"
"What do you think of Monsieur Sainte-Beuve? Is he as unfaithful a
critic as Monsieur Theophile Gautier and Monsieur Jules Janin?" I asked,
rather timidly.
"Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has received from Heaven (which he has ceased to
believe in) an exquisite taste, an extraordinary delicacy of tact,
admirable talents of criticism, relieved, and, as it were, fertilized,
by rare poetical faculties. He possesses and exercises in the most
masterly manner the art of shading, of hints, of hesitations, of
insinuations, of infiltrations, of evolutions, of circumlocutions, of
precautions, of ambuscades, of feline gambols, of ground and lofty
tumbling, of strategy, and of literary diplomacy. He excels in the art
of distilling a drop of poison in a phial of perfume so as to render the
poison delicious and the perfume venomous. His prose is as attractive
and magnetizing as a woman slightly compromised in public opinion, and
who does not tell all her secrets, but increases her attractions both by
what she shows and by what she conceals. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has had
no desire but to be a pilgrim of ideas, lacking the first requisite in a
pilgrim, which is faith.
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