tension. Each of them is a little drama developed within the limits of a short lyric narrative. Take, as a good specimen, the poem entitled À Madame la Comtesse de T. The Countess to whom it is dedicated relates the story. She is travelling by steamer from Cologne to Mainz. To see the scenery better, she has seated herself in her carriage, which is in the fore part of the ship, and she is consequently beside the steerage passengers-servants, workmen and their wives, poor people of all descriptions. One of her children exclaims: "Mother, there is Count Paul!" She looks round and recognises the acquaintance named, a Polish political refugee (the year is 1831). His features are refined and his hands are white, but he is dressed in the old, shabby clothes of a working-man. He is in the company of a family of plain English workpeople. The husband is a coarse- looking man, who is always eating or smoking; his wife is, at the first glance, insignificant; they have a daughter with them, a pretty girl of about fourteen. The Countess's first idea is that the young Pole has been attracted by the girl; then she sees that it is the mother, whose eyes follow him wherever he goes. And this mother is no longer a young woman, though she must, not so long ago, have been very pretty; her figure, in spite of the poverty of her dress, is elegant, and her hair is beautiful. With a solicitude, which is not that of love, but of tenderness towards the being by whom one is beloved, the young man puts her cloak round her and holds the umbrella over her when it rains. He buys expensive grapes for her little boys. The Countess divines that in the distant town where he sought refuge he has found friends in this poor family. But he, like herself, is to go on shore at Mainz, and his friends are to continue their journey in the steamer. "Montant sur le bateau, je suivis la détresse, Le départ jusqu'au bout ! Il baise avec tendresse Il prend, il serre aussi les deux mains à la femme, Quand on ôte le pont et pendant qu'on démarre, De ce groupe vers lui, gestes, coups de mouchoir; Je pensai Pauvre cœur, veuf d'insensés amours, Je vais en Suisse; après, plus loin encor, je vais !'" I would also call attention to a little poem which is a real work of genius, Monsieur Jean, Maître d'école. It is the story of a poor country schoolmaster, who, brought up in a foundling hospital, has known nothing of his parents until he one day suddenly finds out who his father is-no less a man than the famous Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, as his readers know, deposited the children of his wife Theresa (of whom he had no absolute certainty of being the father) in the Paris foundling hospital. The schoolmaster has not read Rousseau, but he begins now, and studies Emile, La nouvelle Héloïse, and all the other works with the deepest interest. He is more intensely conscious than other readers both of their fertile geniality and of the very slight feeling of personal responsibility displayed by their author. At last he can no longer resist the desire to make the acquaintance of his parents. "Il part donc, il accourt au Paris embrumé ; Et c'était là celui qu'il voudrait à genoux Racheter devant Dieu, confesser devant tous ! C'était celle. . . . O douleur ! impossible espérance !" And he hastens back to the country to practise in life as a poor schoolmaster some of the great precepts which are to be found in his father's works, but are set at naught by his practice. The good seed in Rousseau's Émile germinates in the education which the children entrusted to this schoolmaster receive. Les Pensées d'Août was published in 1837. Thenceforward Sainte-Beuve was exclusively the critic. XXX SAINTE-BEUVE IT was to follow his own peculiar, undoubted vocation that Sainte-Beuve gave up the practice of the art of poetry. It was only the art he forsook; for poetry, like an underground spring, communicated life and freshness to his critical investigations of even the driest and most serious subjects. It is interesting to observe all the steps of the somewhat intricate process by which the first great modern critic was prepared for the exercise of his vocation. At the time when the Romantic circle was broken up by the Revolution of July, Sainte-Beuve stood on such good terms with the Legitimist leaders that Polignac was on the point of offering him the post of secretary to Lamartine, who was then about to proceed as ambassador to Greece. It was a post which the young poet would have had no objection to accept from them; hence he involuntarily cherished a certain feeling of resentment against the new government, under which almost all his literary friends received political preferment. The democratic element which lay latent in his character (he gave up the de which he was entitled to prefix to his name), proclaimed itself; he became a species of interpreter of the naïvely ardent socialistic philosopher, Pierre Leroux, and continued to write in the Globe even after it had passed from the hands of the Romantic dogmatists into those of the SaintSimonists, and was appearing as their organ, with the motto: A chacun selon sa vocation, à chaque vocation selon ses œuvres. Like Heine, he had an enthusiastic admiration for Père Enfantin; and in an article written in 1831 he ranks the religious writings of Saint-Simon high above Lessing's Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. Hardly had he separated from the Saint-Simonists, after VOL. V. 321 X the break-up of their "family" in 1832, than he entered into relations with Armand Carrel, the literary chief of Republican France. Although Sainte-Beuve, in the article he wrote on Carrel in 1852, ignores his own close connection with him, it is quite certain that he wrote in Carrel's paper, the National, for three years, and on political as well as literary subjects. He enrolled himself among the Republicans, and made acquaintance with them, as he had previously done with the Saint-Simonists, the Romanticists, and the Legitimists. And it was about this same time that his friend, Ampère, procured him admission to the circle of the Abbaye des Bois, where the venerable Madame Récamier reigned and Chateaubriand was worshipped. After a quarrel with Carrel on the subject of an article on Ballanche, which Carrel considered too favourable to Legitimacy, Sainte-Beuve allied himself with Lamennais, who had made overtures of friendship. What attracted him to Lamennais, whose confidant and adviser he soon became, was partly that great churchman's sincere and ardent devotion to the people, partly sympathy with his main theory, that it was necessary, in order to keep the steadily rising stream of democracy within its banks, to oppose to its powerful, and to a certain extent irrefutable, principle one still more powerful, namely, the religious principle, which addressed itself with authority to the people, and with no less authority to their kings. So strongly did Lamennais' attitude before his defection from the Church of Rome appeal to Sainte-Beuve, that he in one of his articles addressed a public, though qualified, reproach to his friend on the subject of this defection, maintaining that a man who had so lately striven to submit other men's minds to the authority of the church had no right to figure as an anti-papal demagogue. The years 1834-37 were the most painful of SainteBeuve's life. In 1837 the sudden termination of his relations with Madame Hugo simultaneously severed his connection with the Romantic circle and obliterated his religious tendencies. He retired to Lausanne, where, in 1837-38, he began the course of lectures which formed the basis of his great work, Port-Royal. They had been planned and partly |