What
woman, thrilled by the love-scent lurking in the anthoxanthum, will
not understand this wealth of submissive ideas, this white tenderness
troubled by untamed stirrings and this red desire of love demanding a
happiness refused in those struggles a hundred times recommenced, of
restrained, eternal passion. Was not all that is offered to God
offered to love in this poesy of luminous flowers incessantly humming
its melodies to the heart, caressing hidden pleasures there, unavowed
hopes, illusions that blaze and vanish like gossamer threads on a
sultry night?"
This last quotation was probably in Sainte-Beuve's mind when he spoke
of the efflorescence by which Balzac gave to everything the sentiment
of life and made the page itself thrill. Elsewhere he found the
efflorescence degenerate into something exciting and dissolvent,
enervating, rose-tinted, and veined with every hue, deliciously
corruptive, Byzantine, suggestive of debauch, abandoning itself to the
fluidity of each movement. Sainte-Beuve was not an altogether
unprejudiced critic of the novelist; but his impeachment can hardly be
refuted, although Brunetiere would fain persuade us that the only
thing which may be reasonably inveighed against in Balzac's style is
its indelicacy or rather native non-delicacy.
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