Then pass directly to the next
paper, on the terrible Corsican, "who weakened his greatness by the
gigantic--who loved to astonish--who delighted too much in what was
his forte, war,--who was too much a bold adventurer." And further on,
the account of Napoleon's conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in which
account M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness and
truthfulness and penetration of the great German. The impression thus
made on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve's power is
deepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot and
his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly
against those historians "who strain humanity, who make the lesson that
history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place
of Providence," which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p.
150), "is often but a deification of our own thought."
In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve--who had then, for more
than thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the function
of critic--describes what is a fundamental feature of his method in
arriving at a judgment on books and authors.
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