Although the way he went about understanding some of the most important aspects of French Romanticism had the short-term disadvantage of contributing to the neglect of his work by the broader public, it is all but certain that these apparent weaknesses will in the long run turn out to be strengths. For example, because the evanescence of critical fashion has accelerated in the age of literary theory, the exclusion of this perishible item from discussion will probably enhance rather than diminish the readability of his works in the future. Similarly, the neglect of secondary works, while little calculated to endear him to his contemporaries, may increase the aesthetic appeal of his sober, magisterial prose to subsequent readers. We may hope that the appeal of the understatement of goals and achievements will grow, and whether this trait of Bénichou's has been due to the virtue of modesty, to an ability to distinguish the enduring from the ephemeral, or simply to a retiring temperament, Bénichou's character had the additional advantage of enabling him to continue during long years to go on working relatively undistracted at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Even his perhaps regrettable decision to shun the heterogeneously international aspect of the Romantic dynamic is not without its compensatory effect, for as a result Bénichou speaks with a rare authority. One reviewer called Le Temps des prophètes "a monument of science and intelligence"; {83} another, reviewing Les Mages romantiques, noted that Bénichou displayed "a tranquil erudite constancy of which there remain few examples in our intellectual landscape, where monographs and microscopic inquiries predominate." {84} Finally, the philosophical perspective from which the works are written seems likely to maintain its appeal. Undertaken at a time when Left-Bank leftism generally excoriated those whose works took a liberal-humanist position, Bénichou's volumes on French Romanticism adopt a posture that in subsequent years has become much more widespread in French intellectual circles. Certainly the history of the reception of his work suggests as much, for the ideological reservations that were de mise in the 1970s for many reviewers of Le Sacre de l'écrivain and Le Temps des prophètes all but disappeared in reviews of Les Mages romantiques, L'École du désenchantement, and Selon Mallarmé.
This last point raises an important question: to what extent is it possible to separate the values of the writer from the validity of the analysis offered? For Bénichou, the problem is without a simple solution, for it goes to the heart of what it means to be a human being. Nothing is more fundamental in Bénichou than the belief that "a work always testifies . . . in favor of an essential freedom to create . . . . [T]his freedom is a constituent part of the mind." {85} As a consequence of humanity's fundamental liberty and the rational nature of the human subject, strict objectivity is an undesirable, as well as an impossible, ideal:
. . . objectivity, when faced with problems that still exist for us, ceases to be even conceivable, for the simple reason that humanity and humanity's present condition are not, for us, objects. To come to an understanding as a stranger of a human situation or debate that has not been resolved, without reference to any value, is too obviously impossible. One cannot, then, speak of objectivity -- as opposed to a necessary honest integrity that does not exclude the open embrace of an order of values (no human being can evade this) and does not pretend to forget qua historian what has been embraced qua human being -- without condemning oneself to empty talk. {86}This trenchant position is certainly not without its difficulties, as an examination of Bénichou's ideas will show, but the author of Le Sacre de l'écrivain neither evaded nor minimized them as he pursued his "difficult ideal."