The old, so-called philosophic criticism treated the literary document as if it had fallen from the clouds, judged it without taking its author into account at all, and placed it under some particular heading in a historical or aesthetic chart. Sainte-Beuve found the author in his work; behind the paper he discovered the man. He taught his own generation and the generations to come, that no book, no document of the past, can be understood before we have gained an understanding of the psychical conditions which produced it, and formed an idea of the personality of the man who wrote it. Not until then does the document live. Not until then does a soul animate history. Not until then does the work of art become transparently intelligible. Sainte-Beuve's most marked characteristic was an insatiable thirst for knowledge, a quality which he possessed in the form that may be called scientific inquisitiveness. This directed his life even before it expressed itself in his criticism. At first it is only faintly perceptible in his works, because he began with unlimited praise of his contemporaries, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and others, a good deal of which he was obliged subsequently to retract--thus progressing in the opposite direction from Théophile Gautier, who began with severity and gradually declined into a nerveless leniency. But it is possible to trace even Sainte-Beuve's first uncritical praise to his critical instincts. Its exaggeratedness was due to the fact that he stood, as a young man, too near to the personages he criticised; but this circumstance was itself attributable to his curiosity. Before he knew, he dimly divined the difference between books and life, and was less apt than others to accept the author's own account of himself, the image of himself which he desired, by means of his book, to imprint on his readers' minds; and it was the unconscious instinct of investigation, the keen interest of the born psychologist, the longing to see for himself and close at hand, the inclination to pass by all that was official and conventional and make straight for the truth that is concealed, the small facts which explain--that led him to seek personal acquaintance; though he himself believed that it was his enthusiasm for ideas which attracted him irresistibly to their originators.