The centre of the intellectual life was always the University. It could not be otherwise in a country in which every man is born a pedagogue. In England the view has come to prevail that literature only begins to be vital when it ceases to be academic. In the Canton of Vaud the literature is academic or nothing, and even the poets are professors, unbending in their hours of sentimental ease; while the literature of revolt is the bitter cry of professors who have forfeited their chairs on account of their religious or political opinions. As the result of each revolution in turn we see a company of professors put to flight. The casualties of that sort are at least as numerous as the broken heads.

The detailed relation of such professorial vicissitudes belongs, however, to the native antiquary. Here it will suffice to recall a few more notable names.

A Swiss historian would doubtless say that the greatest of the names is that of Alexandre Vinet. In his hot youth he wrote riotous poetry:

Afterwards he became austere, and played a great part in theological controversy. He hated the Revivalists, whom he described as 'lunatics at large'; but he insisted that religious liberty should be the heritage of all, and, while opposing established churches, exercised a profound spiritual influence. He was a great Broad Churchman, and we may class him as the F. W. Robertson or F. D. Maurice of the Canton of Vaud. Sainte-Beuve blew his trumpet, and he, on his part, almost persuaded Sainte-Beuve to become a Protestant.

Sainte-Beuve, it is hardly too much to say, came to Lausanne in search of a religion. St. Simonism had disappointed him, and so had the Liberal Catholicism of Lamennais. Lamennais, in fact, had gone too fast and too far for him—had, as it were, he said, taken him for a drive, and spilt him in a ditch, and left him there and driven on. None the less, he earnestly desired to be spiritually-minded and a devout believer, feeling, in particular, an inclination towards mysticism, though unable to profess himself a mystic. 'I have,' he wrote to a friend, 'the sense of these things, but not the things themselves.' It seemed to him that he might find 'the things themselves' at Lausanne, if he went there in the proper spirit and sat at Vinet's feet.

His Swiss friend, Juste Olivier, a professor who was also a poet, procured him an engagement to deliver a course of lectures at the Lausanne Academy,[8] and he embarked upon his errand with as much humility as was compatible with professorship. Left free to choose his own subject, he decided to treat of Port Royal and the Jansenists—the most spiritually-minded of the Catholics, and those who had the closest affinity with the Protestants. By means of his lectures he thought to build himself a bridge by which to pass from the one camp to the other.

His elocution was defective, and his lectures were not quite such a success as he could have wished. The students used to meet in the cafÉs to parody them in the evenings. On the other hand, however, serious people eagerly watched the developments of the spiritual drama. Not only did it seem to them that the fate of a soul was in the balance—they were also hoping to see Protestantism score the sort of triumph that would make a noise in Paris. So they asked daily for news of Sainte-Beuve, as of a sick man lying at death's door, and asked Vinet, whom they regarded as his spiritual physician, to issue a bulletin. And Vinet's bulletin was to this effect: 'I think he is convinced, but not yet converted.' But Vinet, as he was soon to discover, was only partly right.

That Sainte-Beuve was not converted was, indeed, obvious enough, seeing that he was making violent love to his neighbour's wife at the time—between him and 'conversion' stood the obstructive charms of Madame Olivier. But it is equally true that he was not convinced; and, by a crowning irony, he found his faith evaporating as he got to close quarters with the subject, through the study of which he had expected to achieve conviction. The great history of Port Royal, begun by a believer, was finished by a sceptic. 'Moral bankruptcy,' is M. Michaut's description of his condition, and there is a sense in which it might be applied even by those who desire to dissociate morality from creeds. It was the end—at any rate, for Sainte-Beuve—of all emotion which was not either purely sensual or purely intellectual. He could not be a mystic, as he could not be a poet, because he lacked the necessary genius; and forms of religion which depended, not on intuition, but on authority, were repugnant to his sane intelligence. So he said a sad farewell to Christianity, and sought no substitute. 'I am mournfully looking on at the death of my heart,' he wrote to Vinet; and he went away and resigned himself to become a materialist, a voluptuary, and a critic.

And now a word about that Juste Olivier to whom Sainte-Beuve owed his appointment, and to whose wife Sainte-Beuve made love. The poet and the critic had met at Paris, where Olivier had gone to prepare himself for the Chair of Literature at NeuchÂtel. He was promoted, three years later, to the Chair of History at Lausanne, which he occupied for twelve years, acting also, during part of the time, as editor of the Revue Suisse, to which Sainte-Beuve contributed. The Revolution of 1845 unseated him. He went to Paris, where he achieved no great success, and was homesick there for five-and-twenty years. The Swiss forgot him, and the Parisians did not understand him. But, in 1870, when there was no longer a living to be made in Paris, he came home again. One may quote the pathetic picture of his home-coming, drawn by M. Philippe Godet:

'He had to live. For three winters the poet travelled through French Switzerland, lecturing, reading his verses, relating his reminiscences, with that melancholy humour which gave his speech its charm. The public—I speak of what I saw—was polite, respectful, and nothing more. Olivier felt almost a stranger in his own country. But he consoled himself, in the summer, at Gryon, "the high village facing the Alps of Vaud," which he has so often celebrated. He was to sing, at the mid-August fÊte, his song to the Shepherds of Anzeindaz. And there they understood him and applauded. He had his day of happiness and glory among these simple mountaineers. He was, for an hour, what it had been the dream of his life to be, the national singer of the Vaudois country.'

But the end is melancholy. He died in a chalet at Gryon in January, 1876, a broken and disappointed man, reluctant even to speak of his work or hear it spoken of. There is a deep pathos in one of his last letters which M. Godet quotes:

'It is a melancholy history—that of our country. It did nothing for Viret or Vinet; and, though I do not rank myself with them, I too know what neglect means. "Come and have a drink"—that is their last word here. I had hoped for better things. What a beautiful dream it was! At least I have been loyal to it, even if I have not, as I fancy, done all that it was in me to do. Since the day when, in one of my first printed poems, I wrote, "Un gÉnie est cachÉ dans tous les lieux que j'aime," I have obstinately sought out that genius, and tried to make it speak. It has answered me, I think more often than its voice has been heard.'