580
PARTISAN REVIEW
his letters; where he says of his slightest works that they are sublime,
where he dismisses
La Fille aux Yeux d'Or
with the utmost disdain,
and doesn't mention the close of
Les Illusions Perdues
or that marvel–
ous scene I have been talking about. The character of Eve, which
to us seems trivial, seemed to him, so he says, another great find. But
all this may depend on the chance of which letters have survived,
and even of which letters he wrote.
Sainte-Beuve does as he always does about Balzac. Instead of
discussing Balzac's
Femme de Trente Ans,
he discusses women of
thirty in general, and after a few words about Balthasar Claes (in
La Recherche de l'
Abso~u)
he talks about a real-life Claes who
actually left a book about his own searchings for the absolute, and
gives long quotations from this production-of no literary value,
needless to say. Looking down from the height of his false and bale–
ful ideal of the gentleman of letters, he misjudges Balzac's harshness
toward Steinbock (in
La Cousine Bette),
that mere amateur who
conceives nothing, who produces nothing, who does not understand
that to be an artist one must devote the whole of oneself to art. Here
Sainte-Beuve rears up with ruffled dignity against the phrase that
Balzac uses: "Homer ... cohabited with his Muse." It is not, perhaps,
very happily expressed. But really there can be no interpreting the
masterpieces of the past unless one judges them from the standpoint
of those who wrote them, and not from the outside, from a respectful
distance, and with all academic deference. That the outward condi–
tions of literary production should have changed during the course
of the last century, that the calling of the man of letters should have
become a more absorbing and excluding affair, is quite possible. But
the inward, mental laws of that production cannot have changed.
That a writer should be a genius occasionally,
so that
for the rest of
his time he may lead the pleasant life of a cultured social dilettante,
is as false and silly a notion as that of a saint pursuing a life of the
austerest contemplation so that in Paradise he may lead a life of
vulgar enjoyment. One is nearer to understanding the great writers
of the ancient world if one understands them as Balzac did, than as
Sainte-Beuve did. Dilettantism has never created anything. Even
Horace was certainly closer to Balzac than to M. Daru or M. Mole.
(Translated from the French by Sylvia Townsend Warner)
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