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October 14, 1869. Yesterday, Wednesday, death of Sainte-Beuve. What a loss! October 16, 1869. Laboremus seems to have been the motto of Sainte-Beuve, as it was that of Septimius Severus. He died in harness, and up to the evening before his last day he still wrote, overcoming the sufferings of the body by the energy of the mind.
Of the chief French novelists or litterateurs who were his contemporaries, critics are inclined to esteem his influence most evident on George Sand and Victor Hugo. Brunetiere, indeed, begins with Sainte-Beuve.
If Agen was renowned as 'the eye of Guienne, Jasmin was certainly the greatest poet who had ever written in the pure patois of Agen." Sainte-Beuve also said of Jasmin that he was "invariably sober."
Le Comte de Valmont; ou, Les Egarements de la Raison, is a novel by Abbé Gérard, in which, under the cover of a very innocent plot, the author refutes the doctrines of the eighteenth century, and inculcates the principles of an enlightened religion. Sainte-Beuve, who knew the Comte de Valmont, as he knew everything, was consumed with laughter when I told him this story.
In these one discovers important features which, from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminent individual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the fond, is found in others of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state." Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic.
Even the mighty figure of Sainte-Beuve totters at the whisper of the name Balzac. Even Matthew Arnold would have been wiser to have taken counsel with himself before he laughed at Shelley. And the very unimportant but sincere and interesting writer, whose book occupies us to-day, is in some respects the crowning instance of the rule.
He rushed before the public with a pamphlet under the title, “Letter of a Doctor of the Sorbonne to a Person of Condition, concerning an event which has recently happened in a parish of Paris to a Nobleman of the Court, February 24, 1655.” The Letter opened with an expression of his wish to dispute no more; but as Sainte-Beuve hints, the avowed desire of peace plunged him all the more into war.
But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare." Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners.
Sainte-Beuve hints that the subject is unpleasant, and summarily dismisses it; and Madame Möhl, ever ready to defend Madame Récamier, acknowledges that in this case she was to blame, and that Madame Récamier thought so herself, and wished Constant's letters to be published after her death, in order to justify him.
I find in a recently published volume by Kathleen O'Meara on the life of my old friend, Miss Clarke, who afterwards became his wife, the following passage quoted from Sainte-Beuve, who describes him as "a man who was the very embodiment of learning and of inquiry, an oriental savant more than a savant a sage, with a mind clear, loyal, and vast; a German mind passed through an English filter, a cloudless, unruffled mirror, open and limpid; of pure and frank morality; early disenchanted with all things; with a grain of irony devoid of all bitterness, the laugh of a child under a bald head; a Goethe-like intelligence, but free from all prejudice."
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