Chapter 13

This work is more than opportune. It is imperative. I publish it.V. H.

This work is more than opportune. It is imperative. I publish it.

V. H.

Victor Hugo’s egotism was so vast that it was insane if it was not sublime. To exemplify adequately this statement by extracts would ask pages of room. The four lines about to follow, from one of his longer poems, present a modest and moderate example. The poet has been supposing the impossible case that the Supreme Being should take different views, in a certain matter, from his, the poet’s, own—that he should outrage his, the poet’s, sense of moral propriety. Here is how, in that case, Victor Hugo would, he declares, deal with offending Deity (we translate literally the original Alexandrines, line for line, without attempting to reproduce either meter or rhyme):

I would go, I would see him, and I would seize him,Amid the heavens, as one takes a wolf amid the woods,And, terrible, indignant, calm, extraordinary,I would denounce him with his own thunder.

I would go, I would see him, and I would seize him,

Amid the heavens, as one takes a wolf amid the woods,

And, terrible, indignant, calm, extraordinary,

I would denounce him with his own thunder.

To Victor Hugo himself, the foregoing was not blasphemy; it was simply sublimity of a sort suitable to the character of the poet. There was, it is said, fully developed mental unsoundness in his father’s family and in his own. Victor Hugo’s own genius had, we suspect, some trace of a real, though noble, insanity in it.

In 1862, appeared “Les Miserables,” which must be accounted, if not the greatest, at least the most popular work of its author. This book was issued simultaneously in eight different cities and in nine different languages—a circumstance probably not paralleled in the history of literature. The fameof “Les Miserables” does not fade, and it hardly will fade. It is a book of truly prodigious elemental power. That, however, Victor Hugo’s genius in producing it worked with some disturbing consciousness of a theory of literary art to be exemplified and defended, the following curious note, inserted in the midst of the text, at a point of interest in the story, may serve to show:

Then the poor old man began sobbing and soliloquizing;for it is a mistake to suppose that there is no soliloquy in nature. Powerful agitations often talk aloud.

“Les Miserables” is justly open to many strictures, both on literary grounds and on ethical; but it must be pronounced, notwithstanding, a great, and, on the whole, a noble work.

Victor Hugo made this approach to the illimitable in power, that he was well-nigh equally able to do great things and to do small. To exhibit by specimen his achievement in verse we shall offer here a few of his small things, in the impossibility of representing his great. The small things that we offer may acquire a value extrinsic to themselves if thought of as the gentle play of a giant who could with the same ease have astonished you by exhibitions of strength.

Victor Hugo went a second time, having once failed, to intercede with King Louis Philippe on behalf of a political offender condemned to death. It was late at night, and the monarch could not be seen. The intercessor would not be baffled, and, bethinking himself to appeal by the tenderness of birth and of death to the king, wrote four lines of verse which he left on the table. The allusions in them are to a lovely daughter of the royal house just lost and to a little son just born. We give the French text, and follow it with a close English translation:

Par votre ange envolée ainsi qu’une colombe,Par ce royal enfant doux et frèle roseau,Grace encore une fois! grace au nom de la tombe!Grace au nom du berceau!By your lost angel, dove-like from you flown,By this sweet royal babe, fair, fragile reed,Mercy once more! Be mercy, mercy shown,In the tomb’s name, and cradle’s, both, I plead.

Par votre ange envolée ainsi qu’une colombe,

Par ce royal enfant doux et frèle roseau,

Grace encore une fois! grace au nom de la tombe!

Grace au nom du berceau!

By your lost angel, dove-like from you flown,

By this sweet royal babe, fair, fragile reed,

Mercy once more! Be mercy, mercy shown,

In the tomb’s name, and cradle’s, both, I plead.

The poet’s plea availed.

Another little gem of Victor Hugo’s is the following quatrain, which, though it may have had at first some particular occasion, is capable of the most general application. Again we give the French, for the French here almost translates itself:

Soyons comme l’oiseau posé pour un instantSur des rameaux trop frêles;Qui sent trembler la branche, mais qui chant pourtant,Sachant qu’il a des ailes.

Soyons comme l’oiseau posé pour un instant

Sur des rameaux trop frêles;

Qui sent trembler la branche, mais qui chant pourtant,

Sachant qu’il a des ailes.

This may be thus rendered, almost word for word:

Like the bird let us be, for one moment alightUpon branches too frail to uphold,Who feels tremble the bough, but who sings in despite,Knowing well she has wings to unfold.

Like the bird let us be, for one moment alight

Upon branches too frail to uphold,

Who feels tremble the bough, but who sings in despite,

Knowing well she has wings to unfold.

One more little gem from Victor Hugo’s treasury of such we are happily able to present in a version whose authorship will commend it; Mr. Andrew Lang translates “The Grave and the Rose.” The poet here affirms, as he is very fond of doing, that capital article in his creed, the immortality of the soul:

The Grave said to the Rose,“What of the dews of morn,Love’s flower, what end is theirs?”“And what of souls outworn,Of them whereon doth closeThe tomb’s mouth unawares?”The Rose said to the Grave.The Rose said, “In the shadeFrom the dawn’s tears is madeA perfume faint and strange,Amber and honey sweet.”“And all the spirits fleetDo suffer a sky-changeMore strangely than the dew—To God’s own angels new,”The Grave said to the Rose.

The Grave said to the Rose,

“What of the dews of morn,

Love’s flower, what end is theirs?”

“And what of souls outworn,

Of them whereon doth close

The tomb’s mouth unawares?”

The Rose said to the Grave.

The Rose said, “In the shade

From the dawn’s tears is made

A perfume faint and strange,

Amber and honey sweet.”

“And all the spirits fleet

Do suffer a sky-change

More strangely than the dew—

To God’s own angels new,”

The Grave said to the Rose.

The majesty with which this great Frenchman would sometimes, in prose, condescend to be an acrobat walking the tight-rope of grandiloquence stretched over a bottomless abyss of the ridiculous, is well shown in his monograph on Shakespeare. This is accessible in a scholarlike English translation (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, publishers) by Melville B. Anderson. The following sentences will indicate what it is. No one familiar with Victor Hugo can doubt that the great presence ofHIMSELF, the writer, was really the chief thing in his musing eye, when, in the latter part of this extract, he was ostensibly describing and vindicating romanticist Shakespeare:

Shakespeare, shuddering, has within himself winds, spirits, magic potions, vibrations; he sways in the passing breeze, obscure effluences pervade him, he is filled with the unknown sap of life. Thence his agitation, at the core of which is peace. It is this agitation which is lacking in Goethe, wrongly praised for his impassiveness, which is inferiority. All minds of the first order have this agitation. It is in Job, in Æschylus, in Alighieri. This agitation is humanity.... It seems at times as if Shakespeare terrified Shakespeare. He shudders at his own depth. This is the sign of supreme intelligence. It is his own vastness which shakes him and imparts to him strange and mighty oscillations. There is no genius without billows. An intoxicated savage, it may be. He has the savagery of the virgin forest; he has the intoxication of the high sea.

“He shudders at his own depth”—hardly could we resist the temptation to bracket in “[Victor Hugo]” after the pronoun “he.” Every reader should do this mentally for himself; he otherwise will miss that important part of the true sense, which here is written between the lines. There never was genius with more inseparable, unescapable, tyrannizing consciousness of itself. You feel the personality even more than you feel the genius in reading Victor Hugo.

A considerable part of Victor Hugo’s prose production, mostly fiction, has been translated into English. Messrs. T.Y. Crowell & Co. publish six portly volumes in a uniform edition. From “Les Miserables” in this series we make extracts which will briefly represent Victor Hugo’s prose at its very best, alike in style, in thought, and in spirit. In the first, the writer gives utterance to reflections inspired by the final event of the battle of Waterloo:

This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest bravery which ever astounded history—is that causeless? No. The shadow of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls surrendering their swords. Those who have conquered Europe have fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say or to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence.Hoc erat in fatis.That day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.

In the second, Victor Hugo contrasts the two leaders, the conqueror and the conquered, of that momentous day:

Waterloo is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God, who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of batallions, carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand, nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage, absolute regularity; on the other intuition, divination, military oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul, association with destiny; the stream, the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it. Wellington was the Barême of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo; and on this occasion genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded.Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected Blücher; he came.

It remains only to exemplify, as best in small space we can, Victor Hugo’s portentous, his terrific, power in working up a tragic situation, and displaying it as in a calcium-light of intense imaginative description or narration. We shall then feel that this Titanic figure in French literature is at least by suggestive partial glimpses fairly before our readers. From “Les Miserables,” we take the following passage, introduced by the original author as a first step only in the climax by which he represents the supreme agony of his hero in a great crisis of his life:

It sometimes happens that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a man, traveler or fisherman, while walking at low tide on the beach, far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is bird-lime....The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns toward the land, endeavors to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road: he halts to get his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand....He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores, cries to theclouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man!

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns toward the land, endeavors to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road: he halts to get his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand....

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores, cries to theclouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man!

Victor Hugo’s hero was involved thus in a quicksand—but the quicksand in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool—he was wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer. All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven. This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo’s writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric. Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.

That Victor Hugo willed to be buried exactly like a pauper did not prevent the occurrence of certain very important contrasts between his obsequies and the rites of an ordinary pauper funeral; perhaps, indeed, such a will on his part contributed to create the difference which at all events existed. The funeral attendance was said to be the most numerous ever seen in France. A million spectators were present. Three large wagons headed the procession filled with floral gifts. A beautiful diadem of Irish lilies was contributed by Tennyson, inscribed “To the World’s Greatest Poet.”

The French apotheosis of a national idol would not becomplete without tribute from the theater. Accordingly, the Theâtre Français produced a drama by M. Rénan entitled “Mort,” in which the shades of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Voltaire, and Diderot hold a dialogue about human progress in the century to follow them, and, Corneille asking, “What poet will sing in that era, as sweet and tender as Racine, as logical as Boileau, as clear in style as Voltaire,” the genius of the age lyrically answers, “Hugo,” at the same time placing a crown on Hugo’s bust.

Victor Hugo the man, especially as he mellowed with old age, was a sunny, sweet, benignant nature. He was a hearty, one might almost say a partisan, believer in God—atheism was so offensive to him. Unfortunately, however, Victor Hugo’s theism was not such as to enforce departure, in his own personal practice, from that deplorable tradition of his country which has rendered so many distinguished French authors, from the earliest to the latest, offenders against the laws of marriage and of chastity.

2. Sainte-Beuve.

Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve’s fame as a critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is admitted to be a critic of the first rank. Nay, in the opinion of many, Sainte-Beuve constitutes a rank by himself, having no peers.

Sainte-Beuve’s range of subjects was very wide. He exercised himself to be equally open and fair toward all schools of taste and of opinion alike. At the outset, he was of the coterie of the romanticists. But he soon broke with these, either personally repelled by antipathies, or else unconsciously attracted by a secret sympathy of his own, too strong for his contrary will to resist, toward the classical standardsrespesented in the seventeenth-century writers. He never seems to feel himself more entirely in his element than when he is appreciating the literature of the French golden age.

As to religion, Sainte-Beuve, having had his phase of pietism even, ended by becoming a blank unbeliever. But his own antipathetic personal attitude of intellect and of heart toward Christianity he would not in the least allow to disturb the urbanity and serenity of his tolerance for the most orthodox Christian writers. Such, at any rate, was his standard and ideal.

But at this point, as at all points, the complaisance of Sainte-Beuve’s writing is a manner with him, rather than a spirit. It does not penetrate deeply. He loves his “insinuations.” That is his own word. He is willing to write a whole essay in criticism for the sake of the “insinuations” which his deceitful blandness will sheathe. Or, rather, he would sooner give up the whole essay than forego a phrase, or perhaps a single word, containing his insinuation. It was partly his critical conscience, no doubt, instinctively nice about shades of opinion and of expression; but then a something very like malice was mingled with his critical conscience. With all that must be conceded to the value of Sainte-Beuve’s critical work, readers are conscious, in concluding the perusal of almost any one of his essays, that the result to them is a sapor remaining on their literary palate, rather than substance of nutriment entered into their mental digestion. Their food has been refined into a flavor.

For our illustration of Sainte-Beuve, we go to a paper of his on Bossuet. But we need to prepare our readers. Sainte-Beuve is a writer for the few, instead of for the many. To profit from him requires some effort of attention. One must study a little, as well as simply read. Sainte-Beuve does not deal in heavy strokes. His lines are most of them fine, many of them hair-lines vanishing almost into invisibility. He escapes you like Proteus. Very different is he, by this elusive quality of his, from his countryman, M. Taine, whose bold crayon sketches are at once appreciable to all.

In the choice indicated of specimen, we draw from a series of short criticisms which the author calledCauseries du Lundi; “Monday-Chats,” Mr. William Matthews, who has a volume of select translations from them, not unhappily renders the title. These were originally published as Monday articles in the columns of two Paris journals, theConstitutioneland theMoniteur. Mr. Matthews’s volume is introduced by a most readable biographical sketch and literary appreciation of Sainte-Beuve himself from the pen of the translator. M. Sainte-Beuve, we ought to say, in addition to his very considerable body of criticism, ranging, as we have intimated, over a wide field of literature, wrote an extended historical monograph on Port Royal, which is constantly referred to by writers as an authority on its subject.

The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding traits:

The simple idea of order, of authority, of unity, of the continual government of Providence, Bossuet, among the moderns, has grasped more completely than any other man, and he applies it on all occasions without effort, and, as it were, by an irrefutable deduction. Bossuet is the Hebrew genius, expanded, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the gains of the human intelligence, but acknowledging something of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely at the point where its light ceases. In mien and in tone he resembles a Moses; there are mingled in his speech traits characteristic of the Prophet-King, touches of a pathos ardent and sublime; there sounds the voice eloquent by eminence, the simplest, the strongest, the most abrupt, the most familiar, the most suddenly outbursting in thunder. Even where he holds his course unbending, in an imperious flood, he bears along with him treasures of eternal human morality. And it is by all these qualities that he is for us a unique man, and that, whatever may be the employment he makes of his speech, he remains the model of eloquence the most exalted, and of language the most beautiful.

Sainte-Beuve is so much a critic that he cannot help criticising by the way, or even sometimes perhaps a little out of the way. But it will be quite to our purpose if we admit here what Sainte-Beuve incidentally says of Lamartine:

[Bossuet] was early distinguished for surprising gifts of memory and of understanding. He knew Virgil by heart, as, a little later, he knewHomer. “Less easy to understand is it,” says M. de Lamartine, “how he was infatuated all his lifewith the Latin poet, Horace, spirit exquisite, but the reverse of spontaneous and natural, who strings his lyre with only the softest fibers of the heart; a careless voluptuary,” etc. M. de Lamartine, who has so well discerned the great features of the eloquence and of the talent of Bossuet, has studied a little too lightly his life, and he has here proposed to himself a difficulty which does not exist; there is nowhere mention made in fact of thatinexplicable predilectionof Bossuet for Horace,the least divine of all the poets. M. de Lamartine must have inadvertently read “Horace” instead of “Homer.” ... It was Fénelon (and not Bossuet) who read and relished Horace more than any other poet, who knew him by heart.... The great pagan preference of Bossuet (if one may use such an expression) was quite naturally for Homer; after him for Virgil; Horace, in his judgment and in his liking, came far behind them. But the book by eminence which gave early direction to the genius and to the entire career of Bossuet, and which dominated all within him, was the Bible; it is said that the first time he read it he was illuminated and transported by it. He had found in it the source whence his own genius was destined to flow, like one of the four great rivers in Genesis.

Sainte-Beuve speaks of the relation of the Hotel de Rambouillet to the future great man:

The young Bossuet was conducted thither one evening to preach there an improvised sermon. In lending himself to these singular exercises and to these tournaments where his person and his gifts were challenged, treated as an intellectual virtuoso in the salons of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and the Hôtel de Nevers, it does not appear that Bossuet was in consequence subjected to the slightest charge of vanity, and there is no example of a precocious genius so praised, caressed by the world, and remaining so perfectly exempt from all self-love and from all coquetry.

In the following passage, Sainte-Beuve appreciates, not without insinuated criticism, the younger eloquence of Bossuet the preacher. Conceive this atheist critic, for such in effect Sainte-Beuve was, entering into the spirit of the orthodox Christian, exclusively for the purpose of justly judging and enjoying a strain of pulpit eloquence! But that is Sainte-Beuve:

When he portrays to us Jesus purposing to clothe himself with a flesh like our own, and when he sets forth the motives for this according to the Scriptures, with what bold relief and what saliency he does it! He exhibits that Saviour who above all seeks out misery and distress, shunningto take on the angelic nature which would have exempted him from this, leaping over, in some sense, and tasking himself to pursue, toapprehendwretched human nature, precisely because it is wretched, clinging to it and running after it, although it flies from him, although it recoils from being assumed by him; aiming to secure for himself real human flesh, real human blood, with the qualities and the weaknesses of our own, and that for what reason?In order to be compassionate.Although in all this Bossuet only makes use of the terms of the Apostle and perhaps of those of Chrysostom, he employs them with a delight, a luxury, a gust for reduplication, which bespeaks vivacious youth: “He has,” says the apostle, “apprehendedhuman nature; it flew away, it would have nothing of the Saviour; what did he do? He ran after it with headlong speed, leaping over the mountains, that is to say, the ranks of the angels.... He ran like a giant, with great strides and immeasurable, passing in a moment from heaven to earth.... There he overtook that fugitive nature; he seized it, he apprehended it, body and soul.” Let us study the youthful eloquence of Bossuet, even in his risks of taste, as one studies the youthful poetry of the great Corneille.

Sainte-Beuve cannot let Lamartine alone. In the clause following, italicized by us, our readers are to recognize an irony on the part of the critic:

M. de Lamartine, who,with that second sight which is granted to poets, knew how to see Bossuet distinctly as he was when young, etc.

Having quoted, with significant italics disposed here and there, a highly realistic imaginary picture of the youthful Bossuet from the hand of Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve says:

Here is a primitive Bossuet much toned down and mollified, so it seems to me, a Bossuet drawn very much at will, to resemble Jocelyn and Fénelon, in order that it may be said afterward [by Lamartine]: “The soul evidently in this great man was of one temper, and the genius of another. Nature had made him tender; dogma had made him hard.” I do not believe in this contradiction in Bossuet, a nature having the most perfect harmony, and the least at war with itself, that we know. But what for me is not less certain is, that the illustrious biographer [Lamartine] here treats literary history absolutely as history is treated in an historical romance; there you lightly invent your character, where your information fails, or where dramatic interest demands it. And without refusing the praise which certain ingenious and delicate touches of this portrait merit, I will permit myself to ask more seriously: Is it proper, is it becoming, thus to paint Bossuet as a youth, to fondle thus with the brush, as one would a Greek dancing-woman or a beautiful child of theEnglish aristocracy, him who never ceased to grow under the shadow of the temple, that serious youth who gave promise of the simple great man, all genius and all eloquence? Far, far from him [Bossuet] these fondlings and these physiological feats of a brush which amuses itself with carmine and with veins....

You feel, with regard to the foregoing criticism, that it is as just as it is penetrative. Lamartine fairly provoked it.

Here is a trait of Bossuet’s that pertained remarkably also to Daniel Webster:

Bossuet is not one of those ingenious men of talent who have the art of treating commonplace subjects excellently, and of introducing into them foreign materials; but let the subject presented to him be vast, lofty, majestic, he is at his ease, and, the higher the theme, the more is he equal to its demands, on his proper plane, and in his element.

The Abbé Maury is a critic belonging to the classical school of French literature. His best-known work is a treatise on pulpit eloquence. La Harpe is another critic of the same class with Maury, who has a considerable work, historical and critical, devoted to French literature in general. To these two writers Sainte-Beuve makes instructive allusion in the following passage:

Two opinions found expression when the Sermons of Bossuet were first published, in 1772; I have already indicated that of the Abbé Maury, who placed these sermons above everything else of that kind which the French pulpit had produced; the other opinion, which was that of La Harpe, and which I have known to be shared since by other sensible men, was less enthusiastic and showed itself more sensitive to the inequalities and to the discordances of tone. It would be possible to justify both of these opinions, with the understanding that the first should triumph in the end, and that the genius of Bossuet, there as elsewhere, should keep the first rank. It is very true that, read continuously, without any notice of the age of the writer, and of the place and circumstances of their composition, some of these discourses of Bossuet may offend or surprise minds that love to dwell upon the more uniform and more exact continuity of Bourdaloue or of Massillon.

Victor Cousin is one among the somewhat numerous writers who, within the bounds of this same paper on Bossuet, fall under the touch of Sainte-Beauve’s critical lance, that weapon borne ever in rest and ready for any encounter:

A great writer of our days, M. Cousin ... has been disposed once more to despoil Louis XIV. of his highest glory in order to carry it all back to the epoch preceding. M. Cousin has a convenient method of exaggerating and aggrandizing the objects of his admiration: he degrades or depresses their surroundings. It is thus that, to exalt Corneille, in whom he sees Æschylus, Sophocles, all the Greek tragic poets united, he sacrifices and diminishes Racine; it is thus that, in order the better to celebrate the epoch of Louis XIII. and of the regency which followed, he depresses the reign of Louis XIV.

It is Sainte-Beuve’s specialty—in aim, whether in achievement or not—to be without the tendency thus charged upon M. Cousin, to violate proportion in his criticism. The insinuating delicacy of his adverse, or at least disparaging, critical judgment toward a distinguished contemporary author is well exemplified in the following passage, in which the critic, by his instinct as critic, is irresistibly drawn to make a return to Cousin. The wise reader familiar with Mr. Matthew Arnold will see how exactly the latter caught from his French master the trick of method here displayed:

Ah, I cannot refrain from expressing another thought. When M. Cousin speaks so at his ease of Louis XIV., of Louis XIII., and of Richelieu, confidently attributing superiority to that which he prefers and which he thinks resembles him, I am astonished that he has never once asked himself this question: “What would have been the gain, what the loss to my own talent, this talent which is daily compared with that of the writers of the great age—what would have been gained or lost to that admirable talent” (I forget that it is he that is speaking) “if I had had to write or to discourse, were it but for a few years, in the very presence of Louis XIV., that is to say, of that royal good sense, calm, sober, and august? And that which I should have thus gained or lost, in my vivacity and my eloquence, would it not have been precisely that which it lacks in the way of gravity, of proportion, of propriety, of perfect justice, and, consequently, of true authority?”

Lamartine does not escape still another light thrust from this dangerous delicate lance, aimed yet again, with exquisite accuracy, through an unquestionable joint in the victim’s harness:

“These two rivals in eloquence,” says M. de Lamartine, speaking of Bossuet and of Bourdaloue, “were passionately compared.To the shame of the time, the number of Bourdaloue’s admirers surpassed in a short time thatof the enthusiastic devotees of Bossuet. The reason of this preference for a cold argumentation above a sublime eloquence lies in the nature of human things. The men of middling stature have more resemblance to their age than the giants have to their contemporaries. The orators who deal in argument are more easily comprehended by the multitude than the orators who are fired with enthusiasm; one must have wings to follow the lyric orator.” ... This theory, invented expressly to give the greatest glory to thelyric oratorsand to the giants, is here at fault. M. de Bausset, author of a work on Bossuet, has remarked, on the contrary, as a kind of singularity, that it never entered any man’s head at that time to consider Bossuet and Bourdaloue as subject of comparison, and to weigh in the balance their merit and their genius, as was so often done in the case of Corneille and of Racine; or, at least, if they were compared, it was but very seldom. To the honor and not to the shame of the time, the public taste and sentiment took note of the difference. Bossuet, in the higher sphere of the episcopate, remained the oracle, the doctor, a modern Father of the Church, the great orator, who appeared on funeral and majestic occasions; who sometimes re-appeared in the pulpit at the monarch’s request, or to solemnize the assemblies of the clergy, leaving on each occasion an overpowering and ineffaceable recollection of his eloquence. Meanwhile Bourdaloue continued to be for the age the usual preacher by eminence, the one who gave a connected course of lectures on moral and practical Christianity, and who distributed the daily bread in its most wholesome form to all the faithful. Bossuet has said somewhere, in one of his sermons: “If it were not better suited to the dignity of this pulpit to regard the maxims of the Gospel as indubitable than to prove them by reasoning, how easily could I show you,” etc. There, where Bossuet would have suffered from stooping and subjecting himself to too long a course of proof and to a continuous argumentation, Bourdaloue, who had not the same impatience of genius, was, beyond doubt, an apostolic workman who was more efficient in the long run, and better fitted for his task by his constancy. The age in which both appeared had the merit to make this distinction, and to appreciate each of them without opposing one to the other; and to-day those who glory in this opposition, and who so easily crush Bourdaloue with Bossuet, the man of talent with the man of genius, because they think they are conscious themselves of belonging to the family of geniuses, too easily forget that this Christian eloquence was designed to edify and to nourish still more than to please or to subdue.

The “bright consummate flower” of Bossuet’s eloquence is to be found in his Funeral Discourses. Of one of these, Sainte-Beuve, with a sudden sympathetic swell of kindredeloquence in description, speaks, in a passage with quotation from which we close our exemplifications of this famous critic:

The death of the Queen of England came to offer him (1669) the grandest and most majestic of themes. He needed the fall and the restoration of thrones, the revolution of empires, all the varied fortunes assembled in a single life, and weighing upon one and the same head; the eagle needed the vast depth of the heavens, and, below, all the abysses and the storms of the ocean.

It has been to us some satisfaction that the wrong of distortion by reduction in scale done to the majestic figure of Bossuet in our own treatment of him, and unavoidable there, could thus in a measure be redressed by return to the subject in effective quotation from Sainte-Beuve. Looking back on the extracts preceding, we feel that enough is expressed, or suggested, in them, to justify us in saying, There is Bossuet.

But at any rate we have great confidence in saying, There is Sainte-Beuve.

3. Balzac.

Honoré de Balzac is one of the heroes of literature. He set himself labors of Hercules in literary production, and he toiled at his tasks of will with a tireless tenacity little less than sublime. The moral spectacle of such courageous industry in Balzac, the present writer admires, not the less, but the more, that the intellectual achievement resulting seems to him not commensurately great. Balzac’s long “toil and endeavor” was not leavened and lightened and turned into play by that “reflex of unimpeded energy” in him which a lofty philosopher has defined happiness to be. He did his work hardly—with profuse sweat of his brow. His mind did not answer to that definition of genius which makes it a faculty of lighting its own fires. His fires Balzac lighted with late hours, artificial illumination, strong stimulant drinks. He burned himself out early in life—comparatively early, that is to say; he died at fifty-one.

The moral triumph of Balzac we have but half suggested. Not only did he lack the spontaneous joy of genius at work;he lacked also, for many and many a doubtful year, the encouragement of recognition and success. Book after book of his failed, and still he toiled on. The world was fairly conquered at last. The reverse of Tulliver’s experience happened with Balzac. One man, in his case, proved “too many” for the world.

For his own part, he freely confesses, the present writer not only admires; he wonders. Balzac’s novels do not please him, either as products of genius or as works of art. They please him solely as monuments of victorious labor. They have to his mind exactly the quality that was to have been expected from the history of their production. They smell of oil, they smack of sweat. They are full of stimulated, rather than stimulating, thought. So much as one passage in which imagination played its magnificent play in easy and easily perfect creation, one passage in which the words flowed of themselves, and did not come each pumped with a several stroke of author’s will, he cannot remember ever to have found in Balzac. He wonders, therefore, and helplessly wonders, that Balzac should be esteemed, as he is, and that by some good judges, one of the greatest writers in the world.

What Balzac undertook was to write the whole “human tale of this wide world”—that is, to represent in fiction all the manifold phases and aspects of human life and character. He calls the entire series of his novels “The Human Comedy.” This title, we have seen it stated, was not original with Balzac, but was adopted by him at the suggestion of a friend who hit upon it as a kind of balance and contrast to Dante’s expression, “Divine Comedy.” It is not quite a cynic conception of human character and human destiny that Balzac intended thus to express. Still, on the other hand, his view of human nature and human life cannot be said to be genial. The disagreeable preponderates in his fiction—the disagreeable one must call it, rather than the tragic. For true tragedy there is not height enough. In reading Balzac, you breathe for the most part an atmosphere of the not merely common, but—vulgar. Of course, the novelist himself wouldhave said, Very well, such is man, and such is life. This one need not deny, but one can say, It was at least not desirable that readers should be obliged to feel the novelist to be himself vulgar, along with his characters. There is such a thing as refined dealing with people not refined.

Realism was Balzac’s aim, and realism was the rock on which Balzac suffered double shipwreck. In seeking to be realistic, he became vulgar; and in seeking to be realistic, he became unreal. For there is an air of unreality diffused everywhere over the pages, meant to be realistic or nothing, of this voluminous writer. Balzac evolved the personages of his fiction out of his own consciousness. They are none of them human beings, such as you meet in the real world. They aresimulacra, images, bodiless projections, of the author’s own mind. They move over his canvas like the specters thrown by the magic-lantern on its screen.

Balzac and Dickens are sometimes paralleled. There certainly is in a number of particulars a superficial resemblance between them. Both undertake to be realists. Both concern themselves chiefly with people of the average sort—sort, perhaps, even tending toward the vulgar. Both exaggerate to a degree that makes them at times almost caricaturists. Both deal abundantly in minute detail of description. But the contrast too between them is great. Balzac is far less spontaneous than Dickens. You feel that Dickens improvises. You never feel this about Balzac. You can hear Balzac drive his Pegasus with shout and with lash. Dickens’s Pegasus often flies with his bitbetweenhis teeth. Dickens was an observer of men and of things—of books, a student never; there is perhaps scarcely another instance in nineteenth-century literature of an author who owed so little as did Dickens to study of books. From books, on the other hand, Balzac purveyed a large share of his material. Dickens writes as if unconscious that a race of men like the critics existed. Balzac writes in view of the critics. These in fact seem to be his audience quite as much as do the general public. Balzac, beginning that novel of his from which we are presently todraw our sole brief extract to exhibit his manner, enters, according to a fashion of his, upon an elaborate unnecessary description of the house in which the scene of his action is laid. But he prefaces thus:

Before describing this house, it may be well, in the interest of other writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic preliminaries, since they have raised a protest from certain ignorant and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing the generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?

Such a sentence as that—prefatory, but in the body of the text, and not in a formal preface—would have been impossible to Dickens. In Balzac, it is the most natural thing in the world. And it discloses the secret of the character everywhere stamped on his production. He wrote as a professional writer. He conformed to a law that he himself imposed upon his genius, instead of leaving his genius free to be a law to itself. A real realist, a realist, that is to say, such by nature, and not merely by profession, a realist like De Foe, for example, could never have committed the offense against art of disturbing thus that very illusion of reality which he sought to produce, by exhibiting and defending the method adopted by him to produce it. There could not be a case imposing more obligation on the artist to conceal his art. But Balzac, instead, forces upon his reader the thought of art by calling its very name.

Balzac paints with a big brush and puts on plenty of color. No one need fear in reading him that he will miss delicate shades. There are none such to miss. Balzac does not suggest. He speaks right out. Nay, he insists. You shall by no means fail of understanding him.

But, over against everything that can thus justly be said in diminution of his worth, there remain the unalterable facts, of Balzac’s great reputation, just now looming larger than ever, of his voluminous literary achievement, of his population of imaginary personages projected into the world of thought, by actual count more, we believe, than two thousand poll.There is published a portly biographical dictionary exclusively devoted to the characters of Balzac’s fiction.

Paralyzed to choose, even to think of choosing, out of the enormous volume of this writer’s laborious production, a single page for exemplifying his quality, we pitch desperately upon the conclusion of that story of his called by the accomplished American translator of it, Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, “The Alkahest,” “The Search for the Absolute” is the author’s own title. This work, belonging in the endless series of volumes dedicated to the display of the “comedy of human life” in all its phases, is a novel which undertakes to illustrate the effect on character and destiny of an exclusive supreme absorption in scientific pursuits. The hero has at length reached the catastrophe of his career. He is an old man who has wrecked fortune after fortune in chemical quest of a scientific chimera, The Absolute. A monomaniac before, he is paralytic now, and the last night of his life is slowly passing. Balzac:

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