On the other hand, neither Goethe nor Sainte-Beuve is for a moment to be compared with Darwin in that ineffable sweetness and simple charm which endeared him to all who came into contact with him and which breathe everywhere through his letters and even his more formal scientific works. One striking feature in Sainte-Beuve is that he recognized fully the absorbing, engrossing nature of the scientific spirit, yet appreciated that the pursuit of knowledge does not necessarily bring happiness. No one has expressed the barren desolation of mortal life with more acrid bitterness than he. Shakespeare tells us that ripeness is all. Sainte-Beuve doubts whether it exists. ‘Ripen?’ he cries. ‘Ripen? We never ripen. We harden in some spots. We rot in others. We ripen never.’[152] Years bring with them—for him—an utter indifference to everything and everybody: ‘I have arrived in life at a complete indifference: provided I do something in the morning, and go somewhere at night, life has nothing more for me.’[153] And again, life is nothing but the pricking of one illusion after another, till one becomes bitterly convinced that no illusion is worth the pains of being pricked. As he sums it up in a vivid figure: ‘Why I no longer care for nature, for the country? Why I no longer care to walk in the little footpath? I know well that the footpath is the same, but _there is no longer anything on the other side of the hedge_. In old times there was rarely anything, but always there might be something.’[91] It is true that Sainte-Beuve’s melancholy and disgust are closely connected, as he himself admits, with the gross sexual disorders of his celibate career, and he speaks of ‘the incurable disgust with everything which is peculiar to those who have abused the sources of life.’[92] In his later years he seems to have had no principle of sexual restraint whatever, and to have indulged as freely in indiscriminate commercial amours as did Pepys or Aaron Burr, though he was as much without Burr’s gay oblivion as without Pepys’s touches of remorse. He proclaims as a cynical creed his method of seeking wisdom: ‘Like Solomon and like Epicurus, I have made my way to philosophy through pleasure. It is a better road than traveling thitherward by logic after Hegel’s or Spinoza’s fashion.’[93] And the sum of the philosophy was akin to Solomon’s. ‘Sainte-Beuve said to me,’ records Goncourt, ‘One should make the tour of everything and believe in nothing. There is nothing real but woman.’[94] Solomon would hardly have made the exception. The curious thing is that, with all this abandoned personal license, Sainte-Beuve, in his critical judgments, preserved the most delicate sensibility as to moral excellence in sexual lines, as in all others.