Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve
born
Dec. 23, 1804, Boulogne, France
died Oct. 13, 1869, Paris
French literary historian and critic,
noted for applying historical frames of
reference to contemporary writing. His
studies of French literature from the
Renaissance to the 19th century made him
one of the most respected and most
powerful literary critics in
19th-century France.
Early
life and Romantic period.
Sainte-Beuve was the posthumous only
child of a tax collector. After a
sheltered childhood, he completed his
classical education in Paris and began
to study medicine, which he abandoned
after a year. A talented but in no way
brilliant youth, he continued his
general education at his own pace,
attending the University of Paris and
extension institutions, and in 1825 was
drawn into journalism by his former
teacher, Paul Dubois, editor of a new
liberal periodical, Le Globe. In its
pages he wrote his first essays on the
poetry of Victor Hugo and soon became a
member of his literary circle of
Romantic writers and poets. In his first
book, Tableau historique et critique de
la poésie française et du théâtre
français au XVIe siècle (1828;
“Historical and Critical Description of
French Poetry and Theatre in the
Sixteenth Century”), he discovered,
perhaps naturally, a Renaissance
ancestry for Hugo and others of his new
friends. A brief visit to England in
1828 strengthened his taste for the
poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, both of whom were then
little known in continental Europe. His
visit to England may also account for
the appearance of elements of the style
of William Cowper and George Crabbe in
volumes of his own poetry, Vie, poésies
et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829; “The
Life, Poetry, and Thought of Joseph
Delorme”) and Les Consolations (1830),
which on their publication attracted
some attention—not least because of
their deliberate flatness and apparent
uncouthness, much in contrast to the
grander manner of Hugo and the poet
Alfred de Vigny.
He had
meanwhile developed a taste for social
speculation and a concern for problems
of religious experience. His social
concerns first crystallized in a passing
attachment to the group of reformers
assembled around the doctrines of Count
Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. According
to Saint-Simon’s disciples, the feudal
and military systems were to be replaced
by one controlled by industrial
managers, and scientists rather than the
church were to become the spiritual
directors of society. When this group in
1830 took over management of Le Globe,
Sainte-Beuve was entrusted with drafting
two manifestos, or “professions of
faith”; and, although he was soon to be
repelled by the sentimental excesses and
intemperance of its leaders, he retained
for 30 years a lingering sympathy for
its vision of a technocratic society
founded on the brotherhood of man.
Almost simultaneously, Sainte-Beuve came
under the spell of a religious reformer
and polemist, Félicité Robert de
Lamennais, to whom for a time he looked
for religious guidance. Lamennais was
then the spiritual adviser of the wife
of Victor Hugo, Adèle, with whom
Sainte-Beuve in 1831 struck up a lasting
but seemingly platonic relationship of
great intensity. Many of the details of
this shadowy affair are more or less
accurately related in the critic’s
privately printed volume of lyrics,
Livre d’amour (1904), which was,
however, not published in the lifetime
of either of them.
Early critical and historical writings.
Besides Le Globe, Sainte-Beuve from 1831
contributed articles to another new
periodical, the Revue des deux Mondes.
The success of his articles in the two
reviews prompted him to collect them as
Critiques et portraits littéraires, 5
vol. (1832–39). In these “portraits” of
contemporaries, he developed a kind of
critique, novel and much applauded at
the time, of studying a well-known
living writer in the round and entering
into considerable biographical research
to understand the mental attitudes of
his subject.
In the
early 1830s Sainte-Beuve was hampered by
his dislike for the newly established
regime of King Louis-Philippe, which had
aroused his anger mainly by its brutal
handling of the riots of 1832. He
accordingly refused several educational
posts that would have relieved his
poverty, fearing that they might
compromise his freedom of judgment.
Sainte-Beuve’s friendship with Victor
Hugo, which had already begun to cool in
1830, was almost extinguished by the
anonymous publication of Sainte-Beuve’s
autobiographical novel Volupté in 1834.
In this book the hero Amaury’s hopeless
love for the saintly and unapproachable
Madame de Couaën reflects its author’s
passion for Adèle Hugo. Volupté is an
intensely introspective and troubling
study of Amaury’s frustration, guilt,
religious striving, and final
renunciation of the flesh and the devil.
While
continuing to produce intellectual
“portraits” of his literary
contemporaries, as further collected in
Portraits contemporains (1846),
Sainte-Beuve became a member of the
circle presided over by Mme Récamier,
the famous hostess, and the writer and
politician François-René de
Chateaubriand. Sainte-Beuve greeted the
appearance of Chateaubriand’s memoirs
with enthusiasm, though a decade and a
half later he was to write an extensive
and far more detached study of that
writer and his literary circle, entitled
Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire
sous l’empire (1861).
A
softening of Sainte-Beuve’s attitude
toward Louis-Philippe’s regime coincided
in 1836 with an invitation from François
Guizot, then minister of education, to
accept a one-year appointment as
secretary of a government commission
studying the nation’s literary heritage.
Guizot’s suggestion at that time that
Sainte-Beuve demonstrate his eminence as
a scholar by producing a major work led
to Port-Royal, his single most famous
piece of writing. In 1837 Sainte-Beuve
accepted a year’s visiting professorship
at the University of Lausanne to lecture
on Port-Royal, the convent famous in the
17th century for advancing a highly
controversial view of the doctrine of
grace, loosely called Jansenism. For his
lectures he produced Histoire de
Port-Royal, 3 vol. (1840–48), which he
revised over the next two decades. This
monumental assemblage of scholarship,
insights, and historical acumen—unique
of its kind—covers the religious and
literary history of France over half of
the 17th century, as glimpsed through
the internal records of Jansenism.
On
completing his year in Lausanne,
Sainte-Beuve returned to Paris, and in
1840 he was appointed to a post in the
French Institute’s Mazarine Library, a
position he held until 1848. He
continued regular essay writing, and the
first two volumes of Port-Royal had also
been published when he was elected to
the French Academy in 1844. By then he
had already broken his earlier close
links with the Romantics and was highly
critical of what now appeared to him as
the undisciplined excesses of that
movement.
After
the overthrow in 1848 of Louis-Philippe,
Sainte-Beuve was not impressed by what
he saw of revolutionary democracy.
Unfairly accused in the republican press
of accepting secret government funds for
the repair of a chimney in his
apartment, he resigned his library
appointment in a fit of pique and
settled for a year at the University of
Liège (Belgium) as visiting professor.
There he wrote his definitive—but
unfinished—study of Chateaubriand and
the birth of literary Romanticism and
carried out research on medieval French
literature.
The Causeries du lundi period.
After Sainte-Beuve returned to Paris in
1849, he was asked by Louis Véron,
editor of the newspaper Le
Constitutionnel, to write a weekly
article or essay on current literary
topics, to appear every Monday. This was
the start of the famous collection of
studies that Sainte-Beuve named
Causeries du lundi (“Monday Chats”),
after their day of publication. These
critical and biographical essays
appeared in Le Constitutionnel from
October 1849 to November 1852 and from
September 1861 to January 1867; in Le
Moniteur from December 1852 to August
1861 and from September 1867 to November
1868; and in Le Temps in 1869. Their
success was such that Sainte-Beuve began
collecting them as Causeries du lundi, 3
vol. (1851); the definitive 3rd edition
formed 15 volumes (1857–62). A new
series, consisting of the articles of
1861–69, was published in 13 volumes as
Nouveaux lundis (1863–70). In his
articles Sainte-Beuve wrote about both
past and present French authors, with
some attention paid to those of other
European nations as well.
Sainte-Beuve welcomed the rise of
Napoleon III’s more dictatorial and
orderly regime in the early 1850s. In
due course, his sympathy was rewarded by
appointment to the chair of Latin at the
Collège de France, a well-paid but
largely nominal post. His first lectures
there were interrupted by the
demonstrations of radical students
critical of his support of Napoleon III,
however, and he resigned his duties and
salary, retaining only the title. The
intended lectures were published as
Étude sur Virgile (1857), a full-length
study of Virgil. In 1858 Sainte-Beuve
received a temporary teaching
appointment in literature at the École
Normale Supérieure, where he drew upon
his 1848 researches to deliver a course
on medieval French literature; but
otherwise his whole later career was
based on freelance essay writing.
Under
the Second Empire, many of
Sainte-Beuve’s earlier acquaintances,
now dead or in retirement, were replaced
by other writers: Gustave Flaubert,
Ernest Renan, the Goncourt brothers,
Prosper Mérimée, Ivan Turgenev, Matthew
Arnold, and a large number of scholars,
historians, and academicians. He
frequented the salon of Napoleon III’s
cousin, the princess Mathilde, somewhat
of a literary centre itself, though less
formal in style than had been the salon
of Mme Récamier until 1848.
Nevertheless, the crushing task of
researching, writing, correcting, and
proofreading a 3,000-word essay for
publication every Monday largely
prevented Sainte-Beuve from exploring in
the same leisurely way as in his youth
the many new trends being developed by
young writers. There is no doubt that
his literary tastes, though
unprecedentedly wide, ceased to develop
much after about 1850.
In 1865
he was made a senator by imperial
decree. His addresses to the Senate were
unpopular with his colleagues because of
his liberal views, but two were
important: that in support of public
libraries and liberty of thought (1867)
and that on liberty of education (1868).
In December 1868 Le Moniteur, which had
been independent, was reorganized and
became a government organ. An article
Sainte-Beuve wished to publish in the
paper caused difficulties, and for the
first time he was asked to correct and
cut a sentence. He withdrew the article
and offered it to Le Temps, for which he
remained a contributor until his death
in 1869 after unsuccessful bladder stone
operations.
Assessment.
It was with Sainte-Beuve that French
literary criticism first became fully
independent and freed itself from
personal prejudice and partisan
passions. That he was able to
revolutionize critical methods was
partly a result of the rise of the
newspaper and the critical review, which
gave prestige and wide circulation to
criticism and guaranteed its
independence.
Sainte-Beuve’s critical works, published
over a period of about 45 years,
constitute a unique collection of
literary portraits. He ranged widely,
covering every genre of literature and
reinstating writers whose works had been
forgotten, neglected, or misunderstood.
To use his own phrase, Sainte-Beuve was
primarily a creator of likenesses of
great men (imagier des grands hommes).
He wished, as he said, to understand
fully those about whom he wrote, to live
alongside them, and to allow them to
explain themselves to present-day
readers. To this end, he conceived the
practice of providing in his essays
extensive data on an author’s character,
his family background, physical
appearance, education, religion, love
affairs and friendships, and so on.
Though now a standard method of
historical criticism, this practice led
to allegations that Sainte-Beuve was
providing merely biographical
explanations of literary phenomena.
The
field of criticism has widened since
Sainte-Beuve’s day, and as a result he
has come to be reproached for his
omissions and injustices toward some of
his great French contemporaries. As one
who prepared the way for modern poetry,
he is disappointing when writing on
Charles Baudelaire, and he was unfair to
Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, and
especially to Honoré de Balzac. But from
his earliest review articles on Hugo,
Sainte-Beuve was never afraid to
introduce specific reservations into his
most enthusiastic eulogies, and it was
this uncompromising independence that
earned him the reputation of being an
unreliable, or even perfidious, critic
of friends.
Sainte-Beuve was able to achieve his
enormous output, which constitutes an
encyclopaedia of thought, only by
relentless labour and an unequaled
tenacity of purpose, linked with
unusually subtle intellectual power. A
portion of his scholarly research has,
with time, become old-fashioned, but
within limits the precision of his
documentation is almost always
impeccable, even over details on which
it has been challenged by literary
opponents. This precision was due to a
lifetime’s habit of extreme care in
documentation and to a fanatical respect
for historical accuracy.
To
older critical traditions whose judgment
rested on rigid standards of taste,
Sainte-Beuve added a much more flexible
and historical approach, entailing the
sympathetic reconstruction of values not
necessarily shared by himself and his
readers. Although he was not without
limitations as a critic of literature,
his success in his vocation was probably
unequaled in his time. A fitting summary
of his life and work was given by Barbey
d’Aurevilly in his words “Sainte-Beuve,
abeille des livres . . . faisant miel de
tout pour le compte de la littérature”
(“Sainte-Beuve, like a bee among books .
. . distilling honey from everything of
literary value”).
