Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/294

274 things which the former detested in letter-writing,—"une belle enfileure de paroles courtoises," "à bienvienner, à prendre congé, à remercier, à saluer, à presenter mon service et tels compliments verbeux des lois ceremonieuses de nostre civilité."

Balzac's dissertations are strings of sonorously elaborated commonplaces. The one theme on which he writes with freshness and with his eye on the object is literature. He was not such an educated critic as the dry and pedantic Chapelain; but in his letter to Scudéry on the Cid, in his criticism of Heinsius's Herodes Infanticida, and in his remarks on paraphrasing and the sublime simplicity of the Old Testament, he is sound in principle, while in more than one place he writes imaginative and eloquent appreciations. The following sentences on Saint Chrysostom might almost have been written by Sainte-Beuve of Saint François de Sales: "Avec un commentaire de deux syllabes, avec un petit mot qui tempère la rigueur des choses, avec une particule de charité, qui adoucit les menaces de la justice, il défriche les plus dures et les plus sauvages expressions.  Il console et rassure les esprits que le texte de Saint Paul avait effrayés.  Partout où il passe il laisse des traces de blancheur et une impression de lumière."

Balzac is essentially the man of letters, the prose artist and nothing more. The second great shaper of classical French prose was more interested in the lucid and logical exposition of his thought than in the cadence of his