Front matter (continued 7)

There is Béranger, his whole secret, summed up in small by a masterhand. What Béranger, then, did was to choose wisely, with long heed, some single, simple, obvious sentiment, appealing to every body’s experience, shut that sentiment up into a short, neat, striking, rememberable form of words suited to be sung, make of that form of words a refrain to recur at intervals, and finally on that refrain build up, one after another to the end, the stanzas of his song. He worked slowly and painfully. His genius was never very prolific. The time of his chief fruitfulness was short, covering only fifteen years, the fifteen years between Waterloo (1815) and the elevation of Louis Philippe to the throne of France (1830). During this time his largest product hardly exceeded a dozen songs a year.

Béranger’s first discipline to his art may be considered to have been a certain favorite diversion of his childhood, the carving of cherry-stones. This exercise of skill he practiced sedulously with delight when a boy, and in it learned the long, minute patience of art. The man’s songs were cut gems laboriously finished, like the boy’s carvings in cherry-stones.

Béranger became immensely popular. He remained so to the end. When he died, and it was after prolonged silence on his part—if one can call silence a period marked, indeed, by non-production, but filled with the singing, from land’s end to land’s end, of his songs in every mouth—when he died the empire buried him and the nation attended his funeral. He had been born poor, and he was reared in poverty. Rich he would not be, when a man. He took infinite pains to be of the people, and he succeeded. The people were loving and honoring themselves in loving and honoring Béranger. Sainte-Beuve, with that critical incredulity of his, thought that Béranger carried his demonstrative cultivation of the “people” to the point of something like affectation. Perhaps; but the affectation, if it was such, had a sound basis in it of real instinctive popular sympathy. Still, Béranger’s emphasized identification of himself with the people was not all a matter of instinct with him. It was in part a matter of deliberately adopted policy. He said:

The people wanted a man to speak to them the language they love and understand, and to create imitators to vary and multiply versions of the same text. I have been that man.

Béranger was quite willing to make any moral descent that might seem to him necessary in order to reach his audience. He may have been instinctively, but he was also deliberately, low and lewd in some of his songs.

Without their help [said he, that is without the help of such immoral songs] I am disposed to think that the others would not have been able to go so far, or so low, or even so high; no offense in this last word to the virtues of good society.

Even the best of Béranger’s songs lack any thing like lift and aspiration. They are conceived in a comparatively low tone. The noblest leaven in them is love of France and of liberty. Béranger hated the Bourbons; they persecuted him, but that only helped him sing them off the throne of France. Béranger’s songs did more than any other one individual influence, perhaps they did more than all other individual influences combined, first to overturn the restored Bourbon dynasty after Waterloo, and, second, to bring about the elevation of Louis Napoleon to power.

For Béranger was a passionate admirer of the great Napoleon. True, he deprecated the exhaustions visited on France by the wars of glory which Napoleon waged. But that famous piece of his, “The King of Yvetot,” in which this deprecation found voice, was a protest so lightly conceived and at bottom so genial, that the jealousy of Napoleon himself could afford to laugh at it. The pieces in which, on the contrary, he celebrated the praises of the emperor were written with an emotion contagiously vivid. Let us now have before us “The King of Yvetot,” with an appropriate contrast to it afterward supplied in one of these encomiastic pieces.

“Yvetot” is the name of an ancient French town, situated in a seignory the lord of which once enjoyed the nominal rank of king. The effect of Béranger’s title to his song is of course humorous. The song-writer’s purpose was to draw, in the king whom he describes, a whimsical contrast to the restless Napoleon. Thackeray furnishes us with a happily sympathetic rendering of Béranger’s “King of Yvetot,” as follows; for brevity’s sake we omit one stanza:

There was a king of Yvetot, Of whom renown hath little said, Who let all thoughts of glory go, And dawdled half his days a-bed; And every night, as night came round, By Jenny with a night-cap crowned, Slept very sound. Sing, ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he! That’s the kind of king for me. And every day it came to pass That four lusty meals made he, And step by step, upon an ass, Rode abroad his realms to see; And wherever he did stir, What think you was his escort, sir? Why, an old cur. Sing, ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he! That’s the kind of king for me. If e’er he went into excess, ’Twas from a somewhat lively thirst, But he who would his subjects bless, Odd’s fish!—must wet his whistle first, And so from every cask they got, Our king did to himself allot At least a pot. Sing, ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he! That’s the kind of king for me. To all the ladies of the land A courteous king, and kind, was he; The reason why you’ll understand, They named him Pater Patriæ. Each year he called his fighting-men, And marched a league from home, and then, Marched back again. Sing, ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he! That’s the kind of king for me. ***** The portrait of this best of kings Is extant still, upon a sign That on a village tavern swings, Famed in the country for good wine. The people in their Sunday trim, Filling their glasses to the brim, Look up to him. Singing, ha, ha, ha! and he, he, he! That’s the sort of king for me.

In his autobiography, an interesting book, Béranger says that hardly any other writer equally with himself could have dispensed with the help of the printer. His songs traveled of themselves from mouth to mouth without the intervention of printed copies. In fact, Béranger was already famous before his works went into print. It was this oral currency of his songs that made them such engines of power. That brilliant Bohemian wit among Frenchmen, Chamfort, defined, it is said, before Béranger’s time, the government of France to be absolute monarchy tempered by songs. This celebrated saying does not overstate the degree, though it may misstate the kind, of influence that Béranger exercised with his lyre. He was, by conviction and in sympathy, a determined and ardent republican, and yet, in fact, he founded, or played the chief part in founding, the imperial usurpation of Louis Napoleon. This he did by getting the glories of the great emperor sung by Frenchmen throughout France, until the very name of Napoleon became an irresistible spell to conjure by. We now give the most celebrated of these Bonaparte songs. Mr. William Young, an American, has a volume of translations from Béranger. Of this particular song, Mr. Young’s version is so felicitous that we unhesitatingly choose it for our readers. The title of the song is, “The Recollections of the People.” It was, we believe, founded on an incident of Béranger’s own observation; we shorten again by a stanza:

Aye, many a day the straw-thatched cot Shall echo with his glory! The humblest shed, these fifty years, Shall know no other story. There shall the idle villagers To some old dame resort, And beg her with those good old tales To make their evenings short. “What though they say he did us harm Our love this cannot dim; Come, Granny, talk of him to us; Come, Granny, talk of him.” “Well, children—with a train of kings Once he passed by this spot; ’Twas long ago; I had but just Begun to boil the pot. On foot he climbed the hill, whereon I watched him on his way; He wore a small three-cornered hat; His overcoat was gray. I was half frightened till he spoke; ‘My dear,’ says he, ‘how do?’” “O, Granny, Granny, did he speak? What, Granny! speak to you?” ***** “But when at length our poor Champagne By foes was overrun, He seemed alone to hold his ground; Nor dangers would he shun. One night—as might be now—I heard A knock—the door unbarred— And saw—good God! ’twas he, himself, With but a scanty guard. ‘O what a war is this!’ he cried, Taking this very chair.” “What! Granny, Granny, there he sat? What! Granny, he sat there?” “’I’m hungry,’ said he: quick I served Thin wine and hard brown bread; He dried his clothes, and by the fire In sleep drooped down his head. Waking, he saw my tears—’Cheer up, Good dame!’ says he, ‘I go ‘Neath Paris’ walls to strike for France One last avenging blow.’ He went; but on the cup he used Such value did I set— It has been treasured.” “What! till now? You have it, Granny, yet?” “Here ’tis; but ’twas the hero’s fate To ruin to be led; He, whom a pope had crowned, alas! In a lone isle lies dead. ’Twas long denied: ‘No, no,’ said they, ‘Soon shall he re-appear; O’er ocean comes he, and the foe Shall find his master here.’ Ah, what a bitter pang I felt, When forced to own ’twas true!” “Poor Granny! Heaven for this will look, Will kindly look on you.”

There was not in Béranger’s genius much innate and irrepressible buoyancy toward poetry, as we English-speakers conceive poetry. But he practiced a severely self-tasking art of verse, which at last yielded a product sufficiently consummate in form to command the admiration of qualified critics. He became unquestionably first among the song-writers of France; he even elevated song-writing, popular song-writing, to the rank of acknowledged literature. His fashion, and, with his fashion, his currency, are rapidly becoming things of the past; but the real merit of his achievement, and, more than that, the fact of his extraordinary influence make his name securely immortal in the literary history, and in the literature, of France.

XXII.

LAMARTINE.

1791-1869.

Lamartine, the man, was an image incongruously molded of gold and of clay. Take him at his best, and what is there better? Take him at his worst, and you would not wish worse.

The same contrast holds, but not in the same degree, in Lamartine the author. He is at once one of the most admirable, and one of the least admirable, of writers.

There are few figures in history worthier to command the homage of generous hearts than the figure of Lamartine in 1848, calming and quelling the mob of Paris by the simple ascendant of genius and of bravery. There are few figures in history more abject than the figure of Lamartine, toward the close of his life, in the garb of a beggar holding out his hat to mankind for the pence and half-pence of wonder, of sympathy, and of sympathetic shame.

Perhaps we instinctively fall into some contagious conformity to Lamartine’s own exaggerating rhetoric in expressing ourselves as we do.

The chief facts of the life of Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine are briefly these. Well-born, having for mother a woman of more than Cornelian, of Christian, virtue, who herself mainly educated her son, he traveled, loved, lost, wept “melodious tears”—mixed much in Parisian society, until, at thirty, he published under the title “Meditations,” a volume of verse which made him instantly, brilliantly, triumphantly, famous. Every thing desirable was easy to him now. He married an Englishwoman of wealth, he wrote and published more poetry, amusing himself meantime with various diplomatic service, was made member of the French Academy, and in 1832 went traveling in the East, like an Eastern prince for lavish splendor of equipage and outlay. His book, “Memories of the Orient,” published three years after, was the fruit of what he saw and felt and dreamed during this luxurious experience of travel. Dreamed, we say, for Lamartine drew freely on his imagination to expand and embellish his memories of the East. Other volumes of verse, his “Jocelyn,” his “Fall of an Angel,” and his “Recollections” followed speedily.

The Revolution of 1830 had seated Louis Philippe on the throne. Lamartine under him had been elected to the legislature of France and had been making reputation as an orator. The poet and orator would now be historian. Lamartine wrote his celebrated “History of the Girondists,” which, after first appearing in numbers, was issued in volume in 1847. This book had in it the fermenting principle of a fresh revolution. In 1848 that revolution came, and Louis Philippe fled from Paris and from France, in precipitate abdication of his throne.

Now was the moment of glory and of opportunity for Lamartine. During the three months following, he may be said to have ruled France. Eloquence and bravery together never won triumphs more resplendent than were Lamartine’s during this swift interval of his dizzy elevation to power. He was in title simply minister for foreign affairs, in a provisional government which he had had himself the decision and the intrepidity among the first to propose. But his personal popularity, his serene courage, his magical eloquence, gave him much the authority of dictator. It cannot be asserted that Lamartine, in this crisis, proved himself a statesman able to cope with the stern exactions of the hour. The candidate for such distinction success only can crown, and Lamartine did not succeed. He fell, as suddenly and as swiftly as he had risen. Yesterday omnipotent, he was absolutely impotent to-day.

But nothing can deprive Lamartine of the pacific glory his due from several extraordinary feats of eloquence achieved by him, at imminent risk to himself, on behalf of mankind. A mob of forty thousand Parisian fanatics roared into the street before the Hôtel de Ville to compel the Provisional Government sitting there to adopt the red flag as the ensign of the republic. This meant nothing less than a new reign of terror for France. Lamartine, single-handed, met the wild beast to its teeth, and with one stroke of the sword that went forth from his mouth laid it tamed at his feet. “The red flag you bring us,” cried the orator to the mob, he shining the while resplendent in a personal beauty touched with the gleam of genius and glorified with the consecration of courage—like a descended Apollo, the rattling quiver borne on his shoulder—“The red flag you bring us,” said he, “has only gone round the Champ de Mars, trailed in the blood of the people—in 1791 and in 1793; while the tricolor has gone round the world, with the name, the glory, and the liberty of our country.” This eloquent condensation of history, untremblingly shot, at close quarters, full in the face of those wild-eyed insurgents, felled them, as if it had been a ball from a cannon. But ranks from behind still pressed forward with menacing cries. “Down with Lamartine!” “Down with the time-server!” “Off with his head! His head! His head! Lamartine’s head!”

The brandished weapons were in Lamartine’s very face. But that gentle blood never blenched. “My head, citizens? You want my head? Indeed, but I wish you had it, every one of you. If Lamartine’s head were now on each pair of shoulders among you, you would be wiser than you are, and the revolution would go on more prosperously.” The mob was in Lamartine’s hand again, taken captive with a jest.

It is generally granted that Lamartine saved the nation from a new reign of terror. But eloquence is not statesmanship; and Lamartine, weighed in the balance, was found wanting. He served at last only to hand over the state to Louis Napoleon, first president, and then emperor.

Under Napoleon, Lamartine, now and henceforward simply a private citizen, found his affairs embarrassed. He had been a prodigal spender of money. He toiled at letters to mend his broken fortunes. But his sun was past its meridian, and it settled hopelessly in cloud toward its west. He wrote a pseudo-biography of himself and published it as a serial in one of the Paris daily newspapers. He almost literally with his own hands performed the profaneness execrated by the poet, and “tare his heart before the crowd”—or would have done so, if his production, the “Confidences,” so called, had really been what it purported to be, the actual story of his life. It was in fact as much imagination as revelation. But the once overwhelmingly popular author now cheapened himself before the public in almost every practicable way. He brought his own personal dignity to market in his works—and did this over and over again. The public bought their former idol at his own cheapened price, and he still remained poor. In 1850 a public subscription was opened for his relief. As a last humiliation, the proud patrician submitted to accept a pension from the empire of Louis Napoleon. This he enjoyed but two years, for in two years after he died. A further space of two years, and the empire itself that granted Lamartine his pension had met its Sedan and ceased to be.

Fresh from admiring the radiant pages of Lamartine’s rhetoric in prose, from admiring the iridescent play in color, the deliquescent melody in sound, of his verse, we feel it painful to admit to ourselves that so much indisputably fine effect goes for little or nothing, now that the fashion of that world of taste and feeling for which this writer wrote has passed returnlessly away. But so it is. Lamartine, like Chateaubriand, and for substantially the same reason, namely, lack of fundamental genuineness, has already reached that last pathetic phase, well-nigh worse than total eclipse, of literary fame, the condition of an author important in the history of literature, rather than in literature.

Poet, orator, historian, statesman, this munificently gifted nature was most profoundly, most controllingly, poet. But he was French poet, which is to say that his poetry is removed, if not quite from access to the English mind, at least from access to the English mind through translation. He, however, enjoyed at first high English reputation as poet, and the publication of “Jocelyn,” his masterpiece in verse, may be said to have been even a European event in literary history.

The story of “Jocelyn” is avouched by the author to be almost a series of actual occurrences. This assertion, to those familiar with Lamartine’s style in asserting, will not be quite so conclusive as on its face it appears. At any rate, if “Jocelyn” be truth, Lamartine has made truth read like fiction, and fiction of a highly improbable sort. The story, true or fictitious—and which it is, as nobody now knows, so nobody now cares—we need not detain our readers to report.

The poet staggered his public by printing on the title-page to his “Jocelyn” the words, “An Episode,” as much as to say that a certain “Epic of Humanity,” which he might finally (but which, as a matter of fact, he never did) produce, would be large enough to make shrink into the dimensions of a mere episode this poem of ten thousand lines more or less!

Now for an extract or two. In the “Edinburgh Review,” of a date not far from fifty years past now, we find our translation. A day of festival, followed by a long evening of out-door dancing to music, has just closed. The breaking-up is described, with the sequel of young Jocelyn’s pensive and yearning emotions:

Then later, when the fife and hautboy’s voice Began to languish like a failing voice, And moistened ringlets, by the dance unstrung, Close to the cheek in drooping tresses clung, And wearied groups along the darkening green Gliding, in converse soft and low, were seen, What sounds enchanting to the ear are muttered! Adieus, regrets, the kiss, the word half uttered— My soul was stirred; my ear with sweet sounds rife Drank languidly the luscious draught of life; I followed with my step, my heart, my eye, Each maiden that with wearied eyes went by, Thrilled at the rustle of each silken dress, And felt that each that passed still left a joy the less. At last the dance is hushed, the din at rest, The moon is risen above the mountain’s crest; Only some lover, heedless of the hour, Wends homeward, dreaming, to his distant bower; Or, where the village paths divide, there stand Some loitering couples, lingering hand in hand, Who start to hear the clock’s unwelcome knell, Then dive and vanish in the forest dell. And now I am at home alone. ’Tis night. All still within the house, no fire, no light. Let me, too, sleep. Alas! no sleep is there! Pray then. My spirit will not hear my prayer. My ear is still with dancing measures ringing, Echoes which memory back to sense is bringing; I close my eyes: before my inward glance Still swims the fête, still whirls the giddy dance; The graceful phantoms of the vanished ball Come flitting by in beauty each and all; A glance still haunts my couch; a soft hand seems To press my hand, that trembles in my dreams, Fair tresses in the dance’s flight brought nigh, Just touch my cheek, and like the wind flow by, I see from maiden brows the roses falling, I hear beloved lips my name recalling— Anne, Lucy, Blanche!—Where am I—What is this? What must love be, when even love’s dream is bliss!

There is an indefinable French difference, but, that apart, the foregoing is somewhat like Goldsmith in his “Deserted Village.” Or is it the resemblance of meter that produces the impression?

“Jocelyn,” though certainly intended by the author to be pure, wavers at points on the edge of the exceptionably ambiguous. The following spring song, however, put by the poet into the mouth of his Laurence, is an inspiration as innocent as it is sweet:

See, in her nest, the nightingale’s mute mate, Hatching her young, her patient vigil hold. See how with love her fostering wings dilate, As if to screen her nurslings from the cold. Her neck alone, in restlessness upraised, O’ertops the nest in which her brood reposes, And her bright eye, with weary watching glazed, Closing to sleep, with every sound uncloses. Care for her callow young consumes her rest, My very voice her downy bosom shakes, And her heart pants beneath its plumy vest, And the nest trembles with each breath she takes. What spell enchains her to this gentle care? Her mate’s sweet melody the groves among, Who, from some branching oak, high poised in air Sends down the flowing river of his song. Hark! dost thou hear him, drop by drop distilling The sighs that sweetest after transport be, Then suddenly the vault above us filling With foaming cataracts of harmony? What spell enchains him in his turn—what makes His very being thus in languor melt— But that his voice a living echo wakes, His lay within one loving heart is felt! And, ravished by the note, his mate still holds Her watch attentive through the weary time; The season comes, the bursting shell unfolds, And life is music all, and love, and prime.

Passing now from Lamartine’s poetry, expressly such, we go to his prose, which, however, is scarcely, if at all, less poetical. Poetry, or at least, the presence in power, and in great proportionate excess of power, of imagination, lording it over every thing else, over memory, judgment, taste, good sense, veracity—characterizes all that proceeded from Lamartine’s pen. His history is valueless, almost valueless, as history. His travels are utterly untrustworthy as records of fact. Lamartine cannot tell the simple truth. Persons, things, events, suffer a sea-change, always to something rich and strange seen by him looming in the luminous haze of atmosphere with which his imagination perpetually invests them. His men are ennobled, like Ulysses transfigured by Pallas-Athene. His women are beautiful as houris fresh from paradise. The aspects of ocean and shore and wood and stream and mountain and sky, are all, to Lamartine, washed with a light that never was on sea or land or in heaven overhead, the consecration and the poet’s dream. This quality in Lamartine’s style does not prevent his being very fine. He is very fine; but you feel, Oh, if this all were also true!

On the whole, large, splendid, scenic, admirable in instinct for choosing his point of view, as Lamartine is in his histories, brilliant even, and fecund in suggestion, we turn from the ostensibly historical in our author to the ostensibly autobiographical, in order to find our prose specimens of his quality in the “Confidences.” Lamartine never perhaps did any thing finer, any thing more characteristic, than in telling his story of “Graziella” in that work. This story is an “episode” where it appears; or rather—for it is hardly so much as let into the continuous warp and woof of the “Confidences”—it is a separable device of ornament embroidered upon the surface of the fabric. It is probably, indeed, to some extent autobiographic; but the imagination had as much part in it as the memory. For instance, the actual girl that is transfigured into the “Graziella” of the story was not a coral-grinder, as she is represented by Lamartine, but an operative in a tobacco factory. The real beauty of the tale is, by a kind of just retribution on the author, inseparably bound up with unconscious revelation on his part of heartless vanity and egotism in his own character. You admire, but while you admire you wonder, you reprobate, you contemn. A man such as this, you instinctively feel, was not worthy to live immortally as an author. You are reconciled to let Lamartine pass.

“Graziella” is a story of love and death, on one side, of desertion and expiation—expiation through sentimental tears—on the other. One would gladly trust, if one could, that the reality veiled under the fiction was as free in fact from outward guilt as it is idealized to have been by the writer’s fancy. But neither this supposition, nor any other charitable supposition whatever, can redeem “Graziella” from the condemnation of being steeped in egregious vanity, egotism, and false sentiment, from the heart of the author.

We strike into the midst of the narrative, toward the end. There has been described the growth of relation between the author and the heroine of the idyll, a fisherman’s daughter. And now this heroine, Graziella, is desired in marriage by a worthy young countryman of hers. Such a suitor—for she loves, though secretly, the author (this by the way is a thing almost of course with Lamartine)—the girl cannot bring herself to accept. In despair she flees to make herself a nun. She is found by the autobiographer alone in a deserted house. He ministers to her in her exhausted state—and this to the following result:

“I feel well,” said she to me, speaking in a tone of voice that was low, soft, even, and monotonous, as if her breast had completely lost its vibration and its accent at the same time, and as if her voice had only retained one single note. “I have in vain sought to hide it from myself—I have in vain sought to hide it forever from thee. I may die, but thou art the only one that I can ever love. They wished to betroth me to another; thou art the one to whom my soul is betrothed. I will never give myself to another on earth, for I have already secretly given myself to thee. To thee on earth, or to God in heaven! that is the vow I made the first day I discovered that my heart was sick for thee! I well know that I am only a poor girl, unworthy to touch thy feet even in thought; therefore, have I never asked thee to love me. I never will ask thee if thou dost love me. But I—I love thee, I love thee, I love thee!” And she seemed to concentrate her whole soul in those three words. “Now despise me, mock me, spurn me with thy feet! Laugh at me if thou wilt, as a mad thing who fancies she is a queen in the midst of her tatters. Hold me up to the scorn of the whole world! Yes, I will tell them with my own lips—’Yes, I love him. And had you been in my place you would have done as I have—you would have loved him or have died.’”

The man thus wooed by the maid assures her of his reciprocal affection. But the author explains to his readers:

Alas! it was not real love, it was but its shadow in my heart. But I was too young and too ingenuous not to be deceived by it myself. I thought that I adored her as so much innocence, beauty, and love deserved to be adored by a lover. I told her so, with that accent of sincerity which emotion imparts; with that impassioned restraint which is imparted by solitude, darkness, despair, and tears. She believed it because she required that belief to live, and because she had enough passion in her own heart to make up for its insufficiency in a thousand other hearts.

The autobiographer is summoned away by his mother, and he goes, lacerating Graziella’s heart, but swearing a thousand oaths of fealty to his beloved. Alas! the “treacherous air of absence” undid all—with him, though not with her. He blames himself in retrospect—gently—and pities himself lamentably, as follows:

I was at that ungrateful period of life when frivolity and imitation make a young man feel a false shame in the best feelings of his nature ... I would not have dared to confess ... the name and station of the object of my regret and sadness.... How I blush now for having blushed then! and how much more precious was one of the joy-beams or one of the tear-drops of her chaste eyes than all the glances, all the allurements, all the smiles for which I was about to sacrifice her image! Ah! man, when he is too young, cannot love! He knows not the value of any thing! He only knows what real happiness is after he has lost it.... True love is the ripe fruit of life. At twenty, it is not known, it is imagined.

A farewell letter from Graziella dying:

“The doctor says that I shall die in less than three days. I wish to say farewell to thee ere I lose all my strength. Oh! if I had thee near me, I would live! But it is God’s will. I will soon speak to thee, and forever, from on high. Love my soul! It shall be with thee as long as thou livest. I leave thee my tresses, which were cut off for thy sake one night. Consecrate them to God in some chapel in thy own land, that something belonging to me may be near thee!”

The autobiographer “complied with the order contained in her dying behest.” He says: “From that day forward, a shadow of her death spread itself over my features and over my youth.” He apostrophizes the remembered Graziella as follows:

“Poor Graziella! Many days have flown by since those days. I have loved, I have been loved. Other rays of beauty and affection have illumined my gloomy path. Other souls have opened themselves for me, to reveal to me in the hearts of women the most mysterious treasures of beauty, sanctity, and purity that God ever animated on earth, to make us understand, foretaste, and desire heaven; but nothing has dimmed thy first apparition in my heart.... Thy real sepulcher is in my soul. There every part of thee is gathered and entombed. Thy name never strikes my ear in vain. I love the language in which it is uttered. At the bottom of my heart there is always a warm tear which filters, drop by drop, and secretly falls upon my memory, to refresh it and embalm it within me.”

The pensive poet even makes poetry on the subject, twenty years afterward, poetry which, in his customary triplets of expression, he calls “the balm of a wound, the dew of a heart, the perfume of a sepulchral flower.” He wrote it, he says, “with streaming eyes.” He prints his stanzas—for Lamartine is eminently of those who, as it has been said, weep in print and wipe their eyes with the public—and with a sigh, says:

Thus did I expiate by these written tears the cruelty and ingratitude of my heart of nineteen. I have never been able to reperuse these verses without adoring that youthful image which the transparent and plaintive waves of the Gulf of Naples will roll eternally before my eyes ... and without detesting myself! But souls forgive on high. Hers has forgiven me. Forgive me also, you!—I have wept.

We ought not to disturb, with any further words of our own, the impression of himself which Lamartine has now made on the reader. He has given us here his own true image. He is the weeping poet. It is fit—let him dissolve, let him exhale, from view in tears.

Lachrymose Lamartine, farewell!

XXIII.

THE GROUP OF 1830.

VICTOR HUGO: 1802-1885; SAINTE-BEUVE: 1804-1869; BALZAC: 1799-1850; GEORGE SAND: 1804-1876; DE MUSSET: 1810-1857.

As a convenient method of inclusion and condensation for a number of authors who must by no means be omitted, but for whom there is left little room in these pages, we adopt the plan of making a cluster of important names to be treated in a single chapter. The political and the literary history of France join a sort of synchronism with one another at a certain point of time, which makes this arrangement not only feasible but natural.

The accession of Louis Philippe to the throne of France and the first representation of Victor Hugo’s “Hernani” in Paris both occurred in the year 1830. The Bourbon or absolutist tradition in French politics and the classic tradition in French letters were thus at one and the same moment decisively interrupted. For, as in the commencing reign of Louis Philippe, the “Citizen King” of France, the French people became for the first time, under monarchical rule, a recognized estate in the realm, so, with the triumph of Victor Hugo’s “Hernani” on the stage, the hour may be said to have struck of culmination in splendor and in influence for the romantic movement in French literature. The dominance of the ideas indicated in the expression “the Romantic Movement” was then suddenly for the moment so overwhelming and so wide that it amounted almost to a usurpation of letters in France. We might indeed have written “The French Romanticists” as a fairly good alternative title to the present chapter.

1. Victor Hugo.

The men of 1830—we thus use a designation which has come to be established in French literary history—began each man his career in letters as a fighting romanticist. Victor Hugo was the acknowledged Achilles of the fight. Whoever wavered backward, Victor Hugo clamped his feet for his lifetime on the bridge of war, where his plume nodded defiance, seeming still to say for its wearer standing with a cliff of adamant at his back,

Come one, come all, this rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I.

Around Victor Hugo, as the towering central figure among them all, were mustered, though some of them not to remain in this comradeship with him, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, George Sand, De Musset. There were others than these, but these shall for us here constitute the group of 1830.

We shall be in yet better accord with Victor Hugo’s estimate of himself, if we take for his symbol a being mightier even than a demigod like Achilles. Let us do so and call him a Titan. But the past tense half seems an anachronism in speaking of Victor Hugo. The earth still trembles to his retiring footsteps and to the portentous reaction of his wrestle in war with the gods. This is his glory—he fought against Olympus, and, if he did not overthrow, at least he was not overthrown. Olympus in our parable was classicism in power; Victor Hugo was the genius of insurgent romanticism.

We thus repeat yet again terms which it would be difficult precisely to define. Classicism and romanticism are two forces in literature, seemingly opposed to each other, which, however, need to be compounded and reconciled in a single resultant, in order to the true highest effect from either. For neither classicism nor romanticism alone concludes the ultimate theory of literature.

Classicism criticises; romanticism creates. Classicism enjoins self-control; romanticism encourages self-indulgence. Classicism is mold; romanticism is matter. Classicism is art; romanticism is nature. Classicism is law; romanticism is life. Romanticism is undoubtedly first and indispensable; but so, not less, classicism is indispensable, though second. Neither, in short, can get along without the other. But Victor Hugo represents romanticism.

Victor Hugo’s personality seems to have been a literary force almost as much as was his genius. As his quantity was immense, so his quality was vivific. Such a man was certain to be not only the master of a school but the center of a worship. Mr. Swinburne’s late volume on Victor Hugo may be cited in extreme example of the deific ascription rendered by many at the shrine of this idolatry. Mr. Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, lost no opportunity to flout with indignity the claims of Victor Hugo to his supreme literary godship.

This great French writer has so recently died that, for the purposes of this book, he might almost be considered still living. At any rate, he has of late been so much talked about in current periodicals; he is, in some of his books, so freshly familiar to all, and, if we must say it, he offers a subject so perplexing to treat at this moment judicially, that we shall in some measure avoid responsibility by presenting him here with the utmost brevity—brevity, however, to be taken rather as a homage, than as a slight, to the unmanageable greatness by imminency of his merit and his fame.

Victor-Marie Hugo wrote verse very early, beginning as a classicist. In later youth he was royalist and religious in spirit. At twenty he acquired the title of “the sublime boy.” How he acquired this title seems a matter of doubt. It is generally supposed to have been given by Chateaubriand, in his quality of patriarch of French letters. But this origin of the sobriquet the present writer has seen seriously suggested to be, along with the sobriquet itself, the pure invention of Victor Hugo’s own imaginative egotism; which fruitful source of autobiography is said also to have yielded the poet’s noble pedigree—the process of production employed on his part being, in the latter case, the extremely simple one of adopting for ancestry the ancient line of a family, bearing the same name indeed with himself, but otherwise utterly unrelated to his own humble house. The really extraordinary independence of fact with which Victor Hugo undoubtedly made his assertions respecting himself renders any testimony that he bears on this point interesting as imagination rather than instructive as history. For three or four years now he was an irrepressible producer and publisher of verse. At twenty-five he put out his “Cromwell,” a drama, with a belligerent preface in favor of romanticism. After this each play of his was a battle for that literary cause. His “Hernani” (1830) was at last more than a battle—it was a victory.

The royalist in due time became republican. When Louis Napoleon was president, Victor Hugo opposed him. When Louis Napoleon made himself emperor, Victor Hugo denounced him. Banished for this from France, the poet betook himself to Belgium. Repelled from Belgium, he found refuge in England. Here, or, more exactly, in the island of Jersey first, and longer, afterward, in the island of Guernsey, he remained till the second empire fell. He then returned to Paris, and shared the melancholy fortunes of that beleaguered capital during the Prussian siege and during the anarchy of the Commune. Here, finally, he died, and, by his own will and testament, in a quite other than the original meaning of that pregnant Scripture phrase, “was buried”—for his funeral was to be attended with peculiar obsequies. He signified his wish to be treated in burial exactly as one of those paupers of whose cause he had been in his works the life-long champion.

During his long exile, which, notwithstanding his passionate love of Paris, he refused to shorten by any understanding arrived at with the emperor, he kept persecuting that usurper with printed diatribes, both in prose and in verse, which for mordant bitterness have probably never been surpassed in the literature of invective. One of these diatribes was a book entitled “The History of a Crime.” To this he prefixed a kind of imprimatur of his own, which may be quoted here as well exemplifying the high oracular style of expression characterized by short sentences and short paragraphs—these often of a single sentence only—that he habitually affected:

This work is more than opportune. It is imperative. I publish it.

V. H.

Victor Hugo’s egotism was so vast that it was insane if it was not sublime. To exemplify adequately this statement by extracts would ask pages of room. The four lines about to follow, from one of his longer poems, present a modest and moderate example. The poet has been supposing the impossible case that the Supreme Being should take different views, in a certain matter, from his, the poet’s, own—that he should outrage his, the poet’s, sense of moral propriety. Here is how, in that case, Victor Hugo would, he declares, deal with offending Deity (we translate literally the original Alexandrines, line for line, without attempting to reproduce either meter or rhyme):

I would go, I would see him, and I would seize him, Amid the heavens, as one takes a wolf amid the woods, And, terrible, indignant, calm, extraordinary, I would denounce him with his own thunder.

To Victor Hugo himself, the foregoing was not blasphemy; it was simply sublimity of a sort suitable to the character of the poet. There was, it is said, fully developed mental unsoundness in his father’s family and in his own. Victor Hugo’s own genius had, we suspect, some trace of a real, though noble, insanity in it.

In 1862, appeared “Les Miserables,” which must be accounted, if not the greatest, at least the most popular work of its author. This book was issued simultaneously in eight different cities and in nine different languages—a circumstance probably not paralleled in the history of literature. The fame of “Les Miserables” does not fade, and it hardly will fade. It is a book of truly prodigious elemental power. That, however, Victor Hugo’s genius in producing it worked with some disturbing consciousness of a theory of literary art to be exemplified and defended, the following curious note, inserted in the midst of the text, at a point of interest in the story, may serve to show:

Then the poor old man began sobbing and soliloquizing; for it is a mistake to suppose that there is no soliloquy in nature. Powerful agitations often talk aloud.

“Les Miserables” is justly open to many strictures, both on literary grounds and on ethical; but it must be pronounced, notwithstanding, a great, and, on the whole, a noble work.

Victor Hugo made this approach to the illimitable in power, that he was well-nigh equally able to do great things and to do small. To exhibit by specimen his achievement in verse we shall offer here a few of his small things, in the impossibility of representing his great. The small things that we offer may acquire a value extrinsic to themselves if thought of as the gentle play of a giant who could with the same ease have astonished you by exhibitions of strength.

Victor Hugo went a second time, having once failed, to intercede with King Louis Philippe on behalf of a political offender condemned to death. It was late at night, and the monarch could not be seen. The intercessor would not be baffled, and, bethinking himself to appeal by the tenderness of birth and of death to the king, wrote four lines of verse which he left on the table. The allusions in them are to a lovely daughter of the royal house just lost and to a little son just born. We give the French text, and follow it with a close English translation:

Par votre ange envolée ainsi qu’une colombe, Par ce royal enfant doux et frèle roseau, Grace encore une fois! grace au nom de la tombe! Grace au nom du berceau! By your lost angel, dove-like from you flown, By this sweet royal babe, fair, fragile reed, Mercy once more! Be mercy, mercy shown, In the tomb’s name, and cradle’s, both, I plead.

The poet’s plea availed.

Another little gem of Victor Hugo’s is the following quatrain, which, though it may have had at first some particular occasion, is capable of the most general application. Again we give the French, for the French here almost translates itself:

Soyons comme l’oiseau posé pour un instant Sur des rameaux trop frêles; Qui sent trembler la branche, mais qui chant pourtant, Sachant qu’il a des ailes.

This may be thus rendered, almost word for word:

Like the bird let us be, for one moment alight Upon branches too frail to uphold, Who feels tremble the bough, but who sings in despite, Knowing well she has wings to unfold.

One more little gem from Victor Hugo’s treasury of such we are happily able to present in a version whose authorship will commend it; Mr. Andrew Lang translates “The Grave and the Rose.” The poet here affirms, as he is very fond of doing, that capital article in his creed, the immortality of the soul:

The Grave said to the Rose, “What of the dews of morn, Love’s flower, what end is theirs?” “And what of souls outworn, Of them whereon doth close The tomb’s mouth unawares?” The Rose said to the Grave. The Rose said, “In the shade From the dawn’s tears is made A perfume faint and strange, Amber and honey sweet.” “And all the spirits fleet Do suffer a sky-change More strangely than the dew— To God’s own angels new,” The Grave said to the Rose.

The majesty with which this great Frenchman would sometimes, in prose, condescend to be an acrobat walking the tight-rope of grandiloquence stretched over a bottomless abyss of the ridiculous, is well shown in his monograph on Shakespeare. This is accessible in a scholarlike English translation (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, publishers) by Melville B. Anderson. The following sentences will indicate what it is. No one familiar with Victor Hugo can doubt that the great presence of HIMSELF, the writer, was really the chief thing in his musing eye, when, in the latter part of this extract, he was ostensibly describing and vindicating romanticist Shakespeare:

Shakespeare, shuddering, has within himself winds, spirits, magic potions, vibrations; he sways in the passing breeze, obscure effluences pervade him, he is filled with the unknown sap of life. Thence his agitation, at the core of which is peace. It is this agitation which is lacking in Goethe, wrongly praised for his impassiveness, which is inferiority. All minds of the first order have this agitation. It is in Job, in Æschylus, in Alighieri. This agitation is humanity.... It seems at times as if Shakespeare terrified Shakespeare. He shudders at his own depth. This is the sign of supreme intelligence. It is his own vastness which shakes him and imparts to him strange and mighty oscillations. There is no genius without billows. An intoxicated savage, it may be. He has the savagery of the virgin forest; he has the intoxication of the high sea.

“He shudders at his own depth”—hardly could we resist the temptation to bracket in “[Victor Hugo]” after the pronoun “he.” Every reader should do this mentally for himself; he otherwise will miss that important part of the true sense, which here is written between the lines. There never was genius with more inseparable, unescapable, tyrannizing consciousness of itself. You feel the personality even more than you feel the genius in reading Victor Hugo.

A considerable part of Victor Hugo’s prose production, mostly fiction, has been translated into English. Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Co. publish six portly volumes in a uniform edition. From “Les Miserables” in this series we make extracts which will briefly represent Victor Hugo’s prose at its very best, alike in style, in thought, and in spirit. In the first, the writer gives utterance to reflections inspired by the final event of the battle of Waterloo:

This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest bravery which ever astounded history—is that causeless? No. The shadow of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls surrendering their swords. Those who have conquered Europe have fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say or to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence. Hoc erat in fatis. That day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.

In the second, Victor Hugo contrasts the two leaders, the conqueror and the conquered, of that momentous day:

Waterloo is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God, who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of batallions, carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand, nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage, absolute regularity; on the other intuition, divination, military oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul, association with destiny; the stream, the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it. Wellington was the Barême of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo; and on this occasion genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected Blücher; he came.

It remains only to exemplify, as best in small space we can, Victor Hugo’s portentous, his terrific, power in working up a tragic situation, and displaying it as in a calcium-light of intense imaginative description or narration. We shall then feel that this Titanic figure in French literature is at least by suggestive partial glimpses fairly before our readers. From “Les Miserables,” we take the following passage, introduced by the original author as a first step only in the climax by which he represents the supreme agony of his hero in a great crisis of his life:

It sometimes happens that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a man, traveler or fisherman, while walking at low tide on the beach, far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is bird-lime....

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns toward the land, endeavors to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road: he halts to get his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand....

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man!

Victor Hugo’s hero was involved thus in a quicksand—but the quicksand in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool—he was wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer. All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven. This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo’s writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric. Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.

That Victor Hugo willed to be buried exactly like a pauper did not prevent the occurrence of certain very important contrasts between his obsequies and the rites of an ordinary pauper funeral; perhaps, indeed, such a will on his part contributed to create the difference which at all events existed. The funeral attendance was said to be the most numerous ever seen in France. A million spectators were present. Three large wagons headed the procession filled with floral gifts. A beautiful diadem of Irish lilies was contributed by Tennyson, inscribed “To the World’s Greatest Poet.”

The French apotheosis of a national idol would not be complete without tribute from the theater. Accordingly, the Theâtre Français produced a drama by M. Rénan entitled “Mort,” in which the shades of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Voltaire, and Diderot hold a dialogue about human progress in the century to follow them, and, Corneille asking, “What poet will sing in that era, as sweet and tender as Racine, as logical as Boileau, as clear in style as Voltaire,” the genius of the age lyrically answers, “Hugo,” at the same time placing a crown on Hugo’s bust.

Victor Hugo the man, especially as he mellowed with old age, was a sunny, sweet, benignant nature. He was a hearty, one might almost say a partisan, believer in God—atheism was so offensive to him. Unfortunately, however, Victor Hugo’s theism was not such as to enforce departure, in his own personal practice, from that deplorable tradition of his country which has rendered so many distinguished French authors, from the earliest to the latest, offenders against the laws of marriage and of chastity.

2. Sainte-Beuve.

Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve’s fame as a critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is admitted to be a critic of the first rank. Nay, in the opinion of many, Sainte-Beuve constitutes a rank by himself, having no peers.

Sainte-Beuve’s range of subjects was very wide. He exercised himself to be equally open and fair toward all schools of taste and of opinion alike. At the outset, he was of the coterie of the romanticists. But he soon broke with these, either personally repelled by antipathies, or else unconsciously attracted by a secret sympathy of his own, too strong for his contrary will to resist, toward the classical standards respesented in the seventeenth-century writers. He never seems to feel himself more entirely in his element than when he is appreciating the literature of the French golden age.

As to religion, Sainte-Beuve, having had his phase of pietism even, ended by becoming a blank unbeliever. But his own antipathetic personal attitude of intellect and of heart toward Christianity he would not in the least allow to disturb the urbanity and serenity of his tolerance for the most orthodox Christian writers. Such, at any rate, was his standard and ideal.

But at this point, as at all points, the complaisance of Sainte-Beuve’s writing is a manner with him, rather than a spirit. It does not penetrate deeply. He loves his “insinuations.” That is his own word. He is willing to write a whole essay in criticism for the sake of the “insinuations” which his deceitful blandness will sheathe. Or, rather, he would sooner give up the whole essay than forego a phrase, or perhaps a single word, containing his insinuation. It was partly his critical conscience, no doubt, instinctively nice about shades of opinion and of expression; but then a something very like malice was mingled with his critical conscience. With all that must be conceded to the value of Sainte-Beuve’s critical work, readers are conscious, in concluding the perusal of almost any one of his essays, that the result to them is a sapor remaining on their literary palate, rather than substance of nutriment entered into their mental digestion. Their food has been refined into a flavor.

For our illustration of Sainte-Beuve, we go to a paper of his on Bossuet. But we need to prepare our readers. Sainte-Beuve is a writer for the few, instead of for the many. To profit from him requires some effort of attention. One must study a little, as well as simply read. Sainte-Beuve does not deal in heavy strokes. His lines are most of them fine, many of them hair-lines vanishing almost into invisibility. He escapes you like Proteus. Very different is he, by this elusive quality of his, from his countryman, M. Taine, whose bold crayon sketches are at once appreciable to all.

In the choice indicated of specimen, we draw from a series of short criticisms which the author called Causeries du Lundi; “Monday-Chats,” Mr. William Matthews, who has a volume of select translations from them, not unhappily renders the title. These were originally published as Monday articles in the columns of two Paris journals, the Constitutionel and the Moniteur. Mr. Matthews’s volume is introduced by a most readable biographical sketch and literary appreciation of Sainte-Beuve himself from the pen of the translator. M. Sainte-Beuve, we ought to say, in addition to his very considerable body of criticism, ranging, as we have intimated, over a wide field of literature, wrote an extended historical monograph on Port Royal, which is constantly referred to by writers as an authority on its subject.

The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding traits:

The simple idea of order, of authority, of unity, of the continual government of Providence, Bossuet, among the moderns, has grasped more completely than any other man, and he applies it on all occasions without effort, and, as it were, by an irrefutable deduction. Bossuet is the Hebrew genius, expanded, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the gains of the human intelligence, but acknowledging something of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely at the point where its light ceases. In mien and in tone he resembles a Moses; there are mingled in his speech traits characteristic of the Prophet-King, touches of a pathos ardent and sublime; there sounds the voice eloquent by eminence, the simplest, the strongest, the most abrupt, the most familiar, the most suddenly outbursting in thunder. Even where he holds his course unbending, in an imperious flood, he bears along with him treasures of eternal human morality. And it is by all these qualities that he is for us a unique man, and that, whatever may be the employment he makes of his speech, he remains the model of eloquence the most exalted, and of language the most beautiful.

Sainte-Beuve is so much a critic that he cannot help criticising by the way, or even sometimes perhaps a little out of the way. But it will be quite to our purpose if we admit here what Sainte-Beuve incidentally says of Lamartine:

[Bossuet] was early distinguished for surprising gifts of memory and of understanding. He knew Virgil by heart, as, a little later, he knew Homer. “Less easy to understand is it,” says M. de Lamartine, “how he was infatuated all his life with the Latin poet, Horace, spirit exquisite, but the reverse of spontaneous and natural, who strings his lyre with only the softest fibers of the heart; a careless voluptuary,” etc. M. de Lamartine, who has so well discerned the great features of the eloquence and of the talent of Bossuet, has studied a little too lightly his life, and he has here proposed to himself a difficulty which does not exist; there is nowhere mention made in fact of that inexplicable predilection of Bossuet for Horace, the least divine of all the poets. M. de Lamartine must have inadvertently read “Horace” instead of “Homer.” ... It was Fénelon (and not Bossuet) who read and relished Horace more than any other poet, who knew him by heart.... The great pagan preference of Bossuet (if one may use such an expression) was quite naturally for Homer; after him for Virgil; Horace, in his judgment and in his liking, came far behind them. But the book by eminence which gave early direction to the genius and to the entire career of Bossuet, and which dominated all within him, was the Bible; it is said that the first time he read it he was illuminated and transported by it. He had found in it the source whence his own genius was destined to flow, like one of the four great rivers in Genesis.

Sainte-Beuve speaks of the relation of the Hotel de Rambouillet to the future great man:

The young Bossuet was conducted thither one evening to preach there an improvised sermon. In lending himself to these singular exercises and to these tournaments where his person and his gifts were challenged, treated as an intellectual virtuoso in the salons of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and the Hôtel de Nevers, it does not appear that Bossuet was in consequence subjected to the slightest charge of vanity, and there is no example of a precocious genius so praised, caressed by the world, and remaining so perfectly exempt from all self-love and from all coquetry.

In the following passage, Sainte-Beuve appreciates, not without insinuated criticism, the younger eloquence of Bossuet the preacher. Conceive this atheist critic, for such in effect Sainte-Beuve was, entering into the spirit of the orthodox Christian, exclusively for the purpose of justly judging and enjoying a strain of pulpit eloquence! But that is Sainte-Beuve:

When he portrays to us Jesus purposing to clothe himself with a flesh like our own, and when he sets forth the motives for this according to the Scriptures, with what bold relief and what saliency he does it! He exhibits that Saviour who above all seeks out misery and distress, shunning to take on the angelic nature which would have exempted him from this, leaping over, in some sense, and tasking himself to pursue, to apprehend wretched human nature, precisely because it is wretched, clinging to it and running after it, although it flies from him, although it recoils from being assumed by him; aiming to secure for himself real human flesh, real human blood, with the qualities and the weaknesses of our own, and that for what reason? In order to be compassionate. Although in all this Bossuet only makes use of the terms of the Apostle and perhaps of those of Chrysostom, he employs them with a delight, a luxury, a gust for reduplication, which bespeaks vivacious youth: “He has,” says the apostle, “apprehended human nature; it flew away, it would have nothing of the Saviour; what did he do? He ran after it with headlong speed, leaping over the mountains, that is to say, the ranks of the angels.... He ran like a giant, with great strides and immeasurable, passing in a moment from heaven to earth.... There he overtook that fugitive nature; he seized it, he apprehended it, body and soul.” Let us study the youthful eloquence of Bossuet, even in his risks of taste, as one studies the youthful poetry of the great Corneille.

Sainte-Beuve cannot let Lamartine alone. In the clause following, italicized by us, our readers are to recognize an irony on the part of the critic:

M. de Lamartine, who, with that second sight which is granted to poets, knew how to see Bossuet distinctly as he was when young, etc.

Having quoted, with significant italics disposed here and there, a highly realistic imaginary picture of the youthful Bossuet from the hand of Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve says:

Here is a primitive Bossuet much toned down and mollified, so it seems to me, a Bossuet drawn very much at will, to resemble Jocelyn and Fénelon, in order that it may be said afterward [by Lamartine]: “The soul evidently in this great man was of one temper, and the genius of another. Nature had made him tender; dogma had made him hard.” I do not believe in this contradiction in Bossuet, a nature having the most perfect harmony, and the least at war with itself, that we know. But what for me is not less certain is, that the illustrious biographer [Lamartine] here treats literary history absolutely as history is treated in an historical romance; there you lightly invent your character, where your information fails, or where dramatic interest demands it. And without refusing the praise which certain ingenious and delicate touches of this portrait merit, I will permit myself to ask more seriously: Is it proper, is it becoming, thus to paint Bossuet as a youth, to fondle thus with the brush, as one would a Greek dancing-woman or a beautiful child of the English aristocracy, him who never ceased to grow under the shadow of the temple, that serious youth who gave promise of the simple great man, all genius and all eloquence? Far, far from him [Bossuet] these fondlings and these physiological feats of a brush which amuses itself with carmine and with veins....

You feel, with regard to the foregoing criticism, that it is as just as it is penetrative. Lamartine fairly provoked it.

Here is a trait of Bossuet’s that pertained remarkably also to Daniel Webster:

Bossuet is not one of those ingenious men of talent who have the art of treating commonplace subjects excellently, and of introducing into them foreign materials; but let the subject presented to him be vast, lofty, majestic, he is at his ease, and, the higher the theme, the more is he equal to its demands, on his proper plane, and in his element.

The Abbé Maury is a critic belonging to the classical school of French literature. His best-known work is a treatise on pulpit eloquence. La Harpe is another critic of the same class with Maury, who has a considerable work, historical and critical, devoted to French literature in general. To these two writers Sainte-Beuve makes instructive allusion in the following passage:

Two opinions found expression when the Sermons of Bossuet were first published, in 1772; I have already indicated that of the Abbé Maury, who placed these sermons above everything else of that kind which the French pulpit had produced; the other opinion, which was that of La Harpe, and which I have known to be shared since by other sensible men, was less enthusiastic and showed itself more sensitive to the inequalities and to the discordances of tone. It would be possible to justify both of these opinions, with the understanding that the first should triumph in the end, and that the genius of Bossuet, there as elsewhere, should keep the first rank. It is very true that, read continuously, without any notice of the age of the writer, and of the place and circumstances of their composition, some of these discourses of Bossuet may offend or surprise minds that love to dwell upon the more uniform and more exact continuity of Bourdaloue or of Massillon.

Victor Cousin is one among the somewhat numerous writers who, within the bounds of this same paper on Bossuet, fall under the touch of Sainte-Beauve’s critical lance, that weapon borne ever in rest and ready for any encounter:

A great writer of our days, M. Cousin ... has been disposed once more to despoil Louis XIV. of his highest glory in order to carry it all back to the epoch preceding. M. Cousin has a convenient method of exaggerating and aggrandizing the objects of his admiration: he degrades or depresses their surroundings. It is thus that, to exalt Corneille, in whom he sees Æschylus, Sophocles, all the Greek tragic poets united, he sacrifices and diminishes Racine; it is thus that, in order the better to celebrate the epoch of Louis XIII. and of the regency which followed, he depresses the reign of Louis XIV.

It is Sainte-Beuve’s specialty—in aim, whether in achievement or not—to be without the tendency thus charged upon M. Cousin, to violate proportion in his criticism. The insinuating delicacy of his adverse, or at least disparaging, critical judgment toward a distinguished contemporary author is well exemplified in the following passage, in which the critic, by his instinct as critic, is irresistibly drawn to make a return to Cousin. The wise reader familiar with Mr. Matthew Arnold will see how exactly the latter caught from his French master the trick of method here displayed:

Ah, I cannot refrain from expressing another thought. When M. Cousin speaks so at his ease of Louis XIV., of Louis XIII., and of Richelieu, confidently attributing superiority to that which he prefers and which he thinks resembles him, I am astonished that he has never once asked himself this question: “What would have been the gain, what the loss to my own talent, this talent which is daily compared with that of the writers of the great age—what would have been gained or lost to that admirable talent” (I forget that it is he that is speaking) “if I had had to write or to discourse, were it but for a few years, in the very presence of Louis XIV., that is to say, of that royal good sense, calm, sober, and august? And that which I should have thus gained or lost, in my vivacity and my eloquence, would it not have been precisely that which it lacks in the way of gravity, of proportion, of propriety, of perfect justice, and, consequently, of true authority?”

Lamartine does not escape still another light thrust from this dangerous delicate lance, aimed yet again, with exquisite accuracy, through an unquestionable joint in the victim’s harness:

“These two rivals in eloquence,” says M. de Lamartine, speaking of Bossuet and of Bourdaloue, “were passionately compared. To the shame of the time, the number of Bourdaloue’s admirers surpassed in a short time that of the enthusiastic devotees of Bossuet. The reason of this preference for a cold argumentation above a sublime eloquence lies in the nature of human things. The men of middling stature have more resemblance to their age than the giants have to their contemporaries. The orators who deal in argument are more easily comprehended by the multitude than the orators who are fired with enthusiasm; one must have wings to follow the lyric orator.” ... This theory, invented expressly to give the greatest glory to the lyric orators and to the giants, is here at fault. M. de Bausset, author of a work on Bossuet, has remarked, on the contrary, as a kind of singularity, that it never entered any man’s head at that time to consider Bossuet and Bourdaloue as subject of comparison, and to weigh in the balance their merit and their genius, as was so often done in the case of Corneille and of Racine; or, at least, if they were compared, it was but very seldom. To the honor and not to the shame of the time, the public taste and sentiment took note of the difference. Bossuet, in the higher sphere of the episcopate, remained the oracle, the doctor, a modern Father of the Church, the great orator, who appeared on funeral and majestic occasions; who sometimes re-appeared in the pulpit at the monarch’s request, or to solemnize the assemblies of the clergy, leaving on each occasion an overpowering and ineffaceable recollection of his eloquence. Meanwhile Bourdaloue continued to be for the age the usual preacher by eminence, the one who gave a connected course of lectures on moral and practical Christianity, and who distributed the daily bread in its most wholesome form to all the faithful. Bossuet has said somewhere, in one of his sermons: “If it were not better suited to the dignity of this pulpit to regard the maxims of the Gospel as indubitable than to prove them by reasoning, how easily could I show you,” etc. There, where Bossuet would have suffered from stooping and subjecting himself to too long a course of proof and to a continuous argumentation, Bourdaloue, who had not the same impatience of genius, was, beyond doubt, an apostolic workman who was more efficient in the long run, and better fitted for his task by his constancy. The age in which both appeared had the merit to make this distinction, and to appreciate each of them without opposing one to the other; and to-day those who glory in this opposition, and who so easily crush Bourdaloue with Bossuet, the man of talent with the man of genius, because they think they are conscious themselves of belonging to the family of geniuses, too easily forget that this Christian eloquence was designed to edify and to nourish still more than to please or to subdue.

The “bright consummate flower” of Bossuet’s eloquence is to be found in his Funeral Discourses. Of one of these, Sainte-Beuve, with a sudden sympathetic swell of kindred eloquence in description, speaks, in a passage with quotation from which we close our exemplifications of this famous critic:

The death of the Queen of England came to offer him (1669) the grandest and most majestic of themes. He needed the fall and the restoration of thrones, the revolution of empires, all the varied fortunes assembled in a single life, and weighing upon one and the same head; the eagle needed the vast depth of the heavens, and, below, all the abysses and the storms of the ocean.

It has been to us some satisfaction that the wrong of distortion by reduction in scale done to the majestic figure of Bossuet in our own treatment of him, and unavoidable there, could thus in a measure be redressed by return to the subject in effective quotation from Sainte-Beuve. Looking back on the extracts preceding, we feel that enough is expressed, or suggested, in them, to justify us in saying, There is Bossuet.

But at any rate we have great confidence in saying, There is Sainte-Beuve.

3. Balzac.

Honoré de Balzac is one of the heroes of literature. He set himself labors of Hercules in literary production, and he toiled at his tasks of will with a tireless tenacity little less than sublime. The moral spectacle of such courageous industry in Balzac, the present writer admires, not the less, but the more, that the intellectual achievement resulting seems to him not commensurately great. Balzac’s long “toil and endeavor” was not leavened and lightened and turned into play by that “reflex of unimpeded energy” in him which a lofty philosopher has defined happiness to be. He did his work hardly—with profuse sweat of his brow. His mind did not answer to that definition of genius which makes it a faculty of lighting its own fires. His fires Balzac lighted with late hours, artificial illumination, strong stimulant drinks. He burned himself out early in life—comparatively early, that is to say; he died at fifty-one.

The moral triumph of Balzac we have but half suggested. Not only did he lack the spontaneous joy of genius at work; he lacked also, for many and many a doubtful year, the encouragement of recognition and success. Book after book of his failed, and still he toiled on. The world was fairly conquered at last. The reverse of Tulliver’s experience happened with Balzac. One man, in his case, proved “too many” for the world.

For his own part, he freely confesses, the present writer not only admires; he wonders. Balzac’s novels do not please him, either as products of genius or as works of art. They please him solely as monuments of victorious labor. They have to his mind exactly the quality that was to have been expected from the history of their production. They smell of oil, they smack of sweat. They are full of stimulated, rather than stimulating, thought. So much as one passage in which imagination played its magnificent play in easy and easily perfect creation, one passage in which the words flowed of themselves, and did not come each pumped with a several stroke of author’s will, he cannot remember ever to have found in Balzac. He wonders, therefore, and helplessly wonders, that Balzac should be esteemed, as he is, and that by some good judges, one of the greatest writers in the world.

What Balzac undertook was to write the whole “human tale of this wide world”—that is, to represent in fiction all the manifold phases and aspects of human life and character. He calls the entire series of his novels “The Human Comedy.” This title, we have seen it stated, was not original with Balzac, but was adopted by him at the suggestion of a friend who hit upon it as a kind of balance and contrast to Dante’s expression, “Divine Comedy.” It is not quite a cynic conception of human character and human destiny that Balzac intended thus to express. Still, on the other hand, his view of human nature and human life cannot be said to be genial. The disagreeable preponderates in his fiction—the disagreeable one must call it, rather than the tragic. For true tragedy there is not height enough. In reading Balzac, you breathe for the most part an atmosphere of the not merely common, but—vulgar. Of course, the novelist himself would have said, Very well, such is man, and such is life. This one need not deny, but one can say, It was at least not desirable that readers should be obliged to feel the novelist to be himself vulgar, along with his characters. There is such a thing as refined dealing with people not refined.

Realism was Balzac’s aim, and realism was the rock on which Balzac suffered double shipwreck. In seeking to be realistic, he became vulgar; and in seeking to be realistic, he became unreal. For there is an air of unreality diffused everywhere over the pages, meant to be realistic or nothing, of this voluminous writer. Balzac evolved the personages of his fiction out of his own consciousness. They are none of them human beings, such as you meet in the real world. They are simulacra, images, bodiless projections, of the author’s own mind. They move over his canvas like the specters thrown by the magic-lantern on its screen.

Balzac and Dickens are sometimes paralleled. There certainly is in a number of particulars a superficial resemblance between them. Both undertake to be realists. Both concern themselves chiefly with people of the average sort—sort, perhaps, even tending toward the vulgar. Both exaggerate to a degree that makes them at times almost caricaturists. Both deal abundantly in minute detail of description. But the contrast too between them is great. Balzac is far less spontaneous than Dickens. You feel that Dickens improvises. You never feel this about Balzac. You can hear Balzac drive his Pegasus with shout and with lash. Dickens’s Pegasus often flies with his bit between his teeth. Dickens was an observer of men and of things—of books, a student never; there is perhaps scarcely another instance in nineteenth-century literature of an author who owed so little as did Dickens to study of books. From books, on the other hand, Balzac purveyed a large share of his material. Dickens writes as if unconscious that a race of men like the critics existed. Balzac writes in view of the critics. These in fact seem to be his audience quite as much as do the general public. Balzac, beginning that novel of his from which we are presently to draw our sole brief extract to exhibit his manner, enters, according to a fashion of his, upon an elaborate unnecessary description of the house in which the scene of his action is laid. But he prefaces thus:

Before describing this house, it may be well, in the interest of other writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic preliminaries, since they have raised a protest from certain ignorant and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing the generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?

Such a sentence as that—prefatory, but in the body of the text, and not in a formal preface—would have been impossible to Dickens. In Balzac, it is the most natural thing in the world. And it discloses the secret of the character everywhere stamped on his production. He wrote as a professional writer. He conformed to a law that he himself imposed upon his genius, instead of leaving his genius free to be a law to itself. A real realist, a realist, that is to say, such by nature, and not merely by profession, a realist like De Foe, for example, could never have committed the offense against art of disturbing thus that very illusion of reality which he sought to produce, by exhibiting and defending the method adopted by him to produce it. There could not be a case imposing more obligation on the artist to conceal his art. But Balzac, instead, forces upon his reader the thought of art by calling its very name.

Balzac paints with a big brush and puts on plenty of color. No one need fear in reading him that he will miss delicate shades. There are none such to miss. Balzac does not suggest. He speaks right out. Nay, he insists. You shall by no means fail of understanding him.

But, over against everything that can thus justly be said in diminution of his worth, there remain the unalterable facts, of Balzac’s great reputation, just now looming larger than ever, of his voluminous literary achievement, of his population of imaginary personages projected into the world of thought, by actual count more, we believe, than two thousand poll. There is published a portly biographical dictionary exclusively devoted to the characters of Balzac’s fiction.

Paralyzed to choose, even to think of choosing, out of the enormous volume of this writer’s laborious production, a single page for exemplifying his quality, we pitch desperately upon the conclusion of that story of his called by the accomplished American translator of it, Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, “The Alkahest,” “The Search for the Absolute” is the author’s own title. This work, belonging in the endless series of volumes dedicated to the display of the “comedy of human life” in all its phases, is a novel which undertakes to illustrate the effect on character and destiny of an exclusive supreme absorption in scientific pursuits. The hero has at length reached the catastrophe of his career. He is an old man who has wrecked fortune after fortune in chemical quest of a scientific chimera, The Absolute. A monomaniac before, he is paralytic now, and the last night of his life is slowly passing. Balzac:

The old man made incredible efforts to shake off the bonds of his paralysis; he tried to speak and moved his tongue, unable to make a sound; his flaming eyes emitted thoughts; his drawn features expressed an untold agony; his fingers writhed in desperation; the sweat stood in drops upon his brow. In the morning, when his children came to his bed-side and kissed him with an affection which the sense of coming death made day by day more ardent and more eager, he showed none of his usual satisfaction at these signs of their tenderness. Emmanuel [the dying man’s son-in-law], instigated by the doctor, hastened to open the newspaper, to try if the usual reading might not relieve the inward crisis in which Balthazar was evidently struggling. As he unfolded the sheet he saw the words, “Discovery of the Absolute,” which startled him and he read a paragraph to Marguerite [the daughter] concerning a sale made by a celebrated Polish mathematician of the secret of the Absolute. Though Emmanuel read in a low voice, and Marguerite signed to him to omit the passage, Balthazar heard it.

Suddenly the dying man raised himself by his wrists and cast on his frightened children a look which struck like lightning; the hairs that fringed the bald head stirred, the wrinkles quivered, the features were illumined with spiritual fires, a breath passed across that face and rendered it sublime; he raised a hand, clenched in fury, and uttered with a piercing cry the famous words of Archimedes, “Eureka!”—“I have found.”

He fell back upon his bed with the dull sound of an inert body, and died, uttering an awful moan, his convulsed eyes expressing to the last, when the doctor closed them, the regret of not bequeathing to science the secret of an enigma whose veil was rent away—too late—by the fleshless fingers of death.

The reader there has Balzac at his highest and best.

Those desirous of acquainting themselves with some integral work of this author’s will choose wisely if they choose any one of these four: “Père Goriot,” “César Birotteau,” “Modeste Mignon,” “The Alkahest” (“The Search for the Absolute”). Mr. Saintsbury, a competent hand, edits a series of translations from Balzac, including the novels just named, together with everything else worth possessing from his industrious pen.

4. George Sand.

In virile quality, Madame de Stael seemed rediviva, or should we keep the more familiar masculine gender, and say redivivus? in George Sand. “It only happened that she was a woman,” said some one, of the latter personage; and indeed the chance that made her such seemed half on the point of being reversed by the choice of the subject herself. For, besides that she has her fame permanently under a pseudonym naturally betokening a man as its owner, it is a fact that she did, at one time, in order to greater freedom of the world, wear man’s clothes and otherwise play the man among her Parisian fellows. This episode in her experience doubtless helped give her that great advantage over other women, which her genius enabled her to use to effect so surpassing, in describing the male human being such as he himself recognizes himself to be.

The episode, however, was short, and George Sand is thought by her admirers—and her admirers include some very grave and self-respecting persons, the late Mr. Matthew Arnold being one example—never to have parted with a certain paradoxical womanly reserve and delicacy which ought logically to have been quite lost out of her nature through the coarse and soiled contacts to which she herself willingly, and even willfully, subjected it.

But, poor George Sand! Let us never, in judging her, forget how ill-bestead a childhood was hers, and how unhappy a marriage was provided for her warm and passionate youth. Her life began in protest, and protest was the early strength of her genius and her endeavor. She protested against things as they were, and, according to her light—a light sadly confused with misguiding cross-lights from many quarters besides her own eager self-will—fought, and pleaded, and wept, aspiring, hoping, believing, for an ideal world in which love should be law; or rather an ideal world in which law should have ceased, and love should be all. From one of the last of her innumerable books, perhaps from the very last, Mr. Matthew Arnold translates this expression, which he repeats as summing up the motive of her work—“the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man’s normal life as we shall one day know it.”

The word “love” does not occur in this expression, but that word and that thought make the luminous legend over everything hers by the light of which everything hers is to be read and interpreted.

Of course, George Sand’s “love” is not the sentiment which the apostle Paul sings in that prose canticle of his found in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. But neither is it the purely animal passion that base souls might understand it. The peculiar affection natural between the sexes it indeed includes, but it includes much more. It includes all domestic, all social affections. In short, it is love in the largest sense. The largest sense, but not the highest. For it is love, the indulgence, the appetite; not love, the duty, the principle. George Sand’s gospel is that you may love and indulge yourself; Paul’s gospel is that you must love and deny yourself. Paul says love is the fulfilling of the law; George Sand virtually says love is the annulling of the law.

Because in many passionate and powerful novels, read everywhere in Europe and not only in France, read also in America, George Sand has preached this gospel of love as the virtual solvent of existing society, Mr. Justin Macarthy pronounces the opinion that she is on the whole incomparably the greatest force in literature of her generation. He probably would attribute to her as a chief motor the portentous movements in human society which we of to-day feel, like tides of the sea, bearing us on, no one knows whither. It is no doubt true that George Sand has contributed what mechanicians call a “moment,” not sufficiently considered, to make up the urgency that is pushing us all in the direction toward uncalculated social solutions and social reconstructions. This constitutes her a notable social force working by literature; a force, however, that has already chiefly spent itself, or that persists, so far as it does persist, translated indistinguishably into other forms.

For George Sand is no longer read as she formerly was, her fashion having already to a great extent passed away. It is a common testimony that, as she wrote like one improvising, so her writing is to be read once and not returned to. Her “Consuelo,” in its time such a rage, and still often spoken of as her masterpiece, is now even a little hard to get through. You yawn, you feel like skipping, you do skip, and you finally shut up the book wondering why such bright writing should make such dull reading.

There occurred a sharp, decisive change, a change, however, not consistently maintained, in George Sand’s quality of production. From producing novels of social ferment, she turned to producing the quietest, most quieting, idyllic little stories in the world. There is a long list of such. “La Petite Fadette,” “François le Champi,” “Les Maîtres Sonneurs,” are among the best of them. From this last, consummately well translated by our countrywoman, Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, who has Messrs. Roberts Brothers for her publishers, we shall offer a very short extract in specimen. But first a short passage from one of her earlier books, in order that our readers may get a sense of the change that she underwent, or rather—for no doubt the change was voluntary and calculated on her part—the change that she chose to make, in her manner. It is simply her two contrasted manners that we aim to illustrate—not at all, in either case, the matter or doctrine set forth. To illustrate this last we should have no room, had we the inclination.

From “Lélia,” we translate a passage descriptive of Alpine scenery, or rather of the effect on the mind of Alpine scenery. After lighting upon this passage for our choice we found that Mr. Saintsbury too, in his “Specimens of French Literature,” had made the same selection, at double length, for his sole exemplification of George Sand. We are thus confirmed in trusting that we shall show our author, if far too briefly, still at her best: