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Updated: June 3, 2025
Sainte-Beuve, with whom the art of female biography seems to have died, and who has given us so many softly touched and profoundly understood portraits, is here engaged with one of his own personal friends and contemporaries.
The text of Wallon's Life is, however, wanting in charm, and it is, as M. Veuillot writes of it, 'un livre sérieuse et solide. Sainte-Beuve has been still more severe in his judgment on Wallon's book, which he calls 'la faiblesse même.
He left two hundred and five printed copies of this book to be distributed after his death. A virulent enemy of Sainte-Beuve was not too expressive when he declared that its purpose was "to leave on the life of this woman the gleaming and slimy trace which the passage of a snail leaves on a rose."
Of the many good stories told us by Lowell, I remember one especially. During a stay in Paris he dined with Sainte-Beuve, and took occasion to ask that most eminent of French critics which he thought the greater poet, Lamartine or Victor Hugo.
Those who are familiar with the general philosophical spirit of the present age, as represented by writers otherwise so different as Littre and Sainte-Beuve, will best appreciate the power and originality of these speculations. Coming in the last century, amid the crudities of deism, they made a well-defined epoch.
"Spiritual truths," he once cynically remarked to Sainte-Beuve, whom, by the way, he detested, "will take care of themselves; it is the nursing of spiritual falsehood which needs all the care of the clergy." On the Sunday in question he had surpassed himself.
I think, on the contrary, that it is, at most, only at its dawning. They are on a different tack from before, but nothing more. At the time of La Harpe, they were grammarians; at the time of Sainte-Beuve and of Taine, they are historians. When will they be artists, only artists, but really artists? Where do you know a criticism?
In a letter to her adopted daughter, she says, "I hope you will be more happy than I have been"; and she confessed to Sainte-Beuve, that more than once in her most brilliant days, in the midst of fêtes where she reigned a queen, she disengaged herself from the crowd surrounding her and retired to weep in solitude. Surely so sad a woman was not to be envied.
It was necessary for the enthusiastic young romanticists to possess a great indigenous figure to stand beside those imported idols Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, and Dante. Sainte-Beuve, who brought out a Ronsard anthology with a critical essay in 1828, showed them where to look. After that, it was as though French literature had begun with Ronsard. He was the "ideal ancestor."
Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve, throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in addition to that primary proof of having himself written good poems. Besides the love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct draws him to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love is the more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined.
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