Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/508

492 shirk with a n'importe: but, so far as we are capable of judging, or "guessing," he succeeds right deftly in applying it to the messieurs and mesdames of his "ain countree." French philosophers and French poets, French politicians and French peers, French matrons and French maidens, French pietists and French infidels, French nobles and French sansculottes,—all in their turn he discusses under duly diversified aspects, and really goes a good way towards becoming all things to all [French] men. It is allowed that few rival him in an intimate acquaintance with the history and literature of his country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—in the shifting phases of its many-coloured life—whether the couleur de rose of tranquil days, or the blood-stained tricolor of revolutionary frenzy, or any other shade and hue of social experience, before or since.

In style he is clear, classical, simple. Great and constantly repeated is his aversion to turgid, grandiose diction; great and warmly-expressed his admiration of the simplicity Thus, in his essay on Readings in public, he insists on the importance of losing no opportunity of instilling into one's audience a love du simple, du sensé, de l'élevé, de ce qui est grand sans phrase; advising the Reader, for instance, to follow up a chapter of some modern romance with an extract from Xavier de Maistre—"Causeries," i., 234. Again, speaking of Balzac, he contrasts his giddy-making, capricious, indefinite style, with that of the old French classics, "simple, grave, sincere," qui va loin, as La Bruyère says; and quotes admiringly that Maxim-maker's remark, that for every thought there is one single expression available, which, and no other, should be used, and if necessary hunted up without stint of time and pains (ii., 357). He delights in Bonald's rule, Le beau en tout est toujours sévère:` he ratifies as essential to literature the axiom of Vauvenargues, La nettesé est le vernis des maítres: he reiterates the sarcasm of Pascal on those who cannot call a king roi, but forsooth auguste monarque—who are afraid to call Paris, Paris, but must drag in the periphrasis capitale du royaume. And on one occasion M. Sainte-Beuve thus enthusiastically apostrophises bis literary models—after having wearied and sickened himself over the bigarrées and convulsives pages of Camille Desmoulins' "Vieux Cordelier"—"On se prend à s'écrier en se rejetant en arrière: O le style des honnêtes gens, de ceux qui ont … placé dans les sentiments mêmes de l'âme le principe et la mesure du goût! O les écrivains polis, modérés et purs! O le Nicole des Essais! O Daguesseau écrivant la Vie de son père! O Vauvenargues! O Pellisson!"—"Causeries," iii, 97. Alas and woe the day for, were his vagabondage of diction and nondescript style—anarchical, anomalous, antinomian, and a good many other bad adjectives—to come under the ken and pen of M. Sainte-Beuve! That Lundi were a Black Monday for Sir Nat. and purity of the school of Pascal and Bourdaloue. He has a keen eye, and a severe one, for neologisms and solecisms; he loves to expose them in their monstrosity, and conjure up the ghost of a Nicole or a Fontenelle, and ask what he would think, what he would say, of such a piece of wickedness. Sir Thomas Browne would trouble him; Elia would fidget him; Coleridge would give him no peace; Carlyle would drive him mad.

In politics and ethics, those delicate points for English readers of French authors, he is cautiously conservative—not using that phrase technically, or as a party word, but as significant of his opposition to assailants of what is established and time-honoured in morals and social science. The immoral in fiction, the lawless in fact, he cannot away with. Romancers who weave network of false sentiment, and political theorists who never tire of playing "Much Ado about Nothing," at the state's expense and society's risk—find in him an adversary "of credit and renown." Condorcet's conduct in 1792, is enough, he protests, merely in a moral point of view, to make one curse revolutions, and shudder non pas pour sa vie, mais pour son propre caraetère. André