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wrote (January 2nd and 9th, 1827) two articles which attracted the notice of Goethe:

'I had then no acquaintance with Victor Hugo. We were near neighbours without knowing it. He came to thank me for the articles, without finding me. The next day, or the day after, I called on him, and found him at breakfast. This little scene, and my entrée, have been painted in lively colours in "Victor Hugo, raconté." But, it is not accurate to say that I came to offer to place the "Globe at his disposal. From my youth upwards I have understood criticism differently: modeste, mais digne. I have never offered myself, I have waited for people to come to me. Dating from this day, began my initiation into the romantic school of poets. Till then I was sufficiently antipathic, on account of the royalism and the mysticism, which I did not share. I had even written in the "Globe" a severe article on the "Cinq Mars" of M. de Vigny, shocked by the falsehood of its historic side. It was in this same year that I left the study of medicine. I had been élève externe at the hospital Saint Louis. I had a chamber there, and was regular in my attendance. Finding it easier to make my way in the career of literature, I took to it.'

The intimacy with Victor Hugo grew rapidly, and he became a welcome member of the coterie called Le Cénacle (the guestchamber), composed of poets or poetasters, painters and sculptors, who claimed a monopoly of French genius and, taken at their word, had almost all of them a masterpiece in preparation or conception. Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, David d'Angers, Louis Boulanger, and the two Deschamps were of the number. They met constantly at Victor Hugo's, where they called one another by their Christian names. Indeed, the tone of familiarity became so general and so catching, that he was compelled to issue a peremptory injunction to prevent Madame, his wife, from being addressed as Adèle. A spark of jealousy or rivalry would occasionally flash out in a sarcasm, as when Emile Deschamps said of a rising light, That poet have a star! Say rather a taper (bougie).' But they presented a united front to the outer or philistine world: forming a kind of Mutual Admiration Company (Unlimited) and animated by the spirit which originated La Camaraderie of Scribe

George Smythe (Lord Strangford) used to describe a scene at one of the Young England breakfast-tables, to which the editor of a daily paper had been invited in the hope of enlisting his services in the cause. He was explaining how far his political notions agreed with theirs, when one of them broke in: This is all very well, but when do you intend to butter us?' It may be suspected that the same question was put to Sainte-Beuve by more than one of the eager aspirants to im

mortality

mortality with whom he was now associated.

Nor was he

slow in responding to the call. Besides ringing the praises of the most distinguished members of the school, he undertook a series of articles on Ronsard and the French poetry of the sixteenth century, with the avowed object of discovering in the older poets the (to borrow M. d'Haussonville's apt expression) ancestors of the romanticists, of drawing up their genealogical tree, and establishing that they had hit upon the veritable tradition of French poetry from which the classicists had been the first to stray. In thus reverting to the bards of the olden time as the true sources of inspiration, Sainte-Beuve, consciously or unconsciously, was following in the track of the leaders of the same school in Germany, the Schlegels and Tieck, whose views were amusingly paraphrased by Henri Heine. 'Our poetry,' he makes them say, 'is antiquated; our muse is an old woman with a distaff; our hero no fair boy, but a shrivelled dwarf with grey hair; our feelings are withered, our fancy is dried up; we must refresh ourselves; we must seek out the neglected fountains of the naive simple poetry of the middle ages; there the draught of renovation bubbles up for us.' Their disciples, he adds, hurried off at once to these wondrous springs, where they sipped, and gulped, and swallowed with such extraordinary zest, that it chanced to them as to the elderly waitingwoman who drank so much of the elixir of youth on her mistress's dressing-table, that she not only became young again but was turned into a little child.

Sainte-Beuve laid himself equally open to raillery, when, instead of relying on the simple touches of fancy and feeling, the graces snatched beyond the reach of art, the native woodnotes wild, of the early unsophisticated poets, he adduced their irregularities to justify the licences in which the modern renovators of art and literature systematically indulged. There was a line, however, beyond which he refused to go along with the new school. The unrestrained admiration which he bestowed on their lyrical productions was not extended to their dramas: he was a classicist on the stage; and his sympathies were not with the party who, after the first representation of Henri Trois' at the Français, formed a ring in the foyer and danced round the bust of Racine, shouting Enfoncé Racine! Enfoncé Racine!

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There was a suppressed bitterness in the smile with which Alfred de Vigny listened to some female admirers who, when he was meditating a rivalry with Milton, cried out in chorus, 'Oh, give us more Cinq Mars; that is your line.' Sainte-Beuve would have received much in the same manner the compliments and congratulations of friends on his having hit upon his own richest vein Vol. 141.-No. 281.

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in criticism. His destiny, he fully believed, was to achieveimmortality as a poet: he was burning to enter the lists with the most brilliant of his associates, and early in 1829 he came before the public with the first of his original compositions, entitled 'Vie, Poésies et Pensées de Joseph Delorme.' ThisJoseph Delorme, he states in his autobiography, without being identically himself as to biographical circumstances, was faithfully his 'moral image.' We therefore turn to the 'Vie' to verify his moral image or ascertain at least what sort of moral image he deemed likely to conciliate favour for the 'Poésies' reflecting it.

'If, on

Joseph Delorme, then, is a moody, sickly, wayward lad, whoa commonplace thing enough in precocious boys-passes most of his time in day-dreaming. His place of refuge from haunting fancies was the church, and he found strength and comfort morning and evening in long prayers. His school days were marked by displays which betokened a brilliant career. leaving school, he had given way unreservedly to his literary and poetical tendencies, no doubt, we think, he would have succeeded to his heart's desire; he would have found in his virgin soul sufficient energy for all; his obscure name would now be linked to more works than one.' Unluckily the genial current of his virgin soul was stopped or frozen by science. Abjuring his Christian creed, he gave himself up to the impiety of the eighteenth century, or rather to the sombre and mystic adoration of nature, which, with Diderot and Holbach, almost resembles a religion.' He would have scrupled to set foot in a church, and on coming home on a Sunday evening, he would have walked a league to throw into the hat of a pauper thesavings of a week. He was ready for any amount of sacrifice. He abruptly broke off his visits to a charming young person with whom he might hope, at the end of some years, a suitable union.

'But his rather rude (un peu farouche) philanthropy dreaded to be permanently imprisoned in too contracted affections, or, as has been said, in an égoïsme à deux personnes. Moreover, he had formed for himself a perspective of I know not what ideal of marriage, in which the sacrament should count for nothing. He required a Mademoiselle de Chaux, a Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, or a Lodoïska.'

He kept a journal, almost all the pages of which are dated at night, like the prayers of Dr. Johnson and the poems of the unhappy Kirke White.' One evening, as he was returning to his humble and elevated abode on the fifth story by moonlight, he caught himself murmuring and intoning plaints which resembled verses. Then the long-hidden truth broke upon him;

science

science was not his strong point: verse was.

He read over

again with candour and simplicity those melodious poetical lamentations which he had once treated with mockery.

'The idea of being associated with those chosen beings who sing their sufferings here below, and of groaning harmoniously after their manner, smiled on him in the depths of his wretchedness, and set him up again a little. Art, no doubt, went for nothing in his first attempts. He desired merely to tell himself his sufferings faithfully, and to tell them in verse. This occupation proved an inadequate restorative; he thought only of living as the condemned of yesterday who is to die to-morrow, and to lull himself with monotonous songs to put death to sleep.'

To carry out this purpose of dying like the fabled swan, he shut himself in a garret and passed his time between faintingfits and frenzies, his chief trouble being the occasional recurrence of reason, which, prowling round him like a phantom, and accompanying him to the abyss with a lurid glare, suggested the agreeable image of drowning with a lantern round one's neck.

'Joseph retired last summer to a little village near Meudon. He died there, some time in October, of a pulmonary cough, complicated, it is believed, by an affection of the heart. A melancholy consolation for us mingles with the reflection on so premature an end. If the malady had been prolonged some time more, it is to be feared that he would not have waited its effects; at least, in reading the collection, it can scarcely be doubted that he secretly nourished a sinister thought.'

In 1829, when these 'Poésies' were published, Sainte-Beuve had outlived his own analogous struggles and delusions: he may have suffered from poverty or disappointments of the heart, but, although below the middle height, he was of strong, healthy make, especially as regards chest and lungs. It is hardly conceivable, therefore, that he should have selected such a character for his poetical début. This diluted mixture of Byronism and Wertherism, of Chatterton and Rousseau, of maudlin sentiment and perverted imagination, has not even the poor merit of novelty. It was the malady of the generation. A diseased liver, a heart complaint, or a hectic cough, was mistaken by intense vanity for an infallible proof of genius, and morbid self-consciousness sought notoriety in default of fame, at the first grave check or mortification, in suicide. It was in the height of this mania that two young men, named Lebras and Escousse, on the failure of a small piece at the Gaîté, put an end to their lives by charcoal. 'I request,' writes Escousse, 'that the journals which announce my death will add this declaration : "Escousse killed himself because

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because he felt that his place was not here; because he wanted force at every step he took, before or behind; because the love of glory did not sufficiently animate his soul-if soul he had." One of the journalists who complied with the request, retorted: 'Madman, you die non pas parce que la gloire vous manque, mais parce que vous manquez à la gloire.' Béranger aggravated the evil by embalming their memory in a sonnet:—

'Quoi, morts tous deux ! dans cette chambre close
Où du charbon pèse encore la vapeur !
Leur vie, hélas, était à peine éclose.
Suicide affreux! triste objet de stupeur!

*

Et vers le ciel, se frayant un chemin,
Ils sont partis en se donnant la main.'

Starting for heaven in the same fashion, and probably in the same doubt about a soul, a notary's clerk left a piece of paper declaring that he quitted the world because, having duly calculated and considered, he did not think it possible for him to be so great a man as Napoleon."*

The best (or worst) half of Joseph Delorme's poetry is pervaded by the same tone of feeling and of thought, if it can be called thought. In Le Suicide,' Charles ascends a rock overhanging the sea, with the view of taking a plunge into eternity. He looks round, and the prospect brightens as he gazes on it. Pleasure boats, carrying laughing friends, approach and hail him as they pass. He smiles a pitying smile at their lightness of heart, emblematic of human folly; but resolves to wait till a wandering cloud shall momentarily obscure the

sun.

'Ce sera l'heure alors. . . . . Et quand, d'un flot docile
Mollement ramenés vers un retour facile

Et poussés par le flux,

Les joyeux promeneurs regagneront la terre,
Celui que, le matin, ils virent solitaire,

Ils ne le verront plus.'

In 'Les Rayons Jaunes' (which, he says, in a note, provoked more criticisms and epigrams than any piece in the collection) the golden tints of evening, as he sits at his window, recall how everything looked yellow when he attended chapel as a child. But, alas! the time has come, when, let things look as yellow as they would, they could not bring back the trusting piety of youth. The scene is the aunt's funeral:

* Bulwer's (Lord Dalling's) 'France.' 1834. Vol. i., Book i., ' Vanity.'

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