But although Gautier's influence has thus extended far beyond the 1830 period, and beyond the term of his own life, his is one of the names most inseparably connected with the early, the fighting, days of Romanticism. It is significant and touching that the last, uncompleted article he wrote was a description of the audience on the night of the first performance of Victor Hugo's _Hernani_. XXIX SAINTE-BEUVE Gautier's critical writings, though they form such an enormous proportion of his total production, are already almost forgotten; he survives as the novelist and poet. But one of his contemporaries, who like him was both a poet and a critic, and whose name during their lifetime was frequently coupled with his, has had a different fate. The rank which Sainte-Beuve won for himself as a critic is so elevated as completely to overshadow his position as a poet, and as a historian in the usual sense of the word. As a poet he showed himself to be possessed of delicate and original talent; but he was an epoch-making critic, one of the men who inaugurate a system and found a new branch of art. In a certain sense it may be said that he was a greater innovator in his province than the other authors of the period in theirs; for there was modern lyric poetry before Victor Hugo, but modern criticism in the strict acceptation of the word did not exist before Sainte-Beuve. At any rate he remodelled criticism as completely as Balzac did fiction. During the last years of his life his authority was undisputed; nevertheless, it was not until some ten years after his death that the literary public beyond the frontiers of France awoke to a full sense of his preeminence. An excellent foreign critic of French literature, the German historian, Karl Hillebrand, has pronounced Sainte-Beuve's to be the master-mind of the period, an assertion which, though it may be an exaggeration, can only be called absurd if criticism be regarded as in itself a lower branch of art than the drama or lyric poetry. This, however, is surely now an antiquated standpoint. To the author that branch of art is the highest in which his nature finds fullest expression; and though there may be an order of precedence among intellects, it is extremely doubtful if there is an order of precedence among arts, and most doubtful of all when an art or branch of art has been remoulded by a productive intellect into its own special, almost personal, organ. So much is certain, that in reasoning power (not only in critical acumen) Sainte-Beuve holds the first place in the generation of 1830.