Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

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The French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), who developed a very personal technique of literary criticism, remains the most important literary arbiter of his century.

Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve went to Paris in 1824 to study medicine. But by 1826 he was contributing actively to the Globe, where an article favorable to Victor Hugo won him the young poet's confidence and a place in his Cénacle, or coterie, among the most innovative literary talents of the time. Saint-Beuve's Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVI sie‧cle (1828) not only rehabilitated the neglected Pléiade poets (Pierre Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay) but laid a claim to respectability for his contemporaries, "romantic" descendants of those forgotten giants of lyricism.

Saint-Beuve's own elegiac efforts in Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) and Consolations (1830) enhanced a prestige among his peers that was not echoed by the public; his unhappy affair with Hugo's wife, Ade‧le (allusively chronicled in his novel Volupté, 1834), led to an open break with his most ardent supporters and initiated a period (mid-1830s) of spiritual upheaval during which he sought guidance in Saint-Simonism and even in the renewed Catholicism of Félicité Robert de Lamennais. His interest in the Jansenist community of Port Royal dates from these years, although he continued producing critical articles for the Revue des deux mondes, which would be collected in Portraits littéraires, Portraits de femmes, and Portraits contemporains. The Histoire de Port-Royal (3 vols., 1840-1848; originally a lecture series given in Lausanne in 1837-1838) remains his most important single contribution, however, and is often termed the most valuable and original work of literary criticism in the 19th century. Here his ideal role as "naturalist of human spirits," seeking to classify by "families" and "generations" those writers whose interior lives he deliberately pursues, is clearly expressed. Sainte-Beuve sought here, as he would throughout his career, that "relative truth of each thing" by which literature remained for him a domain of vital and infinite variety.

The second half of Sainte-Beuve's career (1849-1869), marked by a hasty and widely criticized rallying to the regime of Napoleon III, saw his elevation to a place in the French Academy and finally (1865) a seat in the Senate. These were his most productive years, during which the Causeries du lundi ("Monday Chats" in the Moniteur) regularly confirmed his official status as arbiter of national taste under the Second Empire. Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire (1861; dating from a course given at Lie‧ge in 1848-1849) stands with Port-Royal as a major, unitary contribution. The Lundis and Nouveaux Lundis, however, best reveal that shifting, curious, always allusive talent with which he attempted to join "physiology" and "poetry" in an art of evocation and critical appraisal. Sainte-Beuve, by abandoning the dogmatic evaluations of his predecessors, made of criticism an inductive process based on detailed examination of the author's character, his life, and so his literary work. This historical, biographical method established Sainte-Beuve as the first "modern" literary critic.

Further Reading

There is no complete edition of Sainte-Beuve's works in either French or English, although many of his works have been translated. Two particularly useful critical biographies and appraisals are Harold Nicolson, Sainte-Beuve (1957), and Andrew George Lehmann, Sainte-Beuve: A Portrait of the Critic, 1804-42 (1962).

Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin (1804-69). French poet, novelist, and critic. Even before the publication of Contre Sainte-Beuve, where Proust used him as a straw man in order to define his own anti-intellectual conception of art, Sainte-Beuve had become the scapegoat for all the guilt of literary criticism, and he remains best remembered for his underestimation of Balzac, Stendhal, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, to whom he preferred Béranger, Ernest Feydeau, and many minor writers.

Notorious mostly as a critic—the ‘prince of critics’ and ‘uncle Beuve’, an academician in the July Monarchy and a senator of the Second Empire—he was also, and before this, a poet. Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829), where he poses as the anonymous editor of a dead poet, is marked by a rare realism, for instance in ‘Les Rayons jaunes’, and introduces day-to-day city life into lyric poetry. But Sainte-Beuve never attained the reputation of Lamartine and Hugo, whose glory would always stand in his way. He had come to Paris in 1818 and studied medicine, but quickly turned to literature. His early articles on Hugo and in defence of Romanticism, in Le Globe (1827), introduced him into the Cénacle. He became a friend of Hugo while falling in love with the latter's wife, Adèle. His two other volumes of poetry, Consolations (1830) and Pensées d'août (1837), parallel the evolution of his feelings for Hugo, from ambivalence to hostility after their break in 1835. In 1834 he published his only novel, Volupté, a first-person narrative, where autobiographical elements abound.

Disappointed by the reception of his creative works, Sainte-Beuve later confined himself to criticism and created the 19th-c. genre through numerous articles in Le Constitutionnel, Le Moniteur, and Le Temps, as well as lectures in Lausanne (1837-8), Liège (1848-9), and the École Normale Supérieure (1858-61), all collected in volumes. His Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVIe siècle (1828) re-evaluates the Pléiade and uses it to justify Romanticism; Critiques et portraits littéraires (1836-46, devoted to 17th-c. writers), Portraits de femmes (1844), and Portraits contemporains (1846) develop the biographical genre, explaining, through sympathy, the inspiration of literature by the life of authors. Port-Royal (1840-59), expanding on the lectures in Lausanne, and Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'Empire (1861), based on the lectures in Liège, trace the broader picture of a period and milieu. In the almost 500 articles collected in Causeries du lundi (1851-2) and Nouveaux lundis (1863-70), Sainte-Beuve touched upon a great variety of literature, mostly French, but also classical and foreign. As distinct from the earlier ‘portrait’, the ‘causerie’ is more of an essay and leads to a judgement. Sainte-Beuve combines the criticism of a journalist and a professor; he still protests against theory and systems but, perhaps influenced by Taine's determinism, he claims to create a ‘histoire naturelle des esprits’.

Sceptical, disillusioned, politically ambiguous—students interrupted his lectures at the Collège de France in 1855 in protest against Napoleon III, but massively followed his funeral after he had become a liberal senator—Sainte-Beuve has succeeded in attracting widespread hostility, perhaps because he dared write on the literature of his own time, a risk that academic criticism was soon to avoid. His intimate notebooks, posthumously published in Mes poisons (1926) and Le Cahier vert (1974), should allow us to reappraise a writer to whom history has been unfair.

[Antoine Compagnon]

Bibliography

• J. Cabanis, Pour Sainte-Beuve (1987)
• M. Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays (tr. J. Sturrock, 1988)

Quotes:

"There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age."

Saint Beuve redirects here. For the eponymous saint, see Beuve, Abbess of Saint Pierre de Reims.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve in middle age.

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Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (December 23, 1804 in Boulogne-sur-Mer – October 13, 1869 in Paris) was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Career 1.2.1 Port-Royal 2 Works 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Early years

He was born in Boulogne, educated there, and studied medicine at the Collège Charlemagne in Paris (1824-27). In 1828, he served in the St Louis Hospital. Beginning in 1824, he contributed literary articles, the Premier lundis of his collected Works, to the Globe newspaper, and, in 1827, he came, through a review of Victor Hugo's Odes et ballads, into close association with Hugo and the Cénacle, the literary circle that strove to define the ideas of the rising Romanticism and struggle against classical formalism. Sainte-Beuve became friendly with Hugo after publishing a favourable review of the author's work but later had an affair with Hugo's wife, which, naturally enough, led to their estrangement. Curiously, when Sainte-Beuve was made a member of the French Academy in 1845, the ceremonial duty of giving the reception speech fell upon Hugo.

Career

Sainte-Beuve published collections of poems and the partly autobiographical novel Volupté in 1834. His articles and essays were collected the volumes Port-Royal and Portraits littéraires.

During the turmoil of 1848 in Europe, he lectured at Liège on Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire. He returned to Paris in 1849 and began his series of topical columns, Causeries du lundi ('Monday Chats') in the newspaper, Le Constitutionnel. When Louis Napoleon became Emperor, he made Sainte-Beuve professor of Latin poetry at the Collège de France, but anti-Imperialist students hissed him, and he resigned.

Port-Royal

After several books of poetry and a couple of failed novels, Sainte-Beuve began to undertake literary research, of which the most important is Port-Royal, while also contributing to the Revue contemporaine

Port-Royal (1837-1859), probably Sainte-Beuve's masterpiece, is a huge history of the famous Jansenist abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs. This monumental work not only had an influence on what constitutes the history of religious belief, i.e. the method of how it is carried out, but also, of course, on the philosophy of history and on the history of esthetics, the whole episode of Jansenism being one of the richest and most important in French intellectual history.

He was made Senator in 1865, in which capacity he distinguished himself by his pleas for freedom of speech and of the press. However, it seemed Sainte-Beuve had a bit of a temper. According to Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, "Sainte-Beuve was a clever man with the temper of a turkey!" In his last years, he was an acute sufferer and lived much in retirement.

Sainte-Beuve had vast knowledge, wonderful tact, and acute perception of what was vital and significant in his subjects. A selection of the Causeries in English appeared as English Portraits (New York, 1875) and another as Essays on Men and Women (London, 1890). E. J. Trechmann published a translation (eight volumes, New York, 1909-11).

One of Sainte-Beuve's critical contentions was that, in order to understand an artist and his work, it was necessary to understand that artist's biography. Marcel Proust took issue with this notion and refuted it in a set of essays, Contre Sainte-Beuve ('Against Sainte-Beuve'). Ideas that Proust began to examine in these essays eventually developed into his approach to À la recherche du temps perdu.

Works

• Tableau de la poésie française au seizième siècle (1828)
• Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829)
• Les Consolations (1830) (poetry)
• Volupté (1835) (novel)
• Port-Royal (1840–1859)
• Les Lundis (1851–1872)
• Causeries du lundi (1851–1862)
• Nouveaux Lundis (1863–1870)

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

• Works by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve at Project Gutenberg
• What Is a Classic? at Bartleby.com

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