Hugo et Sainte-Beuve: Vie et mort d'une amitié "littéraire" (review)

In this essay, Brix revisits the Hugo-Sainte-Beuve friendship and its demise, seeking to nuance the widely accepted biographical explanations for the split (Sainte-Beuve's romantic relationship with Adèle, his envy of Hugo's success) by exploring the significant role in their falling out played by a number of literary factors, namely tensions within the Romantic movement and divergent positions relative to the role of the critic and the function of art. In this, Brix succeeds not only in illuminating the multiple and lesser-known sources of discord in their relationship but also in making a compelling case for restoring the often-maligned Sainte-Beuve to a more prominent place in literary history.

The first chapter, "Biographiques," traces Hugo and Sainte-Beuve's friendship from its harmonious beginning in the late 1820s to its acrimonious end in the mid 1830s. Brix supplements the chronological biographical account that he provides of this period with critical commentary that lays the groundwork for the arguments that will be made in subsequent chapters relative to Sainte-Beuve's esthetic penchants, literary models and poetics, and views on the role of the critic and literary criticism in general. The portrait of an earnest, disciplined, and sympathetic Sainte-Beuve concurrently draws one of a largely unlikable Hugo, whose megalomania was fueled early on by the mutual adoration society of the Cénacle and a desire to "voir ses proches servir sa gloire naissante" (19). Anyone at odds, then, with Hugo's views, or who dared to offer constructive or outright criticism, was cast out of the inner circle. Carefully supporting his claims by an able use of primary sources (letters, articles and comptes rendus from contemporary literary journals), Brix suggests that, from Hugo's perspective, Sainte-Beuve's literary betrayal (his independent and sometimes negative judgments of Hugo's work) was in fact more significant than his personal one (the affair with Adèle).

The subsequent chapters chip further away at facile explanations for the falling out, each developing an aspect of the literary divide. In the second ("Le 'Judas' du Cénacle?"), Brix raises doubts around assertions that cast Sainte-Beuve in the role of traitor or Hugo-hater, proposing rather that Sainte-Beuve was torn between the desire to please his friend and the conviction that the literary critic must do his job dispassionately. Brix underscores the consistencies in Sainte-Beuve's criticisms of Hugo's poetry, theater, and novels -most notably the zest for excess and exaggeration -as well as the respect Sainte-Beuve earned from other nineteenth-century authors who recognized him as a skilled and thoughtful critic most often on the mark. Despite Hugo's revisionist claims that he had plucked Sainte-Beuve from obscurity, Sainte-Beuve established himself from early on as a critic of integrity and worth who was not afraid to ruffle feathers and whose advice was often sought out and heeded. The third chapter, "D'un romantisme à l'autre," enlarges the scope to account for the ways in which differing esthetic views -which created friction within the Romantic movement nearly from its inception -additionally contributed to the tension between Hugo and Sainte-Beuve as the two, although united in their desire to "réconcilier la poésie et la société" (61), had divergent opinions about how to achieve this.

In the fourth chapter, "La poétique de Sainte-Beuve: modèles et filiations," Brix examines Sainte-Beuve's own writing -poetic and critical -as a way of further exposing the esthetic divide that separated Sainte-Beuve from Hugo, and of reinforcing the consistency of Sainte-Beuve's message. Indeed, as Brix's analysis of Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) illustrates, Sainte-Beuve's esthetic convictions -which championed the innovation central to Romanticism all while foregrounding "la peinture de l'intériorité" (75) favored by the underappreciated Chenier -guide not only his criticisms...