第77章
"You turn all the good points into bad ones.""I am incapable of such a juggler's feat.""My dear boy,a journalist is a juggler;a man must make up his mind to the drawbacks of the calling.Look here!I am not a bad fellow;this is the way _I_should set to work myself.Attention!You might begin by praising the book,and amuse yourself a while by saying what you really think.'Good,'says the reader,'this critic is not jealous;he will be impartial,no doubt,'and from that point your public will think that your criticism is a piece of conscientious work.Then,when you have won your reader's confidence,you will regret that you must blame the tendency and influence of such work upon French literature.'Does not France,'you will say,'sway the whole intellectual world?French writers have kept Europe in the path of analysis and philosophical criticism from age to age by their powerful style and the original turn given by them to ideas.'Here,for the benefit of the philistine,insert a panegyric on Voltaire,Rousseau,Diderot,Montesquieu,and Buffon.Hold forth upon the inexorable French language;show how it spreads a varnish,as it were,over thought.Let fall a few aphorisms,such as--'A great writer in France is invariably a great man;he writes in a language which compels him to think;it is otherwise in other countries'--and so on,and so on.Then,to prove your case,draw a comparison between Rabener,the German satirical moralist,and La 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 deion 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 balderdash;the modern representatives of the school of Voltaire as opposed to the English and German schools,even as the seventeen heroic deputies of the Left fought the battle for the nation against the Ultras of the Right.
"And then,under cover of names respected by the immense majority of Frenchmen (who will always be against the Government),you can crush Nathan;for although his work is far above the average,it confirms the bourgeois taste for literature without ideas.And after that,you understand,it is no longer a question of Nathan and his book,but of France and the glory of France.It is the duty of all honest and courageous pens to make strenuous opposition to these foreign importations.And with that you flatter your readers.Shrewd French mother-wit is not easily caught napping.If publishers,by ways which you do not choose to specify,have stolen a success,the reading public very soon judges for itself,and corrects the mistakes made by some five hundred fools,who always rush to the fore.
"Say that the publisher who sold a first edition of the book is audacious indeed to issue a second,and express regret that so clever a man does not know the taste of the country better.There is the gist of it.Just a sprinkle of the salt of wit and a dash of vinegar to bring out the flavor,and Dauriat will be done to a turn.But mind that you end with seeming to pity Nathan for a mistake,and speak of him as of a man from whom contemporary literature may look for great things if he renounces these ways."Lucien was amazed at this talk from Lousteau.As the journalist spoke,the scales fell from his eyes;he beheld new truths of which he had never before caught so much as a glimpse.
"But all this that you are saying is quite true and just,"said he.