Sainte-Beuve's watchword is "vengeance", suggests Wolf Lepenies. With his Cahier vert and his recently published Cahier brun, he is a meticulous and often bitter painter of the literary warfare of his time. Sainte-Beuve notes that the time is over when literature could be a simple exercise of the mind, entrusted to authors honed by their poor health. This century needs "athletes with powerful necks" whose "physiology and hygiene" reflect and characterize their talent.
The literary world described by Sainte-Beuve is made up of enemies and rivals. By choosing the latter, we reveal the spirit we are. Sainte-Beuve's adversaries are his elders - Guizot, Cousin, Villemain, Thiers - as well as a number of contemporary critics. Hugo is not among them, because one does not wage public war on one's former friends, even and especially when they have become one's enemies.
Sainte-Beuve did not fail to mock the charlatanism of his time: the charlatan pushes himself up by his collar, and is not so far removed from the athlete who inflates his. The evil of the age lies in the fact that its great authors have stopped writing for their peers, in favor of the people: this is the case of Hugo and George Sand. Chateaubriand did not escape criticism: he was the very type of impostor writer, to whom the whole era was complacent. The central fact of this charlatanism is the rhetoric to which the era is devoted, and which replaces true bravery. Sainte-Beuve is harsh on his contemporaries, who have abandoned real warfare for the war of the pen. But he praises the remarkable career of Paul de Molènes: a soldier and even a bravura critic, his love of literary warfare led him to a military career, in stark contrast to his era. For his part, Baudelaire praises him thus: "War for war's sake !" he would have gladly said, as others say "Art for art's sake !""
Sainte-Beuve often uses the military metaphor to talk about himself, as when he says that he has "a short and frequent sword", suggesting that he wields the pen like a handgun. We can't rule out the possibility of a sexual allusion, as Sainte-Beuve also uses metaphor in this area when he talks about holding troops, assembling a garrison. Nevertheless, the metaphor is particularly useful for the way ideas are assembled, and the ease with which they can be used on a grand scale by those great generals who are talented writers.
Sainte-Beuve misses the days of illustrious pitched battles, of warfare with hard blows, which is not modern guerrilla warfare. He sees in none of his contemporaries the respect one should have for one's adversary, without whom one is nothing. He always sees himself as the representative of a middle way, even between modesty and glorification, where Hugo is constantly "whale" or "bladder". He recounts his entire life as a series of campaigns: there's the Globe, then the Revue de Paris, the Revue des Deux Mondes, the École normale supérieure, the failed Collège de France, the Lundis.... Each time, his weapons were "malice and vengeance". Like Latouche, his role model, Sainte-Beuve enjoyed slipping snakes into his texts... which also gave him his colors.
