'I have read,' I said, 'and liked, his narrative of the manner in which he forced on the Spanish war of 1822. I thought it well written.'
'It is, perhaps,' said Ampère, 'the best thing which he has written, as the intervention to restore Ferdinand, which he effected in spite of almost everybody, was perhaps the most important passage in his political life.
'There is something revolting in an interference to crush the liberties of a foreign nation. But the expedition tended to maintain the Bourbons on the French throne, and, according to Chateaubriand's ideas, it was more important to support the principle of legitimacy than that of liberty. He expected, too, sillily enough, that Ferdinand would give a Constitution. It is certain, that, bad as the effects of that expedition were, Chateaubriand was always proud of it.'
'What has Ballanche written?' I asked.
'A dozen volumes,' he answered. 'Poetry, metaphysics, on all sorts of subjects, with pages of remarkable vigour and finesse, containing some of the best writing in the language, but too unequal and too desultory to be worth going through.'
'How wonderfully extensive,' I said, 'is French literature! Here is a voluminous author, some of whose writings, you say, are among the best in the French language, yet his name, at least as an author, is scarcely known. He shines only by reflected light, and will live only because he attached himself to a remarkable man and to a remarkable woman.'
'French literature,' said Ampère, 'is extensive, but yet inferior to yours. If I were forced to select a single literature and to read nothing else, I would take the English. In one of the most important departments, the only one which cannot be re-produced by translation—poetry—you beat us hollow. We are great only in the drama, and even there you are perhaps our superiors. We have no short poems comparable to the "Allegro" or to the "Penseroso," or to the "Country Churchyard."'
'Tocqueville,' I said, 'told me that he did not think that he could now read Lamartine.'
'Tocqueville,' said Ampère, 'could taste, like every man of genius, the very finest poetry, but he was not a lover of poetry. He could not read a hundred bad lines and think himself repaid by finding mixed with them ten good ones.'
'Ingres,' said Beaumont, 'perhaps our greatest living painter, is one of the clever cultivated men who do not read. Somebody put the "Misanthrope" into his hands, "It is wonderfully clever," he said, when he returned it; "how odd it is that it should be so totally unknown."'