- The germ of it is there I sense in Fontanes, of whom Sainte-Beuve said: ‘This epicurean side was very strong in him … but for these rather materialistic habits, Fontanes, with his talent, would have produced much more … and more lasting works.’ Note that the impotent man always claims not to be so. Fontanes says:
If they are to be believed I waste my time,
They alone do honour to the century
and assures us of his own industry.
Coleridge’s is a more pathological case still. ‘No man of his time, or perhaps of any other time,’ says Carpenter (quoted by M. Ribot in his fine book on Diseases of the Will), ‘combined better than Coleridge the power of reasoning of the philosopher with the imagination of the poet, etc. And yet no one gifted with such remarkable talents has ever made so little of them: the great defect of his character was a lack of willpower to turn his natural gifts to advantage, so that although he always had gigantic projects floating in his brain, he never made a serious effort to execute a single one of them. Thus, from the outset of his career, he found a generous bookseller who promised him thirty guineas for the poems he had been reciting, etc. He preferred to come begging each week without supplying a single line of the poem he needed only to write down to be set free.’
- I have no need to say that it would be pointless to look for this convent near Utrecht and that this whole passage is pure imagination. It was suggested to me however by the following lines in M. Léon Séché’s book on Sainte-Beuve: ‘He (Sainte-Beuve) took it into his head one day, while he was at Liège, to get in touch with the little church in Utrecht. It was quite late but Utrecht was a good long way from Paris and I do not know whether Volupté would have sufficed to open the doors to the archives in Amersfoort wide to him. I rather doubt it, because even after the first two volumes of his Port-Royal, the devout scholar who then had charge of these archives, etc. With difficulty Sainte-Beuve obtained permission from the good M. Karsten to glance inside certain cardboard boxes … Open the second edition of Port-Royal and you will find the gratitude which Sainte-Beuve expressed to M. Karsten.’ As for the details of the journey, all of them rely on actual impressions. I do not know whether one goes through Dordrecht to get to Utrecht, but I have described it just as I saw it. It was when going to Vollendam, and not to Utrecht, that I travelled by passenger barge, amongst the reeds. The canal which I have set in Utrecht is in Delft. It was in the Hôpital of Beaune that I saw a Van der Weyden and nuns of an order which came, I believe, from Flanders, and who still wear the same headdresses, not as in the Roger van der Weyden but as in other paintings I saw in Holland.
- Pure snobbery is more innocent. To take pleasure in someone’s company because he had an ancestor at the Crusades, that is vanity, intelligence does not enter into it. But to take pleasure in someone’s company because the name of his grandfather recurs frequently in Alfred de Vigny or in Chateaubriand, or (a truly irresistible attraction for me, I must confess) who has her family coat-of-arms (the woman in question is richly deserving of admiration without this) in the great rose-window of Notre-Dame in Amiens, that is where the intellectual sin begins. I have anyway analysed this at too great a length elsewhere, although I have much left to say on the matter, to need to insist on it further here.
- I am told that he became the celebrated Admiral de Tinan, father of Mme Pochet de Tinan, whose name artists still hold dear, and the grandfather of the dashing cavalry officer. It was he also, I believe, who was in charge of supplies and communications between Francis II and the Queen of Naples before Gaeta (see Pierre de la Gorce’s Histoire du Second Empire).
- True distinction, moreover, always feigns to be addressing itself only to persons of distinction who know the same usages, it does not ‘explain’. A book by Anatole France hints at a mass of erudite knowledge, and contains constant allusions that the masses will overlook but which, independently of its other beauties, constitute its incomparable nobility.
- This is no doubt why often, when a great writer turns critic, he talks a lot about the available editions of old works, and very little about contemporary books. Example, the Lundis of Sainte-Beuve and Anatole France’s Vie littéraire. But whereas M. Anatole France is a wonderful judge of his contemporaries, it may be said that Sainte-Beuve misinterpreted all the great writers of his own day. And let it not be objected that he was blinded by personal animosities. After, unbelievably, having disparaged the novelist in Stendhal, by way of compensation he extols the modesty and tactful dealings of the man, as if there were nothing else to be said in his favour! This blindness in Sainte-Beuve, where his own time was concerned, contrasts oddly with his pretensions to clear-sightedness and to prescience. ‘Everyone is adept,’ he says in Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, ‘at prononucing on Racine and Bossuet … But the sagaciousness of the judge and the perspicacity of the critic prove themselves above all on new writings as yet untried by the public. To judge at first sight, to divine, to lead the way, that is the gift of the critic. How few possess it.’
- And, vice versa, the classics have had no better commentators than the ‘Romantics’. The Romantics alone indeed know how to read classical works, because they read them as they were written, romantically, because to read a poet or a prose writer properly, one has oneself to be, not a scholar, but a poet or a prose writer. This is true for the least ‘Romantic’ of works. It was not the professors of rhetoric who drew our attention to Boileau’s beautiful lines, but Victor Hugo:
Et dans quatre mouchoirs de sa beauté salis
Envoie au blanchissuer ses roses et ses lys.
And in four handkerchiefs soiled by her beauty
Sends to the laundryman her roses and her lilies.
Or M. Anatole France:
L’ignorance et l’erreur à ses naissantes pièces
En habits de marquis, en robes de comtesse.
Ignorance and error in his newborn plays
In a marquis’s clothes, in a countess’s robes.
The latest issue of La Renaissance latine (15 May 1905) has enabled me, as I was correcting my proofs, to extend this observation to the fine arts, by means of a fresh example. This shows M. Rodin, indeed (in an article by M. Mauclair), to be the true commentator on Greek statuary.
- A predilection which they themselves generally believe to be fortuitous: they assume that the best books merely chance to have been written by ancient authors; and this may happen no doubt, because the old books which we read have been selected from the past as a whole, so vast compared with the modern age. But an in a sense accidental reason can not suffice to explain an attitude of mind so general.
- I think for example that the charm normally found in these lines from Andromaque:
Pourquoi l’assassiner? Qu’a-t-il fait? A quel titre?
Qui te l’a dit?
Why murder him? What has he done? On what grounds?
Who told you?
comes precisely from the fact that the usual syntactical links have been deliberately broken. ‘On what grounds?’ relates not to the ‘What has he done’ immediately preceding, but to ‘Why murder him?’ And ‘Who told you?’ also relates to ‘murder’ (Recalling another line in Andromaque: ‘Who told you, my Lord, that he despises me?’ one might imagine that ‘Who told you?’ stands for ‘Who told you to murder him?’). Zigzags in the expression (the recurring, broken line I speak of above) which do not fail to obscure the sense somewhat, so that I have heard a great actress, more concerned for the clarity of the speech than the accuracy of the prosody, say straight out: ‘Why murder him? On what grounds? What has he done?’ Racine’s most celebrated lines are so in point of fact because we are charmed when some bold colloquialism is thus thrown like an impetuous bridge between two mellow river-banks. ‘Je t’aimais inconstant, qu’aurais-je fait fidèle.’ [I was inconstant and loved you, what would I have done had I been true.] And what pleasure they give, these splendid encounters with expressions whose almost vulgar simplicity lends to their meaning, as to certain of Mantegna’s faces, so sweet a fullness, such lovely colours:
Et dans un fol amour ma jeunesse embarquée …
And on a mad love my youth embarked
Réunissons trois coeurs qui n’ont pu s’accorder.
Let us unite three hearts unable to agree.
This is why it is right to read classical authors in the text and not be satisfied with extracts. The famous passages of writers are often those where this intimate contexture of their language is disguised by the beauty – almost universal in character – of the extract. I do not believe that the essence peculiar to the music of Gluck reveals itself in any one of his sublime arias so much as in certain cadences of his recitative, where the harmony is like the actual sound of the voice of his genius as it drops on an involuntary intonation on which is stamped all of his artless gravity and
