ABSTRACT
The confusion has been even greater than Sainte-Beuve foresaw when he set down this reflection a hundred years ago, and those people who are still occupied with the problems of criticism have abandoned any pretensions to his kind of elegant connoisseurship. He, and the kindred spirits that he invokes, enjoyed the privilege of living more at ease with their time and in closer touch with the past; the influx and reflux of subject-matter from both of those continual sources were rich indeed, yet not too overwhelmingly large to be breasted by a nicely discriminating eclecticism. Now decadence, the state of mind anticipated by Sainte-Beuve and consciously cultivated in the nineties, need not be critically inarticulate. On the contrary, that manifestation of it known as Alexandrianism is characterized precisely by the ascendancy of criticism over artistic creation. Thus criticism learns to live with history. Writers have felt more free to accept or reject historical situation in which they have found themselves.
