a Johnson or the narrow generalizations of a Boileau—­were in reality not critical at all.  He saw that the critic’s first duty was not to judge, but to understand; and with this object he set himself to explore all the facts which could throw light on the temperament, the outlook, the ideals of his author; he examined his biography, the society in which he lived, the influences of his age; and with the apparatus thus patiently formed he proceeded to act as the interpreter between the author and the public.  His Causeries du Lundi—­short critical papers originally contributed to a periodical magazine and subsequently published in a long series of volumes—­together with his Port Royal—­an elaborate account of the movements in letters and philosophy during the earlier years of Louis XIV’s reign—­contain a mass of material of unequalled value concerning the whole of French literature.  His analytical and sympathetic mind is reflected in the quiet wit and easy charm of his writing.  Undoubtedly the lover of French literature will find in Sainte-Beuve’s Lundis at once the most useful and the most agreeable review of the subject in all its branches; and the more his knowledge increases, the more eagerly will he return for further guidance and illumination to those delightful books.

But the greatest prose-writer of the age devoted himself neither to history nor to criticism—­though his works are impregnated with the spirit of both—­but to Fiction.  In his novels, FLAUBERT finally accomplished what Balzac had spasmodically begun—­the separation of the art of fiction from the unreality, the exaggeration, and the rhetoric of the Romantic School.  Before he began to write, the movement towards a greater restraint, a more deliberate art, had shown itself in a few short novels by GEORGE SAND—­the first of the long and admirable series of her mature works—­where, especially in such delicate masterpieces as La Mare au Diable, La Petite Fadette, and Francois le Champi, her earlier lyricism and incoherence were replaced by an idyllic sentiment strengthened and purified by an exquisite sense of truth.  Flaubert’s genius moved in a very different and a far wider orbit:  but it was no less guided by the dictates of deliberate art.  In his realism, his love of detail, and his penetrating observation of facts, Flaubert was the true heir of Balzac; while in the scrupulosity of his style and the patient, laborious, and sober treatment of his material he presented a complete contrast to his great predecessor.  These latter qualities make Flaubert the pre-eminent representative of his age.  The critical sense possessed him more absolutely and with more striking results than all the rest of his contemporaries.  His watchfulness over his own work was almost infinite.  There has never been a writer who took his art with such a passionate seriousness, who struggled so incessantly towards perfection, and who suffered so acutely from