V.

In 1830 the disciples of the Count of Saint-Simon (who were, as we should say, a band of unorthodox Christian Socialists) bought the great Liberal newspaper, the 'Globe,' Sainte-Beuve's Globe sérieux.' Round the deal table in the office he met not only his old acquaintance, Pierre Leroux, the humanitarian philosopher, who had founded the paper with Dubois, but Jouffroy the idealist, Quinet, Fourier, Auguste Comte, with all the Saint-Simonians; Enfantin and his disciples. The Saint-Simonians dreamed of an Utopia, where the rich should not be quite so rich and the poor not quite so poor; where every man should work, and every man enjoy leisure; no one starve, and no one perish of ennui. In this ideal world, woman was to be the equal of man, with all his rights and all her duties. It was a system of Collectivism, a vast brotherhood in which all men and women were to enjoy all things in common. As a living force, their society lasted only about five years, but it gave birth to the two greatest movements of the nineteenth century, Socialism and Positivism. Sainte-Beuve was a sympathetic spectator. 'I 'was present,' he was to say a few years later, 'at the birth of a religion. The Saint-Simonians taught me how to under'stand Christianity and Port-Royal.'

6

Nothing delighted Sainte-Beuve so much as to quaff an idea at its source, before it had been canalised, contaminated, and dispensed to the general public. When that stage was reached-when the spring was captured and the theory laid on in every household-Sainte-Beuve lost his interest and, hazel-twig in hand, went tapping untrodden ground for some new well to discover. Toujours en quête de quelque 'grande âme à épouser,' he espoused, temporarily at least, the cause of the Saint-Simonians, more, perhaps, by an effort of will and by a curiosity of the intellect than by a vocation of the heart. He hoped this great new interest would dispel the fumes and forces of a forbidden passion. When he went to Brussels in 1831 it was to stay in the house of the Saint-Simonians; thence he wrote to Victor Hugo:

'Je ne suis pas saint-simonien classé, ni ne le serai, soyez tranquille, bien que les aimant beaucoup et logé dans leur maison. Je ne sais pour combien de temps je suis ici. Il y a des jours où il me prend idée qu'on y pourrait vivre et travailler comme ailleurs.'

Sainte-Beuve divided his sympathies between the Saint

Simonians and a band of young Liberal Catholics, under the Abbé de Lamennais: J'ai traversé, ou plutôt côtoyé, 'le Saint-Simonisme et presque aussitôt le monde de Lamen'nais, encore très catholique,' he confesses in his 'Derniers 'Portraits.' The Revolution of July had suddenly let loose many forces long pent and compressed under the pious despotism of Charles X. The Jesuits had disappeared with the King, but the Liberal Catholics were at the head of a social movement inspired by a noble passion for the happiness of other men.

Lamennais was at that time one of the most imposing figures in France-a sort of Savonarola, a fiery yet tender Apostle, taking his religion chiefly on the social side, burning with the desire to save society and to make of the Christian faith what Christ had left it, a school of fraternity and equality. The last shall the first, and the first last.' The words were ringing in the brain of Lamennais as though he had heard them for the first time. The Revolution had unsealed his ears to them. Until close on 1830 he had preached the gospel of submission to authority.

For, before 1830, the Catholic Church in France had appeared dependent on the legitimate monarchy; but the Revolution had startled Lamennais into a sort of prophetic socialism. He and his disciple Lacordaire forthwith unshackled the religious idea and dissociated Church and State. They did for an hour that which St. Francis had done for an age. They severed the ideas of temporal and spiritual power, and steeped Christianity in the founts of Freedom.

Lamennais' great idea was to reach the working class and to get hold of the youth of France. He started a popular newspaper, democratic and dithyrambic: 'L'Avenir.' He invented a scheme of education which was meant to bring the ecclesiastical schools up to at least the level of the lay University: one may say that Lamennais drew up the programme which the Catholic Church put in practice fifty years later, under the Third Republic, when the Assumptionists founded the 'Croix,' when the Jesuits and Oratorians established their great schools. But a prophet is seldom obeyed in his own generation. The bishops were uneasy, and Lamennais was reported to Rome as a dangerous demagogue-as indeed, perhaps, he was. At least it is certain that he was a Romantic in religion.

Félicité de Lamennais-Monsieur Féli,' as his disciples called him-was born at St. Malo in 1782. He was therefore already a man of fifty-the veteran of a little band of

reformers, but at heart the youngest of them all, vehement and violent under his grey locks a very whirlwind compared with the prudent Lacordaire or the subtle and curious Sainte-Beuve. He had a great heart, full of faith and charity, and yet it was not the heart of a saint; anger seethed in it too often; he was a man of wrath. SainteBeuve was often shocked by 'ces injures si grossières de Lamennais-quelque chose qui n'est propre qu'à l'injure du prêtre du "Curé Catholique "-de quelqu'un qui n'a pas 'été galant et qui ne se bat pas en duel.'* In fact Lamennais, though well born and well bred, was not a man of the world; a monk of the Middle Ages, rather; or a passionate Breton Druid, worshipping Nature only less than God. He knew his own faults, was proud of them, and had designed for himself a seal which bore a strange device for a priest: a blasted oak, with the motto 'Je romps et ne plie pas.' Such as he was he exercised an almost magnetic influence-the influence of a passionate sincerity. Tantôt il avait ce que Buffon, parlant des animaux de proie, a appelé une " âme de colère"; 'tantôt, et non moins souvent, il avait une douceur, une tendresse, à ravir les petits enfants, une âme tout à fait 'charmante; et il passait de l'une à l'autre en un instant.' There was something which recalls Mr. Gladstone, among the last generation in England, in the personal ascendency, the candour, the vehement contradictions, the native nobleness, and the disconcerting transformations of this born leader of men, at once theologian, philosopher, and politician. His right-hand man was an orator of a very different stamp, a sagacious and eloquent Gaul from Burgundy: the Abbé Lacordaire. Lacordaire was barely two years older than Sainte-Beuve, and until recently had been a brilliant Voltairean young barrister. Then, one day, something came into his life wholly unreckoned on-as if a shining meteoric stone, flashing out of space, should suddenly strike a man senseless between the familiar box-edged paths of his own garden. By a conversion as brusque as Paul's, Lacordaire entered the Church. This history endeared him to SainteBeuve, already preoccupied by Pascal and the idea of Grace. He admired, too, something strong and patient in the mind of Lacordaire.

But both these Catholic Reformers were absolute to a fault. Sainte-Beuve, though he sat at their feet in senti

*Correspondance de Sainte-Beuve avec M. et Mme. Juste Olivier,

p. 321.

mental humility, was often offended by their lack of method, and indeed of erudition, their hazardous assertions, their cocksureness, their happy-go-lucky prophecies. They seemed to have no sense of proportion; their eye, too longsighted, abolished all intervals as, blind to the world around them, they seemed to discern and live in the twenty-second century. Sainte-Beuve was fervent, he was humble, but he was perspicacious to a fault. J'analyse tout avec perfidie et une secrète aigreur,' as he confessed one day to Victor Hugo. He would have peeped and botanised on his mother's grave. He peeped and botanised at the feet of his spiritual directors, observing, in spite of himself, how the noble Lacordaire was often wily, showing too much of the churchman's ruse, too slippery a diplomacy; while Lamennais lacked judgement and measure, carrying you off your feet by an impetuosity which might after all be a rush towards a precipice.

If Lamennais was always in a whirl, Leroux was always in a maze. Misty and moonstruck, he was the best of men, vowed to a voluntary poverty, contemptuous of this world's gear; when he spoke or wrote, a great and pure idea flickered through a flux of words, like a pale ray drowned in a shower. If the absolutism of the Catholics distressed Sainte-Beuve, the unpractical dreaminess of Leroux and the Saint-Simonians failed to satisfy him. Still, with all the honesty he was capable of, he tried to lose himself in their great general schemes for the common weal, since such largeembracing efforts are the antidote to passion. But he could not give himself wholly to either little band. He kept advancing a little way with the Saint-Simonians, and then a short distance along the path of the Liberal Catholics. Although the roads ran parallel, he made but little progress.

Still his curiosity was interested. 'Le Saint-Simonisme que j'ai vu de près et par les coulisses m'a beaucoup servi à 'comprendre l'origine des religions avec leur diverses mises, et même (j'en demande bien pardon) le Christianisme et 'Port-Royal.' And when the brain is all alert, the heart for a while becomes less exacting. Sainte-Beuve thought himself cured. He left Brussels in the late spring of 1831, and on his return to Paris he sought out Victor Hugo. The meeting was cordial. He was invited to call in the Rue Jean Goujon, where he found Madame Hugo pale and nervous; she had long been out of health, they said. 'It is only a nervous gastritis,' declared Sainte-Beuve, who was still • Werther, Jacobin et carabin,' But he was

VOL. CCI. NO. CCCCXII.

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preoccupied by her languid looks and, little by little, his good resolutions weakened. Perhaps he was not the only one to suffer? . . . As a matter of fact, she was jealous. She had supposed Sainte-Beuve to be interested by some other woman. He explained. The first stanzas of the Livre 'd'Amour' are dated August 9, 1831.

VI.

The Livre d'Amour' of Sainte-Beuve has naturally never been published, although, quite of late, it has become a great deal too well known. By an extraordinary aberration, which M. Michaut has compared to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's exhumation of his buried verses, Sainte-Beuve printed it privately in 1843 (anonymously, of course) and gave an annotated copy to the Bibliothèque Impériale, of which at that time he was the librarian. There whoso chooses may consult it, on due application. Almost all the remaining copies were destroyed on the death of the author in 1869. But a few months ago, M. Michaut printed most of the verses in his essay on Le Livre d'Amour de Sainte-Beuve,' and M. Troubat, the critic's residuary legatee, is about to issue a very small, privately printed edition of the copy in the National Library. Sainte-Beuve himself led the way. Many of the verses of the Livre d'Amour' appear in his collected poems, published in 1863, under the title 'Suite 'de "Joseph Delorme.""

The Livre d'Amour' is not only the day-book of a love story written hour by hour; it is a serious artistic effort which we may compare with Coventry Patmore's Angel in 'the House,' despite the moral abyss which divides the two volumes. Sainte-Beuve began it just about the time when his rival, Victor Hugo, was publishing Notre-Dame 'de Paris.' He reproached the great Romantic with an excess of fantasy--'les caractères traversent trop fréquem'ment la trame de la nature humaine dans un sens ou 'dans un autre, dessus et dessous, en féerie et en grotesque, < vers le ciel ou vers l'enfer.' Sainte-Beuve himself intended never to exceed the level of every day's most quiet need, he meant to place a man and a woman in the circumstances of ordinary modern life, and to distil the wine of poetry from their unforced sentiments. He was beginning to think with Racine (Hugo's 'bête noire ') that toute l'invention consiste 'à faire quelque chose de rien.' Unfortunately, the Livre 'd'Amour' is not Bérénice'; too often, the preachiness