certainly is. There is a remedy in every district in London, in the
shape of a spacious and comfortable public room, which may be had for
the hiring. The rooms to which I allude are never used for doubtful
purposes. They are mainly devoted to Lectures, Concerts, and Meetings.
When used for a private object, they might be kept private by giving
each guest a card to present at the door, just as cards are presented
at the opera. The expense of the hiring, when set against the expense
of preparing a private house for a party, and the expense of the
injuries which crowding causes, would prove to be next to nothing. The
supper might be sent into the large room as it is sent into the small
house. And what benefit would be gained by all this? The first and
greatest of all benefits, in such cases--room. Room for the dancers to
exercise their art in perfect comfort; room for the spectators to move
about and talk to each other at their ease; room for the musicians in
a comfortable gallery; room for eating and drinking; room for
agreeable equal ventilation. In one word, all the acknowledged
advantages of a public ball, with all the pleasant social freedom of a
private entertainment.
And what hinders the adopting of this sensible reform? Nothing but
the domestic vanity of my beloved countrymen.
I suggested the hiring of a room, the other day, to an excellent
friend of mine, who thought of giving a party, and who inhumanly
contemplated asking at least a hundred people into his trumpery little
ten-roomed house. He absolutely shuddered when I mentioned my idea:
all his insular prejudices bristled up in an instant. "If I can't
receive my friends under my own roof, on my own hearth, sir, and in my
own home, I won't receive them at all. Take a room indeed! Do you call
that an Englishman's hospitality? I don't." It was quite useless to
suggest to this gentleman that an Englishman's hospitality, or any
man's hospitality, is unworthy of the name unless it fulfils the first
great requisite of making his guests comfortable. We don't take that
far-fetched view of the case in this domestic country. We stand on our
own floor (no matter whether it is only twelve feet square or not); we
make a fine show in our houses (no matter whether they are large
enough for the purpose or not); never mind the women's dresses; never
mind the dancers being in perpetual collision; never mind the supper
being a comfortless, barbarous scramble; never mind the ventilation
alternating between unbearable heat and unbearable cold--an
Englishman's house is his castle, even when you can't get up his
staircase, and can't turn round in his rooms. If I lived in the Black
Hole at Calcutta, sir, I would see my friends _there_ because I lived
there, and would turn up my nose at the finest marble palace in the
whole city, because it was a palace that could be had for the hiring!
And yet the innovation on a senseless established custom which I now
propose, is not without precedent, even in this country. When I was a
young man, I, and some of my friends, used to give a Bachelors' Ball,
once a-year. We hired a respectable public room for the purpose.
Nobody ever had admission to our entertainment who was not perfectly
fit to be asked into any gentleman's house. Nobody wanted room to
dance in; nobody's dress was injured; nobody was uncomfortable at
supper. Our ball was looked forward to, every year, by the young
ladies, as the especial dance of the season at which they were sure to
enjoy themselves. They talked rapturously of the charming music, and
the brilliant lighting, and the pretty decorations, and the nice
supper. Old ladies and gentlemen used to beg piteously that they might
not be left out on account of their years. People of all ages and
tastes found something to please them at the Bachelors' Ball, and
never had a recollection, in connection with it, which was not of the
happiest nature. What prevents us, now we are married, from following
the sensible proceeding of our younger days? The stupid assumption
that my house must be big enough to hold all my friends comfortably,
_because_ it is my house. I did not reason in that way, when I had
lodgings, although my bachelor sitting-room was, within a few feet
each way, as large as my householder's drawing-room at the present
time.
However, I have really some hopes of seeing the sensible reform, which
I have ventured to propose, practically and generally carried out,
before I die. Not because I advocate it, not because it is in itself
essentially reasonable; but merely because the course of Time is
likely, before long, to leave obstinate Prejudice no choice of
alternatives and no power of resistance. Party-giving is on the
increase, party-goers are on the increase, petticoats are on the
increase,--but private houses remain exactly as they were. It is
evidently only a question of time. The guests already overflow on to
the staircase. Give us a ten years' increase of the population, and
they will overflow into the street. When the door of the Englishman's
nonsensical castle cannot be shut, on account of the number of his
guests who are squeezed out to the threshold, then he will concede to
necessity what he will not now concede to any strength of reasoning,
or to any gentleness of persuasion. The only cogent argument with
obstinate people is Main Force--and Time, in the case now under
consideration, is sooner or later sure to employ it.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] For the information of ignorant young men, who are beginning life,
I subjoin the lamentable particulars of this calculation:--
£. s. d.
A Tulle Illusion spoilt 2 0 0
Repairing gathers of Moiré Antique 0 5 0
Cheap white lace dress spoilt 3 0 0
Do. blue gauze do. 1 6 0
Two new breadths of velvet for Mama 4 0 0
Cleaning my son-in-law's trousers 0 2 6
Cleaning my own coat 0 5 0
--------------
Total 10 18 68
CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE.--II.
PORTRAIT OF AN AUTHOR, PAINTED BY HIS PUBLISHER.
I.
The Author was born a Frenchman, and died in the year 1850. Over the
whole continent of Europe, wherever the literature of France has
penetrated, his readers are numbered by tens of thousands. Women of
all ranks and orders have singled him out, long since, as the marked
man, among modern writers of fiction, who most profoundly knows and
most subtly appreciates their sex in its strength and in its weakness.
Men, whose critical judgment is widely and worthily respected, have
declared that he is the deepest and truest observer of human nature
whom France has produced since the time of Molière. Unquestionably, he
ranks as one of the few great geniuses who appear by ones and twos, in
century after century of authorship, and who leave their mark
ineffaceably on the literature of their age. And yet, in spite of this
widely-extended continental fame, and this indisputable right and
title to enjoy it, there is probably no civilised country in the Old
World in which he is so little known as in England. Among all the
readers--a large class in these islands--who are, from various causes,
unaccustomed to study French literature in its native language, there
are probably very many who have never even heard of the name of HONORÉ
DE BALZAC.
Unaccountable as it may appear at first sight, the reason why the
illustrious author of Eugénie Grandet, Le Père Goriot, and La
Recherche de l'Absolu, happens to be so little known to the general
public of England is, on the surface of it, easy enough to discover.
Balzac is little known, because he has been little translated. An
English version of Eugénie Grandet was advertised, lately, as one of a
cheap series of novels. And the present writer has some indistinct
recollection of meeting, many years since, with a translation of La
Peau de Chagrin. But so far as he knows, excepting the instances of
these two books, not one other work, out of the whole number of
ninety-seven fictions, long and short, which proceeded from the same
fertile pen, has been offered to our own readers in our own language.
Immense help has been given in this country to the reputations of
Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue: no help whatever, or
next to none, has been given to Balzac--although he is regarded in
France (and rightly regarded, in some respects) as a writer of Action
superior to all three.
Many causes, too numerous to be elaborately traced within the compass
of a single article, have probably contributed to produce this
singular instance of literary neglect. It is not to be denied, for
example, that serious difficulties stand in the way of translating
Balzac, which are caused by his own peculiarities of style and
treatment. His French is not the clear, graceful, neatly-turned French
of Voltaire and Rousseau. It is a strong, harsh, solidly vigorous
language of his own; now flashing into the most exquisite felicities
of expression, and now again involved in an obscurity which only the
closest attention can hope to penetrate. A special man, not hurried
for time, and not easily brought to the end of his patience, might
give the English equivalent of Balzac with admirable effect. But
ordinary translating of him by average workmen would only lead,
through the means of feeble parody, to the result of utter failure.[5]
The difficulties, again, caused by his style of treatment are not to
be lightly estimated, in considering the question of presenting this
author to our own general public. The peculiarity of Balzac's literary
execution is, that he never compromises the subtleties and delicacies
of Art for any consideration of temporary effect. The framework in
which his idea is set, is always wrought with a loving minuteness
which leaves nothing out. Everything which, in this writer's mind, can
even remotely illustrate the characters that he depicts, must be
elaborately conveyed to the minds of his readers before the characters
themselves start into action. This quality of minute finish, of
reiterated refining, which is one of Balzac's great merits, so far as
foreign audiences are concerned, is another of the hindrances, so far
as an English audience is concerned, in the way of translating him.
Allowing all due weight to the force of these obstacles; and further
admitting that Balzac lays himself open to grave objection (on the
part of that unhappily large section of the English public which
obstinately protests against the truth wherever the truth is painful),
as a writer who sternly insists on presenting the dreary aspects of
human life, literally, exactly, nakedly, as he finds them--making
these allowances, and many more if more be needful--it is still
impossible not to regret, for the sake of readers themselves, that
worthy English versions of the best works of this great writer are
not added to the national library of translated literature. Towards
the latter part of his career, Balzac's own taste in selection of
subject seems to have become vitiated. His later novels, consummately
excellent as some of them were in a literary sense, are assuredly, in
a moral sense, not to be defended against the grave accusation of
being needlessly and even horribly repulsive. But no objections of
this sort apply to the majority of the works which he produced when he
was in the prime of his life and his faculties. The conception of the
character of "Eugénie Grandet" is one of the purest, tenderest, and
most beautiful things in the whole range of fiction; and the execution
of it is even worthy of the idea. If the translation already
accomplished of this book be only creditably executed, it may be left
to speak for itself. But there are other fictions of the writer which
deserve the same privilege, and which have not yet obtained it. "La
Recherche de l'Absolu,"--a family picture which, for truth, delicacy,
and pathos, has been surpassed by no novelist of any nation or any
time; a literary achievement in which a new and an imperishable
character (the exquisitely beautiful character of the wife) has been
added to the great gallery of fiction--remains still unknown to the
general public of England. "Le Père Goriot"--which, though it unveils
some of the hidden corruptions of Parisian life, unveils them nobly
in the interests of that highest morality belonging to no one nation
and no one sect--"Le Père Goriot," which stands first and foremost
among all the writer's works, which has drawn the tears of thousands
from the purest sources, has its appeal still left to make to the
sympathies of English readers. Other shorter stories, scattered about
the "Scènes de la Vie Privée," the "Scènes de la Vie de Province," and
the "Scènes de la Vie Parisienne," are as completely unknown to a
certain circle of readers in this country, and as unquestionably
deserve careful and competent translation, as the longer and more
elaborate productions of Balzac's inexhaustible pen. Reckoning these
shorter stories, there are at least a dozen of his highest
achievements in fiction which might be safely rendered into English;
which might form a series by themselves; and which no sensible
Englishwoman could read and be, either intellectually or morally, the
worse for them.
Thus much, in the way of necessary preliminary comment on the works of
this author, and on their present position in reference to the English
public. Readers who may be sufficiently interested in the subject to
desire to know something next about the man himself, may now derive
this information from a singular, and even from a unique source. The
Life of Balzac has been lately written by his publisher, of all the
people in the world! This is a phenomenon in itself; and the oddity of
it is still further increased by the fact that the publisher was
brought to the brink of ruin by the author, that he mentions this
circumstance in writing his life, and that it does not detract one
iota from his evidently sincere admiration for the great man with whom
he was once so disastrously connected in business. Here is surely an
original book, in an age when originality grows harder and harder to
meet with--a book containing disclosures which will perplex and dismay
every admirer of Balzac who cannot separate the man from his works--a
book which presents one of the most singular records of human
eccentricity, so far as the hero of it is concerned, and of human
credulity so far as the biographer is concerned, which has probably
ever been published for the amusement and bewilderment of the reading
world.
The title of this singular work is, "Portrait Intime De Balzac: sa
Vie, son Humeur et son Caractère. Par Edmond Werdet, son ancien
Libraire-Editeur." Before, however, we allow Monsieur Werdet to relate
his own personal experience of the celebrated writer, it will be
advisable to introduce the subject by giving an outline of the
struggles, the privations, and the disappointments which marked the
early life of Balzac, and which, doubtless, influenced his after
character for the worse. These particulars are given by Monsieur
Werdet in the form of an episode, and are principally derived, on his
part, from information afforded by the author's sister.
* * * * *
Honoré de Balzac was born in the city of Tours, on the sixteenth of
May, seventeen hundred and ninety-nine. His parents were people of
rank and position in the world. His father held a legal appointment in
the council-chamber of Louis the sixteenth. His mother was the
daughter of one of the directors of the public hospitals of Paris. She
was much younger than her husband, and brought him a rich dowry.
Honoré was her first-born; and he retained throughout life his first
feeling of childish reverence for his mother. That mother suffered the
unspeakable affliction of seeing her illustrious son taken from her by
death at the age of fifty years. Balzac breathed his last in the kind
arms which had first caressed him on the day of his birth.
His father, from whom he evidently inherited much of the eccentricity
of his character, is described as a compound of Montaigne, Rabelais,
and Uncle Toby--a man in manners, conversation, and disposition
generally, of the quaintly original sort. On the breaking out of the
Revolution, he lost his court situation, and obtained a place in the
commissariat department of the army of the North. This appointment he
held for some years. It was of the greater importance to him, in
consequence of the change for the worse produced in the pecuniary
circumstances of the family by the convulsion of the Revolution.
At the age of seven years Balzac was sent to the college of Vendôme;
and for seven years more there he remained. This period of his life
was never a pleasant one in his remembrance. The reduced circumstances
of his family exposed him to much sordid persecution and ridicule from
the other boys; and he got on but little better with the masters. They
reported him as idle and incapable--or, in other words, as ready
enough to devour all sorts of books on his own desultory plan, but
hopelessly obstinate in resisting the educational discipline of the
school. This time of his life he has reproduced in one of the
strangest and the most mystical of all his novels, "La Vie
Intellectuelle de Louis Lambert."
On reaching the critical age of fourteen, his intellect appears to
have suffered under a species of eclipse, which occurred very suddenly
and mysteriously, and the cause of which neither his masters nor the
medical men were able to explain. He himself always declared in
after-life, with a touch of his father's quaintness, that his brain
had been attacked by "a congestion of ideas." Whatever the cause might
be, the effect was so serious that the progress of his education had
to be stopped; and his removal from the college followed as a matter
of course. Time, care, quiet, and breathing his native air, gradually
restored him to himself; and he was ultimately enabled to complete his
studies at two private schools. Here again, however, he did nothing to
distinguish himself among his fellow-pupils. He read incessantly, and
preserved the fruits of his reading with marvellous power of memory;
but the school-teaching, which did well enough for ordinary boys, was
exactly the species of teaching from which the essentially original
mind of Balzac recoiled in disgust. All that he felt and did at this
period has been carefully reproduced by his own pen in the earlier
pages of "Le Lys dans la Vallée."
Badly as he got on at school, he managed to imbibe a sufficient
quantity of conventional learning to entitle him, at the age of
eighteen, to his degree of Bachelor of Arts. He was destined for the
law; and after attending the legal lectures in the various
Institutions of Paris, he passed his examination by the time he was
twenty, and then entered a notary's office in the capacity of clerk.
There were two other clerks to keep him company, who hated the
drudgery of the law as heartily as he hated it himself. One of them
was the future author of "The Mysteries of Paris," Eugène Sue; the
other was the famous critic, Jules Janin.
After he had been engaged in this office, and in another, for more
than three years, a legal friend, who was under great obligations to
Balzac the father, offered to give up his business as a notary to
Balzac the son. To the great scandal of the family, Honoré resolutely
refused the offer--for the one sufficient reason that he had
determined to be the greatest writer in France. His relations began by
laughing at him, and ended by growing angry with him. But nothing
moved Honoré. His vanity was of the calm, settled sort; and his own
conviction that his business in life was simply to be a famous man,
proved too strong to be shaken by anybody.
While he and his family were at war on this point, a change for the
worse occurred in the elder Balzac's official circumstances. He was
superannuated. The diminution of income thus produced was followed by
a pecuniary catastrophe. He had embarked almost the whole of his own
little remaining property and his wife's in two speculations; and they
both failed. No resource was now left him but to retire to a small
country house in the neighbourhood of Paris, which he had purchased in
his prosperous days, and to live there as well as might be on the
wreck of his lost fortune. Honoré, sticking fast to the hopeless
business of becoming a great man, was, by his own desire, left alone
in a Paris garret, with an allowance of five pounds English a month,
which was all the kind father could spare to feed, clothe, and lodge
the wrong-headed son.
And now, without a literary friend to help him in all Paris; alone in
his wretched attic, with his deal-table and his truckle-bed, his
dog's-eared books, his bescrawled papers, his wild vanity, and his
ravenous hunger for fame, Balzac stripped resolutely for the great
fight. He was then twenty-three years old--a sturdy fellow to look at,
with a big, jovial face, and a strong square forehead, topped by a
very untidy and superfluous allowance of long tangled hair. His only
difficulty at starting was what to begin upon. After consuming many
lonely months in sketching out comedies, operas, and novels, he
finally obeyed the one disastrous rule which seems to admit of no
exception in the early lives of men of letters, and fixed the whole
bent of his industry and his genius on the production of a tragedy.
After infinite pains and long labour, the great work was completed.
The subject was Cromwell; and the treatment, in Balzac's hands,
appears to have been so inconceivably bad, that even his own
family--to say nothing of other judicious friends--told him in the
plainest terms, when he read it to them, that he had perpetrated a
signal failure. Modest men might have been discouraged by this. Balzac
took his manuscript back to his garret, standing higher in his own
estimation than ever. "I will give up being a great dramatist," he
told his parents at parting, "and I will be a great novelist instead."
The vanity of the man expressed itself with this sublime disregard of
ridicule all through his life. It was a precious quality to him--it is
surely (however unquestionably offensive it may be to our friends) a
precious quality to all of us. What man ever yet did anything great,
without beginning with a profound belief in his own untried powers?
Confident as ever, therefore, in his own resources, Balzac now took up
the pen once more--this time, in the character of a novelist. But
another and a serious check awaited him at the outset. Fifteen months
of solitude, privation, and reckless hard writing--months which are
recorded in the pages of "La Peau de Chagrin" with a fearful and
pathetic truth, drawn straight from the bitterest of all experiences,
the experience of studious poverty--had reduced him to a condition of
bodily weakness which made all present exertion of his mental powers
simply hopeless, and which obliged him to take refuge--a worn-out,
wasted man, at the age of twenty-three--in his father's quiet little
country house. Here, under his mother's care, his exhausted energies
slowly revived; and here, in the first days of his convalescence, he
returned, with the grim resolution of despair, to working out the old
dream in the garret, to resuming the old hopeless business of making
himself a great man.