A Passionate Listener

...He is a mythographer of the literary institution, who with astonishing persistence and what Lionel Trilling has called "imperturbable amenity" elaborated his chronicle of distraction, relying on his "poetical affection for hidden lives," a dislike of authority that was no refutation of the enjoyment of order, and, as the Goncourts put it, a nest of vipers at the bottom of every page disguised as footnotes...

...he had a penchant for vice—and for the baser vices besides...

...We hear the voice of d'Aurévilly's "laiciste without a lake," the patient stitching of this exorbitantly metropolitan being, the ablutionary and apologetic passes of the tiny, fat man who went to a duel carrying a pistol and an umbrella, declaring he was quite prepared to die but determined not to get wet, who described himself as "inclined to accumulate incompatibles," and whose favorite discovery about the classics was that "the principal sense is not absolutely exclusive of another...

...This, of course, is an unfamiliar and an unfashionable view for us who have come to see the writing and even the reading of books as a series of separate, searing acts, uncontaminated by a constant relation to each other and to the rest of our life...

...de Sévigné, or this shred from the Balzac study: "When people spoke to Balzac of his fame, he accepted the term, but taking it lightly...

...Manzoni...

...I was travelling in Russia with a few friends...

...That is why, too, Port-Royal, which he called "my really great and solid work, the most personal and least superficial of all my writings," succeeds where the collection that Messrs...

...But it is not so...

...Had Sainte-Beuve himself not said, "One has accomplished nothing against opinions until one has attacked persons...

...Renan...

...Bad taste, good taste—what matters is the passionate curiosity with which he attended to what was being said...

...This man who was never able to speak or understand English called Shakespeare "the least self-conscious of all the classics...

...We hear, in short, the voice of our middle mind, of ourselves when we seek to endure...

...It is in the tapestry itself that Sainte-Beuve is a master, and there are some fine swatches of it even in this new selection: the essay on Mme...

...On the evidence of this new selection, in fact, Sainte-Beuve was not qualified to discuss any genre of literature with understanding...

...is the sound of our own survival, the interminable, impossible, unnameable gossip that is recognizable 100 years later: "I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it is done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on...

...All his judgments of individual authors are superficial, and most are also silly...

...How natural if within the compass of these 15 splendidly translated essays and 320 pages we should be able to peer into what Henry James called "the vast deep well of the French critic, prime acquaintance with whom having, by my measure, to form a really sacred date in the development of any historic or aesthetic consciousness worth mentioning...

...Etc...

...We read Sainte-Beuve because he inspires, sustains and restores our faith in the survival of literature as a function of life...

...Geoffrin, on Grimm's correspondence, on Voltaire's feud with the Président des Brosses, on Mme...

...He focused his faith not on salvation by Works, but by Grace: "I have always had a weakness for authors who are authors without our suspecting it...

...de Sévigné and Mme...

...Hegel...

...Outsiders, we so often have the sense of French literature as one gigantic conversation, some questions being answered 500 years before they are asked, other responses made to provocations offered only the day before...

...She was holding a tray, about to present it to us, when she heard the hostess say "'And so, M. de Balzac, you think that '" She was so startled and thrilled that she dropped the tray, smashing the china and the glasses...

...Flaubert "could have turned out a noble and touching figure instead of a vulgar one...

...Baudelaire "ought to have written in Latin or Greek...

...For Port-Royal, on which Sainte-Beuve spent 24 years, is the history of an emotional, religious, social and political phenomenon, as well as of a literary one...

...Steegmuller and Guterman have so attractively compiled exasperatingly fails...

...of whom we feel that "someone else must do our reading for us" Why, then, do we read SainteBeuve—not here, I suggest, but in the dozen or so little volumes of the Mondays in the Oxford World Classics and in Port-Royal, which the editors of this collection paradoxically call "his masterpiece...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Author, "Quantities...

...Just then I was introduced to the lady of the house and we were starting to talk when the lady who had gone out came back...

...one of the latter left the room to get refreshments...

...The pride of it all, and the horror, is that it keeps going on, a myth of our human happening, and here Sainte-Beuve is an incomparable guide indeed...

...Why do we enjoy so much the man who said "George Sand had a great soul and a perfectly enormous bottom...

...As criticism of literature, not one of Sainte-Beuve's charming essays is worth reading...

...For if we read at all—and this is the paradox of our literary situation at the present time—and if we are to continue reading at all, we will read Sainte-Beuve...

...No, one becomes hard in spots and soft in others...

...When night came we asked for hospitality in a chateau...

...How appropriate if we could fall upon this book as a fair sample, and the only one in print, of what Harold Nicolson has called "the most valuable of all introductions to French literature...

...contributor, "Poetry" It would be a privilege as well as a pleasure to report that the editors of this new selection from Sainte-Beuve, reversing the latter's celebrated recipe tel arbre, tel fruit, have judiciously pruned the 50volume orchard of Causeries and Portraits and plucked the finest fruits of the critic who once complained: "Does one really ripen...

...His cats were eaten by his neighbors during the seige of Paris...

...SainteBeuve who once said, "I no longer live, I just listen" And if, as he reported of Mme...

...To its author it represented a powerful opportunity for ransoming his stifled piety ("I had only one hope of saving my soul, and that was for someone to take it away and keep it for me"), of projecting his own inadvertences du coeur onto the men and women of that Jansenist community whose passions had produced a Pascal and a Racine and the intellectual schism that still divides the mind of France today...

...Fame,' he said one day, T saw with my own eyes...

...How convenient if by a chronological sounding as far down as Montaigne we could glimpse, as Sainte-Beuve himself remarked of Chateaubriand, at the bottom of the well the crocodile that lived there, the bucket rising in graduated literary interludes through the strata of Corneille, Molière, Racine, Voltaire and Rousseau to the level of his contemporaries: Stendhal (who prepared him an Italian itinerary), Balzac (whom he served as a pallbearer in more than one sense), Baudelaire (whom he recommended to his fellow academimicians as "a nice chap, refined of speech and with perfectly correct manners"), and Flaubert (who in Madame Bovary had written a book in which "the author has remained completely uninvolved...

...When one touches the tapestry", he said of Chateaubriand on Christianity, "one is aware that there is a gap between it and the wall behind...

...The book, of course, is not boring, it is exhaustive (even for Balzac...

...Indeed, Sainte-Beuve is not a literary critic at all...

...Récamier, he was not always a brilliant conversationalist, he always listened with taste...

...whom Nietzsche described as "embittered against everything great, against whatever believes in itself, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping...

...In his voice ("What does it matter, so long as I do something in the morning and go somewhere at night...

...Rousseau, he said, "lacks innate nobility...

...Not, as he himself cravenly saw it, in literature as a solace or consolation, but in literature as the ground of our being, a continuity—exactly: a causerie...

...and if it were not for the inspired chatter about Mme...

...His observations on novels, plays and poems are ludicrous, offensive...

...Now that is fame.'" In these passages we hear the endless, burrowing, "diabolically malicious voice" of Sainte-Beuve as William James also heard it...

...and in it, at least, we never have the sense that Sainte-Beuve, as nearly always in these essays, was simply missing the point...

...The hostess and her companions received us courteously...

...occasionally he himself joked about it...

...That is why all those portraits of formidable women, those characterizations of Friday salons, of forgotten literary tyrants, of fading mistresses and mysterious frondeurs —the very epiphenomena Proust reproached him for—are SainteBeuve's center and strength...

...Geoffrin, wisely included by the editors along with the "historical" studies of Voltaire and Grimm and the curious appreciation of Stendhal the critic, one would slam this book shut and merely add "Oncle Beuve" to the list of 19th century nobodaddies (Carlyle...

...and whose own view of his life's work was: "I sought the nuance and spoiled the passion...

...When the book appeared, Balzac insisted it was boring, to which Sainte-Beuve replied that Balzac's attitude to history and literature was that of a specialist in the skindiseases of women...