A LITERARY critic, a genuine one, should carry in his brain an arsenal of opposites. He should combine common sense with tact, integrity with indulgence, breadth with keenness, vigor with delicacy, largeness with subtlety, knowledge with geniality, inflexibility with sinuousness, severity with suavity; and, that all these counter qualities be effective, he will need constant culture and vigilance, besides the union of reason with warmth, of enthusiasm with self-control, of wit with philosophybut hold at this rate, in order to fit out the critic, human nature will have to set apart its highest and best. Dr. Johnson declared, the poet ought to know every thing and tỏ have seen every thing, and the ancients required the like of an orator. Truly, the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued as generously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped by the light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of the Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be susceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of the critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing aggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue lines that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be able swiftly to follow these lines.

Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip a veritable sure critic, we have yet to add two carVOL. II.-26

dinal qualifications, which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberal allotment. The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M. SainteBeuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but a mellow, radiant geniality.

Not

The other, which is of still deeper account, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue,--for so it deserves to be called,-born directly of the nobler sensibilities, those in whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and the profound, the beautiful and the true. He who is not well endowed with these higher senses is not a bad critic: he is no critic at all. only can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he can as little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implying failures to reach a certain fulness, implying a falling short of the complete, to say where and what are deficiencies, involves the having in the mind an idea of the full and complete. The man so meagrely furnished as to hold no such idea is but a carper, not a critic. To know the bad denotes knowledge of the good: in criticism as in morals, a righteous indignation can only flash from a shock to pure feelings.

In a notice of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Cæsar, adds: "A man of letters smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a campaign of a great captain equally a work of genius? Napoleon is here the high sovereign critic, the Goethe in this department, as the Feuquières, the Jominis, the St. Cyrs are the La Harpes or the Fontanes, the Lessings or the Schlegels, all good and expert critics; but he is

the first of all, nor, if you reflect on it, could it have been otherwise. And who then would say better things of Homer than Milton?"-Goethe supreme in literary criticism, Milton on Homer: this touches the root of the matter: sympathy with the writer and his work the critic must have-sympathy as one of the sources of good judgment, and even of knowledge. You cannot know, and therefore not judge of, a man or book or thing, unless you have some fellow-feeling with him or it; and to judge well you must have much fellowfeeling. The critic must, moreover, be a thinker: reason is the critic's sun. Scott and Byron could say just and fresh things about poets and poetry; but neither could cominand the whole field, nor dig deep into the soil. Witness Byron's deliberate exaltation of Pope. Whereas Wordsworth and Coleridge were among the soundest of critics, because, besides being poets, they were both profound thinkers.

For the perfecting of the literary critic the especial sympathy needed is that with excellence; for high literature is the outcome of the best there is in humanity, the finished expression of healthiest aspirations, of choicest thoughts, the ripened fruit of noble, of refined growths, the perfected fruit, with all the perfume and beauty of the flower upon it. Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve, throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in addition to that primary proof of having himself written good poems. Besides the love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct draws him to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love is the more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined. Through variety of knowledge, with intellectual keenness, he enjoys excellence in the diversified forms that literature assumes. His pages abound in illustrations of his versatility, which is nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in the contrast between two successive papers (both equally admirable) in the very first volume of the Causeries du Lundi, the one on Madame

Récamier, the other on Napoleon. Read especially the series of paragraphs beginning, "Some natures are born pure, and have received quand même the gift of innocence," to see how gracefully, subtly, delicately, with what a feminine tenderness, he draws the portrait of this most fascinating of women, this beautiful creature, for whom grace and sweetness did even still more than beauty, this fairy-queen of France, this refined coquette, who drew to her hundreds of hearts, this kindly magician, who turned all her lovers into friends. Then pass directly to the next paper, on the terrible Corsican, "who weakened his greatness by the gigantic-who loved to astonish-who delighted too much in what was his forte, war-who was too much a bold adventurer." And further on, the account of Napoleon's conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in which account M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness and truthfulness and penetration of the great German. The impression thus made on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve's power is deepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot and his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly against those historians who strain humanity, who make the lesson that history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place of Providence,” which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p. 150), “is often but a deification of our own thought."

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In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve,-who had then, for more than thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the function of critic, -describes what is a fundamental feature of his method in arriving at a judgment on books and authors. "Literature, literary production, is in my eyes not distinct, or at least not separable, from the rest of the man and his organization. I can enjoy a work, but it is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of the man himself; and I readily say, as is the tree so is the fruit. Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study." This,

of course, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with the moderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know the man who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interior beginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best means is, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, his predecessors. "You are sure to recognize the superior man, in part at least, in his parents, especially in his mother, the most direct and certain of his parents; also in his sisters and his brothers, even in his children. In these one discovers important features which, from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminent individual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the fond, is found in others of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state."

Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic. Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part the cause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact in delineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence all living parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes is more captivating than his Portraits de Femmes, a translation of which we are glad to see announced.

Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of the Noureaux Lundis, an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deep is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes the occasion to write a paper on Les saints Evangiles, especially the Sermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beatitudes, he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world such accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial recom

pense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness, but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar address to the Father who is in Heaven? Was there ever before any thing like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we not a right to say that here was a new ideal of a soul perfectly heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form, was set before all coming generations?

"Who talks to us of myth, of the realization, more or less instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience, reflecting itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly existed. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating, bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind such words? What. more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the Mount?"

Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity towards the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not Christianity itself, as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the Mount and the other sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and

to simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy

"Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists, not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece, any more than in Confucius. It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any more than in the modern Franklin. The principle of inspiration is different, if indeed it be not opposite: the paths may come together for a moment, but they cross one another. And it is this delicate ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source.”

Of M. Sainte-Beuve's delight in what is the most excellent product of literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page. "Poetry," says he, "is the essence of things, and we should be careful not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water, or floods of color. The task of poetry is not, to say every thing, but to make us dream every thing." And he cites a similar judg

ment of Fénélon: "The poet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch but what can be beautified." In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaks of the youthful poems of Milton: "I Penseroso is the masterpiece of meditative and contemplative poetry: it is like a magnificent oratorio, in which prayer ascends slowly towards the Eternal. I make no comparison: let us never take august names from their sphere. All that is beautiful in Milton stands by itself: one feels the tranquil habit of the upper regions, and continuity in power." In a paper on the letters of Ducis he proves that he apprehends the proportions of Shakespeare. He asks: "Have we then got him at last? Is our stomach up to him? Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (cette moelle de lion)?" And again, in an article on the men of the eighteenth century, he writes: "One may be born a sailor, but there is nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a battle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that, and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare."

Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, how catholic he is, and liberal towards all other greatness, one even takes pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency. Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Molière, his words flame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust in his own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His native favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not overrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls "the Frenchman par excellence," and of

whom he is proud as the literary sovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devoted to Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, he lauds this spirituallyminded thinker as one of the best of critics. And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: "Voltaire is sometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even are impudent. There are defects difficult to perceive, that have not been classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them."

In a paper on Louise Labé, a poetess of the sixteenth century, he reproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and then adds: "These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that, at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry." No German or English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature, and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not an exaltation of French prose, it is a depression of French poetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of which possibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts to an acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are not capable of producing and embodying the highest poetry.

Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always mentions with deference. On Eckerman's Conversations with Goethe he has a series of three papers, wherein he deals chiefly with the critic and sage, exhibiting with honest pride Goethe's admiration of some of the chief French writers, and his acknowledgment of what he owed them. To a passage relating to the French translation of Eckerman, M. Sainte-Beuve has the following note, which we, on this side the Atlantic, may cherish as a high tribute to our distinguished countrywoman: "The English translation is by Miss Fuller, afterwards Marchioness Ossoli, who perished so unhappily by shipwreck. An excellent preface precedes this translation, and I must say that for elevated comprehension of the subject and for justness of

appreciation it leaves our preface far behind it. Miss Fuller, an American lady of Boston, was a person of true merit and of great intellectual vigor." A sympathetic student of Goethe, Margaret Fuller purposed to write a life of him; and seeing what critical capacity and what insight into the nature of Goethe she has shown in this preface, we may be confident that she would have made a genuine contribution to the Goethe "literature," had she lived to do that and other high literary work. Her many friends had nearer and warmer motives for deploring the early loss of this gifted, generous, noblehearted woman.

One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a hand that can shake hard

and hit hard, too, at times. For fifteen years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of Causeries du Lundi, a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines. He was thus ever in the thick of the literary mêlée. Attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate; the æsthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences and friendships. A literary circle as large as that of Paris, if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray some of its vices. In this voluminous series of papers the critical pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality is seldom transpicuous. The Parisian reader will no doubt often perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. His perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious dead who