eighteenth century, he writes: "One may be born a sailor, but there is
nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a
battle. A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that,
and yet he knew it all. But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare."

Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed
himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest
class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of
his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures
in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners. Seeing, too, how
catholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takes
pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency.
Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Moliere, his words
flame with a tempered enthusiasm. But he throws no dust in
his own eyes: his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the
feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady. His native
favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not
overrate them. Nor does he overrate Voltaire, whom he calls "the
Frenchman par excellence," and of whom he is proud as the literary
sovereign of his age. At the same time, in articles directly devoted
to Joubert, as well as by frequent citations of his judgments, he
lauds this spiritually-minded thinker as one of the best of critics.
And yet of Voltaire, Joubert says the hardest things: "Voltaire is
sometimes sad; he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even
are impudent.--There are defects difficult to perceive, that have not
been classed or defined, and have no names. Voltaire is full of them."

In a paper on Louise Labe, a poetess of the sixteenth century, he
reproduces some of her poems and several passages of prose, and then
adds: "These passages prove, once more, the marked superiority that,
at almost all times, French prose has over French poetry." No German
or English or Italian critic could say this of his native literature,
and the saying of it by the foremost of French critics is not an
exaltation of French prose, it is a depression of French
poetry. In this judgment there is a reach and severity of which
possibly the eminent critic was not fully conscious; for it amounts to
an acknowledgment that the nature and language of the French are not
capable of producing and embodying the highest poetry.

Goethe, M. Sainte-Beuve always me