"
Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional
conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic.
Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part the
cause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact in
delineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence all
living parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes is
more captivating than his "Portraits de Femmes," a translation of
which we are glad to see announced.
Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of
the "Nouveaux Lundis," an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deep
is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For
the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament
was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes the
occasion to write a paper on "Les saints Evangiles," especially the
Sermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beatitudes,
he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world such
accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and
thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of
men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial
recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness
but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who
persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar
address to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anything
like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the
precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of
human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated
from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that
predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we
not a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectly
heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before
all coming generations?
"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or less
instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting
itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly
existed.
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