But let us now cheer the reader who is impatient of much praise, and at the same time perform the negative part of our task.

Well, then, to be bold, as befits a critic of the critic, we beard the lion in his very den.  We challenge a definition he gives of the critic.  In the seventh volume of the “Causeries,” article “Grimm,” he says:  “When Nature has endowed some one with this vivacity of feeling, with this susceptibility to impression, and that the creative imagination be wanting, this some one is a born critic, that is to say, a lover and judge of the creations of others.”  Why did M. Sainte-Beuve make Goethe sovereign in criticism?  Why did he think Milton peculiarly qualified to interpret Homer?  From the deep principle of like unto like; only spirit can know spirit.  What were the worth of a comment of John Locke on “Paradise Lost,” except to reveal the mental composition of John Locke?  The critic should be what Locke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form of literature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, some share of that whereby poetry is fledged, “creative imagination.”  He may “want the accomplishment of verse,” or the constructive faculty, but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful he must have.  But do not the presence of “vivacity of feeling with susceptibility to impression” imply the imaginative temperament?  If not, then we confidently assure M. Sainte-Beuve that had his definition fitted himself, his “Causeries du Lundi” would never have been rescued from the quick oblivion of the feuilleton.

Now and then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness, which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue,—­the love of glory.  M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon’s passion for glory saved him in his latter years from ennui, from “that languor of the soul which follows the age of the passions.”  Where are to be found men more the victims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not more distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than for insatiable greed of glory,—­Byron and Chateaubriand?  No form of self-seeking is morally more weakening than this quenchless craving, which makes the soul hang its satisfaction on what is utterly beyond its sway, on praise and admiration.  These stimulants—­withdrawn more or less even from the most successful in latter years—­leave a void which becomes the very nursery of ennui, or even of self-disgust.  Instead of glory being “the potent motive-power in all great souls,” as M. Sainte-Beuve approvingly quotes, it is, with a surer moral instinct, called by Milton,—­

  “That last infirmity of noble mind.”

In some of the noblest and greatest, so subordinate is it as hardly to be traceable in their careers.  Love of glory was not the spring that set and kept in motion Kepler and Newton, any more than Shakespeare and Pascal or William of Orange and Washington.