Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/513

Rh of reflection and inquiry, though without at any time abjuring his more genial self. The grand peculiarity of Montaigne, that which made him a phenomenon, is defined to be his moderation, his sound discretion, his self-possessed discipline, in an age of extremes in things small and great: extreme credulity and extreme scepticism—ultraism in the court, the camp, the field; an age of ferment and chaos, of storm and tempest, of many-voiced strife and tumult; an age pronounced by one who lived through the Reign of Terror, the most tragical age m the annals of history. Fénélon (to name a sufficient contrast to the author of the Essays) is carefully delineated—with that lightsome spirit of innocent gaiety, as pure from dissipation as from hypocrisy, the natural impulse of a chaste, placid, equable temperament—with that disposition sweeter than sweetness itself, more patient than patience, which on this account impels M. Sainte-Beuve to murmur against it as faulty and irritating. Saint-Simon, again; almost unrivalled in penetration, and intuitive analysis (so to speak) of human character—in the power of reading minds and hearts à travers face and expression, and of plucking forth the mystery of motive and intention—in perfecting into an art, a science, a system, his piercing detection of what lay beneath the masks of the actors around him—in the burning curiosity, sometimes insatiable and unrelentingly cruel, with which he would anatomise a courtier's soul, and make visime the invisible, on the point of his scalpel. Le Sage, laughing for laughing's sake, without special contempt towards his own age, or hobby of an idea to be set trotting at the expense of his fellow-men; herein distinguishing himself from the satirists of his century, and allying himself to the more genial and jovial race of bygone days. Huet, commemorated by Voltaire asand, alas for the vanity of literature! better known now-a-days by that poor couplet than by his once proverbial and prodigious scholarship, and the reputation of the greatest helluo librorum and digester of them when swallowed in his omnivorous maw, that ever committed ravages in library stores; perfect examplar of the man of polish, the man of the world, and of l'honnéte homme under Louis XIV. Poor bishop! well might he proceed to demonstrate by a process in geometry the fatuity of those who reckon on an income of posthumous renown, or a bill on posterity for twelve months after date of decease.—Fontenelle; in whose case, brain was all in all, and heart totally omitted; who passed through his long existence without one burst of laughter, or one gush of tears, or one fit of passion.—Vauvenargues, a softened, not enfeebled Pascal; the little Abbé Galiani, uttering alternately thoughts "worthy of Vico, if not of Plato," and balderdash unworthy of an ordinary buffoon; the Abbé de Choisy, who was never himself save in woman's clothes, and whose ideal summum bonum consisted in dressing and undressing himself all day long, and dreaming about it all night; the Abbé de Chaulieu, debauched and apoplectic, shrewd and serviceable;—together with such notables as Voltaire and Rousseau, Boileau and Molière, La Fontaine and Daguesseau, Diderot, Condorcet, Beaumarchais, Bernardin St. Pierre, Florian, Malesherbes, Barnave, Mirabeau, &c., &c., come before the Causeur for judgment.

Of contemporary genius, M. Sainte-Beuve has evidently a special