and rivals. Each will select some special figure for his opposite and standard. There are such juvenile "piques" and challenges between equals or minds almost equal-which continue throughout a career. Yet, though we may resent the undue importance of a contemporary, and have no liking for the rôle of second fiddle, let us never wish away a man of our own generation, rival though he be-nay, though he were an enemy! Should the worst come to the worst, after all it is he who will stand our friend in need, and, if we be worth the pains, it is he who will plead our cause with the generations that tread us down (insolent young champions of To-morrow), reminding them of the bygone feats of an old wrestler whose triumphs they must still respect. His own vanity is enlisted in our cause, for we have stood up to him many a time in the good old days when we measured our strength together.'(Sainte-Beuve, 'Nouveaux Lundis,' t. iii., Chateaubriand.) It was in the January of 1827 that Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve had made the acquaintance of the Hugos. He was twenty-three years old, and up to that time his life had been singularly dull and dead-alive. I began life where my 'father left it off,' he says in one of his notes, with much 'such a brain as he had then, stored with literary ideas and ' reminiscences.' He began life therefore at fifty; which was his father's age when he died leaving a bride of forty, for his death followed his marriage: Sainte-Beuve was a posthumous child. He was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, and spent his childhood there between a prim, authoritative, half-English mother, and an aged aunt, his father's elder sister. Thence he had come to Paris, to school. In 1827 he was walking the hospital as a student in surgery, and in his leisure hours reviewing books for the Globe,' the most serious and indeed doctrinaire of French newspapers. 6 And, for the Globe,' it fell to his lot to review the 'Orientales' of Victor Hugo. Hugo had been delighted with the review-he was always delighted with praise-and had called to thank the editor, who referred him to SainteBeuve. The critic lived at that time with his mother; his address was 97 Rue de Vaugirard; at number 90, Hugo and his wife occupied a small flat on the second floor. The young men met; 'J'étais conquis dès ce jour,' says SainteBeuve, à la branche de l'école romantique dont il était le 'chef.' The young literary surgeon who called on Victor Hugo was a red-haired, ugly youth, delicate of aspect and awkward, with the timidity peculiar to young men whose education has been austere, if not severe, and who have always lived in the society of their elders. Hitherto SainteBeuve's friends had been, first and foremost, a young seminarist at Boulogne, and then his two old schoolmasters, Dubois, the editor of the Globe,' and Daunou, the historian. When he forgot to be shy the youth was charming, often brilliant, extraordinarily quick at the up-take, and, despite his cynical opinions (for so they seemed to the young Hugos), full of a tremulous, tender sensitiveness. But after all he has left us his portrait: 'Jeune sage Austère et rougissant, cœur malade et sauvage Et n'ayant jusque-là fait d'ode ou d'élégie Où, mes jours de loisirs, j'écrivais de mon mieux, (Sainte-Beuve, 'Livre d'Amour,' viii.) Imagine this young sawbones-tired of the timid pious social France of Charles X., disgusted by the rowdy materialism of his fellow-students in the dissecting-room, and vaguely bored also by the excellent philosophers of the 'Globe-when, suddenly, a gate opens and he finds himself in Armida's garden. Sainte-Beuve was a pupil of Lamarck's (it was indeed from the teaching of Lamarck that he gathered that idea of the gradual transformation of organisms by their environment which Lamarck was never able to prove, and which SainteBeuve spent his life in developing and handed on to Taine)— he was a young disciple of Lucretius and Buffon, austerely incredulous of any divine intervention in the order of this world, when he entered the bare little salle' over the carpenter's shop where Victor Hugo and his wife sit at supper.... The table is spread, the gods are feasting; a magic air stirs, on this January evening, the secret sap of the trees and plants in the little garden outside. The world as changed. Hitherto, he has lived with old people and d people; he has learned to look on life as an ordered ence of phenomena in which the past inevitably commands and shapes the future. For himself, being ugly and poor, he expected little, but hoped to do his duty and earn his daily bread. A sense of the law and the limits of developement had lain on him like a weight. He might have said with Prometheus: τὴν πεπρωμένην δὲ χρὴ αἶσαν φέρειν ὡς ῥᾷστα, γιγνώσκονθ ̓ ὅτι τὸ τῆς ̓Ανάγκης ἔστ ̓ ἀδήριτον σθένος. It is a conception of things which has no doubt a great deal of truth in it, a noble simplicity in its nudity and sadness. But there is no place in it for the enthusiasm of youth. Youth would be up and doing, setting the world to rights. And what is the use of it in a universe which renews itself automatically, without any revivals or transformation-scenes, by the sheer force of its continuity and the fortuitous concourse of its atoms? It takes, we imagine for our part, both these theories to explain the world. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in any philosophy. It is true that Law presides over the workings of the Cosmos, that even the smallest cells alive reveal the nicest order in their arrangement, and that like produces like through all the developements of being. But it is also true that this iron progress of Rule is occasionally interrupted by spasmodic bursts of something like Passion or Genius in the Cosmos, which transforms species, provokes unimaginable changes, invents something fresh and spontaneous and changes the face of things. A star dances in Heaven then; and a great poet is born, or a new ideal invades humanity, or some insignificant germ awakes to virulence and we suffer from a new disease: have not the last fifteen years witnessed the genesis of influenza? The botanist Hugo de Vries has supposed that after long and regular periods most living organisms pass through some such a brusque, brief spell of mutation, and then and there develope new qualities, of which no doubt the principle lay secret in them or in their ancestors, but which nothing up till then has revealed. Towards 1830, when Sainte-Beuve met the Hugos, French society and literature were about to undergo such a mysterious mutation-suffering 'a sea-change 'Into something rich and strange,' which was Romanticism. VOL. CCI. NO. CCCCXII. EE = Tetor Exem vas te se of a group of young poets, rel & sector and fingers, and by a painter or is Botanger ir Any Deschamps. The other Schauns via Depale Santer a handsome lad fresh im shed, mi mr surgen of the Press, Sainte-Beure, frmei a made-ati sites reviving round a planet of the is mas. Tear Eam, and visited sometimes by porous ireng mites. Lamartine and Vigny, who not miementy verse del r of the Cénacle.' These young men vere adiusaste priests of the Marvellous - vis ka 13 las led the Bemscence of Wonder. They coked a new leven and a new earth, and yet, by some tharming agree. meir special fancy was for the Mitte Apes. Cu the ine spring evenings of 1827 they would meet in Ex's boase, and, after the five o'clock Sinner of those staat days, they would sally forth in a band to see the sunset over the Seine from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame. As the spring drew on and the days grew longer they would troop cct to the plain of Montrouge and meet a band of young painters, headed by Charlet or Lévéria, at some point beyond the fortifications; there they would sit in a circle on the sunny grass and tell sad stories ' of the death of kings. Sometimes they dined at Vanves in a little 'guinguette" beyond the walls, under a trellis, on a rough deal table, and discussed the verse of Ronsard and the sculptures of Chartres over a bottle of Mother Saguet's 'vin bleu.' Madame Victor Hugo was the life, or, since she was rather a nonchalant young beauty, let us say the charm and the grace of these reunions. Not only the mother but the baby (the last baby, for the stock was constantly replenished) was usually a member of the party. The young men would tramp along the dusty country road, talking, discussing, laughing to their hearts' content, while Victor Hugo unrolled his vast discourse and talked them all down in golden periods. His lovely young wife hangs on his arm, often absent-minded, sometimes listening from every depth of her great dark eyes: she was nearly always silent. And just in front stalks the nursemaid, holding the stiff-swaddled babe upright against her shoulder, so that its smiling face is turned towards the happy parents. Among all these youths of twenty or thereabouts, Hugo strode like a prince in his court. He was little their senior, a man of twenty-five; but something pure and grave and lofty in mien and manner made him appear older and taller than he was. In this innocent Bohemia he was the only stickler for dignity: the young poets of the Restoration, out of a sort of 'mièvrerie' and intimate brotherhood, were given to calling their fellow-singers' spouses by their Christian names; one of them had once addressed Hugo's young wife as Adèle: Madame Victor Hugo' corrected the stately husband, and no one transgressed again. He was strikingly handsome-a king of men, as Sainte-Beuve loved to call him—(in Greek)—but handsome in an inspired, thoughtful, slender Byronic style which Boulanger's frontispiece to the 'Odes 'et Ballades' commemorates-not the magnificent burly Homer that the middle-aged among us can remember. No greater contrast can be imagined to the little critic with his mop of foxy hair, his mobile irregular features, and timid ingratiating neophyte's manner-so proud to be, as he says more than once--le héraut d'armes, le serviteur, le 'secrétaire des grands hommes.' Victor Hugo accepted all this devotion in his lordly way and condescended to enlighten his proficient disciple not only in literature but in politics and religion. Sainte-Beuve was fascinated, amused, and a little mistrustful. The Viscount Victor Hugo, the Count Alfred de Vigny, and Alphonse de Lamartine were noblemen, Catholics and Royalists, with all the prejudices of the chivalrous and frivolous little Court of Charles X. C'était au premier 'abord dans ces retraites mondaines quelque chose de doux, 'de parfumé, de caressant et d'enchanteur.' There was a sort of subtle mysticism in the air, a savour of platonic love, royalist fervour, and Christian mythology rather than religion. Vigny is an archangel, Lamartine is content 'with the rank of seraph,' wrote Sainte-Beuve, who found so much idealism a little pretentious. He never understood or liked the chaste, profound, and haughty genius of Vigny, 'le gentilhomme,' as he used to call him, with his knack of finding the weak place in the armour. Lamartine'half Fénelon, half Ovid'-alternately attracted and repelled him. He was jealous of either, for both had older claims than he, and more brilliant titles, to the friendship of Hugo; and yet he was proud of living in the company of these demigods and interpreting their voices to the multitude. With his ticklish vanity, the young Jacobin surgeon would have been happier could he have known that he was the equal by birth of these young men, entitled to call himself M. de Sainte-Beuve. But the Revolution had |