think it will fare ill with morality when they are definitively laid aside: when human love may pass unchallenged as love divine, and illicit passion make its stealthy approaches under the hallowed name of friendship. There may be large-hearted people in the world to whom love is heaven and heaven is love a pure unselfish attachment may have an elevating effect: Steele said of Lady Elizabeth Hastings that to behold her is an immediate check to loose behaviour, and to love her is a liberal education.'* But the most irreproachable of SainteBeuve's heroines exercised no influence of the sort; and the moral, if there be a moral, of Volupté' is that refined passion is not a preventive or corrective of sensuality.

Volupté' is the supposed confession of a priest named Amaury, who, after leading a somewhat loose life, enters one of the strictest religious orders and dies in the odour of sanctity in America, after administering extreme unction to the lady who had enjoyed the principal share of his adoration, which was distributed in constantly varying proportions between three: a young and innocent girl, an accomplished married coquette, and the virtuous high-minded wife of a royalist noble. Distractions enough, one would have thought, for a simple man of letters of a languid, indolent turn; but his coarser nature gets the better of his finer, and as a relief from mystic transport he plunges headlong into sensuality, seeking out by preference the sirens who are most destitute of soul.

The confession is reduced to writing for the edification of a young friend prone to the vice which gives the title to the book, and the young friend must have been most exceptionally constituted to be either amused or reformed by it :

'Two categories of readers' (observes M. d'Haussonville) 'decide the success of a work of imagination: the young people and the women. It is their judgment which imposes and which the gravest judges end by accepting.† Now, neither the young people nor the women could be warmly interested in a work where the study of the passion occupies more space than the passion itself, where the analysis of love anticipates in some sort the expression. "Volupté" is addressed rather to that stage of life when the soul, already calmed without being indifferent, finds pleasure in studying without disturbance, in their complications and their shades, sentiments which have not yet become for it reminiscences. But I do not believe there

*Tatler,' No. 44.

I began with our patriotic and impetuous youth. With youth and woman on our side, success is certain.'-Lesseps, History of the Suez Canal.' Translated by Sir H. D. Wolff.

is a man who, having truly loved, has not after reading certain passages of "Volupté " been tempted to exclaim 'Tis true.'

In an appendix to one of the later editions (the seventh is now before us), Sainte-Beuve has brought together a quantity of testimonials in the shape of letters from admiring friends, which recall Sheridan's remark that the number of endorsements throws doubt upon the bill. Chateaubriand, who heads the list, begins: I am only yet at p. 51, but I tell you, without flattery, I am enchanted.' Michelet declares it is a book to be tasted drop by drop; that no book of the time will bear detailed examination so well. Villemain has devoured it with praise, blame, doubt, lively interest, admiration.' Lamartine did not like it and called it a book à deux fins, but (must it be said?) he was not pleased at finding himself anticipated in the supreme confession reproduced by him two years afterwards in his of "Jocelyn." The mysticism naturally secured the suffrage of Madame Swetchine; and a grande dame, who had ample experience of the range of feelings in question, having passed through a jeunesse orageuse, naively writes:

6

poem

'I love the work which reveals me to myself, which explains to me the struggles, the dreamy thoughts, too weak as I was to lift the burthen of them, or too impotent to give expression to them.'

By a hardly excusable indiscretion Sainte-Beuve states that 'this ravishing person' was the Duchesse de Castries, who figures in one of Balzac's stories (La Grenadière') as the Duchesse de Langeais. To this list might have been added the distinguished name of General Radowitz, who speaks highly of the book as an analysis of passion. The chief value of Volupté,' in our eyes, is that it supplements a chapter of biography ::

'It would not be difficult to give the name of the Marquise de Concaën, and well-informed people know even that of Madame R...; but the genuine portrait is Amaury. Amaury is Joseph Delorme in love with a marchioness. We clearly recognise in him this mixture of sensuality and romance, of feebleness and passion, of sensibility and egotism, which, painted with more or less of ideal or reality, constitutes the eternal type of the hero of romance, whether called Saint-Preux, Werther, Oswald, or Benedict. That, however, which is peculiar to Amaury and his model are those alternations of romantic passion, of gross disorder, and mystic remorse, which faithfully portray the state of mind of Sainte-Beuve when he was writing Volupté.' The resemblance stops, it is true, at the dénouement. But many of Sainte-Beuve's best friends believed that he was about to follow the example of his hero. "It is reported," wrote Madame Sand, "that you are about to become a priest.'

They

They mistook him widely, and the best proof that M. d'Haussonville is right in tracing his religious fit to his love fit is that they began and ended together. The affair with the marchioness was broken off by a quarrel, and a scene after the breach is thus narrated by an eye-witness, a lady :

'They were not yet reconciled, when, one evening, chance brought them together in my presence. Nothing but what is very common in this; it happens every day; but the piquancy of the thing was that M. Sainte-Beuve, wishing to utter all he had upon the heart, made use of me to express the bitterest reflections on inconstancy in friendship, misunderstood sentiments, &c. &c. . . . As I was near enough for her to hear, and she listened motionless without losing a word, you can fancy the scene and my embarrassment between the three personages; for the husband, two paces further off, was listening too.'

Sainte-Beuve had met with his usual luck, and been thrown over; the real grievance being not that the lady was inconstant in friendship, but that she kept within its bounds.

The connection of subject has led us to anticipate and we must retrace our steps. It is clear from the suddenness and eagerness with which Sainte-Beuve closed with the advances of Victor Hugo and Co. in 1827, that there was little cordiality between him and the leading writers of the Globe;' such as MM. Charles de Remusat, Duvergier de Hauranne, Vitet, Duchatel, and Ampère. They were men of the world or politicians who used journalism as a stepping-stone. He had, therefore, no cause for surprise, much less for complaint, when they took their own course at and after the revolution of July.

'I was absent (he says) during "the three days" in Normandy. I returned in all haste. I found dissension already amongst our friends in the "Globe." Some had become Government men and Conservatives, suddenly alarmed. The others only demanded to move on. I was one of these last. I therefore adhered to the journal with Pierre Leroux, Lerminier, Desloges, &c.'

Half repenting a decision which excluded him from a share in the spoil, he subsequently exclaims: To hear certain persons, it would seem now-a-days that the Globe' had no other object than to smooth the way to power for MM. the doctrinaires, great and small, after having passed six long years in flattering one another.' Yet there came a moment of candour when he admitted that he had graduated in the doctrinaire school.

According to Goethe there is no more enviable situation for a man than to find himself between a love that is ending and a love that is beginning. If this be true of intellectual attachments,

ments, Sainte-Beuve must have had a most enviable time of it; for in less than ten years, besides the vitally important change from infidelity to faith, he changed sides and systems three or four times over, and had been the professed admirer, or sat at the feet as a disciple, of Victor Hugo, Pierre Leroux, Armand Carrel, Chateaubriand, and Lamennais. It is an awkward fact, brought to light since his death, that in 1829 he was prepared to accept the appointment of Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople from the Prince de Polignac. One of his excuses for the versatility of his earlier years was that the critic was not yet born in him. But, tested by consistency, the critic was never born in him: he never attained fixity of any kind, either of head or heart; never at least till that period of life when, like the old coquette, he might be compared to the weathercock which only became fixed when it was rusty. In a less apologetic mood he insists that this versatility was essential to the complete study of the conflicting systems to which he successively adhered; or (as M. d'Haussonville states the case) he persuaded himself that he should see more of the edifice within than without, and if, to gain admittance to the consecrated ground, he was required to put on the gown of the neophyte, he put it on without hesitation. The plan of the localities once drawn, he insensibly lets drop the gown which he always took care to wear loosely, and it will be resumed no more.' This is rather an ingenious illustration than an argument. Numerous as were his gyrations, and much as he was swayed by circumstances, he was (with rare exception) quite in earnest when he turned, and wore the new gown as if made for him till he threw it off.

When the Globe' was sold by Pierre Leroux to the SaintSimonians, Sainte-Beuve went with it and wrote for it after it had become the organ of the père Enfantin and had assumed the motto: A chacun selon sa vocation, à chaque vocation selon ses œuvres. All he could say in his defence was that he did not go all lengths with the socialists:

When it is said that I attended the preachings of the rue Taitbout, what is meant? If, that I attended, like Lerminier, in a sky-blue coat, and on the platform, it is absurd. I went there as one goes everywhere when one is young, to every spectacle that attracts; and that is all. I am like the man who said, "I may have smelt at the bacon, but I was not caught in the rat-trap.'

6

He glosses over his connection with the National':

'It was in 1831, that Carrel proposed to me, through Magnin, to write in it. I joined it, and remained in it till 1834, having done some services which were not always too well recognised. The pub

lisher,

lisher, honest man, Paulin, knew this better than anybody, and was grateful to me for it to the last.'

6

He omits to state that his intimacy with Carrel, the uncompromising republican, grew so close as to alarm his mother, and he advocated the democratic cause with a vehemence which justifies a suspicion that he was a democrat at heart. At the same time, he was unable to resist the charm of aristocratic society when it was thrown open to him. Some time in 1833, Ampère, a former colleague of the Globe,' presented him to Madame Recamier, and he was immediately received on a footing of familiarity in the brilliant circle which clustered round her and Chateaubriand, at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. Unluckily forgetting the adage that it is good to be off with the old love before one is on with the new, he published, in 1834, whilst still a writer in the 'National,' an article on Ballanche (a favoured habitué of the Abbaye-aux-Bois), in which he alluded with respect, almost with regret, to that historical legitimacy which no enlightened publicist contests.' There were other phrases flattering to the admirers of the old régime, and a vehement protest, signed by Bastide and Raspail, declared that all men of heart had read the article with indignation and astonishment. Béranger took part with Sainte-Beuve, but Carrel remained neuter, and the schism resulted in a definite separation, happily for Sainte-Beuve, who was shortly afterwards congratulated by Carrel: "You are fortunate; yes, you are not bound.' 'Bound,' exclaims M. d'Haussonville, 'Sainte-Beuve was never bound to anyone! And in due time he made this clear to many others, besides Carrel and Raspail. He made it tolerably clear to Lamennais, although it may be alleged that the Lamennais whom he quitted was no longer the Lamennais he had joined.

The primary object of the remarkable triumvirate (Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert), who founded the 'Avenir,' was to exalt Christianity as represented by the Church, to base all that is best in human institutions upon Faith as upon a rock. Although these views were not incompatible with Sainte-Beuve's when the connection was formed, he declares that he never wrote for the Avenir'; but speaking of Lamennais, he says, 'One was never bound to him by halves'; and he was so deep in Lamennais' confidence that he was entrusted with the duty of seeing the Paroles d'un Croyant' through the press. Without authority from the author, he struck out a passage injuriously reflecting on the Pope. He wished to leave a reconciliation open, and it pained him (to borrow M. Renan's image) to see the hand of the priest lifting the axe against the still respected statue of the god. The full import of the work, however, was first revealed

to