copy they compose. My office is all topsy-turvy. I am a friend of the Government and do not want to get into difficulties: but since I have undertaken the work, I will lend my presses if you can find another printer to lend his name."'-(Sainte-Beuve, 'Nouveaux Lundis,' i. p. 40.)

M. Plassan's compositors were better judges on this occasion than Sainte-Beuve. The book appeared, and Paris was as much in an uproar as M. Plassan's printing office. Henceforward there was no disguise about the attitude of Lamennais the priest was no longer a priest but a demagogue. Sainte-Beuve, who disliked to be taken by surprise, never forgave Lamennais his defection, and it was not until forty years afterwards that he wrote of his old master: C'est le Soldat de l'Avenir!' . . . The soldier of the future is often the martyr of the present: Lamennais was to endure all the rigours of the Church he loved and forsook. But he found more bitter, we think, than opprobrium or excommunication, the sincere complaint of his old disciple, whose faith he had destroyed. You filled my 'soul with hope,' wrote Sainte-Beuve; 'you carried it on your shoulder like the good shepherd. And now you have thrown it violently to the ground, and behold it 'dies in the ditch!'

VIII.

This was in 1834. Twelve months earlier the world (which knew nothing of the 'Paroles d'un Croyant') took Lamennais for an eminent Catholic priest, just as (knowing nothing of Madame Hugo) it imagined Sainte-Beuve to be a pious young Neo-Christian. There was indeed something naturally sacerdotal in his character and tastes-something claustral, tranquil, recollected in the whole manner of the man, which suggested the curé rather than the Romantic. If you went to see him, his retired life with his old mother, the great parlour lined with books looking out on a highwalled garden, the student himself divided between erudition and a passionate fraternity, all pointed to Sainte-Beuve as a sort of lay confessor. And, indeed, he had many penitents.

None of them was so illustrious as the Baroness Aurore Dudevant, better known as George Sand. In 1833, early in the spring, Sainte-Beuve published in the National' a review of her first two novels. He had never met the lady, but knew that this descendant of a king of Poland had come to Paris, on the morrow of 1830, to earn her living

She had left

No one has

by painting hand-screens and writing stories. her home, like Ibsen's Nora, to find her soul. told us the after-history of Nora. George Sand, as it happened, had spent three very stormy years in Paris where Jules Sandeau had been her first lover, succeeded by Mérimée; and now she was determined to have no more to do with passion but to live for Art and friendship. She was not happy and came to Sainte-Beuve in trouble about her soul. There is so much of the priest in you!' she said-like Lamartine. And in truth a psychologist is almost a confessor.

The George Sand of 1833 was not as yet the woman of her official portraits, whose noble head, large heavy features, wise and placid glance are familiar to us all. She was a Spanish-looking young creature of eight-and-twenty, not regularly beautiful, but most attractive. Je l'ai trouvée 'beaucoup plus jolie femme que je m'y attendais,' wrote a Swiss pastor's wife, one of Sainte-Beuve's friends, Madame Juste Olivier. 'Oui, elle est jolie, plus femme que dame; cependant, par instants, plus ceci que je n'imaginais. Forte 'de corps et d'esprit; les doigts mignons et fort bien posés 'autour d'une cigarette.' (Léon Séché, Sainte-Beuve,' t. ii.) There is a pen drawing by Alfred de Musset taken about this time, which shows her in her young, supple, yet stalwart Southern grace. Two jet-black loops of hair fall over a pale, round, candid, childish face, out of which look two great black solemn eyes.

6

'Sainte-Beuve et Madame Didier me disent la même chose d'elle,' wrote Madame Olivier in 1842, 'elle absorbe les 'affections, les engloutit ; elle est "fatale." This was already so much the opinion of Madame Victor Hugo that she forbade Sainte-Beuve to call upon the siren. He received, therefore, her confessions by correspondence.

Sainte-Beuve was destined to have the very greatest influence over his illustrious penitent, and this is the more remarkable since he never fell in love with her, nor she with him. But it was he who confessed and consoled the poor Magdalen throughout the tragic ignominy of her double love affair with Musset and Pagello. And having poured oil and balm into her wounds, it was he who set the passionate individualist in a better path, pointing out to her his own ideal of fraternity and social progress. It was SainteBeuve who brought together George Sand and Lamennaiswhich fierce hater of woman kept a soft corner in his heart for Madame Sand-and he also laid her under the spell of

Pierre Leroux, whose mouthpiece she became. A little later he quarrelled with them all, but they continued undisturbed to labour together in the cause of democracy, and some years later, in 1845, she wrote to Sainte-Beuve :

'Ma vie intellectuelle se compose de vous, de M. de Lamennais et de Leroux. . . . C'est vous qui le premier m'avez prononcé le nom de Leroux et qui m'avez enthousiasmée pour M. de Lamennais. C'est à vous que je dois (après les orages dont vous m'avez aidée à sortir) d'avoir cherché ma vie dans des sentiments moins individuels.'-(George Sand, Lettres à Sainte-Beuve,' 'Revue de Paris,' November 15, December 1, 1896.)

Thanks to Sainte-Beuve, the poor romantic slave of passion was to enter into the spirit of Nature with a deeper serenity and a vaster love than any mind (save Goethe's) of the nineteenth century, even as she was to feel the love of humanity no less than the noble Utopians of 1830. She was the child of Rousseau and the heir of the Saint-Simonians; when at last her influence died down in France, it sprang up, and still bears its fruits, in Scandinavia and Russia; after all, it is an ample destiny.

IX.

or

In the pauses of their earnest conversations George Sand and Sainte-Beuve read to each other the novels they were writing. We are in 1833; she was busy with 'Lélia,' he was finishing Volupté.' 'Lélia,' when it appeared, enjoyed the insensate triumph of a work which chimes in with the taste of the moment and squanders all its glory in an hour. It belongs to the extremest left of Romanticism, is satanic, anti-social, dithyrambic even as Manfred 'Han d'Islande,' and as unreadable to-day. Lélia herself is a Femme fatale,' a Blighted Being, a Void Volcano; Lélia is poor pretty George Sand's idea of herself at eightand-twenty with a husband, two children, and two lovers in the background, as she quaintly describes herself in a letter to Sainte-Beuve: 'austère et presque vierge, hideuse dans 'mon égoïsme et mon isolement.' 'You terrify me!' exclaimed Sainte-Beuve when she finished reading the story. On the first blush of it, George Sand liked the idea; but the next morning she seized her pen and scribbled off to her confidant:

་

'Ne croyez pas trop à tous mes airs sataniques: je vous jure que c'est un genre que je me donne.'-(Sainte-Beuve, 'Portraits Cor temporains,' i., note.)

That, perhaps, is just why Lélia' to-day leaves us unmoved. 6 Volupté' is, for us, the more interesting book; there is a great deal of real life in it-a great deal about Sainte-Beuve and Madame Victor Hugo, and the inner history of that social and religious movement which produced both Lamennais and Leroux. Yet it pretends to be an historical novel-it takes place in the year of SainteBeuve's birth. But Sainte-Beuve had no imagination, and simply put into his book, under other names, the persons and the preoccupations which filled his thoughts. The heroine, exquisitely drawn, is Madame Victor Hugo married, not to a Romantic poet, but to an aged conspirator, a Breton; but surely we recognise the obstinate and vehement soul, the bitter tirades, the grey locks and fierce glance of Monsieur de Couaën? Do they not all belong to Monsieur Féli,' himself, in his own sphere, a conspirator against the powers that be? In Amaury, the hero, we see much of SainteBeuve himself; whole passages are transferred from the 'Livre d'Amour,' or from his prose writings. But Amaury, like Lacordaire, enters Holy Orders; and it was Lacordaire who wrote the chapter describing the hero's life in the seminary.

The title Volupté' speaks of sensuous love; it is a novel with a purpose. His passions are the hero's bane. Yet only in the purest meaning is he the lover of the three women who fill his heart: the girl he ought to have married, the woman he adores, and the coquette with whom he trifles. But there is a dark side, according to SainteBeuve, to chivalrous devotion; l'amour courtois' exalts a Beatrice at the expense of some girl on the streets; and this complete divorce between sentiment and the senses results in a depravation of the whole nature. Marriage or the priesthood,' resumes Sainte-Beuve, already a Jansenist at heart.

Any human being whose pen is the pen of a of a ready writer can write one good novel by telling the story of his heart. And, since this is what Sainte-Beuve has done in 'Volupté,' we may marvel that the book is rarely opened now.

could tell us why.

Balzac

Of all the great men produced by the Romantic revolution, Balzac and Sainte-Beuve were the most alike. Each had the same insatiable curiosity, a similar power and refinement in searching the dark places of the soul; each owned the physiologist's instinct which classes men by their temperament rather than by their actions; each of them possessed

that gift of creating or portraying an individual which, in Balzac's phrase, 'ajoutait de nouveaux êtres à l'état civil.' The same world lives and breathes-the same romantic and mystical great ladies, Sirens and Muses; the same Eolian poets and politicians ambitious and sublime-in the Por'traits Contemporains' and the 'Comédie Humaine.' And each of them, Balzac and Sainte-Beuve, stippled his portraits to the verge of pettiness or affectation, so that Lamennais exclaimed, 'La critique de Sainte-Beuve, voyezvous, c'est du marivaudage!' He might have said as much of the 'Duchesse de Langeais.' With qualities and defects so near akin, need we say that Sainte-Beuve and Balzac could not endure each other? Something perfidious in the critic exasperated the novelist; all that was gross and extravagant in Balzac offended the Attic delicacy of SainteBeuve. As long as they lived, they were at daggers drawn. Sainte-Beuve had lost no chance of humiliating Balzac in his articles; it happened one day that he classed him with Eugène Sue, a little below Frédéric Soulié. Balzac ought to have laughed and so no doubt he did, but it was on the wrong side of his mouth.

Balzac of course read 'Volupté' when it appeared, early in 1834. And no man in literature ever took a more delicate revenge. The novelist had his own history—a history not unlike Sainte-Beuve's; and he possessed what the critic had not, an extraordinary imagination, a power of making the dry bones live. He pulled the novel to pieces, angry Titan as he was, as he took up the characters and breathed on them one by one-First a bitter, disappointed, elderly conspirator and of the Marquis de Couaën he made Monsieur de Mortsauf, the most wonderful example of the 'trauriger ungriechischer Hypochondrist' that ever lived in any book. More delicately still he manipulated Lucy O'Neilly, the young foreign wife, virtuous but vaguely ennuyée'; ! and behold the exquisite Henriette de Mortsauf (Balzac's own Madame de B...) in the flower of her good sense, practical kindness, depth of sentiment, and tenderest maternity; the morbid Amaury, who loves her and betrays her for a frivolous woman of the world, lives twice over as Félix Vandernesse; while Sainte-Beuve's pale sketch of Madame R. blooms into the riotous fantasy and freedom of Lady Arabella Dudley.

People were still reading Volupté' with the secondary sort of interest which they bestow on the not quite success. ful book of a most successful man, when this new star rose

i