The condition of man ordinarily is no more than a succession of servitudes, and the only liberty that remains is now and then to effect a change. Labour presses, necessity commands, circumstances sweep us along: at the risk of seeming to contradict ourselves or give ourselves the lie, we must go on and for ever recommence; we must accept whatever employments are offered, and even though we fill them with all conscientiousness and zeal we raise a dust on the way, we obscure the images of the past, we soil and mar our own selves. And so it is that before the goal of old age is reached, we have passed through so many lives that scarcely, as we go back in memory, can we tell which was our true life, that for which we were made and of which we were worthy, the life which we would have chosen. Those were the words with which he had closed his chapters on _Chateaubriand_; yet through all his deviations he had borne steadily toward one point. In after years he could write without presumption to a friend: "If I had a device, it would be the _true_, the _true_ alone; and the beautiful and the good might come out as best they could." There are a number of anecdotes which show how precious he held this integrity of mind. The best known is the fact that, in the days before he was appointed senator, and despite the pressure that was brought to bear on him, he still refused to write a review of the Emperor's _History of Cæsar_. Both the sense of disillusion, which was really inherent in him from his youth, and the passion for truth hindered him in his "creative" work, while they increased his powers as a critic. He grew up, it must be remembered, in the midst of the full romantic tide, and as a writer of verse there was really no path of great achievement open to him save that of Victor Hugo and Lamartine and the others of whose glory he was so jealous. Whatever may have been the differences of those poets, in one respect they were alike: they all disregarded the subtle _nuance_ wherein the truth resides, and based their emotions on some grandiose conception, half true and half false; nor was this mingling of the false and true any less predominant in one of Hugo's political odes than in Lamartine's personal and religious meditations. Now, the whole bent of Sainte-Beuve's intellect was toward the subtle drawing of distinctions, and even to-day a reader somewhat romantically and emotionally inclined resents the manner in which his scalpel cuts into the work of these poets and severs what is morbid from what is sound. That is criticism; but it may easily be seen that such a habit of mind when carried to excess would paralyse the poetic impulse. The finest poetry, perhaps, is written when this discriminating principle works in the writer strongly but unconsciously; when a certain critical atmosphere about him controls his taste, while not compelling him to dull the edge of impulse by too much deliberation.