LITERARY STUDIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 343 



divisions shall be accurately determined; but men in their moral 

 nature are so complex that the critic cannot hope ever to treat them 

 just as he would animals or plants. Criticism must forever remain an 

 art, demanding, like the art of medicine, a special tact or talent in 

 those who practice it. The method of Sainte-Beuve is rather English 

 (that of experience and individual circumstance) than French (that 

 of system and abstraction). His mother was English; he was him- 

 self brought up on English books; he especially admired Bacon, with 

 whose prophetic enunciation of the scope and function of literary 

 history he was acquainted, and whose comparative method he him- 

 self attempted to apply. He has, more than any other foreign critic, 

 affected the course of English literary philology in the nineteenth 

 century and affected it for good. His special disciple is Matthew 

 Arnold. Of Sainte-Beuve 's work an admirable estimate has been 

 given by Dowden. The latter says that, " wandering endlessly from 

 author to author in his Portraits litt&raires and Portraits contem- 

 poraires, Sainte-Beuve studied in all its details what we may term 

 the physiology of each." His long research in "his most sustained 

 work, Port-Royal, led him to recognize certain types or families 

 under which the various minds of men can be grouped and classified." 

 So, also, in his Causeries du Lundi and the Nouveaux Lundis. " They 

 formed, as it were, a natural history of intellects and temperaments. 

 He did not pretend to reduce criticism to a science; he hoped that 

 at length, as a result of numberless observations, something like 

 a science might come into existence. Meanwhile he would cultivate 

 the relative and distrust the absolute." To estimate a work, he 

 studies the personality of the author, his conditions, his inherited 

 qualities, his education, life, everything that can be ascertained 

 concerning him. Thus he aims to discover the key to the secret of 

 his literary utterances. This is the method, according to Professor 

 Dowden, "which has best served the study of literature in the 

 nineteenth century." It is largely the method of Matthew Arnold, 

 whose success, however, hardly equaled that of Sainte-Beuve, his 

 master. 



That a reaction against liberal methods should set in was of 

 course to be expected. In this case the movement was headed by 

 Nisard, who, with his followers, reverted to an abstract, authoritative, 

 and individual standard, attempting to test the literary product 

 in question by that. Nisard applies to each literary product a three- 

 fold test: (1) The ideal of the nation; (2) the ideal of the language; 

 (3) the ideal of humanity. While believing that knowledge and 

 taste are essentially relative, of the individual and the environment, 

 he holds that the critic may contribute to the general onward move- 

 ment of culture by expressing sincerely and forcibly his opinion as 

 if it were absolute; for the object of criticism is to regulate the 



