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Thomson's Queens of Society; Sainte-Beuve's Nouveaux Lundis; Lord Brougham on Madame de Staël; J. Bruce's Classic Portraits; J. Kavanagh's French Women of Letters; Biographic Universelle; North American Review, vols. x., xiv., xxxvii.; Edinburgh Review, vols. xxi., xxxi., xxxiv., xliii.; Temple Bar, vols. xl., lv.; Foreign Quarterly, vol. xiv.; Blackwood's Magazine, vols. iii., vii., x.; Quarterly Review, 152; North British Review, vol. xx.; Christian Examiner, 73; Catholic World, 18.
This is the period of his critical maturity, the period of the "Causeries du Lundi," followed by the "Nouveaux Lundis." Many men write voluminously, but most of these only write about a subject, not into it. Only the few who can write into their subject add something to literature. One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve.
His analytical and sympathetic mind is reflected in the quiet wit and easy charm of his writing. Undoubtedly the lover of French literature will find in Sainte-Beuve's Lundis at once the most useful and the most agreeable review of the subject in all its branches; and the more his knowledge increases, the more eagerly will he return for further guidance and illumination to those delightful books.
If Sainte-Beuve, however, calls the poet in his Nouveaux Lundis a "beautiful angel, who has been drinking vinegar," then the modern reader needs a strong caution against malice and raillery, if not jealousy and perfidy, although the article on De Vigny abounds otherwise with excessive critical cleverness.
We read all sorts of things besides Molière Lundis de Ste.-Beuve, Chateaubriand, some splendid pages on the French Revolution, Taine, Guizot, Mme. de Staël, Lamartine, etc., and sometimes rather light memoirs of the Régence and the light ladies of the eighteenth century, who apparently mixed up politics, religion, literature, and lovers in the most simple style.
But his most famous productions were his critical essays published periodically in the "Constitutionnel" the "Moniteur" and the "Temps" later collected in sets under the names of "Critiques et Portraits Litteraires" "Portraits Contemporains" "Causeries du Lundi" and "Nouveaux Lundis." At the height of his vogue, these Monday essays were events of European importance. He died in 1869.
Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of the "Nouveaux Lundis," an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deep is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris.
His best work is contained in the fifteen volumes of "Causeries du Lundi" and in the thirteen volumes of "Nouveaux Lundis" which were articles written for the daily newspapers, the Constitutionnel, the Moniteur, and the Temps, when, between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five, he was at the maturity of his powers.
On his one visit to Compiègne in 1863, the Emperor, wishing to be particularly gracious, said to him, ‘I always read the Moniteur on Monday, when your article appears.’ Unfortunately for this compliment, it was the Constitutionnel that had been publishing the Nouveaux Lundis for more than four years.
I cannot remember, however, having seen him in one of those famous rages which made Barbey d’Aurévilly say that ‘Sainte-Beuve was a clever man with the temper of a turkey!’ The former was much nearer the truth when he called the author of Les Lundis a French Wordsworth, or compared him to a lay bénédictin.
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