saw its acute and learned study of from 7,000 to 7,500 words, full of minute research and profound erudition, written, corrected, published. He became, as he said of himself, "a workman by the piece and the hour." This method of production left no place for correction and repentance. As the tree fell so it must lie. But this only seemed to enhance the spontaneity of his essays. As a contemporary said, "He had no time to spoil them." And under this pressure his style grew ever more supple, more concise and yet more popular, though it never ceased to be scholarly and profound.

What other writing has ever appeared in daily journals at regular intervals for a score of years, and has left such a permanent impress on the world of letters as this? In France Sainte-Beuve's works form the nucleus of every critical library. In England and in America selections continue to be translated and read; among which the most recent and perhaps the most representative are the 'Essays on Men and Women' edited by William Sharp (London, 1890), and 'Select Essays' translated by A. J. Butler (London, 1894). A reference to Poole and Fletcher's 'Index to Periodical Literature' reveals no less than thirty articles in English journals concerning the life and works. of this genial lover of letters.

The subjects of his criticism were as world-wide as literature; and into everything that he touched he put, as he said he sought to do, "a sort of charm and at the same time more reality." To all his work he brought the calm temper of the scientific mind, rarely crossed by querulous clouds or heated by the passion of controversy, and not often roused to a glowing and self-forgetful enthusiasm. "I have but one diversion, one pursuit," he said: "I analyze, I botanize. I am a naturalist of minds. What I would fain create is literary natural history."

He

This mood is naturally drawn to the serious and austere. And so Pascal, Bossuet, Shakespeare, and the Lake Poets attract SainteBeuve more than Rabelais and Molière, or Chaucer and Byron. But nothing human is wholly foreign to this collector of talents. passes with easy flight from Firdausī to General Jomini, from Madame Desbordes-Valmore to the Comte de Saxe. He is naturally tolerant of rising talent and of eccentric natures, and perhaps too stern to those contemporaries who have achieved success and need correction rather than encouragement. The unclassified attracts him; for to the last he remains essentially subjective in his judgments, praising what pleases him without measuring it on the procrustean bed of any critical code. And yet he felt that his method had in it the possibilities of an exact science; and with this prophetic vision he prepared the chosen people of literature to enter (with Taine for their Joshua) the Canaan of critical naturalism.

Sainte-Beuve was more consistent in criticism than in ethics. Fundamentally he thought he had most in common with the materialists of the eighteenth century: but while he was under the romantic spell of Hugo, the smiles of a fair proselyter almost won him to Catholicism; and later his restless mind seemed to sympathize, now with the communism of Saint-Simon, now with the spiritual absolutism of Calvin, now with the liberalism of Lamennais. But from each of these moral experiments he came back to his first conception of life; and in it he found perhaps as much mental repose as so restless a mind could hope to enjoy or attain. He was not, and did not aspire to be, a model of the distinctively Christian virtues; but he was always honorable, single-minded, kindly, cheerful, and ready to make great sacrifices for the integrity of his critical independence. If his manifold ethical experiments suggest a facile morality, yet they contributed to give him a deep insight into human nature and a catholic sympathy with it. Men may differ in their judgment of the man, but they are constrained to unite in their admiration of the critic.

Banj 2. Walle

I

A CRITIC'S ACCOUNT OF HIS OWN CRITICAL METHOD

From the Nouveaux Lundis'

T IS understood then that to-day [July 22, 1862] you will allow me to enter into some details about the course and method that I have thought best to follow in studying books and talents. For me, literature-literary production-is not distinct, or at least not separable, from the rest of the man and from its environment. I can enjoy a work, but I can hardly judge it, independently of a knowledge of the man himself. "The tree is known by its fruits," as I might say; and so literary study leads me quite naturally to the study of morals.

A day will come of which I have caught glimpses in the course of my observations,- a day when the science [of criticism] will be established, when the great mental families and their principal divisions will be known and determined. Then, when the principal characteristic of a mind is given, we shall be able to deduce many others from it. With men, no doubt, one

can never work exactly as with animals or plants. Man is ethically more complex. He has what we call liberty, and what in any case presupposes a great mobility of possible combinations. But however that may be, we shall succeed in time, I think, in establishing moral science on a broader basis. To-day it is at the point where botany was before Jussieu and comparative anatomy before Cuvier,- in the stage, so to speak, of anecdote. We for our part are making mere monographs, amassing detailed observations: but I catch glimpses of connections, relations; and a broader mind, more enlightened and yet keen in the perception of detail, will be able some day to discover the great natural divisions that represent the genera of minds.

But even when mental science shall be organized as one may imagine it from afar, it will be always so delicate and so mobile that it will exist only for those who have a natural vocation and talent for observation. It will always be an art that will demand a skillful artist; just as medicine demands medical tact in him who practices it, as philosophy ought to demand philosophic tact from those who pretend to be philosophers, as poetry demands to be essayed only by a poet.

Suppose we have under observation a superior man, or one merely noteworthy for his productions; an author whose works we have read, and who may be worth the trouble of a searching study. How shall we go about it if we wish to omit nothing important and essential, if we wish to shake off the old-fashioned rhetorical judgments,- to be as little as possible the dupes of phrases, words, conventional sentiments, and to attain the truth as in a study of nature?

We shall surely recognize and rediscover the superior man, at least in part, in his parents, especially in the mother; in his sisters too, in his brothers, and even in his children. We shall find there essential characteristics that in the great man are often masked, because they are too condensed or too amalgamated. In others of his blood we shall find his character more in its simple, naked state. Nature herself has done the analysis for us.

It is enough to indicate my thought. I will not abuse it. When you have informed yourself as far as possible about the origin, the immediate and near relations of an eminent writer, the essential point, after discussing his studies and his education, is his first environment, — the first group of friends and contemporaries in which he found himself at the moment when his

talent was revealed, took material form and became adult.

For

be sure his talent will bear the mark of it, and whatever he may do later he will feel it always.

-

The very great men depend on no group; they make centres themselves; people gather around them: but it is the group, association, alliance, and active exchange of ideas, a perpetual emulation in presence of one's equals and peers,- that gives to the man of talent all his productive energy, his development, and his value. There are talents that share at the same time in several groups, and never cease to pass through successive environments; perfecting, transforming, or deforming themselves. Then it is important to note, even in these variations and slow or sudden conversions, the hidden and unchanging impulse, the persistent force.

Each work of an author examined in this way, in its place, after you have put it back into its framework and surrounded it with all the circumstances that marked its birth, acquires its full significance,- its historic, literary significance; it recovers its just degree of novelty, originality, or imitation: and you run no risk in your criticism of discovering beauties amiss, and admiring beside the mark, as is inevitable when you depend on rhetorical criticism alone.

For the critic who is studying a talent, there is nothing like catching it in its first fire, its first outpouring; nothing like breathing it in its morning hour, in its efflorescence of soul and youth. The first proof of an engraved portrait has for the artist and the man of taste a price which nothing that follows can equal. I know no joy for the critic more exquisite than to comprehend and portray a young talent in its freshness, in its frank. and primitive aspect, anticipating all the foreign and perhaps factitious elements that may mingle with it.

O first and fruitful hour from which all takes its date! Ineffable moment! It is among men of the same age, and of the same hour almost, that talent loves to choose for the rest of its career, or for the longer half of it, its companions, its witnesses, its emulators,- its rivals too, and its adversaries. Each chooses his own opponent, his own point of view. There are such rivalries, challenges, piques, among equals or almost equals, that last a whole lifetime. But even though we should be a little inferior, let us never desire that a man of our generation should fall and disappear, even though he were a rival and though he

should pass for an enemy.

For if we have true worth, he too, at need and on occasion, will warn the coming ignorant generations and the insolence of youth, that in us they have to do with an old athlete whom they may not despise or dismiss with levity. His own self-esteem is interested in it. He has measured himself with us in the good old times. He has known us in our best days. I will clothe my thought with illustrious names. It is still Cicero who renders the noblest homage to Hortensius. A phrase of Æschines remains the fairest eulogy of Demosthenes. And the Greek hero Diomedes, speaking of Æneas in Virgil, and wishing to give a lofty idea of him: "Trust him," said he, "who has measured his own strength with him."

It is not only important to catch a talent at the moment of its first essay, at its first outburst, when it appears full-formed and more than adolescent, when it declares its own majority. There is a second period to note, not less decisive if one wishes to take in the whole man. It is the moment when he begins to spoil, to decay, to fail, or to err. Some stiffen and dry, some yield and lose their hold, some grow hard, some heavy, some bitter. The smile becomes a wrinkle. After the first moment when talent in its brilliant blossoming has become man,—the young man confident and proud,- one must note this second, sad moment when age unmakes and changes him.

One cannot take too many ways to know a man, nor approach him from too many sides; for a man is something quite different from pure spirit. Until you have asked yourself a certain number of questions about an author, and answered them, though only to yourself and under your breath, you are not sure that you have him wholly, though those questions may seem. most foreign to the nature of his writings: What did he think about religion? How was he affected by the spectacle of nature? How did he bear himself in regard to women, and to money? Was he rich? Was he poor? Was he poor? What was his regimen, his daily habit of life? And so on. In short, What was his vice or his foible? Everybody has one. None of these responses is indifferent to the judgment of the author of a book, and of the book itself, unless the book be a treatise on pure geometry; not if it is at all a literary work,- that is to say, a book into which he enters at all. .

Up to a certain point one can study talents in their moral posterity, in their disciples and natural admirers. That is a last