briand, to reiterate his views in two Nouveaux Lundis, which have an independent value, as containing a detailed account of the method of proceeding which, in his judgment, a critic should pursue :

'It is very useful to begin by the beginning and, when one has the means, to take the superior or distinguished writer in his native country, in his race. If we were well acquainted physiologically with the race, the ascendants and ancestors, we should have a clear light on the secret and essential quality of mind; but most frequently this deep root remains obscure and is lost. In the cases in which it is not entirely hidden, much is gained by observing it.'

M. Taine would insist that the country and the climate are more important than the race. After the ancestors, come the near relatives, the family:

The superior man will be recognised, recovered to a certainty, at least in part, in his parents, in his mother especially, this parent the surest and most direct in his sisters also, in his brothers, even in his children. . . . This is very delicate ground, and would require to be illustrated by proper names, by a quantity of particular facts. I will indicate a few.'

Take the sisters, for example. This Chateaubriand, of whom we were speaking, had one sister with imagination based (to use his own phrase) on stupidity (bétise), which must have approached downright extravagance; another, on the contrary, the divine Lucile (the Amelia of "René "), with exquisite sensibility, a sort of tender imagination, melancholy, without any of that which corrected or distracted it in him: she died mad, and by her own hand. The elements which he united and associated, at least in his talent, and which kept a scrt of equilibrium, were distinctly and disproportionately shared between them.'

He was not, he says, personally acquainted with the sisters of Lamartine, but he had heard Royer-Collard speak of them in their first youth as something charming and melodious, like a nest of nightingales. Balzac's sister, Madame Surville, 'whose physical resemblance to her brother is seen at a glance, is also so formed as to give to those who, like me, have the misfortune to admire but incompletely the great novelist, a more advantageous idea which enlightens, reassures, and reclaims them.' The sister of Beaumarchais, again, had all his humour, wit, and sense of fun, which she pushed to the extreme limit of propriety, when she did not go beyond. She was the very sister of Figaro, the same stock, and the same sap.'

His sole instances of brothers are the Despréaux, although many better suited for the purpose lay ready to his hand; e. g. the Mirabeaus and the Dupins: examples rendered familiar

by

by the saying of Mirabeau, that in any other family his elder brother would have passed for a roué and a wit; and the simple inscription on a toinb in Père la Chaise: A la mère des trois Dupins.

*

A host of celebrities who acknowledged a similar debt to mothers crowd upon us :-Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Victor Hugo, Canning, Brougham, George Selwyn, Curran. These are not so much as mentioned. Madame de Sévigné, I have said it more than once, seems to have divided herself between her two children-the Chevalier, light, giddy, endowed with grace, and Madame de Grignan, intellectual, but a little cold, having taken reason for her share.' Would both her children, added together, have made up Madame de Sévigné? After alluding to some daughters of unnamed poets who had aided him to comprehend their fathers, he proceeds :

This is enough to indicate my thought, and I will be moderate. When we have learned as much as possible of the origin, parentage and near relatives, of an eminent writer, the next essential point is the chapter of his studies and his education.'

After this comes the set or group to which he belonged at starting, and when we have tracked him step by step so far, we are to get the best answers we can to the questions mentioned in a preceding article (ante, p. 43) touching his religious opinions, behaviour towards women, pecuniary habits and circumstances, mode of living, &c. &c.

Information on all these points might be required for a complete biography, but would be worse than superfluous as a preparation for the critical examination of a contemporary author in his works. If it did not give rise to personality or impertinence, it would mislead, as it misled Sainte-Beuve in his judgment of Chateaubriand, which was mischievously warped by a minute acquaintance with his peculiarities. Are we bound to find melodious versification in a poem because the poet's daughters sang like nightingales, or wit in a comedy because the dramatist had a witty sister? or (reversing the argument) insist that there can be no real genius in an author whose mother or brother was a fool? It is sad enough to have the dark or soiled passages in a great man's life recalled to us when we are filled with honest admiration of his genius-to be reminded of the meanness of Bacon, the morbid selfishness of Rousseau, the irritable vanity of Vol

*The only inheritance I could boast of from my poor father was the very scanty one of an unattractive face and person like his own; and if the world has ever attributed to me something more valuable than face or person, or than earthly wealth, it was that another and a dearer parent gave her child a fortune from the treasure of her own mind.'-Curran.

taire, the petty vindictiveness of Pope. But to what shall we be brought by criticism if, travelling beyond the record of the works before us, we are to pry into the private history of families-to drag out the skeleton in the closet, and condemn or absolve the author on the strength of the good or bad qualities lineally or collaterally inherited with his blood?

By far the most crucial and important questions which a critic should ask himself have been omitted by Sainte-Beuve. Have you any personal feelings that may affect your judgment either way? Do you like or dislike the author? Are you already committed for or against his style of writing, his views, his party, his system, or his school? Are you quite sure that you are free from indirect influence of any kind, that you have no vanity to indulge, no coterie to assail or flatter, no impugned line of conduct to vindicate, no real or fancied wrongs to avenge? It would have been well for his fame if Sainte-Beuve had occasionally submitted to this sort of self-examination, especially before undertaking his celebrated Causeries du Lundi,' to which these remarks on his method may serve as an appropriate preface.

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They were commenced (October, 1849) in the Constitutionnel,' at the invitation of the proprietor, Veron, and continued in that journal till the end of 1852. They were then transferred to the Moniteur Officiel' (with short interruptions), till 1861, when he accepted a fresh engagement from the Constitutionnel,' which lasted till within a year of his death. The concluding series, entitled 'Nouveaux Lundis,' make thirteen volumes octavo; the first and second, entitled 'Causeries du Lundi,' fifteen. Add the Portraits Littéraires,' the Portraits Contemporains,' &c.; and there are more than forty volumes of literary, historical, and biographical essays, on the most surprising variety of subjects, rarely if ever failing in knowledge, command of language, apt illustration, reflection, penetration, and capacity. His gallery is not restricted to an age, a country, or a class. Ancients and moderns, Greeks and Romans, Frenchmen and Englishmen, poets and historians, wits and beauties, statesmen and generals, are ranged round it with entire disregard of order or congruity, and on a careful review we are strongly disposed to think that (as regards contemporaries) he has painted best those with whom he had come least in contact, whose pursuits were most alien, or whose titles to fame had least in common with his own. The reason is obvious. His sympathies were stronger than his principles: his canons of criticism, at all events their application, varied with his society; and the laudable impartiality with which he started frequently gave way before the temptation of

gratifying

gratifying one of those hates or jealousies, odia quæ in longum jaciens auctaque promeret, which he had always in store for an opportunity.

It was the misfortune of the third Napoleon to obtain power by an act which alienated an immense majority of the most illustrious statesmen of France. Men who have undergone exile or imprisonment under any given régime should be allowed time to get reconciled to it, be it ever so well adapted to the emergency. But in August 1852, only seven months after the coup d'état, Sainte-Beuve published an article entitled 'Les Regrets,' for the sole purpose of heaping the most ungenerous and unfounded reproaches on the discomfited party, because they had given such utterance as the state of things rendered prudent or possible to their disapproval or discontent. He treats such men as Thiers, Molé, Berryer, Tocqueville, Odilon Barrot, Montalembert, Charles de Remusat, Duvergier d'Haurannes, &c. with seeing nothing to regret in the destruction of constitutional government but their own relegation to private life and their lost liberty of speech. They were most of them persons whom he had known at the Globe' office or met in Orleanist or Legitimist houses; l'état-major des salons was his description of them, and we suspect that their worst offences in his eyes were that they had distanced him in public life and that he had never felt quite at ease in their society. He had taken the same ground with more management and tact in a preceding article (May 24th, 1852) on the retirement of MM. Villemain and Cousin from their professorships.

You appear to complain that mind (esprit) has the worst of it at this moment. But who is to blame? Mind has been abused. Every celebrated professor, every clever writer has thought himself fit to be politician, orator, minister.'

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On the 6th December, 1852, four days after the proclamation of the Empire, we find him formally enlisted in the Moniteur Officiel.' In 1854 he was nominated Professor of Latin Poetry in the College of France; and, after taking ample time for preparation, he delivered his opening lecture, 9th March, 1855. This lecture,' he says in one place, which was followed by a second, was disturbed by political manifestations, and the course stopped there.' In another place: I was only able to give two lectures, having been prevented by a sort of émeute, born of political passions and prejudices.' In point of fact, his reception was crushing: the students would have none of him; and (as he knew and felt) the sentiment which animated them was personal, not political; it was a generous outburst of indignation

against

against the combined want of principle and candour of which he had given such signal proof in Les Regrets.' His mortification was extreme. A story got wind that he threatened to come to the third lecture with two pistols: to fire one at the audience and blow out his own brains with, the other. M. d'Haussonville discredits this story, but states that, for some time after the suspended course, Sainte-Beuve never went out without a large poignard in his sleeve, affecting to be in danger of assassination. At the same time he made the most effective appeal to a dispassioned public by recasting his lectures and publishing them as an Etude sur Virgile,' in 1857. It is esteemed one of his best performances, although open to M. d'Haussonville's objection that his constant predisposition is to seek out what is ingenious and pretty, rather than what is simple and fine.

On resuming his 'Lundis,' Sainte-Beuve made it a point to demonstrate that the Second Empire was not unfavourable to literature; nor was it, any more than the First Empire, at its commencement. To cramp or dwarf the intellect, to stifle the genius, to vitiate the taste and morals of a great nation, requires time. The example of M. Renan, adduced in June, 1862, to negative a supposed sterility of original writers, came too soon; and in due course of time the baneful influences at work were seen in his own case; when he became the apologist of Madame Bovary and the eulogist of Fanny. On what altar are you sacrificing?' expostulated his friend Morand. 'Sacrificing to avoid being sacrificed,' was the reply. You do not know, but it is a tide on the flow, and if we do not enter a little into their waters, they will submerge us.' The tide, swelled by a light literature of which La Curée and Mademoiselle Girard ma Femme may pass for samples, has become so foul, that to be submerged by it would be like being smothered in a sink.

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Sainte-Beuve signalised his re-entry in the Constitutionnel' by declaring guerre aux cléricaux, by an anti-Catholic campaign, in which he indiscriminately assailed both the living and the dead-MM. de Falloux and Veuillot, Bourdaloue and Bossuet-and discussed with a hardihood justified by success most of the moral and religious questions of the day. His review of Renan's Life of Jesus,' for example, is a model of clever and ingenious criticism, so conceived and executed as to conciliate many and offend none.

Like Mr. Charles Greville, he was in the habit of reverting to his original impressions with the view of qualifying them; but rarely in a favourable sense, from a spirit of kindness or a feeling of compunction. He was a striking illustration of the