With the course of years he became bolder and more scientific in his psychological analysis. In the following passage he defends his right to be so. It is taken from a letter written on the 9th of May 1863 to a critic who had blamed him for certain disparaging remarks in one of his articles: "Art—and especially a purely intellectual art like that of criticism—is an instrument which is difficult to handle, and its worth is dependent upon the worth of the artist. Granted this, is it not absolutely necessary to have done with that foolish conventionality, that cant, which compels us to judge an author not only by his intentions, but also by his pretensions? Am I, for example, to be obliged to see in Fontanes only the great master, polished, noble, elegant, religious, and not the hasty, brusque, sensual man that he really was? ... Or to come to our own day.... I have had the opportunity for thirty years and more of observing Villemain, a man of distinguished intellect and talent, who is actually brimming over with generous, liberal, philanthropic, Christian, civilising sentiment, but who is, nevertheless, the most sordid, malicious ape in existence. What is to be done in such a case? Are we to go on to all eternity praising his noble, elevated sentiments, as those by whom he is surrounded do? Are we to dupe ourselves and dupe others? Are men of letters, historians, and moralists merely actors, whom we have no right to study except in the rôles which they have chosen and defined for themselves? Are we only permitted to see them on the stage? Or is it allowable, when our knowledge is sufficient, boldly and yet gently to insert the scalpel and show the weak points of the armour, the faulty joints between the talent and the soul? allowable to praise the talent whilst indicating the defects in the soul which actually affect the talent and any permanent influence it may exercise. Will literature lose by such a proceeding? It is possible that it may; but the science of psychology will gain."
This, then, is the first advance—firm ground beneath our feet; no deceptive idealisation! The next is, that criticism, which had hitherto been a disintegrating, separating process, becomes in Saint-Beuve's hands, and with the limitations entailed by his character, an organising, constructive process. His criticism produces an organism, a life, as poetry does. It does not break up the given material into road-metal and gravel, but erects a building with it. It does not break up the human soul into its component parts, so that we only gain an understanding of it as a piece of dead mechanism, without having any idea what it is like when it is in movement. No, he shows us the machine at work; we see the fire that drives it and hear the noise it makes, whilst we are learning the secrets of its construction.
Thanks to these reforms of Sainte-Beuve's, the history of literature, which used to be a kind of secondary, inferior branch of the science of history, has become the guide of history proper, its most interesting and most living part; for the literature of nations is the most attractive and most instructive material with which history has to deal.
We began by asserting that Sainte-Beuve's critical activity did not lead him to forsake poetry. We are now in a position to prove that the art of the critic, as practised by him in the last years of his life, in the highest stage of his development, had entered into the closest relationship with modern poetry. For poetry became synthetic simultaneously with criticism; and the cause of the movement was the same in both cases, namely, the gradual conquest by science of the whole domain of modern intellectual life. At the beginning of the century imagination was considered the essential quality in poetry; it was his capacity of invention which made the poet a poet; he was not tied down to nature and reality, but was as much at home in the supernatural as in the actual world. In the generation of 1830 such authors as Nodier and Alexandre Dumas express this view of the matter, each in his own way. But as Romanticism by degrees developed into realism, creative literature by degrees gave up its fantastic excursions into space. It exerted itself even more to understand than to invent; and this produced a close connection with criticism. Fiction became psychological. The point of departure of the novelist and of the critic in their respective descriptions is now the same, namely, the spiritual atmosphere of a period. In it the real or invented characters appear to us; the novelist's aim is to represent and interpret the actions of a human being, the critic's, to represent and interpret a work, in such a manner that the reader may see both the actions and the work to be results produced with real or apparent inevitability, when certain inward qualities or tendencies are acted upon by suggestions from without. The only fundamental difference is that the creative author makes the speech and the actions of his characters, who, fictitious though they are, are generally drawn from life, the probable consequences of given circumstances; whereas the critic's imagination, fettered by facts, necessarily restricts itself to the representation of the psychical condition which led to or influenced the utterances and actions he describes. The novelist deduces a man's probable actions from what he has observed of his character. The critic deduces a man's character from his works.
Criticism, understood as the capacity of overcoming one's natural narrow-mindedness by the wideness and many-sidedness of one's sympathies, has been a distinguishing faculty of all the greatest authors of this century. It was from this point of view that Émile Montégut regarded it when he called it the youngest genius, the Cinderella among the intelligences. "Criticism," he wrote, "is the tenth Muse. It was she who was Goethe's mystic bride; it was she who made twenty poets of him. What but criticism is the basis of German literature? What are the English poets of our own day? Inspired critics. What was Italy's noble Leopardi? A fiery critic. Amongst all the modern poets only two, Byron and Lamartine, have not been critics; and for this reason these two have lacked many-sidedness and variety and have become as monotonous as they are." When criticism is taken in a wider sense, in the full meaning of the word, this last limitation falls away. For in its signification of the power of passing judgment on the existing state of things, it was an inspiring force in all the great Romantic lyric writers of the period, Byron as well as Hugo, Lamartine as well as George Sand. From the moment when their poetry ceases to exclude all important contemporary life and thought, from the moment when the Romantic lyric poets transform themselves into the organs of great ideas, criticism becomes an inspiring principle in their works also. It inspired Hugo's Les Châtiments; it inspired Byron's Don Juan. It is a finger-post on the path of the human mind. It plants hedges and lights torches along that path. It cuts and clears new tracks. For it is criticism which removes mountains—the mountains of belief in authority, of prejudice, of idealess power and dead tradition.
[1] The two following sentences from Port-Royal exemplify my meaning. In the first we have him calmly and frankly giving up the attempt to produce resemblance between his character portraits of the same person; in the second we see him determined to include every side of the character: "C'est le M. Saint-Cyran tout-à-fait définitif et mûr que j'envisage désormais; c'est de lui qu'est vrai ce qui va suivre; si quelque chose dans ce qui précède ne cadre plus, qu'on le rejette, comme en avançant il l'a rejeté lui-même."—"Certes on peut tailler dans M. de Saint-Cyran un calviniste, mais c'est à condition d'en retrancher mainte parte vitale."