for which the critic
afterwards took a magnanimous revenge in his obituary _causerie_.
Although the thing is not quite unexampled it is not easily to be
surpassed in the blind fury of its abuse. Sainte-Beuve was by no means
invulnerable, and an anti-critic who kept his head might have found, as
M. de Pontmartin and others did find, the joints in his armor. But when,
_a propos_ of the _Port Royal_ more especially, and of the other works
in general, Balzac informs us that Sainte-Beuve's great characteristic
as a writer is _l'ennui, l'ennui boueux jusqu'a mi-jambe_, that his
style is intolerable, that his historical handling is like that of
Gibbon, Hume, and other dull people; when he jeers at him for exhuming
"La mere Angelique," and scolds him for presuming to obscure the glory
of the _Roi Soleil_, the thing is partly ludicrous, partly melancholy.
One remembers that agreeable Bohemian, who at a symposium once
interrupted his host by crying, "Man o' the hoose, gie us less o' yer
clack and mair o' yer Jairman wine!" Only, in human respect and other,
we phrase it: "Oh, dear M. de Balzac! give us more _Eugenie Grandets_,
more _Pere Goriots_, more _Peaux de Chagrin_, and don't talk about what
you do not understand!"

Balzac was a great politician also, and here, though he may not have
been very much more successful, he talked with more knowledge and
competence. He must have given himself immense trouble in reading the
papers, foreign as well as French; he had really mastered a good deal
of the political religion of a French publicist. It is curious to
read, sixty years after date, his grave assertion that "_La France a
la conquete de Madagascar a faire_," and with certain very pardonable
defects (such as his Anglophobia), his politics may be pronounced not
unintelligent and not ungenerous, though somewhat inconsistent and
not very distinctly traceable to any coherent theory. As for the
Anglophobia, the Englishman who thinks the less of him for that must
have very poor and unhappy brains. A Frenchman who does not more or less
hate and fear England, an Englishman who does not regard France with
a more or less good-humored impatience, is usually "either a god or
a beast," as Aristotle saith. Balzac began with an odd but not
unintelligible compound, something like Hugo's, of Napoleonism and
Royalism. In 1824, when he was still in the shades of anonymity, he
wrote and published two by no means despicable pamphlets in favor of
Pri