he has seen the work from so many different points of view that it is impossible for him, without doing a sort of inward violence to himself, to maintain one single standpoint, one attitude of feeling. And if he happens to be dealing, not with a single work, but with a highly productive author who has passed through many stages of development, or possibly even with a whole school of literature, the difficulty of making one comprehensive picture out of the many different impressions received under totally different psychical conditions, becomes proportionately greater. A building which we have seen only once, half of it in sunlight, half in the shadow of a heavy cloud, stands out distinctly in our memory in a certain light against a particular sky; but a building we have seen at every hour of day, in the dusk and in moonlight, from all sides, from various elevations, and as often from the inside as the outside, a building in which we have lived, and the size of which has dwindled in our eyes as we grew--of such a building we find it difficult to give a single, fully descriptive picture. This difficulty Sainte-Beuve avoids by constantly producing fresh descriptions and fresh criticisms of the same men and their works, leaving it to the reader to draw his own conclusions. It was with good reason that he chose as the motto for a series of his works the saying of Sénac de Meilhan: "Nous sommes mobiles et nous jugeons des êtres mobiles." The latter of these propositions, namely, that every human being whom we judge has altered, has developed steadily, Sainte-Beuve understood better than it had ever been understood before. He not only changes his tone every time he changes his theme, but changes it every time there is a change in the man or woman who is his theme for the time being; his agile talent imitates all the movements of the individual human soul during its development process.[1] Hence his manner is as changeable as his subject; he is now the biographer, now the critic; he packs as many limiting and defining parentheses into his periods as possible; connects sentences which modify one another; uses technical words which introduce a whole train of ideas and memories; and vague expressions which may mean much more than they say. For though he moves through the dim depths of a man's life with the certainty of the diver who sees the submarine growths through the water, he nevertheless, for many reasons, prefers to write with a certain amount of vagueness of what he has seen. When he is writing of the living it is, of course, only permissible to make vague allusions to their private life; and the dead have, as a rule, descendants or relatives who keep jealous guard over their reputation. Sainte-Beuve, therefore, generally contents himself with showing that he divines or knows much on which he does not choose to dwell.