ither his having done the same by
others, or his having made the public the confidant of his individual
experience. Few writers have intruded their own personality upon their
readers less than Sainte-Beuve has done: the poems and novels of his
youth, which won fervent admiration from the literary leaders of that
day, De Vigny, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, are now forgotten: he is known
to readers of the last half century by a series of critical and
biographical essays extending from 1823 or 1824 to 1870, which combine
every attribute of perfect criticism except enthusiasm. The most
prominent feature of his method is the conscientiousness with which he
credits the person upon whom he passes judgment with every particle of
worth which can be extracted from his writings, acts or sayings: he
adopts as the basis of criticism the acknowledgment of whatever merit
may exist in the subject of consideration; and his talent and patience
for sifting the grain from the chaff are remarkable and admirable. An
author who has left some forty volumes conceived in this spirit should
have been safe against an effusion of spleen in his biographer. I am not
assailing the fidelity of M. d'Haussonville's portrait--of which I have
no means of judging--but the temper in which it is executed, which can
be judged without difficulty. Besides the injustice already mentioned,
it is disfigured by tittle-tattle, which tends to render the original
ridiculous and repulsive, but does not add one whit to our knowledge of
Sainte-Beuve as a man or an author.

A defence of Sainte-Beuve is not within the purpose of the present
article; but it was impossible for one who has known him favorably for
twenty years through his works and the testimony of his most
distinguished literary compeers to speak of him at all without
protesting against the detraction to which his memory has been
subjected. Two small posthumous volumes have lately been issued in
France,[C] revealing qualities which might expose the dead man to a mean
revenge, though to most readers they will have a delightful freshness
unspoiled by any bitter flavor. They consist of a series of notes on all
sorts of subjects, literary, dramatic, religious and political, one of
them being actually made up of the jottings in his later notebooks,
while the other contains the memoranda of a sort of high-class gossip
with which Sainte-Beuve supplied a friend, the editor of _La Revue
Suisse_, during the years 1843-45.