A long passage about the Globe before finally mentioning that Saint-Beuve was invited to contribute: "[T]hough the journal was taunted with moderatism by the extremists of the Romantic school,"
"its articles were full of freshness and originality, and won the praise of Goethe. 'The editors,' said the sage of Weimar, 'are men of the world, lively, clear-spirited, and bold to the very highest degree. They have a was of expressing disapprobation which is fine and courteous. Our German savants, on the contrary, always think it necessary immediately to hate a person, if they don't happen to agree with him.'" WHAT a quote.
AND we're meeting Hugo! The editor gives him two volumes of Odes and Ballads to review: "'They are by that young barbarian, Victor Hugo,' said he, 'who has talent, and who, moreover, is interesting on account of his life and character.'"
"Gradually the acquaintance ripened into intimacy, and Sainte-Beuve, with his usual facility, became an enthusiastic admirer of the doctrines of the Romantic school and of the genius of its chief."
I do not know what "with his usual facility" is even doing there. But I am going to go on and quote Billy's assessment of the Romantics at length, because wow:
"The principal merit of this school was that, like that of the Lake poets in England, it was essentially a protest against artifice and conventionalism in poetry; the fault of the reformers was that they framed canons and shibboleths of their own as narrow as those against which they declaimed. Ere many months Sainte-Beuve became a member of Le Cenacle (the Guest-Chamber), a kind of Mutual Admiration Society of poets, painters, and sculptors in Paris, who had, each of them, according to his own story, a masterpiece in preparation or conception, and all of them together a monopoly of French genius. Among these self-reliant spirits were Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny, Lamartine, and the brothers Des champs, who, meeting constantly at Victor Hugo's, recited their new verses, and cheered each other amid the storm of criticism by which they were assailed. By degrees their intimacy so deepened that they called each other by their christian names; and, at last, the tone of familiarity became so general and so catching, that, we are told, M. Hugo was obliged to issue a peremptory ukaze, to prevent his wife from being addressed as Adèle. Saint-Beuve was especially smitten with her charms, and it was to this, in part, that, later in life, he attributed that treason against the principles of sound criticism into which he was betrayed when he applauded her husband's innovations in poetry."