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'Le cercueil arriva, qu'on mesura de l'aune.

J'étais là . puis, autour, des cierges brûlaient jaune,

Des prêtres priaient bas.

Mais en vain je voulais dire l'hymne dernière :

Mon œil était sans larme et ma voix sans prière,

Car je ne croyais pas.

Why the coffin on its arrival should be measured with the aune, except to get a rhyme for jaune, is not self-evident. The dreary future in store for him is summed up in two lines :—

'Jamais sur mon tombeau ne jaunira la rose,

Ni le jaune souci.'

There are some verses of a later period in a healthier spirit and more elevated tone, as when the shade of Milton appears and calls on him to lay aside vain fancies and idle plaints for the serious business of life.

Et moi, rêvais-je alors qu'Albion en colère,
Pareille à l'Océan qui irrite et bondit,
Loin d'elle rejetait la race impopulaire
Du tyran qu'elle avait maudit?

Il fallut oublier les mystiques tendresses,

Et les sonnets d'amour, dits à l'écho des bois,
Il fallut, m'arrachant à mes douces tristesses,
Corps à corps combattre les rois.'

Sainte-Beuve's place in the Cénacle is indicated by Alfred de Musset, in his Stanzas to Charles Nodier:

'Sainte-Beuve faisait dans l'ombre,

Douce et sombre,

Pour un œil noir, un blanc bonnet,

Un Sonnet.

He was always more or less the slave of some passion or fancy. In the words of a friend (Mérimée, we suspect), cited by the biographer: Sainte-Beuve was of an amorous complexion; but for his misfortune he was ugly, and of an ugliness which the women never forgive.* Thus he never, or hardly ever, succeeded in his pretensions. "The women," he exclaimed with bitterness, "always offer me their friendship!" He also wanted what Prince Püchler calls the education of the drawing-room; and his sonnets to women of society are sadly deficient in the air of refined gallantry. Thus, in the Causerie au Bal,' to Madame when she looks cold :

* Mirabeau said of his own ugliness that it was interesting: Une laideur intéressante.

Avons-nous

Avons-nous donc fait mal? d'une voix qui soupire
Ai-je effrayé ce cœur, ou d'un trop long sourire?
Ai-je parlé trop bas? ai-je d'un pied mutin
Agacé sous la robe un soulier de satin?'

It was presuming a good deal to suppose the bare possibility of such causes of offence, except at one of the balls which are described con amore by Paul de Kock. The three following lines are from 'Le Suicide' :—

'L'aspect du mal souffert repose l'âme usée :

La sueur de midi nous retombe en rosée

Quand le jour va finir.'

The sweat of the midday descending upon us towards nightfall in dew, may be a truer image but hardly so graceful or pleasing as Lord Chesterfield's :

'The dews of the evening most carefully shun,

Those tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.'

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Sainte-Beuve's verses are not merely deficient in refinement. They want ease, nature, and spontaneity: they do not flash, glow, or sparkle: we smell the midnight oil: we hear the grating of the file: we are constantly reminded that rhymed rhetoric is not poetry. His friends of the Cénacle, however, in the true spirit of camaraderie, were enthusiastic in their admiration. Your Joseph Delorme (wrote Alfred de Vigny) prevents me from writing, prevents me from going out, prevents me from thinking of anything but his verses. Ah, good evening! this mask troubles me; your verses, your prose, your sonnets, your elegies,—I am enchanted with all.' What gratified his vanity still more were some letters from women who, mistaking, or pretending to mistake, the fiction for reality, wrote to him to say that, if they had known Joseph Delorme, they would have consoled him. The scandal caused in graver circles was, in one sense, an advantage; for fame may be compared to a shuttlecock which is kept from falling by being struck from side to side:

'This unlucky book,' wrote Sainte-Beuve to M. Loudière, 'has had all the success I could hope it has irritated worthy people much more than I should have thought credible. Madame de Broglie has condescended to find it immoral; M. Guizot, that it is a Jacobin and Sawbones Werther. It has given rise to schism and debates in the "Globe." Is not this glorious and amusing?'

At the same time he wrote in an apologetic tone to Barbe that he would bring the book to him: that it was too profane to

* Carabin, a cant term for a medical student.

be

be sent from a distance without explanation and commentary, 'although, rest assured, perfectly inoffensive towards religion and monarchy.' The strangest criticism was an anonymous one quoted by M. d'Haussonville: I was acquainted with a woman who was handsome, but her breath always betrayed the fever of an agitated night. Such is the poetry of this M. Delorme; it is not healthy, but it is pénétrante.'

The Poésies et Pensées' of Joseph Delorme appeared in March, 1829: Les Consolations' in March, 1830; and rarely has so startling a transformation been undergone within so short a space. The second work-a collection of lyrical effusions in much the same form-is in studied antagonism to the first. Every trace of doubt, despair, mocking scepticism, and gloomy materialism, has disappeared; and the pervading tone is pious to monotony. To Victor Hugo, of all people in the world, is assigned the credit of this conversion. In a preliminary address, after vividly portraying a friendship which walks and mounts with us, and raises us to the foot of the Eternal throne,' he breaks out:

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That, my Friend, is the happy refuge which I have found in your soul. By you have I been brought back to the outward life, to the movement of this world, and thence, without shock, to the most sublime truths. You have begun by consoling me, and you have then carried me to the source of all consolation; for you have learnt it from your youth upwards; the other waters dry up, and it is only on the border of this celestial Siloe that one can be permanently seated and refreshed.'

The moral of sonnet after sonnet in Les Consolations' is that there is no happiness, above or below, except in faith. In • Consolation' No. 1, addressed to Madame Victor Hugo, who has confessed a constant tendency to shed tears in the midst of all earthly blessings, he gives her the full benefit of her husband's teaching, and winds up :

'Aux instants de tristesse on peut, d'un œil plus ferme,
Envisager la vie et ses biens et leur terme,

Et ce grave plaisir, qui ramène au Seigneur,

Soutient l'âme et console au milieu du bonheur.'

Sainte-Beuve was a safe man, of whom no husband, it would seem, thought it worth his while to be jealous; but we should like to know what Victor Hugo thought, from the poetic point of view, of these verses to his wife :

Quand il n'est plus matin et que j'attends le soir,
Vers trois heures, souvent, j'aime à vous aller voir :
Et là, vous trouvant seule, ô mère et chaste épouse!
Et vos enfants au loin épars sur la pelouse,

Et

Et votre époux absent et sorti pour rêver,

J'entre pourtant; et vous, belle et sans vous lever,
Me dites de m'asseoir: nous causons, je commence

A vous ouvrir mon cœur, ma nuit, mon vide immense.'

By way of experiment let us see how these lines will read in a free translation :

'When 'tis no longer morning, towards noon, without stopping For eve, about three, I most like to drop in,

And find you, oh! chastest of spouses and mothers,

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And your children, so like you, both sisters and brothers,'
The dear little innocents, all out at play

Far off on the grass, and your husband away,

With his head in the clouds-what's by no means surprising—
I enter, however: you, fair and not rising,
Request me to sit, which I do with a start,
And, as usual, begin a discourse on my heart,
On its vast aching void, its tremor, its fright
At the unholy thoughts that besiege it at night.'

Another eminent poet apparently assisted in the new birth which led to the Consolations, indeed rather more than assisted; for, forgetful of the prior (if it was prior) debt of gratitude to Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, with the minuteness of Crabbe, particularises the day and month on which the healing influence descended upon him through the instrumentality of Lamartine, to whom the sixth Consolation is. addressed :

'Le jour que je vous vis pour la troisième fois,
C'était en juin dernier, voici bien deux mois.

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Vous m'avez par la main ramené jusqu'au Ciel.
"Tel je fus," disiez-vous. "Cette humeur inquiète,
Ce trouble dévorant au cœur de tout poète
Et dont souvent s'égare une jeunesse en feu,
N'a de remède ici que le retour à Dieu."'

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Most of the consolations are in the shape of flattering communications pour faire part of an interesting event. Those to whom they were addressed could do no less than repay his compliments in kind. Consoler, may you be consoled!' wrote Alfred de Vigny, as if Sainte-Beuve had seriously thought of consoling anybody. Ecoutez votre génie, Monsieur!' exclaimed Chateaubriand. I have wept, I, who never weep,' was the tribute of Lamartine, of whom might have been said what Curran said of Byron, that he wept for the press and wiped eyes with the public. Mérimée, who had come in for one

his

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of

of the poetic epistles, laughed in his sleeve, and Béranger wrote: When you use the word Seigneur, you make me think of those old cardinals returning thanks to Jupiter and all the gods of Olympus for the election of a new Pope.'

This phase of Sainte-Beuve's life, although, in point of fact, very little out of keeping with the rest, has been studiously investigated by the critics with the view of discovering the precise cause of the change between March, 1829, and March, 1830. He writes to his friend, the Abbé, July 29, 1829:

'I must fairly own to you, that, if I have returned with sincere conviction and extreme good-will to ideas that I had stripped off before feeling all their bearing and all their meaning, this has been less by a theological or even philosophical road than by the path of art and poetry; but what signifies the ladder, provided we rise and arrive.'

This smacks of the Don Juan doctrine :-
:-

And whether coldness, pride, or virtue dignify
A woman-so she's good, what can it signify?

Liars are proverbially said to have short memories: so have confirmed egotists: they renew the excitement of self-analysis by self-contradiction. In 1869 Sainte-Beuve added this note to an article on La Rochefoucauld :

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My first youth, from the moment I had begun to reflect, had been all philosophical, and of an entirely positive philosophy, in accord with the physiological and medical studies to which I destined myself; but a grave moral affection, a great trouble of sensibility, intervened towards 1829, and produced a genuine deviation in the order of my ideas. My collection of poetry, the "Consolations," and other writings which followed,-notably "Volupté," and the first volume of "Port Royal," sufficiently testified this unquiet and excited disposition which admitted a large part of mysticism.'

Starting from this passage the eloquent biographer flies off:'We must no longer shrink back from the appropriate word: it is by love that Sainte-Beuve reached religion, and, I add, he is not the only one, nor the first, who has been led to it by this road. I should be unwilling to say anything in this matter that might have the air of a paradox, or above all of irreverence; but I have always found palpably superficial and deceitful the distinctions which our moralists commonly establish between the different affectionate sentiments of the human heart. Friendship is not so different as is believed from love, nor the love of the creature from the love of the Creator.'

This is a flight beyond us. We humbly own that we are amongst the moralists who still draw such distinctions, and we

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