la volonté, ' conscious effort

Page 109. 1. 1. restera-t-il comme poète? Anatole France, in the préface to Sainte-Beuve's collected poems, after pointing out that the appearance of Lamartine's Méditations in 1820 marked a new epoch in French poetry — ' tout ce qui était jeune admira et pleura ' — that it was followed in rapid succession by De Vigny's Poésies antiques et modernes, Victor Hugo' s Odes et Ballades, the two Deschamps, Delavigne, and Béranger, continues : ' but in 1826 this new inspiration was exhausted, and there was still room for " un poète intense, contenu, familier, sachant le fond des choses, et les traitant par le menu, avec une vérité en même temps fidèle et révélée." '

1. 9. Trianon. Le Grand Trianon and le Petit Trianon are two dépendances of Versailles, pleasure-houses to which kings of France, from Louis XIV downwards, retired to escape from the pomp and ceremony of the Palace. Le Petit Trianon is indissolubly associated with the name of Marie-Antoinette.

1. 24. la poésie d'un critique. Sainte-Beuve said himself, ' Il y a dans les trois quarts des hommes un poète qui meurt jeune tandis que l'homme survit.'

1. 29. l'Histoire de Marèze et dans celle de M. Jean. In the Pensées d'Août.

1. 25. Volupté. Sainte-Beuve confesses himself that the work is not properly a novel, but a psychological study. ' Le véritable objet de Volupté est l'analyse d'un penchant, d'une passion, d'un vice même et de tout le côté de l'âme que ce vice domine et auquel il donne le ton, du côté languissant, oisif, attachant, secret et privé, mystérieux et furtif, rêveur jusqu'à la subtilité, tendre jusqu'à la mollesse, voluptueux enfin.'

Sainte-Beuve himself, in his old âge, confessed to Mme de Méritas that his mysticism had been only a cloak for lovemaking : ' J'ai fait un peu de mythologie chrétienne en mon temps ; elle s'est évaporée. C'était pour moi comme le cygne de Leda, un moyen d'arriver aux belles et de filer au plus tendre amour. La jeunesse a du temps et se sert de tout.'

The plot, if plot it can be called, is of the simplest. A priest, bound for America as a missionary, employs himself during the voyage in compiling for the benefit of a young friend whom he has left behind in Brittany a journal intime, a révélation of the

errors and déceptions which hâve led him at last to abjure the world and take refuge in the Church.

Against Scherer's just but severe criticism may be set the generous appréciation of Gustave Planche. ' Volupté est un beau livre, plein de substance, nourri de pensées et surtout de sentiments vrais, surpris avec bonheur, étudiés avec précision. C'est un livre où ruisselle le sang des blessures, où l'artiste a laissé les lambeaux de son cœur, comme la brebis les lambeaux de sa toison dans la haie qu'elle franchit.'

1. 27. Joseph Delorme. Against this is to be set Planche's mordant criticism of the poem : ' Joseph Delorme se déclare franchement incapable d'aimer d'un amour constant et dévoué. En rêvant les plus beaux triomphes, il rêve le désenchantement et l'abandon. Si ce n'est pas une calomnie, comme j'aime à le penser, c'est à coup sûr un étrange aveu. La jeune fille ignorante et naïve, la jeune femme liée au bras d'un vieil époux, excitent en lui la même ardeur, la même curiosité, mais que l'une des deux se prenne à l'aimer et se livre, son désir à peine assouvi, il prévoit qu'il détournera les yeux et ne gardera pas même le souvenir de leur nom.'

Page 110. 1. 3. Notre-Dame de Paris. Victor Hugo's great novel on mediaeval Paris appeared in 1S31.

1. 29. saint Martin, the famous Bishop of Tours in the fourth century ; noted for his charity and humility.

1. 30. les Confessions de saint Augustin. In the early chapters he confesses in sackcloth and ashes the sins of his youth, but most of thèse, such as robbing an orchard and attending gladiatorial shows, are peccadilloes compared with Amaury's Don Juanisms. There is in Volupté as much of Hazlitt's scandalous Liber Amoris as of the Confessions.

Page 112. 1. 10. Ici il serre, &c. ' At times he rides the metaphor to death, or again he carries subtlety to the verge of affectation. He is wire-drawn, far-fetched, and intentionally breaks the rhythm of his periods.'

1. 20. Dans l'épais sommeil, &c. ' In the deep apoplectic slumber, my chastisement for this relapse, no light crystalline dream bore me back to the embrowned bowers ready to burgeon again, or reinitiated me into the chaste mysteries.'

1. 37. Si le style est l'homme, &c. Buffon's famous saying, ' Le style est l'homme même,' occurs in his speech delivered on his réception by the Académie, August 25, 1753. There is a variant reading, ' de l'homme même.' — Tic, always of a vicious habit, as applied to horses : crib-biting. Shakespeare's ' trick o' the blood ', ' trick of nature ', will best render it.

Page 113. 1. S. Histoire de Port-Royal. Sainte-Beuve's opus magnum occupied over twenty years of his life (1837-59). The best édition, in six volumes, appeared in 1 867. To show the scope of the work, we may indicate the contents of the volumes. The first traces the origin of Port-Royal in the thirteenth century, and its re-establishment at the beginning of the seventeenth. The title of the second is Port-Royal et M. de Saint-Cyran (the champion of Jansenism). The third is devoted to Pascal. The fourth deals with the educational System of the Jansenists. The fifth describes the later génération of Port-Royalists. The sixth is entitled Port-Royal finissant, and gives in full détail the history of the persécutions under Louis XIV.

1. 29. Montaigne. The sworn foe of asceticism, no less than of reckless self-indulgence, counting the monastic life and cowardly shirking of human and civic duties a refined form of selfishness. He says in Essai iii : ' Un jeune homme doibt troubler ses règles, pour esveiller sa vigueur, la garder de moisir et s'apoltronner 5 et n'est train de vie si sot et si débile que celuy qui se conduit par ordonnance et discipline.'

1. 30. Voltaire. His is the philosophy of common sensé. Though his name has corne to connote absolute scepticism — der Geist der stets verneint of Faust — yet he was a genuine theist and upheld revealed religion in so far as it was not contradicted by science. He was a freethinker, but no atheist or antinomian.

Page 114. 1. 1. n'est-il pas un animal. Just as Montaigne asked, ' Sommes-nous pas bien brutes, de nommer brutale l'opération qui nous faict ? '

1. 10. // est bien vrai, &c. This paragraph is a good summary of the idée mère of Positivism, the religion of humanity, ' selfreverence, self-knowledge, self-control,' and the exclusion of what George Eliot nicknamed ' other-worldliness '.

1. 27. Il y a dans tout fait, &c. The argument is : If civilization continues to advance, if ail the world over there is the same material comfort and security {publi= indifférence to a world to corne) that we now find in Paris, the theology of Pascal will become incredible — a belief in the utter depravity of human nature, of a world living in iniquity and awaiting the Day of Judgement.

Page 115. 1. 4. dirigées bailleurs. For instance against Calvinism and other sects, as opposed to primitive Christianity.

1. 7. évangélique. ' Evangelical ' has acquired a specialized meaning in England, the équivalent of ' Low Church '. To avoid the ambiguity we must translate ' of the Gospels '.

1. 28. Confucius. The State religion of China, established in N 2

l80 ÉTUDES FRANÇAISES ET ANGLAISES

the fifth century b.c. by this great religious reformer, has for its most distinctive tenet the worship of ancestors. It recognizes a Suprême Being, and has temples, but no priesthood — the emperor is the high priest of the nation.

1. 29. le bouddhisme. Buddhism is a form of pantheism, and it is a question of words whether the name of God should be given to the anima mundi, the universal spirit, absorption into which (nirvana) is the summum bonum of the Buddhist.

1. 34. on mourait, &c. See Schiller's Die Gbtter Griechenlands, in particular the stanza : —

Damais trat kein gràssliches Gerippe Vor das Bett des Sterbenden ; ein Kuss Nahm das letzte Leben von der Lippe, Seine Fackel senkt' ein Genius.

Selbst des Orkus strenge Richterswage Hielt der Enkel eines Sterblichen, Und des Thrakers seelenvolle Klage Nâhrte die Erinnyen.

Page 116. 1. 13. il a plié, &c. The metaphor is clear : ' as the twig is bent the tree's inclined,' but it does not grow naturally; it shows to the end that it has been twisted and tied to a stake or wall. It is not so easy to translate — ' It has trained humanity by penance, but its pupil still retains the traces.'

1. 33. démoneries, ' bedevilments.' The word is not recognized by Littré or Hatzfeld, though it is used by standard modem authors. ' La duchesse de Maine s'agitait avec une démonerie infatigable, de peur d'avoir à réfléchir et à s'ennuyer un seul instant.' — Sainte-Beuve. On the daemon of Socrates whole volumes, ancient and modem, hâve been written. It will suffice to give his own account of it as recorded in Plato. In crises of his life he heard an inner voice or was conscious of an admonition warning him against some act or course of conduct that he was meditating, and to him it appeared something supernatural.

1. 37. jardin des Plantes. This world-famous establishment on the lef t bank of the Seine, which dates back to the fif teenth century, is far more than a botanical garden and muséum. It contains collections of zoology, geology, mineralogy, &c, and has attached to it chairs of ail thèse subjects and of comparative anatomy.

Page 117. 1. 2. les sciences positives, ' natural science,' as opposed to metaphysics and theology.

1. 11. Buffon (1707-17S8). His Histoire naturelle, of which the first three volumes appeared in 1749, was completed in thirtysix quarto volumes, and published in 1789. Elsewhere, Sainte-

NOTES. PAGES II5-II8 l8l

Beuve, judging it from another point of view, writes : ' Le sentiment moral reste un peu blessé, au milieu de tous les étonnements qu'excite ce bel ouvrage, de le trouver si muet et si désert du côté du ciel. Seul le génie de l'humanité y domine et s'y glorifie dans une dernière page d'une perspective grandiose et superbe, bien que légèrement attristée.'

1. 25. s'accommoder de la regarder. The verb can be followed by de or à, but there is a slight différence of meaning.

s' accommoder à quelque chose= ' to adapt oneself,' as ' l'œil s'accommode aux distances.' S' accommoder de quelque chose =~ ' to make shift with,' as ' La raison qui se borne à s'accommoder des choses raisonnables n'est qu'une demi-raison.' — Fénelon.

I.28. On a remarqué, Sec. SeeBacon s Essay on Deatb: 'It is no less worthy to observe how little altération in good spirits the approaches of death make. ... It is as natural to die as to be born ; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.'

1. 32. Montaigne. Cf. Saintsbury's Short History of French Ltterature, p. 244 : ' His scepticism is altogether sut generis. It is not exubérant like that of Rabelais, nor sneering, like that of Voltaire, nor despairing, like that of Pascal, nor merely inquisitive and scholarly, like that of Bayle.' Also Montaigne, by R. Warwick Bond, p. 76 : ' This is Montaigne's idéal ; a gospel of contentment, of cheerful acceptance, of the golden mean — a life not headstrong or passion-tossed, but self-controlled even in virtue, and ever regardful of the close : a dignified and philosophie attitude, in which, I think, we may suppose Shakespeare to hâve found the model for his Prospero. . . . Montaigne's idéal reminds one most, as Sainte-Beuve suggests, of Horace.'

M. Hippolyte Babon has also noted the likeness between Montaigne and Sainte-Beuve : ' Une parenté directe avec Montaigne, dont il a hérité la nature ondoyante et l'insatiable curiosité.'

Page 118. 1. 9. avec V amour de V art. The références to art in the Essais are rare. He mentions some ancient statues at Rome, but of pictures at Florence and Venice, both which towns he thoroughly explored, there is not a word. 1. 14. au pied, &c. From Consolations :

Le jour que je vous vis pour la première fois, Après nous être un peu promenés seul à seul Au pied, &c.

Also in fines à M. A. de L. :

O toi qui sais ce que la terre . . . Toi qui sais l'âme et ses orages.

l82 ÉTUDES FRANÇAISES ET ANGLAISES

1. 15. le plus jeune. Lamartine, born in 1790, was Sainte- Beuve's senior by fourteen years. Poésies de Joseph Delorme, with the tribute to Lamartine, appeared in 1829. Harmonies poétiques et religieuses appeared in 1830, on the eve of the Révolution.

1. 34. // est clair, &c. This sentence might seem to imply that orthodox belief was a passing phase with Lamartine, no less than with Sainte-Beuve ; the fact being that, while Sainte- Beuve became a professed freethinker and was buried without Christian rites, Lamartine continued to the end of his long life a devout and consistent Catholic. Barbey d'Aurevilly calls him wittily ' un Lamartine à plusieurs Elvires, dont la chair veut chanter comme chantait l'âme de l'autre.'

Page 119. 1. 9. la Restauration. Of this revival of Catholicism Chateaubriand writes in his Mémoires : ' Les fidèles se crurent sauvés. . . . On se précipitait dans la maison de Dieu comme on entre dans la maison d'un médecin le jour d'une contagion.'

1. 33. Tracy (1754-1836), a writer on moral philosophy, a disciple of Condillac, who referred ail ideas to sensation. Thus error, according to Tracy, was simply a lapse of memory.

Z)tf«KOM(i76i-i84o),adistinguishedpoliticianandhistorian, who began life as an Oratorian and lived through the Révolution and the Empire as a republican, after the manner of Plutarch's heroes. That is what doubtless attracted Sainte-Beuve.

Lamarck (less correctly Lamark, 1744- 1829), the most noted precursor of Darwin in the theory of the origin of species. He clearly seized the idea of évolution, though his attempts at explanation were crude and fanciful.

Page 120. 1. 10. auraient commencé. This use of the conditional corresponds to what in Latin syntax is known as virtual oblique oration. There is no équivalent in English, and we must express it by an added parenthesis — (' so it would seem ').

Page 121. 1. 3. un premier fond, ' a substratum.'

1. 13. pour de simples essais ou pour des gageures, 'as mère thèses or dialectical exhibitions.' Essai is hère used in its primitive sensé, as Montaigne and Bacon used it, the tentative treatment of a subject. Gageure, the Greek èniôaÇiç, almost= 'prize compétition.'

Page 122. 1. 1. Causeries, a word that Sainte-Beuve has stamped with his image, just as Montaigne has ' essay ', or Heine ' philistine '. And, like ' essay ', the word was used by him in a deprecatory sensé. Mme de Sévigné commonly uses it of gossip, tittle-tattle. Sainte-Beuve intended to contrast his

NOTES. PAGES Il8-I23 183

familial talks on books and authors with académie dissertations of the preceding génération of critics.

1. 14. ses jugements passés. In addition to his various books, Sainte-Beuve had from 1823 onwards been a constant contributor to periodical literature, in the Revue de Paris, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Constitutionnel.

1. 23. Moniteur. When in 1852 he made his peace with the Empire he left the Constitutionnel and joined the staff of the officiai journal.

1. 33. Daguesseau (or d' Aguesseau, 1668-1751), thegreat Chancellor who saved France from bankruptcy after the South Sea Bubble.

Page 123. I. 28. Bayle (1647- 1706), the author of the famous Dictionnaire historique et critique, Voltaire's favourite work, of which he writes : —

Bayle en sait plus qu'eux tous ; je vais le consulter : La balance à la main, Bayle enseigne à douter.

Basnage (1656-1710), the author of Histoire des ouvrages des savants, a continuation of Bayle's Nouvelles de la république des lettres.

Leclerc (1657-1736), professor of philosophy and belleslettres. He published three séries of Bibliothèques, élégant extracts with criticisms, amounting in ail to seventy-three volumes.

1. 31. Hoffmann (or Hoffman, 1760-1828), a writer of comic opéras and comédies ; joined the Débats in 1807. ' Ses articles se distinguent par un goût épuré, des aperçus ingénieux, une ironie mordante, une conscience scrupuleuse, et une indépendance bien rare.'

Dussault (1769-1824). A maître répétiteur (usher) when the Révolution broke out, he was driven to make a living by his pen. He began by writing in Fréron's organ, the Orateur du peuple ; was condemned to exile by the Directoire, but managed to évade the sentence, and joined the staff of the Journal des Débats, to which, under the signature ' G.', he contributed literary articles, distinguished by their modération and good taste. In 1821 he was a candidate for the Academy in opposition to Villemain, when the latter was elected. His articles in the Débats were published in 1824 under the title Annales littéraires, in five volumes.

Feletz (1767-1850). Imprisoned as a priest who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Republic ; liberated by the coup d'Etat of the i8th Brumaire, he returned to Paris in 1801 and joined the staff of the Débats. M. Nisard, who succeeded to his chair in the Academy, said in his éloge : ' De tous les hommes

distingués qui travaillèrent à la restauration du sens moral, du goût, de la langue, aucun ne fut plus agréable au public que M. de Feletz. ... La déclamation avait été la langue de la Terreur ; elle voulait qu'on l'en vengeât. M. de Feletz l'y servit à souhait.' 1. 34. Villemain, Abel François (1790-1870). ' Accepted as a master by the young critics of the Globe, he prepared the way for Sainte-Beuve.' — Dowden.

Page 125. 1. 33. Diderot, republished in Portraits littéraires. From this article, one of the best in the séries, we may quote a paragraph which gives to the life Sainte-Beuve's method of procédure and his secret of success : ' On s'enferme pendant une quinzaine de jours avec un mort célèbre, poète ou philosophe ; on l'étudié, on le retourne, on l'interroge à loisir ; on le fait poser devant soi ; c'est presque comme si l'on passait quinze jours à la campagne à faire le portrait de Byron, de Scott, de Gœthe ; seulement on est plus à l'aise avec son modèle, et le tête-à-tête, en même temps qu'il exige un peu plus d'attention, comporte beaucoup plus de familiarité. Chaque trait s'ajoute à son tour et prend place de lui-même dans cette physionomie qu'on essaye de reproduire. Au type vague, abstrait, général, qu'une première vue avait embrassé, se mêle et s'incorpore par degrés une réalité individuelle, précise, de plus en plus accentuée et vivement scintillante ; on sent naître, on voit venir, la ressemblance et le jour, le moment où on a saisi le tic familier, le sourire révélateur, la gerçure indéfinissable, la ride intime et douloureuse qui se cache en vain sous les cheveux déjà demi-clairsemés ; à ce moment l'analyse disparaît dans la création : le portrait parle et vit, on a trouvé l'homme.'

Page 126. 1. 28. Omnia transformat. Of Proteus, from Virgil, Géorgie iv. 441.

1. 30. Gœthe. To say that Goethe wholly lacked ' émotion ' is too sweeping a judgement. True that like Sainte-Beuve he was Olympian, ' holding no form of creed, but contemplating ail,' but Scherer himself would not seriously maintain that the prison scène in Faust, the dedication to the Poems, or Prometheus (and thèse are only samples), are lacking in émotion.

Page 127. 1. 9. Regrets. An article published in the Moniteur, Sainte-Beuve's palinode when he gave in his adhésion to the Empire (see notes on p. 107). The younger génération was not slow to express its indignation against this apostasy from the cause of Liberalism. Sainte-Beuve was appointed Professor of Latin at the Collège de France, but at his first lecture was hovvled down by the class, and had to resign.

Page 128. 1. 17. en suivant, &c. : ' adapting itself to every varying phase, never extravagant or ostentatious.'

1. 25. La nécessité, &c. An allusion to the Prologue of Persius' Satires : —

Who taught the parrot ' pretty Poil ' to say, And tamed the pie to wish his lord good day ? Hunger, the muse of muses, who inspires With wit the witless and the dullest fires.

Sainte-Beuve means that the necessity of furnishing his weekly ' copy ' for the press made him prune his periods and abandon his attempts at fine writing.

Page 129. 1. 2. les nuances de l'expression. M. Bersier, in a critique of Sainte-Beuve's style, has elaborated the same characteristic :

' Son style excelle dans cette recherche des nuances fugitives ; sa phrase, désarticulée en quelque sorte par une gymnastique continuelle, se fait souple et chatoyante ; elle se déroule en anneaux brillants qui s'élancent autour de chaque caractère et de chaque sujet.'

1. 12. Carrel, Armand (1800-1836), editor of the National, which he founded in 1830, in conjunction with Thiers and Mignet. The sturdiest and most vigorous of republicans. He was killed in a political duel.

Page 130. 1. 20. L'importance que la critique, &c. With this paragraph compare Matthew Arnold's essay, ' The function of criticism at the présent time.' The opening sentence runs : ' Of the literature of France and Germany, and of the intellect of Europe in gênerai, the main effort, now for many years, has been a critical effort ; the endeavour, in ail branches of Knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.'

Page 131. 1. 30. Port-Royal. This darker side of Jansenism has been delicately touched by Joubert. ' The Jansenists trouble our cheerfulness, but shed no cheering ray on our trouble. . . . They hâve in their way of thinking an austerity which incessantly constrains the will to keep to the path of duty ; but they seem to love God without affection, and solely from reason, from duty, from justice.'

1. 35. la maladie. Pascal suffered most of his adult life from a painful form of consumption, which attacked the stomach and viscera. It was aggravated by his austerities and the ignorant treatment of doctors. In his final illness he suffered tortures.

l86 ÉTUDES FRANÇAISES ET ANGLAISES

Page 133. 1. 35. la vanité qui se comprend, ' vanity that knovvs how vain it is.' It would be advisable to put ' vanity ' between inverted commas in order to show that it is not used in its vulgar sensé.

Page 134. 1. 3. la pensée qui se pense, ' thought which thinks itself ' — whose object is thought.

Oxford : Printed at the Clarcndon Press by Hora:e Hart, M. A.