Sainte-Beuve, CHARLES-AUGUSTIN, the greatest literary critic of modern times, was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1804. His father was commissioner of taxes in the town, and was a man of literary tastes. He died three months before the birth of his son, but it was from him that Sainte-Beuve deduced the leading bent of his own character and talent. His mother, née Augustine
Coilliot, was the daughter of an Englishwoman who had married a Boulogne sailor. This connection of his mother with England partly explains that interest in English literature, and especially in English poetry, which Sainte-Beuve showed from first to last of his literary career. She was a woman of character and practical sense, but with so little regard for any ideal interests of life that she was never reconciled to her son's choice of a literary career till his election as a member of the Academy in his forty-first year. Her husband had left her in straitened circumstances, and it was only by considerable sacrifice on her part that her son received the advantage of a liberal education. Incessant toil and a modest return was to be Sainte-Beuve's own fortune throughout life, and this early acquaintance with a simple economy schooled him to a subsequent scale of living in which many would have forfeited their independence and self-respect.
Till his fourteenth year Sainte-Beuve attended the school of a M. Blériot in Boulogne, where he received a thorough grounding in Latin, and where he gave unmistakable proofs of unusual gifts. By his own desire he was then sent to Paris, where, boarding with a freethinking professor, M. Landry, he attended the Collège Charlemagne. At this school also he gave further promise of future distinction. Though he had thus shown such special aptitudes in the direction of literature, for the next three years (1824-27) he followed a course of medical study, and for another year even walked the hospitals—apparently out of deference to his mother's wishes.
It was in 1824, when Sainte-Beuve was in his twentieth year, and while he was still a medical student, that he began that career as a man of letters which he was to follow with such assiduity and devotion to the end. In that year M. Dubois, who had been one of his teachers at the Collège Charlemagne, founded a literary and political paper called the Globe. Supported by such writers as Jouffroy, Rémusat, Ampère, and Mérimée, the Globe became one of the leading organs of the day, and was hailed by Goethe as heralding a new departure in the intellectual life of France. On the invitation of Dubois, who had recognised the promise of his pupil, Sainte-Beuve took his place on the regular staff of contributors. For three years he wrote short articles on various subjects, which were collected after his death, and published under the title of Premiers Lundis. With the doctrinaire attitude of the chief contributors of the Globe Sainte-Beuve was never in complete sympathy, and in 1827 he came under a new influence, which forms one of the turning-points in his life. In that year he wrote a eulogistic review of the Odes et Ballades of Victor Hugo, which led to the closest relations between the poet and his critic. Supreme as he is in his own department, Sainte-Beuve was not of those who dominate other minds by the fervour of their own convictions, or the fury of their own creative impulse. Before he attained his full powers, therefore, and while his susceptibility was stronger than his judgment, he came under a succession of influences of the most diverse character and tendency. Under the influence of Hugo Sainte-Beuve became for a time the zealous advocate of that romantic movement of which Hugo was the acknowledged leader, and of which Sainte-Beuve himself was eventually the most judicious critic. As a member of the romantic cénacle which counted in its number Hugo, Lamartine, De Musset, and Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve embodied his new ideals and his new experiences both in poetry and prose. In 1828 he published his Tableau de la Poésie Française au Seizième Siècle, with the double object of justifying the romantic movement and of directing attention to what was of real value in the French poetry of the 16th century. In 1829 and 1830 successively appeared Vie et Poésies de Joseph Delorme and Les Consolations, poems which, while they show intellectual subtlety and ingenious fancy, are fraught with morbid feeling strangely dissonant from the buoyancy and serenity of the writer's later years. In 1829, also, in the pages of the Revue de Paris, the predecessor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, he began the first of those longer critical articles on French literature which, under the name of Causeries, he was afterwards to carry to such perfection.
The revolution of July 1830 brought Sainte-Beuve under a new set of influences. The Globe now passed into the hands of the Saint-Simoniens, and for a year he became one of its contributors under the new direction. All his life Sainte-Beuve had a keen interest in questions relating to the well-being of the people; but his new colleagues soon passed the limits of his sympathy, and we find him for the next three years on the staff of the National, then edited by Armand Carrel. An article by Sainte-Beuve in that journal, which was the organ of extreme republicanism, led to a rupture with the editor, and he discontinued his contributions. It was during this period (1830-36), also, that Sainte-Beuve became a sympathetic listener of one of the most interesting men of the century, the famous Lamennais. In his later years Sainte-Beuve insisted that the foundation of his intellectual life was the French materialism of the 18th century; yet both his relations with Lamennais and his private correspondence prove that at this period of his life, at least, religious questions seriously engaged his attention. With the extreme democratic opinions of Lamennais after his breach with Rome Sainte-Beuve could have no sympathy, and by 1836 their intimate relations ceased. Later in life he expressed himself very frankly regarding Lamennais' career, but his final judgment is virtually that of all judicious critics. His solitary novel, Volupté (1834), also belongs to this period of his life, a period apparently of mental and spiritual unrest, of which this novel is the somewhat morbid expression. In 1837 he proceeded to Lausanne, where he delivered a series of lectures on the history of Port-Royal. Subsequently, as the result of the intermittent labour of twenty years, these lectures took the shape of a book of five volumes, which contain some of Sainte-Beuve's finest work. Whereas in the first two volumes, however, he is to a certain extent in sympathy with Jansenism, in the last three his point of view is that of the purely disinterested critic. At Lausanne Sainte-Beuve was deeply impressed by the character and views of Alexandre Vinet, and, though he eventually diverged far from Vinet's teaching, he treasured his memory as one of the noblest hearts and minds it had been his fortune to know. During his stay at Lausanne Sainte-Beuve produced his last volume of poetry, Pensées d'Abut, in which with but moderate success he attempted, as a departure from the usual rhetorical character of French verse, a simpler form of expression and more familiar turns of thought. From Lausanne he made a journey into Italy, visiting Rome, Naples, and other cities; and with this journey closes the first period of his life, during which he was still groping his way to his true function.
From 1840, according to Sainte-Beuve himself, dates a new departure in his criticism. Thenceforward he claims to have been master of himself, and in his own words to be the disinterested 'naturalist of minds.' In that year he was again in Paris, where an appointment as keeper of the Mazarin Library brought him a modest competence, which saved him from the necessity of hasty production. During the next eight years he wrote mainly for the Revue des Deux Mondes, to which he had been an intermittent contributor since its foundation in 1831. As one of the most distinguished literary workers of the day, he was in 1845 elected member of the French Academy, his eulogium being pronounced by Victor Hugo. The political confusions of 1848 led Sainte-Beuve to accept the professorship of French literature at Liège, where he delivered a course of lectures afterwards published under the title of Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire sous l'Empire. In 1849 he returned to Paris, when he entered on an engagement which was to afford him the precise sphere he needed for the adequate display of his powers and attainments as a literary critic. This was to write for the Constitutionnel an article on some literary subject to appear on the Monday of every week. For the next twenty years Sainte-Beuve, with little intermission, carried on this task. On Monday he settled down to his task, and on five successive days worked for twelve hours at the preparation of his materials and the composition of his article. Saturday he devoted to a careful revision of proofs, and on Sunday he allowed himself a holiday. In 1861 these Causeries du Lundi, as they were called, were transferred to the Moniteur, an official organ of Napoleon III.; in 1867 back to the Constitutionnel, and finally in 1869 to the Temps. The papers thus written make up in all twenty-eight volumes, of which the first fifteen are entitled Causeries du Lundi, and the succeeding volumes Nouveaux Lundis.
By his acceptance of the government of Napoleon III. Sainte-Beuve gave offence to many of his former friends; but his justification was that forms of government were indifferent to him provided he might pursue his own objects in peace. In 1854, on the occasion of his appointment as professor of Latin Poetry at the Collège de France, the students refused to listen to his lectures, and he was forced to demit both the office and its emoluments. The lectures he intended to deliver, a critical estimate of Virgil, were subsequently published as a separate volume. Nominated a senator in 1865, he regained popularity by his spirited speeches in favour of that liberty of thought which the government was doing its utmost to suppress. In his last years Sainte-Beuve lived the life of a hermit in his modest house in the Rue Mont-Parnasse, though he counted among his friends and admirers the first men of letters in France. He died on 13th October 1869 of a malady from which he had long suffered. It was his special instruction that he should be buried without religious ceremony and without the customary eulogium. His funeral, however, was attended by a multitude estimated at ten thousand, but the only words pronounced at his grave were—'Adieu, Sainte-Beuve; adieu, our friend.'
It is by the amount and variety of his work, and the range of qualities it displays, that Sainte-Beuve holds the first place among literary critics. Others have equalled or surpassed him in individual effects; where he is unapproachable is in his faculty of educating the interest and significance of the most various types of human character, and the most various forms of creative effort. To his marvellous insight, range of sympathy, and knowledge of detail he added an experience of men and things exceptionally rich and varied for one whose main function was literary criticism. But, besides their value as criticism, the works of Sainte-Beuve are an inexhaustible mine of facts and reflections bearing on every interest of human life. Regarded in its totality, his work is in its essential tendency identical with that of Montaigne. In both we have the point of view of the uncommitted observer, the same many-sided presentment of life, the same inconclusive philosophy; and in both a personal character equally void of every heroic element. Supreme as he is in his own department, however, Sainte-Beuve is not a European man of letters like Erasmus, or Voltaire, or Renan. The subjects he treated were not of universal interest, and his literary methods are as far as possible from the simplicity and directness which are the crowning qualities of these three writers. Nevertheless, the work of Sainte-Beuve marks an epoch in the intellectual history of Europe. By its delicacy, subtlety, and precision it extended the limits of the study of human character and of the products of human intelligence.
The chief authority for the life of Sainte-Beuve is the strongly prejudiced book of the Vicomte d'Haussonville, C. A. Sainte-Beuve, sa Vie et ses Œuvres (1875). See also Sainte-Beuve's own 'Ma Biographie' in Nouveaux Lundis, vol. xiii. Amongst numerous works, one of the most read is Souvenirs by his last secretary, M. Troubat (1890). The works of Sainte-Beuve are as follow: Tableau Historique et Critique de la Poésie Française et du Théâtre Français au XVIe Siècle; Poésies Complètes (2 vols.); Volupté; Port-Royal (7 vols. 1860); Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire sous l'Empire (2 vols. 1860); Critiques et Portraits Littéraires (5 vols.); Portraits Contemporains (5 vols.); Portraits de Femmes; Causeries du Lundi (15 vols.); Nouveaux Lundis (13 vols.); Souvenirs et Indiscrétions; Premiers Lundis (3 vols.); Les Cahiers de M. Sainte-Beuve; Chroniques Parisiennes; Lettres à la Princesse; Étude sur Virgile; Le Général Jomini; Monsieur de Talleyrand; P. J. Proudhon, sa Vie et sa Correspondance; Correspondance de C. A. Sainte-Beuve (2 vols.).