Sainte-Beuve, with his exceptionally impressionable nature, underwent a whole series of religious, literary, and political transformations. These constituted the school he had to pass through to become the founder of modern criticism. Despite all his changes of opinion, we are safe in asserting that he was honest. Private interest can have had little power in great things over a man with a nature as truthful as that which reveals itself in his writings. Truth and honesty are, as Franklin says, like fire and flame; they have a certain natural brightness which cannot be counterfeited. [1] See Sainte-Beuve's article on Alfred de Vigny's reception into the Academy, and also the letter, published by himself, which was written to him by a lady (Madame Hugo) on the occasion of the same event. [2] _Lettres parisiennes_, i v. 170. [3] He was accused of having accepted bribes from the secret fund of Louis Philippe's government. What lay at the foundation of the charge proved to have been a grant of a sum of--one hundred francs--for the repairing of a stove in the Mazarin Library, of which Sainte-Beuve was librarian. XXXI SAINTE-BEUVE AND MODERN CRITICISM _Port-Royal_ (1840-59), Sainte-Beuve's longest piece of connected writing, is a unique work of its kind. Disinclination to tread the beaten track, and the Romanticist's sympathy with religious enthusiasm, two characteristics which early distinguished him, influenced him in choosing the history of Jansenism in France as his subject. Jansenism was an enthusiastic, intelligent, intense form of piety, which, though evolved and retained within the pale of Catholicism, was nevertheless distinguished by a personal, that is to say, heretical, passion for truth, which appeals to our understanding by its independence and to our sympathies by its heroically courageous defiance of persecution and coercion. Like its history, _Port-Royal_, it reaches its highest level in Pascal, whose frail, emaciated figure as its embodiment presents a curious contrast to that of the plethoric, more healthy-minded German who, in a neighbouring country a century earlier, had carried on a very similar, though more successful struggle against ecclesiastical attempts at compromise.