantly, in his grotto and on
his hill, is the exact opposite of the region of bright
and burning light in which Milton dwelt solitary, like
a prophet on the high places. But the historian of
literature, an indefatigable traveller, always open to
the most diverse entertainment, takes the great and
distinguished men of past times as they present them-
selves to him, each in his own home ; he knows that
there is more than one climate, more than one abode
for great and noble intellects.
Pope was undoubtedly the poet of his day, of a bril-
liant and well - balanced era, of a memorable period
when English society, without abjuring itself as under
Charles II., entered into a regulated intercourse with the
Continent, and opened its door in respect both of form
and ideas, to an exchange at once advantageous and
dignified. Pope is what has been called an enlightened
spirit. He was made for select friendships, and they
did not fail him. We can see in his works what care
and what elegance he imported into his epistolary cor-
respondence ; he adapted the turn and the tone of his
letters to those to whom he addressed them. His
correspondence does not appear to me to have as yet
been collected and edited as it deserves.* If he was
a man intimate with the great, he had nothing about
him of the ' public character.' Somewhere or other he
applies to himself a phrase of Seneca, about men of
* [This want has now been supplied by Messrs. Elwin and Court-
hope's great edition of Pope's Works (London : Murray).]
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 263
extreme timidity : ' Tarn umbratiles sunt ut putent in tur-
bido esse quicquid in luce est.' There are some persons
who love a life in the shade so much as to deem that
to be in the light or in the cloud is all one.* He adds,
that some men, like some pictures, are better adapted
to remain in a corner than to be shown in full daylight.
Among those he reckoned himself. Charming as he
was in private conversation, he could no more have
faced public speaking than M. de la Rochefoucauld.
He felt himself incapable, he said, of reciting before
a dozen friends (if it had been so arranged beforehand)
what he could have recited admirably to the same
number taken three by three. When called as witness
in a famous case, he could not utter the few words
which he had to say, without catching himself up two
or three times. But in private life he was gracefulness
and accuracy itself. His judgements on authors, his
remarks on all subjects, particularly on literary matters,
are exquisitely correct. Of Chaucer, Spenser, Cowley,
Milton, even Shakespeare, he talks enchantingly, and
touches each to the quick with impartial taste. To
appreciate Pope as he was in intimate discourse, one
must read Spence's Anecdotes.
In all this my wish has only been to show that it was
possible to speak of Pope with friendship and sympathy ;
but before taking a fitting leave of M. Taine, I must add
a few further remarks and reflections.
The third volume calls for, and makes us wish for, a
* [The passage is from Seneca, Ep. 3 ; but all the editions I have
seen give the opening words, 'Quidam adeo in latebras refugerunt.'
Nor can I trace Pope's alleged quotation of it. TRANSLATOR.]
264 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
fourth.* Modern English Literature, the literature of
the nineteenth century, does not in fact occupy as much
space as it has the right to demand. Even some parts
of the eighteenth might have claimed further develop-
ment. Though very fair in what he says about the chief
poetical names which come in his way, the critic, taken
up with the unity of his plans, seems in too great a
hurry to arrive at the conclusion. Gray, the melan-
choly, the delicate, so original a poet, is smothered ; nor
is there more connection between Gray and Lamartine
than between a pearl and a lake. Collins is lumped
with ten others ; he was worth the trouble of discrim-
ination. Goldsmith's poetry similarly deserved a brief
visit in its home, for the sake of his village of Auburn.
If the Scot, Robert Burns, has been vigorously esti-
mated and worthily classed, it seems to me that William
Cowper does not get a sufficient and proportionate
share in the revival of natural taste, of real poetic ex-
pression. The Lakists, also, are too tightly packed.
Walter Scott is treated with severity, and not at all in
accordance with our recollections. M. Taine does not
give him the rank which is his due as a romance writer.
Generally speaking, what is lacking in this final part is
proportion. The philosophic critic, having brought all
his forces to bear on the difficult parts on the high
levels, as we may say descends rather too rapidly those
pleasant slopes, rich as they yet are in happy undu-
lations and recesses. He disdains to halt on them,
forgetting that for us French readers they would have
been the most accessible regions, bringing us by a series
* This has now appeared.
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 265
of interesting stages continuously closer to our own
point of view. This fault, if the author likes, is easily
reparable. In any case, M. Taine's work, in its original
integrity, will last as one of the most original works of
our time.
Lastly,* I cannot quit a work of this kind, and an
author of this merit, without saying something about
an academical incident which has made some stir.
This book, it is well to recall, after being submitted to
a Commission and read by each of its members, was at
once, and unanimously, considered by them worthy of
one of the prizes which it is the special duty of the
French Academy to award. Observe that the prize in
question, by the terms of the founder's will, involves
no conditions save those of learning and talent. This
proposal voted, I repeat, unanimously by its own
Commission the Academy, assembled in large number,
thought fit, after a long debate, to reject ; basing its
decision on certain principles of philosophic orthodoxy
which seemed to it to be infringed and violated by
the author's system. I am not unduly astonished by
this decision, in which distinguished colleagues, sailing
under all kinds of flags, concurred. Eclectics, Vol-
tairians, Gallicans, some simply Catholics, united all
together in one coalition the majority, too, declaring
that they had not read the work considered themselves
nevertheless authorized, nay, compelled in conscience
to reject it on the mere statement of the objections. I
* [The remarks which follow have no direct bearing on English
literature. They are, however, retained, as an interesting presenta-
tion, from within, of an aspect of academies which was overlooked
by Mr. Arnold in his well-known essay.]
266 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
was detained by my work, and prevented from taking
part in the discussion. If I had been able to be present,
far from disavowing M. Taine, though but in part, as
some even of his most able defenders seemed to do,
I would have taken him as he brings himself before
us, and endeavoured to present and enforce (less in his
interest than in that of the distinguished assembly) one
single consideration which I think is worth pondering.
There is still a moral advance to be made in our
nineteenth century, which claims to be a century of
tolerance, but is yet only halfway to it. Think of the
time when a dominant religion forbade all dogmatic
and philosophic dissent ; when every heretic or schis-
matic or misbeliever was crushed. Even after tole-
ration was extended, more or less, to the different
Christian communions, there were still Jews to go on
reviling, to annoy whenever you met them, to damage
as you pleased in public esteem. In the last century, a
hundred years ago, it was still legally a crime, a blot,
a ground for antipathies, to be a deist, like Rousseau
in Emile, or Marmontel in Belisaire I am coupling
opinions, not talents. At the present day, deism,
Mosaism, are accepted well enough, and saluted respect-
fully when met with. There remains the accusation of
Spinozism ; at this everyone crosses himself or hides
his face. Is it not almost time, gentlemen of enlighten-
ment, leaders of intelligence, to make one effort more,
and set us all an example ? Yes, there exists in truth
a class, small enough in numbers, of steady, sober philo-
sophers, living plainly, avoiding intrigue, occupied like
Woepcke, who died lately, and of whom M. Taine
M. TAINE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 267
talked to us the other day,* in the sole and scrupu-
lous search after truth in old books, in the thankless
study of texts, in difficult experiments ; men who, de-
voting themselves to the cultivation of their understand-
ing, and weaned from all other passions, attend to the
general laws of the world and the universe, and be-
cause in this universe nature is no less living than
history, attend of necessity to the task of listening to
her, and studying the thought and soul of the world
in those regions where she manifests herself to them ;
men who are stoics at heart, who seek to practise the
Good, to act and think as well and as accurately as
they can, even without the attraction of a future indi-
vidual reward, but satisfied and happy to feel them-
selves at one with themselves, in accord and in harmony
with the general order, as Marcus Aurelius, the divine
expressed it in his own day, and as Spinoza too felt it.
These men, I ask you, quite apart from any special creed,
any philosophic profession of faith, is it fair to brand
them at the outset with an odious appellation, and in
virtue of this cast them out, or at most tolerate them
only as those are tolerated and amnestied whose errors
and faults are admitted ? Have they not earned their
place with us, their corner in the sun ? Have they not
a right, generous philosophers of the eclectic school,
whom for perfect moral disinterestedness and great-
ness of soul I like to compare with them, to be treated
at least on the same footing with yourselves, and
* Journal des Dtbats, May 14, 1864. [Franz Woepcke, a German
settled in Paris, was an eminent mathematician and student of the
history of mathematics. He died in 1864, aged 38.]
268 SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
honoured equally with your school for the purity of
their teaching, for the uprightness of their intentions,
and for the innocence of their lives ? There is the
final step of progress worthy of the nineteenth century
which I would fain see accomplished.
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
Saint e-Beuve, C.A.
PR
-99-
Select essays,
.S3
Saint e-Beuve, C.A.
Select essays.
PR
99^
.S3
