It might have been scarcely safe to class M. Armand de Pontmartin with the light horse during his lifetime; he would at any rate, in all probability, have taken care to show that light horsemen not only do not belong to the non-combatant divisions of an army, but are one of its most formidable arms of offence and defence. The extreme voluminousness (he reprinted some fifty or sixty volumes of his Samedis and other work) of this Royalist critic; the sharpness of his tongue, especially in a book entitled Les Jeudis de Madame Charbonneau, which fluttered literary critics in the middle years of the Second Empire; and the fact that Sainte-Beuve took the field against him on more than one occasion, have created, I believe, rather an unfavourable impression. This is not quite fair. M. de Pontmartin wrote, or at least republished, too much; he was too generally under the influence of splenetic partisanship in more than one kind, and there was in his criticism a certain superficiality and tendency to gossip round a subject, whether in attack or in caress, rather than to grasp and penetrate it. But he had great acuteness, wrote an admirable French style of the older and purer kind, and certainly had no reason to be ashamed of the way in which he harassed the “Naturalists” in his later years of contribution to the Gazette de France. The other publications of these years[[893]] show a mellowing of temper and no loss of ability: while even in the earlier Samedis a great number of true things, well put, may be found.

Veuillot.

But the most formidable of French critical Pandours—a man of genius in his own way, and the inspirer in that way of no small or inconspicuous divisions of journalism in other countries and since his own time—was Louis Veuillot. Most of his “swashbuckler” writing—to do him justice he did not merely swash the buckler, but had a right swashing blow with the sword at his enemy’s face and body—was directed to religious and political matters. But he had a real interest in literature: and though his principles, as Extreme Right and Extreme Left principles generally do, allowed and indeed encouraged him to regard no blow as foul in their service, he is perhaps less unscrupulous in administering literary sensations[[894]] than in dealing out others.

The twelve solid volumes of his Mélanges,[[895]] despite the apparently ephemeral character of many of their subjects, are still excellent reading, especially for the judicious student who knows how to skip, and does not disdain to do so now and then. Even when Veuillot raises false issues he is seldom quite negligible; and when he is in sympathy with his subject he is sometimes extraordinarily happy; while one seldom or never detects in him the note of personal spite, or the mere pedantic snarling, which, as has been said, are the unpardonable sins of criticism.

It might surprise some people who have heard of Veuillot only as a tomahawk-and-black-flag critic to read the affectionate and admirably executed eulogy of Edouard Ourliac, at iv. 580 of the second series; until Sainte-Beuve went out of his way to offend the Clericals, Veuillot appreciated him; and even in regard to Hugo, his handling (at ii. 542 of the second series) is astonishingly clever. Further, Veuillot is very seldom silly: one of the few instances I can think of, is his attack on Sainte-Beuve and Rabelais. It is never quite easy to understand what there is in Master Francis which upsets and disorganises even the most intelligent Roman Catholic critics, and the fact is one of the heaviest charges against the Roman form of Catholicism, from the literary point of view. Of poetry, Veuillot had not much sense; one would hardly expect it in him, and it is certain that his doctrine, that a great poet must sing ni sa dame, ni la dame d’autrui, ni les dames de tout le monde, would, if it were carried out universally, make poetry extremely uninteresting. He could be vulgar, as in his attack on Edmond About (at v. 372 of the second series), but then it has to be remembered that About could be and was extremely vulgar himself, and that the greatest danger of this sort of rough-and-tumble journalism is that you are too apt to accept the weapons and the methods of the adversary.

Not so black as, &c.

We have little space for “Mr Bludyer” in this book, and therefore it is that I have given some to his greatest and most gifted representative in the flesh during our time. One may think indeed—I do—that Mr Bludyer is a very unnecessary evil,—that it is perfectly possible to fight as keenly and as stanchly as you like with the pen, and yet never write otherwise than fairly, honestly, and like a gentleman. But whether Mr Bludyer must come or not, he generally does; and when he does, it would be well if he always had the wits, and the raciness, and, on the whole, the freedom from mere dirty selfish vanities and jealousies and greeds, which characterised the redoubtable and notorious author of the Odeurs de Paris.