The Human Comedy: Introductions and Appendix | Page 9

for the critical reader is not less.
Here are tales--extensions of the scheme and manner of the /Oeuvres de
Jeunesse/, or attempts at the /goguenard/ story of 1830--a thing for
which Balzac's hand was hardly light enough. Here are interesting
evidences of striving to be cosmopolitan and polyglot--the most
interesting of all of which, I think, is the mention of certain British
products as "mufflings." "Muffling" used to be a domestic joke for
"muffin;" but whether some wicked Briton deluded Balzac into the idea
that it was the proper form or not it is impossible to say. Here is a
/Traite de la Vie Elegante/, inestimable for certain critical purposes. So
early as 1825 we find a /Code des Gens Honnetes/, which exhibits at
once the author's legal studies and his constant attraction for the shady
side of business, and which contains a scheme for defrauding by means
of lead pencils, actually carried out (if we may believe his exulting note)
by some literary swindlers with unhappy results. A year later he wrote a
/Dictionnaire des Enseignes de Paris/, which we are glad enough to
have from the author of the /Chat-que-Pelote/; but the persistence with

which this kind of miscellaneous writing occupied him could not be
better exemplified than by the fact that, of two important works which
closely follow this in the collected edition, the /Physiologie de
l'Employe/ dates from 1841 and the /Monographie de la Presse
Parisienne/ from 1843.
It is well known that from the time almost of his success as a novelist
he was given, like too many successful novelists (/not/ like Scott), to
rather undignified and foolish attacks on critics. The explanation may
or may not be found in the fact that we have abundant critical work of
his, and that it is nearly all bad. Now and then we have an acute remark
in his own special sphere; but as a rule he cannot be complimented on
these performances, and when he was half-way through his career this
critical tendency of his culminated in the unlucky /Revue Parisienne/,
which he wrote almost entirely himself, with slight assistance from his
friends, MM. de Belloy and de Grammont. It covers a wide range, but
the literary part of it is considerable, and this part contains that
memorable and disastrous attack on Sainte-Beuve, 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