Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/181

Rh SAINT E-B E U V E 163 pied for the remainder of his life, and where in 1850 his mother, from whom hs seems to have inherited his good sense, tact, and finesse, died at the age of eighty-six. For three years he continued writing every Monday for the Constitutionnel ; then he passed, with a similar engage- ment, to the Moniteur. In 1857 his Monday articles began to be published in volumes, and by 1862 formed a collection in fifteen volumes; they afterwards were resumed under the title of Nouveaux Lundis, which now make a collection of thirteen volumes more. In 1854 M. Fortoul nominated him to the chair of Latin poetry at the College of France. His first lecture there was received with inter- ruptions and marks of disapprobation by many of the students, displeased at his adherence to the empire ; at a second lecture the interruption was renewed. Sainte- Beuve had no taste for public speaking and lecturing ; his front-is mollifies, he said, unfitted him for it. He was not going to carry on a war with a party of turbulent students ; he proposed to resign, and when the minister would not accept his resignation of his professorship he resigned its emoluments. The JZtude sur Virgile, a volume published in 1857, contains what he had meant to be his first course of lectures. He was still a titular official of public instruction ; and in 1858 his services were called for by M. Rouland, then minister of public instruction, as a lecturer (maitre de conferences) on French literature at the cole Normale Superieure. This work he discharged with assiduity and success for four years. In 1859 he was made commander of the Legion of Honour, having twice previously to 1848 refused the cross. During the years of his official engagement his Monday contributions to the Moniteur had no longer been continuous; but in 1862 an arrangement was proposed by which he was to return to the Constitutionnel and again supply an article there every Monday. He consented, at the age of fifty-seven, to try this last pull, as he called it, this "dernier coup de collier " ; he resigned his office at the Ecole Normale and began the series of his Nouveaux Lundis. They show no falling off in vigour and resource from the Causeries. But the strain upon him of his weekly labour was great. " I am not a monsieur nor a gentleman," he writes in 1864, "but a workman by the piece and by the hour." "I look upon myself as a player forced to go on acting at an age when he ought to retire, and who can see no term to his engagement." He had reason to hope for relief. Ex- cept himself, the foremost literary men in France had stood aloof from the empire and treated it with a hostility more or less bitter. He had not been hostile to it : he had accepted it with satisfaction, and had bestowed on its official journal, the Moniteur, the lustre of his literature. The prince Napoleon and the princess Mathilde were his warm friends. A senatorship was mentioned ; its income of 1600 a year would give him opulence and freedom. But its coming was delayed, and the strain upon him con- tinued for some time longer. When at last in April 1865 he was made senator, his health was already seriously com- promised. The disease of which he died, but of which the doctors did not ascertain the presence until his body was opened after his death the stone began to distress and disable him. He could seldom attend the meetings of the senate ; the part he took there, however, on two famous occasions, when the nomination of M. Renan to the College of France came under discussion in 1867 and the law on the press in the year following, provoked the indignation of the great majority in that conservative assembly. It delighted, however, all who " belonged," to use his own phrase, "to the diocese of free thought"; and he gave further pleasure in this diocese by leaving at the beginning of 1869 the Moniteur, injudiciously managed by the Government and M. Rouher, and contributing to a Liberal journal, the Temps. His literary activity suffered little abatement, but the attacks of his malady, though borne with courage and cheerfulness, became more and more severe. Pain made him at last unable to sit to write ; he could only stand or lie. He died in his house in the Rue Mont Parnasse on the 13th of October 1869. He had inherited an income of four thousand francs a year from his mother, and he left it six thousand ; to the extent of eighty pounds a year and no further had literature and the senatorship enriched him. By his will he left directions that his funeral was to be without religious rites, quite simple, and with no speeches at the grave except a few words of thanks from one of his secretaries to those present. There was a great concourse ; the Paris students, who had formerly interrupted him, came now to do honour to him as a Liberal and a champion of free thought a senator they could not but admit undeniably, alas, a senator, but ok, si peu / Yet his own account of himself is the best and truest, an account which lays no stress on his Liberalism, no stress on his championship of free thought, but says simply : " Devoted to my profession as critic, I have tried to be more and more a good, and, if possible, an able workman." The work of Sainte-Beuve divides itself into three portions his poetry, his criticism before 1848, and his criticism after that year. His novel of Vohipte may properly go with his poetry. We have seen his tender feeling for his poetry, and he always maintained that, when the " integrating molecule," the foundation of him as a man of letters, was reached, it would be found to have a poetic character. And yet he declares, too, that it is never without a sort of surprise and confusion that he sees his verses detached from their context and quoted in public and in open day. They do not seem made for it, he says. This admirable critic knew, indeed, what a Frenchman may be pardoned for not willingly perceiving, and what even some Englishmen try to imagine that they do not perceive, the radical in- adequacy of French poetry. For us it is extremely interesting to hear Sainte-Beuve on this point, since it is to English poetry that he resorts in order to find his term of comparison, and to award the praise which to French poetry he refuses. " Since you are fond of the poets," he writes to a friend, " I should like to see you read and look for poets in another language, in English for instance. There you will find the most rich, the most dulcet, and the most new poetical literature. Our French poets are too soon read ; they are too slight, too mixed, too corrupted for the most part, too poor in ideas even when they have the talent for strophe and line, to hold and occupy for long a serious mind." And again : "If you knew English you would have treasures to draw upon. They have a poetical literature far superior to ours, and, above all, sounder, more full. Wordsworth is not translated ; these things are not to be translated ; you must go to the fountain-head for them. Let me give you this advice : learn English." But, even as French poetry, Sainte-Beuve's poetry had faults of its own. Critics who found much in it to praise yet pronounced it a poetry "narrow, puny, and stifled," and its style "slowly dragging and laborious." Here we touch on a Avant which must no doubt be recognized in him, which he recognized in himself, and whereby he is separated from the spirits who succeed in uttering their most highly inspired note and in giving their full measure, some want of flame, of breath, of pinion. Perhaps we may look for the cause in a confession of his own : " I have my weaknesses ; they are those which gave to King Solomon his disgust with everything and his satiety with life. I may have regretted sometimes that