his only reflection is, that affection is short lived, and happiness will tarnish. Thus throughout the whole book there is a taint of melancholy, an exhalation, as it were, of death, that speaks not of health, but of disease.

Though, however, this is the prevailing spirit of Joseph Delorme's writings, yet there are times when he seems to forget that it is his self-appointed mission

To weep away a life of care;'

times when his young heart, not altogether frozen, warms with belief in something, be it love, poetry, or religion. These better sentiments, of which the germs are thus to be found in M. SainteBeuve's earlier work, burst into full leaf and blossom in the 'Consolations' which he published a year afterwards. The title itself is a prognostication of better things-an augury which the long dedicatory epistle to Victor Hugo realises and confirms. No longer does the author sit at the feet of Werther and yearn for death. He is comforted after the sorrows he has passed through, comforted both for this world and for the next. The sanctifying influence of his poet-friend has led him first to take an interest in the living world around, and then by a natural transition to find rest in the sublime truths of religion. He believes and is happy. Thus M. Sainte-Beuve ascribes the state of mind which produced the Consolations' entirely to Victor Hugo's influence, and four or five of the pieces composing the volume are dedicated either to him or to Madame Hugo. But the poems themselves, both in the language and the line of thought, have, as it seems to us, much greater analogy with those of Lamartine. Not that M. Sainte-Beuve, in passing into other fields of art, had left behind his peculiar turn of thought. Though the common everyday occurrences of life now suggested very different thoughts to what they had done previously, yet they still formed the ground-work of his songs. But from the deep though vague religious tone that pervades the various pieces, from the readiness with which any subject becomes a text for praise and prayer, from the frequent allusions to Cherubim and Seraphim and the glories of the sanctuary—from all this, as also from the more equable and harmonious flow of the verse, it seems to us that M. Sainte-Beuve, in writing the Consolations,' had courted the influence of Lamartine rather than Victor Hugo.

A critic of great ability, M. Planche, has expressed a very decided preference for the Consolations' over the volumes of verse by which it was preceded and followed.* Nevertheless,

See the Revue des Deux Mondes' for the 1st of September, 1851.

we

we are not sure that, regarded merely as pieces of artistic workmanship, the more religious poems are as a rule the best. They are clearer and more direct in aim; but then they are less subtle and original. But that the Consolations' is in every sense better than the 'Pensées d'Août,' by which it was succeeded after an interval of seven years, is a point respecting which we entertain no doubt at all. The 'Pensées' are characterised by a hazy indistinctness, a certain prosaic frigidity, an evident disenchantment. The writer has now plucked the fruit and tasted it, but finds it crumble to ashes between his teeth. Truth he is discovering to be a phantom; religion, a broken reed; friendship, an empty name; most loving,' as Shakespeare said, 'mere folly;' success, the meed of the undeserving, and worth very little when won. In short, as in the poems of Joseph Delorme we might trace the dawn of the Consolations,' so in the Pensées : we enter into the twilight of M. Sainte-Beuve's present opinions. We advance towards the time when he will be ready to cry with the monarch of disenchanted sages, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

6

To sum up generally the character of M. Sainte-Beuve's poetry, all that skill can give the writer he has. He is ingenious, delicate, thoughtful: every portion of his productions shows evidences of the most careful workmanship. But that mysterious something which tells the reader, if he be ever so slightly attentive to such things, that he is in the presence of one whom God and not man has made a poet, is, so far as we can trust our own impressions, wanting. There is scarcely any one who, on careful inspection, would not admit that there were beauties in the 'Poésies Complètes de Sainte-Beuve ;' there are few whom those beauties would carry away. And now let us go back to 1829.

In that year our author began what he has called a 'literary campaign' in the 'Revue de Paris.' He had given up writing for the Globe' some two years previously, apparently on enrolling himself among Victor Hugo's disciples; and now that this new periodical was started, he was free to become a contributor. Indeed, he took the place of honour in the infant undertaking, for the first article of the first number (April, 1829) came from his pen. The subject (Boileau) is typical of those which he generally treated for this review, just as the article itself is a fair

See especially the poem addressed to the Abbé Eustache B. Though the 'Pensées d'Août' were first published in 1837, yet several additions have been made in subsequent editions. In these additions the tendency we have indicated is, as might be expected, even more marked than in the poems that originally formed part of the book.

specimen

specimen of the literary portrait'-the combination of biography and criticism-in which he excels. But of that more anon. Now, though M. Sainte-Beuve speaks of this 'campaign' of the Revue de Paris' as being toute romantique, and seems to consider that he went a great deal too far in his critical remarks on Boileau, Corneille, Racine, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, and the other demigods whom the classical party delighted to honour, yet on the whole he was really very moderate. Indeed these earlier essays contain much sound sense and good criticism, besides being written in a purer and less elaborate style than their successors of the next few years. How long he continued to contribute to this periodical we do not precisely know; but in 1830 his mind opened to other influences besides those of romanticism, and he went back to the Globe,' which had adopted an entirely new 'platform.' The success of its doctrinaire principles by the revolution of July had dispersed its contributors and editorial staff as effectually as the most disastrous of defeats. They had for the greater part relinquished journalism for government, and the paper had changed hands, and become the organ of the Saint-Simonians. This economical, religious, and political sect, the monstrous offspring of a period of social disintegration, was then in the zenith of its ephemeral prosperity, and had many respectable as well as clever disciples, not a few of whom have since won well-merited fame as writers and thinkers. Nor had Père Enfantin, the great high priest of the religion, yet begun to alienate them, and disgrace the movement, by preaching what two of his indignant adherents stigmatised as 'organised adultery' and 'vice reduced to a system.' In short, Saint-Simonianism was still an imposing and even a growing edifice, when M. Sainte-Beuve, ever greedy of new intellectual pasture, and never satisfied with what he had already obtained, joined the moonstruck' sect. For a brief season he appears to have felt some of the zeal of a neophyte, speaking the speech and talking the vague nonsense of his new friends. But soon his native good sense seems to have perceived that the whole thing was only the fevered dream of a diseased age, a most undesirable Utopia.

From the root and branch radicalism of the Saint-Simonians M. Sainte-Beuve is said to have passed to the more reasonable radicalism of Armand Carrel.* This must have been towards

*The fact of M. Sainte-Beuve's connexion with the 'National,' a fact asserted by some of his biographers, is difficult to verify. He himself makes, so far as we can discover, no allusion to it; and a reference to the National' itself would scarcely help us, as at that date French newspaper articles did not, as now, bear heir authors' signatures.

1831, when that haughty and combative journalist was gradually entering on the course of systematic opposition to Louis Philippe's government, which he pursued to the day of his death. It was a foolish and suicidal policy. But, fortunately for himself and for his fame, Carrel did not live to see the evils which his factiousness had contributed to produce. He did not live to be taught by the bitter experiences of 1848, 1849, and 1851, how unfit his countrymen were for the republic of which he dreamed. M. Sainte-Beuve was, it appears, for a short time carried away by the new stream upon which he had launched; attended liberal demonstrations, and penned liberalism, and, we have seen it stated, more than liberalism, for the National.' This, however, cannot have lasted long. Our author has always been too much of a littérateur to take any very prominent part in politics. And besides, his literary views were entirely at variance with those of Carrel. For, by an interesting contrast, the latter, though revolutionary in all that pertained to matters of government, was a stanch conservative in the world of letters.

It was also in 1831 that M. Sainte-Beuve began to write for the nascent 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' He was one among the many brilliant recruits whose services had been secured by that most successful of editors, M. Buloz. Accordingly we find that, from the first, our author wrote much and wrote frequently for the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' This he continued to do for some seventeen years; and even now he occasionally revisits the scene of his earlier labours; as witness the article on Alfred de Vigny's posthumous volume of poems, which he wrote for the 'Revue' in the earlier part of last year. Most of these contributions have been republished in the 'Portraits Contemporains' and 'Portraits Littéraires,' where they form seven volumes of varied, able, and generally very indulgent criticism. These seven volumes constitute, as it were, the introduction to the 'Causeries du Lundi,' of which we shall have further occasion to speak.

Notwithstanding the variety of phases through which M. Sainte-Beuve's mind had already passed, it had not yet reached that more philosophical phase where it could exist unsupported by external influence. He still required some master-soul on which to lean, some hero to be the object of his temporary worship; and this time his choice fell upon La Mennais. Such a selection—and the remark in a modified degree applies equally to his previous cultus of Victor Hugo-can only have been made on the rule of contraries. The democratic priest's most

salient

salient mental characteristic was his singular narrowness of view. He believed in the absolute truth of his own opinions so intensely, that he could not help regarding all who differed from himself as either great fools or gross knaves. There is certainly no such peculiarity in M. Sainte-Beuve's mind; and probably he was attracted towards La Mennais by that fiery earnestness of conviction of which he felt himself to be incapable. The period when this attraction took place was, as our author has explained in a passage of great beauty,* one of the most decisive in the history of the illustrious Abbé. It was when he had just returned from Rome, to find his dearest hopes of instituting an alliance between Romanism and democracy shattered. It was when the deadly struggle between submission to Papal infallibility on the one hand, and consciousness of right on the other, was beginning to wage in his breast. As yet, however, the former still maintained the upper hand. The old Ultramontane principles, of which he had been the most powerful champion, still kept their shaken hold upon his mind and heart. It therefore happened that when M. Sainte-Beuve, who had recently been sojourning among the Saint-Simonians and the republicans of the National, entered into the little world of La Mennais, he entered into what was comparatively a very Catholic world. And this Catholicism, as there is abundant evidence to show, produced a strong and tolerably lasting impression on his mind—an impression in which there mingled, doubtless, recent reminiscences of the spirit that had prompted the Consolations.' Nor did M. Sainte-Beuve's faith yield entirely to the storm that tore his master's up by the roots and scattered it abroad. Though the echoes of that tempest may be discovered by an attentive ear in the 'Pensées d'Août,'† yet in the two first volumes of 'Port Royal' there is, as we shall have occasion to sec, a prevailing tone of religious asceticism which belongs essentially to the Church of Rome. This is the more surprising, as the writer had been a very near spectator of La Mennais's struggles, doubts, and ultimate apostasy. When the latter, after many days and weeks of gloomy and anxious meditation, had at last determined to raise the standard of revolt, M. Sainte-Beuve was one of the first whom he took into his confidence. To him was entrusted the task of finding an Editor for the 'Paroles d'un Croyant,' and seeing it through the press-the 'Paroles d'un Croyant,' that extraordinary pamphlet which acted

* Article on Maurice de Guérin in the 12th vol. of the Causeries du Lundi. † As for instance where the author says:

'Si le Christ m'attendrit, Rome au moins m'embarrasse.'