The peculiar quality of his mind was its capacity of understanding and interpreting an extraordinary number of other minds. If superiority to the other prominent individuals of the group cannot be claimed for him, the reason lies in the limitations of his gift. Amongst the minds he understood were not numbered the minds of fertile, unrefined geniuses like Balzac, and great but eccentric geniuses like Beyle. And, far-reaching as was his vision, he was seldom able to take a comprehensive view; few historians and thinkers have had such unsystematic minds. This defect had its good side; his freedom from all inclination to systematise kept him fresh to the last, enabled him perpetually, as it were, to slough his skin; so that the man who in 1827 attracted Goethe's attention by his first articles in the _Globe_, in 1869 was not only in complete, understanding sympathy with the group of young scientists and artists who at the moment gave France her claim to the consideration of Europe, but was in a manner their leader. To the very last year of his life he was regarded by all the best men as the natural general, under whose eye the "young guard" was specially anxious to distinguish itself. But his lack of system, his inability to grasp his subject as a whole, not only prevented Sainte-Beuve from distinguishing his name by any single great work, but even from ever attaining in his writings to grandeur of proportion, to the grand style. His eye was formed to see details, characteristic, important details, but no whole. He saw these details in constant, perpetually varying movement, the movement which is life, and by imitating all this movement in his brain and with his pen he gave his pictures a more exact resemblance to life than had ever been seen before. But he had not sufficient mastery over his details; he did not possess the gift of tracing apparent to deeper-lying causes, and these to a first cause. [Illustration: SAINTE-BEUVE] As a critic he was only capable of describing the isolated individual, and even of the individual he only very occasionally gave a complete, final idea (Talleyrand, Proudhon); he showed him now from this side, now from that, now at one, now at another age, now in one, now in another relation to society. Even his short articles display a lack of the power of concentration; he hid his best ideas in subordinate clauses, his most suggestive thoughts in notes. He broke his bread of life into crumbs. He hid his gold, as peasants used to do, in dark corners, in holes in the floors and walls, at the bottom of chests and in stockings; he was incapable of moulding it into figures.