story good in the greatest variety of speeches and situations. The key
to the dislike and fear with which some people must have regarded him
while living lies probably in just this appreciation. It is vain to
assert that humor is necessarily kindly, or the adjectives "grim" and
"savage" would not so often be tacked to it. Nobody could have hoped
that friendship would blind Sainte-Beuve to an absurdity: on the other
hand, even his enemies might count on his recognition if they had said a
good thing, and his not spoiling it in the repetition, as too many
friends do. This produced an impartiality in his verdicts which is the
moral essence of criticism, but perhaps the most trying quality to the
subject of it: he says himself that he had irritated and envenomed more
people by his praise than by his blame. He had not a high opinion of
human nature, which is curiously illustrated by his female portraits:
when there has been only a doubt of a woman's virtue, he never gives her
the benefit of the doubt; when there has not been even the suspicion of
a slip, he presumes that she kept her secrets better than most people
do. He was sensitive to the accusation of cynicism, and resented
extremely an article in _L'Union_ of June, 1855, in which he was set
down as having not only a skeptical mind, but a skeptical heart; which
was no doubt very nearly true. Yet he was on his guard against his
natural cynicism in his literary judgments at least, as one need but
glance over them to see. In the _Cahiers_ he cites an expression of his
fair friend Madame d'Arbonville: "How many good things there are besides
the things which we like! We ought to make room within ourselves for a
certain _opposite_;" and he adds that this should be the motto of a
liberal and intelligent critic. These convictions helped to make his
criticism as admirable, as invaluable, as it is; but the sharpness from
which his literary work is free makes his private observations on men
and things more entertaining. There are few people so well-natured as
not to enjoy the peculiar pungency which gives many of the passages in
the two volumes before us their relish: now and then it is as if we had
got hold of the cruets which were to season a whole article. There is a
batch of anecdotes about Lamartine, whose conspicuous gifts and position
put his puerile vanity in relief; and that vanity Sainte-Beuve never
spared. Lamartine set the fashion of his own idolatry by constituting
himse