new deities whom he exalts.... Whenever he finds a poet not
sufficiently listened to, he aims to enlarge the audience, erects a
stage on which to place him, and arranges everything for enabling him to
produce the fullest effect.... Before him French criticism, when it was
not either acrimonious or simply learned, consisted in a mere
commonplace repetition of precepts and formulas of which the sense had
been lost. His perpetual mobility is but a constant good faith; he
believes in the most opposite schools, because believing is with him
only a mode of comprehending."

Let it not be supposed from this description that M. Sainte-Beuve is
wanting in acuteness, that his enthusiasm predominates over his
sagacity. On the contrary, there is no keener eye than his for whatever
is false, pretentious, or unsound. His sure instinct quickly separates
the gold from the alloy. Unlike the critics of the _nil admirari_
school, whose reluctance to trust themselves to their emotions proceeds
in great part from the absence of this instinct, he is proof against the
approaches of the charlatan, and has never debased the word "art" by
applying it to a mere melodramatic mechanism. But he rightly considers
the office of the detector as insignificant in comparison with that of
the discoverer, and his glow of satisfaction is reserved for the nobler
employment. The points on which he insists are the obligation of
honestly desiring to understand an author; the impropriety of fastening
on defects, or of simply balancing between defects and merits; the duty
of approving with heartiness and warmth, in place of that cold-blooded
moderation which he pronounces, with Vauvenargues, "a sure sign of
mediocrity." If, therefore, we say that his is only one species of
criticism, we cannot deny its claim to be entitled the "criticism of
_appreciation_." It is thus the exact reverse of that species to which
we have before alluded, and which deserves to be called the "criticism
of _depreciation_."

We come now to the particular characteristics of the _Portraits_, the
manner in which the author has there applied his principles. "I have
never," he remarks in a recent defence, "vaunted my method as a
discovery, or affected to guard it as a secret." It involves, however,
both the one and the other. The discovery consists in the perception of
the truth that an author is always in his works; that he cannot help
being there; that no reticence, no pretences, no disguis