Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was the leading French critic of the nineteenth century, the author of the weekly Causeries du lundi for twenty years, in which he examined every writer from Montaigne to his contemporaries through the man behind the work, his temperament, his circle, his life. What Is a Classic? of 1850 gives the definition the Harvard Classics print: a writer who has enriched the human mind, said something true for all time, and spoken in a style that is his own and everyone’s. Proust wrote a book against his method, arguing that the self that writes is not the self that lives, and the argument has not ended.