The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars (review)

It is remarkable how persistently water imagery, with terms such as 'ondoyant' or 'fluent', seems naturally to flow in characterizations of Sainte-Beuve, the man and his works, as Jean-Pierre Richard demonstrated in his contribution to a famous colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1966. Typically, Sainte-Beuve defined criticism as 'une émanation des livres'. Thus it requires an exceptionally subtle, sensitive and incisive approach to follow the sinuosity of the critic's tastes and thoughts and to trace the elements of continuity in his measured outpourings. Christopher Prendergast's book rises magnificently to the task as he maps out Sainte-Beuve's evolving notions of 'le classique' (in both senses of the term) and expounds with remarkable erudition their far-reaching ramifications. The guiding thread of this remarkably sustained analysis is Sainte-Beuve's essay, published in October 1850, 'Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?', along with, to a lesser degree, the critic's inaugural lecture at the École Normale Supérieure in 1858, 'De la tradition en littérature'. Prendergast displays a most impressive array of erudition and an equally impressive demonstration of that most Beuvian of qualities, urbanity, as he charts the sometimes devious avenues through which, with all its compromises and equivocation, the critic crafted his classic ideal: his cult of Latinity, his predilection for Virgil over Homer, his lack of regard for medieval literature and culture, his aversion to popular literature, his anti-democratic views, rooted in his fear of revolution and political disorder, a conservatism with some alarming hints of the more belligerent nationalism of a later age. Prendergast superbly explores the political underpinning of Sainte-Beuve's views on the raison d'état of a classic literature and culture, characteristically defined as a 'dyke' against the troubled waters of political disorder. But a somewhat uncharacteristic note of exasperation creeps in when he deals with Sainte-Beuve's accommodation with the Second Empire, a hardly surprising situation given the perfect match between the critic's views and les idées napoleéoniennes. Perhaps significantly, as if the 'black legend' lives on, Louis-Napoléon is bereft of his imperial title in the index. Despite the natural boost in the number of publications on the occasion of the recent bicentenary commemoration of Sainte-Beuve's birth, bibliographical statistics suggest that the claim, on the first page of this study, that we are witnessing a 'dramatic' renewal of interest in Sainte-Beuve would seem somewhat to overstate the case, but there could be no better stimulus than this splendid study to such a resurgence, at least as far as the English-speaking academic world is concerned.