CEITICISM AND THE MAN 95 



The elective affinities are at work everywhere, — 

 ■where is the critical genius that is a universal 

 solvent ? Probably Sainte-Beuve himself comes as 

 near it as anybody who has lived. 



IV 



It is not truth alone that makes literature ; it is 

 truth plus a man. Headers fancy they are inter- 

 ested in the birds and flowers they find in the pages of 

 the poets ; but no, it is the poets themselves that they 

 are interested in. There are the same birds and flow- 

 ers in the fields and woods, — do they care for them ? 

 In many of the authors of whom Sainte-Beuve writes 

 I have no interest, but I am always interested in 

 Sainte-Beuve's view of them, in the play of his in- 

 telligence and imagination over and around them. 

 After reading his discussion of Cowper, or E^nelon, 

 or Massillon, or Pascal, it is not the flavor of these 

 writers that remains in my mind, but the flavor of 

 the critic himself. I am under his spell, and not 

 that of his subject. Is not this equally true of the 

 criticism of Goethe, or Carlyle, or Macaulay, or 

 Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Coleridge, or any other ? The 

 pages of these writers are no more a transparent 

 medium, through which we see the subject as in 

 itself it is, than are those of any other creative 

 artist. Science shows us, or aims to show us, the 

 thing as it is ; but art shows it to us tinged by the 

 prismatic rays of the human spirit. Criticism that 

 warms and interests is perpetual creation, as Sainte- 

 Beuve suggested. It is a constant combination of 



