“Oh, I say! you must learn your trade,” said Lousteau, laughing. “Given that the book was a masterpiece, under the stroke of your pen it must turn to dull trash, dangerous and unwholesome stuff.” “But how?” “You turn all the good points into bad ones.” “I am incapable of such a juggler’s feat.” “My dear boy, a journalist is a juggler; a man must make up his mind to the drawbacks of the calling. Look here! I am not a bad fellow; this is the way _I_ should set to work myself. Attention! You might begin by praising the book, and amuse yourself a while by saying what you really think. ‘Good,’ says the reader, ‘this critic is not jealous; he will be impartial, no doubt,’ and from that point your public will think that your criticism is a piece of conscientious work. Then, when you have won your reader’s confidence, you will regret that you must blame the tendency and influence of such work upon French literature. ‘Does not France,’ you will say, ‘sway the whole intellectual world? French writers have kept Europe in the path of analysis and philosophical criticism from age to age by their powerful style and the original turn given by them to ideas.’ Here, for the benefit of the philistine, insert a panegyric on Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Buffon. Hold forth upon the inexorable French language; show how it spreads a varnish, as it were, over thought. Let fall a few aphorisms, such as—‘A great writer in France is invariably a great man; he writes in a language which compels him to think; it is otherwise in other countries’—and so on, and so on. Then, to prove your case, draw a comparison between Rabener, the German satirical moralist, and La Bruyère. Nothing gives a critic such an air as an apparent familiarity with foreign literature. Kant is Cousin’s pedestal.