a recognition of popularity that, with one who takes so much joy in applause as Lamartine does, is enough to take the poison out of the sting:  “Those who knew his verses by heart (and the number who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not without regret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, in his prose.  This prose is, in ‘Les Confidences,’ too often but the paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the last, paraphrases of his feelings.”  Amends are made to Lamartine on another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says:  “Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets.  The swans and the eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings.  That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of wing.”  This is better as modesty than as criticism.  Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as of more gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyed getting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of their strongest as well as sweetest notes.

A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, just as a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image of herself.  His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy in things French.  Through means of it he knows them through and through:  they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, his intellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other side the shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more or less the fullest illumination.  Freely he exhibits these shadows.  Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Beranger, is spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement.  Whatever his individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy, that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M. Michelet, to Madame de Stael and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe, to Fenelon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau.

Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will be impatient to ask, nothing but praise?  Not much else.  Commencing his literary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from that date to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits, fill several thousand pages.  Between his forty-fifth to his sixtieth year he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousand pages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects.  This is the period of his critical maturity, the period of the “Causeries du Lundi,” followed by the “Nouveaux Lundis.”  Many men write voluminously, but most of these only write about a subject, not into it.  Only the few who can write into their subject add something to literature.  One of these few is M. Sainte-Beuve.  In his mind there is vitality to animate his large acquirement, to make his many chapters buoyant and stimulant.  All through his writings is the sparkle of original life.