When Taine died, people whom his books had interested felt a sudden
longing to say all that they had been thinking about his famous theory
of the "_milieu_." Taine had been, with Renan, the chief literary
medium of thought in France; but while Renan was altogether useful,
caring as he did more for his method than for its results, Taine, with
his imperative and beautiful consistency, imposed on the younger
generation a habit of applying the principle of environment which was
somewhat lacking in criticism. No one but an artist of his surprising
agility and perceptions could have made such a method so universal.
The French wilfully attain clearness by defect of vision, but this is
the same thing as saying that they attain plausibility at the expense
of truth. Taine died, and the thing we lacked courage to say to his
face we have all been saying now that he is safe and irresponsible, as
well as unresponsive, in the earth.
An inevitable way, undoubtedly, to be assured of the insufficiency of
Taine's method is to read Taine's books; and the first book of all,
the "Essay on La Fontaine," is, I may insert the observation, as
conclusive as the last in this respect. But in order to obtain the
conviction that what the critic can get to know of the environing
conditions of any product, human or other, does not explain that
product, one needs not go to Taine's books; one has only to apply it
to the things and people one knows best. The result will be
unsatisfactory. The critic will find a thousand elements in that
particular product's individuality thus left unexplained; in a word,
the theory is one natural, no doubt, to the Olympians, who see all
things; but impracticable for men who, even at their best, see only
very little. Apply it to yourself; apply it to your friends. Apply it
to the person of whom I am going to speak, to M. de Blowitz, the Paris
correspondent of an English newspaper, the "Times." The act will
result in a failure, a scientific failure, whatever the artistic
success. Yet M. de Blowitz is a very remarkable human fact; and that a
philosophic or critical method cannot be applied to him with triumph,
for both him and the method--is this not of itself a consideration
extraordinary enough to vitiate the whole method? A much more
important thing to know than what determined this or that product,
whether it be the Book of Judges, or the Panama trial, or M. Taine, or
M. de Blowitz, is what they themselves determined; what followed,
because of their existence; and though this be reasoning in a dizzy
circle, I cling to the remark as a not unapt way to introduce my
subject. A chief reason why M. de Blowitz is worth considering is,
that he is and always has been a producer himself, a fact pregnant
with a thousand others, rather than the resultant of many vague facts
that have gone before. Most of us must be content with being,
comparatively speaking, only results. M. de Blowitz, prodigious result
as he is, is even more striking as initiator, as himself the creator
of a special environment, as himself in his own way a "final cause."
[Illustration: THE DINING-ROOM IN M. DE BLOWITZ'S PARIS HOME.]
Cosmopolite in a world becoming rapidly no larger than the tiniest
of the asteroids, M. de Blowitz is one of those who have most
contributed to this planetary shrinkage. His career is a continual
and entertaining illustration of the truth that tact can render even
tolerance successful. For he is the most amiable, the most tolerant
of men, and yet he has blazed a wide path through the woodland of
warring interests in which every man who seeks to succeed runs risk,
not only of losing his way, but of setting all the other denizens of
the forest against him. Ordinarily, success implies that a man is a
man of only one idea. What Frenchman said: "Truth is a wedge that
makes its way only by being struck"? I have forgotten. At all events,
isn't the remark nine times out of ten true? But M. de Blowitz
could apply for the honor of being the proverbial exception. His
workshop is full of wedges, and a more impatient man would have
used up all of them long ago, after having hammered the battered
tops into a condition of splay disfigurement. M. de Blowitz does not
do this. He knew and knows a better way. He can afford to wait. He
likes to wait. He has the good and amiable heart of a man who, like
Odysseus, has seen many men and countries, and knows that all
things--I include even people who are "bores"--have a point of
view that may be rendered interesting. Himself one of the most
individualized of contemporary institutions, his own career is a
standing argument against the sacredness of the idea of institutions.
Yet, though he has inevitably learned how relative things in general
are, he himself appeals to his friends as unusually self-contained
and absolute. Diplomatist among diplomatists, he is more powerful than
any of them, because he works in the interest of the whole rather than
in that of a part. Loyal absolutely to the "Times," which, to its
accidental honor, has entangled him, the "Times" is, at its best, only
the accidental projection, a kind of chronic double, of himself. His
letters are kind attentions which have the air of a continual
favor. Though better recompensed than favors sometimes are, and
though, whatever their contents, they will be read by everybody,
this is not only because what the author writes is important, but
because he does not write when he has nothing to say.