In 1854 he was nominated to the chair of Latin poetry at the college of France. He was rudely interrupted by the students, and resigned ; he was then appointed lecturer on French literature at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Here he lectured for four years. During this period his contributions to the Moniteur were intermittent. He now returned to a regular Monday article for the Constitutionnel.
The Empire was tardy in acknowledging his merits, and it was not until 1865 that he received the senatorship with its income sufficient to make him independent, and his health was failing him. He could seldom attend the meetings of the senate; the part he took there, however, on two famous occasions—when the nomi nation of Ernest Renan to the college of France came under dis cussion in 1867, and the law on the press in the year following— offended the majority in that conservative assembly and delighted those who "belonged," to use his own phrase, "to the diocese of free thought." He gave further pleasure in this diocese by leaving the Moniteur at the beginning of 1869, and contributing to a Liberal journal, the Temps. This defection finally alienated him from the Bonapartists, and lost him the friendship of the Princess Mathilde. His literary activity suffered little abatement, but pain made him at last unable to sit to write; he could only stand or lie. He died in his house in the Rue Montparnasse on Oct. 13, 1869.
The root of Sainte-Beuve's criticism is his single-hearted devo tion to truth. What he called "fictions" in literature, in politics, in religion, were not allowed to influence him. Some one had talked on his being tenacious of a certain set of literary opinions. "I hold very little," he answers, "to literary opinions; literary opinions occupy very little place in my life and in my thoughts. What does occupy me seriously is life itself and the object of it." "I am accustomed incessantly to call my judgments in question anew, and to re-cast my opinions the moment I suspect them to be without validity." "What I have wished" (in "is to say not a word more than I thought, to stop even a little short of what I believed in certain cases, in order that my words might acquire more weight as historical testimony." To all exaggeration
and untruth, from whatever side it proceeded, he had an antipathy. "I turn my back upon the Michelets and Quinets, but I cannot hold out my hand to the Veuillots." But Sainte-Beuve could not have been the great critic he was had he not had, at the service of this his love of truth and measure, the conscientious industry of a Benedictine. "I never have a holiday. On Monday towards noon I lift up my head, and breathe for about an hour; after that the wicket shuts again and I am in my prison cell for seven days." The Causeries were at this price. They came once a week, and to write one of them as he wrote it was indeed a week's work.
To mental independence, industry, measure, lucidity, his criticism adds the merit of happy temper and disposition. Sainte Beuve has more, as a critic, than the external politeness which once at any rate distinguished his countrymen; he has a personal charm of manner due to a sweet and humane temper. He com plained of un peu de durete, "a certain dose of hardness," in the new generation of writers. The personality of an author had a peculiar importance for him; the poetical side of his subjects, however latent it might be, always attracted him and he always sought to extricate it. This was because he had the moderate, gracious, amiably human instincts of the true poetic nature. As a guide to bring us to a knowledge of the great personalities in French literature he is unrivalled.