who, though not a man of original power himself, had a fine sense of what was likely to suit the public. Sainte-Beuve corrected the proofs at the office of the journal, and the article appeared invariably every Monday.

Such facility and regularity of literary production are, considering the quality of the work, without a parallel in literature, for the Causeries de Lundi' have been saluted on all sides as immortal, and will in all probability live as long as the French language.

6

Thus every Monday the readers of the Constitutionnel' had some new literary delicacy served up for their entertainment. The range of subject was of the most varied character-on one Monday they were able to listen to the caustic repartees of Madame du Deffand; on another they might take part in the adventurous career of Beaumarchais; on another they were introduced to the Persian poet Ferdousi; one week they might enjoy the quintessence of the biting wit of Chamfort; the next they were put face to face with the sublimity of Bossuet, or taught to sympathise with the evangelic sweetness of Fénélon. Sainte-Beuve's critical spirit was capable of ranging with equal freedom over the whole realm of French literature-from Villehardouin and Joinville down to George Sand, Thiers, Lamartine, Saint-Marc, Girardin, Nisard, and the less known writers of his own time, with occasional but rare flights into the regions of foreign history and poetry. The appreciation of their value was immediate, and M. Guizot and M. Littré are said to have remarked of them, Ils sont d'autant 'meilleurs qu'il n'a pas le temps de les gâter.' Indeed, under the pressure of rapid production, the style of Sainte-Beuve changed very sensibly in the Causeries de Lundi.' His manner has no longer the involved, oblique, and digressive character which is noticeable in his previous studies, but is rapid, direct, and decisive; his literary judgment now expanded itself into the accent of conscious maturity. We feel we are in the hands of a master of his art, while the peculiarity of his method invests his subject with minute biographic details and historic incident, which add irresistible charm to the perusal. In fact, amid all the ranges of volumes which fill our libraries, we doubt if more instructive or more delightful reading is to be found anywhere than in the twenty-nine volumes into which the Causeries de Lundi' have been collected. And it must be added also that the production of such highlyfinished literary essays week by week would have been possible nowhere else but in France, for nowhere else could be found so large a public with taste and sympathy sufficient to support

the courage of the artist by appreciation; and nowhere else is the personality of a writer allowed so fair and free an address to the public in a daily newspaper. The coup d'état of 1851 exercised, like the revolution of 1848, a remarkable influence on the career of Sainte-Beuve. As is well known, he rapidly gave in his adherence to the new Government. It is not for us here to justify or condemn his political conduct; the fact, we believe, is that Sainte-Beuve was not suited for active political life, and did not desire to take part in it, animated as he was with the conviction that politics and pure literature (in which be felt his real vocation to lie) require different capacities for their successful prosecution. Moreover he had, as we have before hinted, no love of revolutions; he desired a stable government, and that not on the selfish view alone that civil peace is more congenial to the steady development of art and literature, but from views of humanity also; for Sainte-Beuve had ready sympathy with the sufferings of his fellow-men, and was deeply moved by the distress which weighed heavily on the industrial portion of the population of France during the days of the short-lived Republic. He consequently rallied to the Empire; nor did he do so tacitly, but in the month of August, 1852, he published an article styled Les Regrets in the columns of the Constitutionnel,' which made a great deal of noise, and as he flattered himself, porta en plein sur l'état major des salons.' This article excited, indeed, no small degree of temporary ill-feeling against Sainte-Beuve. Of its good taste or expediency there may be much question. It was directed, under the semblance of advice, against old friends and associates who had taken an active part in the Government of Louis-Philippe, and rallied them on the inconsolable airs they had given themselves since the coup d'état. The caustic and subtle power of insinuation of which Sainte-Beuve was a master turned the advice into a satire. With malicious gravity and with the air of a sceptical physician, he signalised the existence of new moral maladies, le mal du pouvoir perdu and le mal de la parole perdue, and prescribed remedies for their treatment. Of its general tone a notion may be formed by the following sentence :--

Surtout je ne puis, pour mon compte, avoir grande pitié des gens auxquels il n'est arrivé d'autre malheur inconsolable que celui de ne me plus gouverner.'

This article is believed to have had no small share in preparing for the writer the unfavourable reception which he met with on his appointment to the Professorship of Latin Poetry at the College de France, previously to which he had passed

from the Constitutionnel' to the Moniteur.' The Imperial Government could not fail to reward in some way the most brilliant of the literary ornaments of its career, who had thus openly declared himself its supporter. But, as is well known, when Sainte-Beuve appeared in his professorial chair, the audience, which on such occasions is composed partly of students and partly of the general public, raised such a charivari, to use the French term, that the professor was obliged to desist, and thought it prudent to send in his resignation. The man who had written in the National' under Armand Carrel -who was supposed, though falsely, to have been in the pay of Louis-Philippe's Government-was treated as a political apostate, and the political animosity thus set in motion found ready allies in old literary rancours long waiting for explosion. Sainte-Beuve, not without some diminution of public favour, continued his Causeries' in the Moniteur,' in the Athénæum français,' and the Revue contemporaine;' he went back, however, for a short time, to the Constitutionnel' to return again to the Moniteur.' It was remarked that his manner changed again slightly in the columns of the Moniteur;' and, indeed, if a writer is, like Sainte-Beuve, at all of an impressionable nature, a different medium of periodical publication does always modify, in some way, his form of expression. The long and wide columns of the Moniteur,' and the official atmosphere of the journal in this case, rendered Sainte-Beuve's style slightly more diffusive and slightly more dignified. The first series of Causeries' ended in 1856, but a new series commenced in 1862, entitled the Nouveaux Lundis.' In this series, Sainte-Beuve, although he does not debar himself from still exploring the ancient domains of literary interest, seems to have had at heart especially the desire to do justice to all the rising literary talents of the day. The spirit of literary curiosity and attraction for novelty was as strong in him as ever, and his appreciation of the productions of Flaubert, Feydeau, Taine, Schérer, Renan, the brothers Goncourt, Paul de Saint-Victor, Lecomte de Lisle, was as generous as it was impartial. It is rare indeed to find a veteran in literature bestowing such warm and active interest on the works of those who are in the early morning of their literary life; and though with his fine literary taste nursed on pure literary traditions, he must have strained his liberality to the utmost in the case of writers of the Flaubert and Feydeau school, yet we cannot too much admire the geniality, catholicity, vivacity of nature, and desire for literary progress which distinguished him up to the very last moments of his life.

6

Nothing could be more amicable than his relations with the younger members of the literary profession, who regarded him as a literary patriarch, whose smile of approval was as valuable as a diploma of rank. And further, in these later studies of his are to be found significant traces that his largely sympathetic nature had led him to reflect deeply on the most perplexing social problems of the time; as an instance of which may be noticed his studies on the writings of M. Le Play, the author of the work on the general condition of European workmen, of La Réforme sociale,' and lately of a work called 'L'Organisation du Travail.' In fact, his active spirit continued to be ever busy with new historical and social investigations up to the very day of his death. His last elaborate essay was on the career of General Jomini, in which he astonished even his intimate friends by the vigour and ease with which, at this late hour, he overcame the technical difficulties of the subject; and as a further example of his increasing interest in social matters, he was engaged immediately before his decease in enlarging into a substantial work a very remarkable paper in the Revue contemporaine,' on the social reformer, Proudhon.

Such are the vicissitudes of public favour, that Sainte-Beuve, who was driven from his professorial chair by a liberal or illiberal demonstration in 1851, was at his death one of the most popular men in France. Nor are the reasons for this change at all mysterious. Sainte-Beuve, with his active progressive spirit, sympathised warmly with every form of social progress: but, as we have already pointed out, he was no friend of disorder or revolution-social change, to be beneficial in his view, should be brought about by peaceful evolution. Nevertheless, though he rallied to the Empire in 1851, and was named a senator on acount of his distinguished position as a man of letters in 1865, he was painfully sensible of the almost absolute divorce which existed between the highest cultivated intelligence and political power under the Imperial system, although he was far from laying at the door of the Government the whole blame of whatever decline has taken place in French literature and art since the coup d'état. Indeed, as to this latter point, he was extremely sceptical whether a fresh birth of a brilliant, rich, and varied literature was possible at all in France since 1851; he imagined the causes of this decline to lie deeper than in the conditions of political power. But he censured the Government for not having made further advances towards the intellectual classes in the way of conciliation; and although he spoke but very rarely in the Senate, on one occasion he made a remarkable defence of the liberty of

public instruction, and of his friend, M. Renan, which excited the anger of the Imperial zealots among the senators to frenzy; this independent attitude of Sainte-Beuve not only gained back to him the goodwill of estranged friends, but excited the admiration of the students of Paris. The opinion of the student body of the French capital is regarded with indifference by no prominent man of letters in France; and when a deputation from the schools of Paris laid at the feet of Sainte-Beuve the homage of their fellow-students on this occasion, he regarded the demonstration with immense satisfaction, as a complete reparation of an ancient wrong. The reputation for liberalism which he thus recovered was increased by his passing shortly afterwards from the Moniteur' to the Temps.' He greeted warmly the new birth of liberalism signalised by the elections of 1869; and when the Chambers met after the elections, about two months before his death, he prepared a speech in which he criticised the past policy of the Imperial Government, and demonstrated the necessity of the introduction of a more liberal system. This speech he was unable from illness to pronounce in the Senate; but the draft of it was published in all the public journals. So that Sainte-Beuve died in the full odour of Liberalism, and this circumstance, together with his free-thinking opinions and the manner of his interment, combined with his popularity among the younger men of letters to give his funeral the air of a Liberal demonstration.

It remains for us to attempt to characterise the critical method of Sainte-Beuve, and indicate in what respects it seems to us defective. Some one remarked of him, Sainte-Beuve tells us, that he was 'un assez bon juge, mais il n'avait pas de code.' To this restriction Sainte-Beuve demurred, and he has incidentally in various Causeries set forth the theory upon which he founded his literary appreciations. In forming his method, he was no doubt influenced in a considerable measure by the impressions left by his early scientific and physiological studies for the medical profession. He says in one of his Čauseries:—

'La littérature, la production littéraire, n'est point pour moi distincte ou du moins séparable du reste de l'homme et de son organisation; je puis goûter une œuvre, mais il m'est difficile de la juger indépendamment de la connaissance de l'homme même; et je dirais volontiers tel arbre, tel fruit. L'étude littéraire me mène aussi tout naturellement à l'étude morale.'

Some exception must, we think, be taken to this proposition of Sainte-Beuve-viewed as a general principle of aesthetic criticism. Our belief is, that our estimate of any literary work