th its glands ready to
open, displaying the spikes of its fire above the starred jasmine and
dominating the incessant rain of pollen, a fair cloud that sparkles in
the air, reflecting the light in its myriad glistening atoms. 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. If the _Contes
Drolatiques_ alone had been in question, this lesser accusation might
suffice. But there are the _Lost Illusions_, the _Bachelor's
Household_, and _Cousin Bette_, not to mention other novels, in which
the scenes of vice are dwelt upon with visible complacency and a
glamour is created and thrown over them by the writer's imagination,
in such a way that the effect is nauseous in proportion as it is
pleasurable. The artistic representation of vice and crime is
justifiable only in so far as the mind contemplating it is carried out
and beyond into the sphere of sane emotion. True, by considerable
portions of the _Comedie Humaine_ only sane emotions are roused; but
these portions are, more often than not, those wherefrom the author's
peculiar genius is absent. It is in less conspicuous works, or those
like the _Cure of Tours_, the _Country Doctor_, _Cesar Birotteau_,
_Cousin Pons_, the _Reverse Side of Contemporary History_ tha