Thanks to these reforms of Sainte-Beuve's, the history of literature, which used to be a kind of secondary, inferior branch of the science of history, has become the guide of history proper, its most interesting and most living part; for the literature of nations is the most attractive and most instructive material with which history has to deal. We began by asserting that Sainte-Beuve's critical activity did not lead him to forsake poetry. We are now in a position to prove that the art of the critic, as practised by him in the last years of his life, in the highest stage of his development, had entered into the closest relationship with modern poetry. For poetry became synthetic simultaneously with criticism; and the cause of the movement was the same in both cases, namely, the gradual conquest by science of the whole domain of modern intellectual life. At the beginning of the century imagination was considered the essential quality in poetry; it was his capacity of invention which made the poet a poet; he was not tied down to nature and reality, but was as much at home in the supernatural as in the actual world. In the generation of 1830 such authors as Nodier and Alexandre Dumas express this view of the matter, each in his own way. But as Romanticism by degrees developed into realism, creative literature by degrees gave up its fantastic excursions into space. It exerted itself even more to understand than to invent; and this produced a close connection with criticism. Fiction became psychological. The point of departure of the novelist and of the critic in their respective descriptions is now the same, namely, the spiritual atmosphere of a period. In it the real or invented characters appear to us; the novelist's aim is to represent and interpret the actions of a human being, the critic's, to represent and interpret a work, in such a manner that the reader may see both the actions and the work to be results produced with real or apparent inevitability, when certain inward qualities or tendencies are acted upon by suggestions from without. The only fundamental difference is that the creative author makes the speech and the actions of his characters, who, fictitious though they are, are generally drawn from life, the probable consequences of given circumstances; whereas the critic's imagination, fettered by facts, necessarily restricts itself to the representation of the psychical condition which led to or influenced the utterances and actions he describes. The novelist deduces a man's probable actions from what he has observed of his character. The critic deduces a man's character from his works.