For several years after leaving the Lycee Louis le Grand, while completing his literary outfit by wonderfully extensive reading, Ferdinand Brunetiere lived on stray orders for work for publishers.  He seldom succeeded in getting these, and when he got any they were seldom filled.  Thus he happened to be commissioned by the firm of Germer, Bailliere and Company to write a history of Russia, which never was and to all appearances never will be written.  The event which determined the direction of his career was the acceptance by the Revue des Deux Mondes, in 1875, of an article upon contemporary French novelists.  Francois Buloz, the energetic and imperious founder and editor of the world-famed French bi-monthly, felt that he had found in the young critic the man whom French literary circles had been waiting for, and who was to be Sainte-Beuve’s successor; and Francois Buloz was a man who seldom made mistakes.

French literary criticism was just then at a very low ebb.  Sainte-Beuve had been dead about five years; his own contemporaries, Edmond Scherer for instance, were getting old and discouraged; the new generation seemed to be turning unanimously, in consequence of the disasters of the Franco-German war and of the Revolution of September, 1870, to military or political activity.  The only form of literature which had power to attract young writers was the novel, which they could fill with the description of all the passions then agitating the public mind.  That a man of real intellectual strength should then give his undivided attention to pure literature seemed a most unlikely phenomenon; but all had to acknowledge that the unlikely had happened, soon after Ferdinand Brunetiere had become the regular literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes.

Fortunately the new critic did not undertake to walk in the footsteps of Sainte-Beuve.  In the art of presenting to the reader the marrow of a writer’s work, of making the writer himself known by the description of his surroundings, the narrative of his life, the study of the forces by which he was influenced, the illustrious author of the ’Causeries du Lundi’ remains to this day without a rival or a continuator.  Ferdinand Brunetiere had a different conception of the duties of a literary critic.  The one fault with which thoughtful readers were apt to charge Sainte-Beuve was, that he failed to pass judgment upon the works and writers; and this failure was often, and not altogether unjustly, ascribed to a certain weakness in his grasp of principles, a certain faint-heartedness whenever it became necessary to take sides.  Any one who studies Brunetiere can easily see that from the start his chief concern was to make it impossible for any one to charge him with the same fault.  He came in with a set of principles which he has since upheld with remarkable steadfastness and courage.  In an age when nearly every one was turning to the future and advocating the doctrine and the necessity of progress,