- I feel the germ of this in Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes, about whom Sainte-Beuve has said: ‘The epicurean side is very strongly developed in him… without these rather materialist habits, Fontanes, with all his talent, would have produced much more… and more lasting works.’ Note how the impotent man always claims to be anything but. Fontanes writes:
Je perds mon temps s’il faut les croire, Eux seuls du siècle sont l’honneur
[If they are to be believed I am wasting my time;
Only they do honor to the age]
and insists that he works very hard indeed.
Coleridge’s case is even more pathological. ‘No man of his time, perhaps of any time,’ according to Carpenter (as quoted by Ribot in his fine book The Diseases of the Will), ‘combined better than Coleridge the reasoning power of the philosopher, the imagination of the poet, etc. Yet there is no one who, gifted with such remarkable talents, accomplished so little: the great defect in his character was the lack of the will to make use of his natural gifts. For all of the massive projects constantly floating through his mind, he never made a serious effort to execute even one. Thus, at the start of his career, he found a generous bookseller who promised him thirty guineas for the poems he had been reciting… He preferred to come begging every week, without supplying a single line of the poems he had only to write down in order to free himself.’
- I need not add that it would be fruitless to look for this convent near Utrecht and that this entire passage is pure imagination. It was, however, suggested to me by the following passage in Léon Séché’s book on Sainte-Beuve: ‘One day, while at Liège, he [Sainte-Beuve] took it into his head to make the acquaintance of the little church in Utrecht. It was rather late, but Utrecht lay at quite a distance from Paris and I do not know if his Volupté would have been enough to open the gates of the Amersfoort archives to him. I rather doubt it, for even after the first two volumes of his Port-Royal, the pious scholar who guarded these archives at the time had [etc.] Sainte-Beuve obtained from the good Abbé Karsten, not without difficulty, permission to half-open some of the cardboard boxes and peek inside… Open the second edition of Port-Royal and you will find Sainte-Beuve’s acknowledgment of Karsten’ (Léon Séché, Sainte-Beuve, vol. I, pp. 229 ff.). As for the details of the trip, they are all based on real impressions. I do not know if you do pass through Dordrecht to get to Utrecht, but Dordrecht is described here just as I saw it. It was while going to Vollendam, not to Utrecht, that I traveled in a horse-drawn barge between the reeds. The canal that I placed in Utrecht is in Delft. It was at the Hôpital de Bon-Dieu in Beaune that I saw the Roger van der Weyden painting and the nuns belonging to, I think, a Flemish order, who still wear the headdresses not of the van der Weyden but of other paintings I saw in Holland.
- Pure snobbery is more innocent. To take pleasure in someone’s company because he had an ancestor in the Crusades is vanity, and intelligence has nothing to do with it, but to take pleasure in someone’s company because his grandfather’s name is mentioned often in Alfred de Vigny or in Chateaubriand, or because – a truly irresistible seduction for me, I must admit – her family’s coat of arms is in the great rose window of Notre-Dame of Amiens (and I am thinking of a woman well worth our admiration without that fact): that is where intellectual sin begins. However, I have analysed this phenomenon at too great length elsewhere (although there is much that remains for me to say) to need to insist on it further here.
- Paul Stapher, ‘Memories of Victor Hugo’, in the Revue de Paris.
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, the chapter ‘On the Vanity and Suffering of Life’.
- ‘I regret having passed through Chartres without being able to see the cathedral’ (A Romantic in Spain, p. 4).
- He would later become, I am told, the celebrated admiral de Tinan, father of that Madame Pochet de Tinan whose name remains dear to artists, and grandfather of the brilliant cavalry officer. It was also he who, I believe, was in charge of supplies and communications between Francois II and the Queen of Naples before Gaeta. See Pierre de la Gorce, History of the Second Empire.
- True distinction, moreover, always purports to address itself only to those men and women of distinction familiar with the same customs; it does not ‘explain’. A book by Anatole France implies a mass of scholarly knowledge and makes constant allusions that the masses do not perceive, which produce, above and beyond the book’s other beauties, its incomparable nobility.
- This is no doubt why, when a great artist writes criticism, he often writes about new editions of older works, and very rarely about contemporary books. For example, Sainte-Beuve’s Monday Conversations or Anatole France’s On Life and Letters. But while Anatole France judges his contemporaries to perfection, Sainte-Beuve may rightly be said to have misjudged all the great writers of his time. And one cannot object that he was blinded by personal animosities: after having belittled Stendhal as a novelist to an unbelievable degree, he celebrates, as though in compensation, the man’s modesty and discreet behavior, as if there were nothing else good to say about him! This blindness in Sainte-Beuve about his own era forms a strange contrast with his claims to clairvoyance and prescience: ‘Everyone in the world is in a position to pass judgment on Racine and Bossuet,’ he says in Chateaubriand and His Literary Milieu, ‘but the sagacity of the judge and the perspicacity of the critic prove themselves above all upon new writing, as yet untried by the public. To judge at first sight, to divine, to lead the way – that is the critic’s gift. How few possess it.’
- And, conversely, classical writers have no better commentators than the ‘romantics.’ Only the romantics know how to read classical works because they read them the way they were written, romantically; because to read a poet or prose writer well one must be, oneself, not a scholar but a poet or writer. This is true of the least ‘romantic’ works. It was not the rhetoric professors who drew our attention to Boileau’s beautiful lines, but Victor Hugo:
Et dans quatre mouchoirs de sa beauté salis Envoie au blanchisseur ses roses et ses lys.
[And in four handkerchiefs smeared with her beauties She sends to the laundry her roses and lilies.]
Or Anatole France:
L’ignorance et l’erreur à ses naissantes pièces En habits de marquis, en robes de comtesses.
[Ignorance and lapses in his newborn plays,
In the cloaks of the marquis, the robes of the countess.]
- While I am correcting the proofs of this book, the most recent issue of La Renaissance latine (15 May 1905) gives me the opportunity to extend this remark to the fine arts with an additional example. The article by Mauclair demonstrates that the truest analysis of Greek statuary is that of Rodin.
- They themselves generally believe that this predilection is fortuitous – they assume that the most beautiful books simply happen, by chance, to have been written by older authors. And of course this may be true, because the older books we still read have been selected from the entirety of the past, so enormous compared to our contemporary age. But an accidental and arbitrary reason like this is not enough to explain such a general cast of mind.
- For example, I believe that the charm we are accustomed to find in these line from Racine’s Andromaque:
Pourquoi l’assassiner ? Qu’a-t-il fait ? A quel titre ? Qui te l’a dit ?
[Why murder him? What did he do? On what grounds? Who told you that?]
comes precisely from intentionally breaking the customary syntactical connections. ‘On what grounds?’ refers not to ‘What did he do?’ — the immediately preceding sentence — but to ‘Why murder him?’ and ‘Who told you that?’ refers to the ‘murder’ as well. (Recalling another line of Andromache’s, ‘Qui vous l’a dit, seigneur, qu’il me méprise ?’ [‘Who told you that, milord, that he mistrusts me?’], we might at first suppose that ‘Who told you that?’ means ‘Who told you to murder him?’) Such zigzags of expression (the broken lines I speak of in the text above) can only obscure the meaning, and in fact I have heard a great actress, more concerned with clarity of sense than prosodic exactitude, simply say: ‘Why murder him? On what grounds? What did he do?’ Racine’s most famous lines are in reality famous because we are charmed by their bold audacity of language, thrown like a daring bridge from one euphonious riverbank to the
