Bruyere. Nothing gives a critic such an air as an apparent familiarity
with foreign literature. Kant is Cousin's pedestal.

"Once on that ground you bring out a word which sums up the French men
of genius of the eighteenth century for the benefit of simpletons--you
call that literature the 'literature of ideas.' Armed with this
expression, you fling all the mighty dead at the heads of the
illustrious living. You explain that in the present day a new form of
literature has sprung up; that dialogue (the easiest form of writing)
is overdone, and description dispenses with any need for thinking on
the part of the author or reader. You bring up the fiction of Voltaire,
Diderot, Sterne, and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact of the stuff of
life; and turn from them to the modern novel, composed of scenery and
word-pictures and metaphor and the dramatic situations, of which Scott
is full. Invention may be displayed in such work, but there is no room
for anything else. 'The romance after the manner of Scott is a mere
passing fashion in literature,' you will say, and fulminate against the
fatal way in which ideas are diluted and beaten thin; cry out against a
style within the reach of any intellect, for any one can commence author
at small expense in a way of literature, which you can nickname the
'literature of imagery.'

"Then you fall upon Nathan with your argument, and establish it beyound
cavil that he is a mere imitator with an appearance of genius. The
concise grand style of the eighteenth century is lacking; you show that
the author substitutes events for sentiments. Action and stir is not
life; he gives you pictures, but no ideas.

"Come out with such phrases, and people will take them up.--In spite of
the merits of the work, it seems to you to be a dangerous, nay, a fatal
precedent. It throws open the gates of the temple of Fame to the crowd;
and in the distance you descry a legion of petty authors hastening to
imitate this novel and easy style of writing.

"Here you launch out into resounding lamentations over the decadence
and decline of taste, and slip in eulogies of Messieurs Etienne Jouy,
Tissot, Gosse, Duval, Jay, Benjamin Constant, Aignan, Baour-Lormian,
Villemain, and the whole Liberal-Bonapartist chorus who patronize
Vernou's paper. Next you draw a picture of that glorious phalanx of
writers repelling the invasion of the Romantics; these are the upholders
of ideas and style as against metaphor and balderda