Still not of these is the _Portraits Contemporains_. One feels inclined to say at the beginning, and perhaps not disinclined to repeat the saying at the end, that the title announces an attempt foredoomed to failure.[578] It is almost inevitable that a contemporary portrait in literature should fail to be a likeness, should be at best a _charge_, from one point of view or another. Sainte-Beuve himself in one place (with a naïveté more characteristic of him than those who have not read him very long and very carefully may think, but seldom so openly expressed) admits that his sitters had an awkward trick of falsifying his presentations. He had traced out for them, more or less early in their career, that career as they _ought_ to pursue it; but lo! they would follow their own stars, and not his tracings and indications. This is one danger, and a common, if not universal one, with its result,—not often realised in Sainte-Beuve’s own case, but constantly in that of smaller critics,—that the prophet loses his temper with these disobedient ducklings, and rates them, not because they behave badly, but because they behave in a way different from that which he expected and wished. But more dangerous still, and less to be avoided even by the staunchest and most vigilant censors, are those insidious, innumerable, ineluctable personal or partisan differences and prejudices which dazzle and trouble the contemporary’s eyes: and, worst perhaps of all, that incurable “too-nearness,” that hopeless lack of the firm perspective of the past, which clings to him, and will not let him attain to clearness and the Whole. Accordingly the _Portraits Contemporains_ are, with the _Portraits Littéraires_, the most unequal of Sainte-Beuve’s work, and all the more often disappointing because of the contemporaneity.