To keep pace with the productions of foreign literature is a task beyond the possibilities of any reader.  The bibliographical journals of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain weekly present such copious lists of new works, that a mere mention of only the principal ones would far exceed the limits we have proposed to ourselves.  However, from the chaos of contemporary productions it is our intention to sift, as far as lies in our power, such works as may with justice be styled representative of the country in which they are produced.  Ranging in this introductory article through the year 1861, we shall limit ourselves to a few of the contributions upon French literary history.

No branch of letters is richer at the present time than that in which the writer, laying aside all thought of direct creativeness, confines himself to the criticism of the works of the past or present, analyzing and studying the influences that have been brought to hear upon the poet, historian, or novelist, anatomizing literature and resolving it into its elements, pointing out the action exercised upon thought and expression by the age, and seeking the effects of these upon society and politics as well as upon the general tastes and moral being of a generation.  Methods of writing are now discussed rather than put in practice.  We are in a transition age more than politically.  Creative genius seems to be resting for more marked and permanent channels to be formed; so that, though every year gives birth to numberless works in every branch of art, original production is rarer than the activity, the restlessness of the time might lead us to expect.

In no country has literary criticism more life than in France.  It engages the attention of the best minds.  No writer, whatever be his speciality, thinks it derogatory to give long and elaborate notices in the daily press of new books or new editions of old books.  Thus, Sainte-Beuve in the “Moniteur,” De Sacy, Saint-Marc Girardin, Philarete Chasles, Prevost-Paradol in the “Journal des Debats,” not to mention the numerous writers of the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” the “Europeenne,” and the “Nationale,” vie with each other in extracting from all that appears what is most acceptable to the general reader.

M. Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a type of the avowedly professional critic.  Whatever he may accomplish as the historian of Port-Royal, it is to his weekly articles, informal and disconnected as they are, that he owes his high rank among French authors.  These “Causeries du Lundi” have now reached the fourteenth volume.[A] In the last we find the same easy admiration, facility of approbation, and suppleness that enable him to praise the “Fanny” of Feydeau, calling it a poem, and on the next page to do justice to the last volume of Thiers’s “Consulate and Empire,” or to the recent publication of the Correspondence of Buffon.  The most important articles in the volume are those on Vauvenargues, on the Abbe de Marolles, and on Bonstetten.