With the course of years he became bolder and more scientific in his psychological analysis. In the following passage he defends his right to be so. It is taken from a letter written on the 9th of May 1863 to a critic who had blamed him for certain disparaging remarks in one of his articles: "Art--and especially a purely intellectual art like that of criticism--is an instrument which is difficult to handle, and its worth is dependent upon the worth of the artist. Granted this, is it not absolutely necessary to have done with that foolish conventionality, that cant, which compels us to judge an author not only by his intentions, but also by his pretensions? Am I, for example, to be obliged to see in Fontanes only the great master, polished, noble, elegant, religious, and not the hasty, brusque, sensual man that he really was?... Or to come to our own day.... I have had the opportunity for thirty years and more of observing Villemain, a man of distinguished intellect and talent, who is actually brimming over with generous, liberal, philanthropic, Christian, civilising sentiment, but who is, nevertheless, the most sordid, malicious ape in existence. What is to be done in such a case? Are we to go on to all eternity praising his noble, elevated sentiments, as those by whom he is surrounded do? Are we to dupe ourselves and dupe others? Are men of letters, historians, and moralists merely actors, whom we have no right to study except in the rôles which they have chosen and defined for themselves? Are we only permitted to see them on the stage? Or is it allowable, when our knowledge is sufficient, boldly and yet gently to insert the scalpel and show the weak points of the armour, the faulty joints between the talent and the soul? allowable to praise the talent whilst indicating the defects in the soul which actually affect the talent and any permanent influence it may exercise. Will literature lose by such a proceeding? It is possible that it may; but the science of psychology will gain." This, then, is the first advance--firm ground beneath our feet; no deceptive idealisation! The next is, that criticism, which had hitherto been a disintegrating, separating process, becomes in Saint-Beuve's hands, and with the limitations entailed by his character, an organising, constructive process. His criticism produces an organism, a life, as poetry does. It does not break up the given material into road-metal and gravel, but erects a building with it. It does not break up the human soul into its component parts, so that we only gain an understanding of it as a piece of dead mechanism, without having any idea what it is like when it is in movement. No, he shows us the machine at work; we see the fire that drives it and hear the noise it makes, whilst we are learning the secrets of its construction.