on sait—et c’est certainement un des grands éléments de son succès—combien d’études l’illustre critique consacre à des auteurs dont l’importance littéraire est quasi nulle (femmes, magistrats, courtisans, militaires), mais dont les écrits lui sont une occasion de pourtraiturer une âme; combien volontiers, pour les maîtres, il s’attache à leurs productions secondaires, notes, brouillons, lettres intimes, plutôt qu’à leurs grandes œuvres, souvent beaucoup moins expressives, en effet, de leur psychologie. Mr. More is not, like Sainte-Beuve, primarily interested in psychology or in human beings; Mr. More is primarily a moralist, which is a worthy and serious thing to be. The trouble with Mr. More is that you cannot disperse a theory or point of view of morals over a vast number of essays on a great variety of important figures in literature, unless you can give some more particular interest as well. Sainte-Beuve has his particularized interest in human beings; another critic—say Remy de Gourmont—may have something to say always about the art of a writer which will make our enjoyment of that writer more conscious and more intelligent. But the pure moralist in letters—the moralist is useful to the creator as well as the reader of poetry—must be more concise, for we must have the pleasure of inspecting the beauty of his structure. And here M. Julien Benda has a great advantage over Mr. More; his thought may be less profound, but it has more formal beauty. Mr. Irving Babbitt, who shares so many of the ideals and opinions of Mr. More that their names must be coupled, has expressed his thought more abstractly and with more form, and is free from a mystical impulse which occasionally gets out of Mr. More’s hand. He appears, more clearly than Mr. More, and certainly more clearly than any critic of equal authority in America or England, to perceive Europe as a whole; he has the cosmopolitan mind and a tendency to seek the centre. His few books are important, and would be more important if he preached of discipline in a more disciplined style. Although he also is an admirer of Sainte-Beuve, he would probably subscribe to this admirable paragraph of Othenin d’Haussonville:[4] Footnote 4: _Revue des Deux Mondes_, fevr. 1875, quoted by Benda, _Belphégor_, p. 140. Il y a une beauté littéraire, impersonnelle en quelque sorte, parfaitement distincte de l’auteur lui-même et de son organisation, beauté qui a sa raison d’être et ses lois, dont la critique est tenue de rendre compte. Et si la critique considère cette tâche comme au-dessous d’elle, si c’est affaire à la rhétorique et à ce que Sainte-Beuve appelle dédaigneusement les Quintilien, alors la rhetorique a du bon et les Quintilien ne sont pas à dédaigner.