International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1. Various
souls and replied aloud, so that their dialogue with themselves might also be a useful conversation with the century in which they lived, or with the future. The human heart is an instrument which has neither the same number nor quality of chords in every bosom, and on which new notes may eternally be discovered and added to the infinite scale of sentiments and melodies in the universe. This is our part, poets and writers in spite of ourselves, rhapsodists of the endless poem that nature chants to men and God! Why accuse me, if you excuse yourselves? Are we not of the same family of the Homeridae, who from door to door recount histories, of which they are by turns the historians and the heroes? Is it, then, in the nature of thought to become a crime in becoming public? A thought, vulgar, critical, skeptical, dogmatic, may, according to you, be unvailed innocently: a sentiment, commonplace, cold, not intimate, awaking no palpitation within you, no response in others, may be revealed without violation of modesty; but a thought that is pious, ardent, lighted at the fire of the heart or of heaven, a sentiment burning, cast forth by an explosion of the volcano of the soul; a cry of the inmost nature, awaking by its accent of truth young and sympathetic voices in the present age or the future: and above all, a tear! a tear not painted like those which flow upon your shrouds of parade, a tear of water and salt, falling from the eyes, instead of a drop of ink, falling from the pen! This is crime! this is shame! this is immodesty, for you! That is to say, that whatever is cold and artificial is innocent in the artist, but what is warm and natural is unpardonable in the man. That is to say, modesty in a writer consists in exposing what is false, immodesty in setting forth what is true. If you have talent, show it, but not your soul, carrying mine away! Oh, shame! What logic!
But after all, you are right at bottom, only you do not know how to express it. It is perfectly true that there are mysteries, nudities, parts of the soul not shameful but sensitive, depths, personalities, last foldings of thought and feeling, which would cost horribly to uncover, and which an honorable and natural scruple would never permit us to lay bare, without the remorse of violated modesty. There is, I agree with you, such a thing as indiscretion of heart. I felt this cruelly myself, the first time when, having written certain poetic dreams of my soul certain too real utterances of my sentiments, I read them to my most intimate friends. My face was covered with blushes, and I could not finish. I said to them: "No, I cannot go farther; you shall read it." "And how is it," answered my friends, "that you cannot read to us what you are about to give to all Europe to read?" "No," I said, "I cannot tell why, but I feel no shame in letting the public read it, though I experience an invincible repugnance to reading it myself, face to face to only two or three of my friends."
They did not understand me—I did not understand myself. We together exclaimed at the inconsistency of the human heart. Since then I have felt the same instinctive repugnance at reading to a single person what cost me not a single effort of violated modesty to give to the public: and after having long reflected on it, I find that this apparent inconsistency is at bottom only the perfect logic of our nature.
And why is this? The reason is, that a friend is somebody and the public nobody; a friend has a face, the public has not; a friend is a being, present, hearing, looking, a real being—the public is an invisible being, a being of the reason, an abstraction; a friend has a name, and the public is anonymous; a friend is a confidant, and the public is a fiction. I blush before the one, because he is a man; I do not blush before the other, because it is an idea. When I write or speak before the public, I feel myself as free, as exempt from the susceptibilities of one man to another, as if I were speaking or writing before God and in the desert; the crowd is a solitude; you see it, you know that it exists, but you know it only as a mass. As an individual it does not exist. Now this modesty of which you speak, being the respect of one's self before some other person, when there is no person distinct on account of the multitude, becomes without a motive. Psyche blushed under a lamp because the hand of a single god passed over her, but when the sun gazed at her with his thousand rays from the height of Olympus, that personification of the modest soul did not blush before the whole heaven. Here is the exact image of the modesty of a writer before a single auditor, and of the freedom of his utterance before all the world. Do you accuse me of violating mysteries before you? You have not the right: I do not know you, I have confided nothing to you personally. You are guilty of impropriety in reading what is not addressed to you. You are somebody, you are not the public. What do you want with me? I have not spoken to you: you have nothing to say to me, and I nothing to reply.
So thought St. Augustine, Plato, Socrates, Cicero, Cæsar, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Montaigne, Alfieri, Chateaubriand, and all other men who have confided to the world the genuine palpitations of their own hearts. True gladiators they are in the human Colosseum, not playing miserable comedies of sentiment and style to distract an academy, but struggling and dying in earnest on the stage of the world, and writing on the sand, with the blood of their own veins, the heroism, the failings, or the agonies of the human heart.
Having said this, I resume these notes where I left them, blushing for one thing only before these critics, that is, for not having either the soul of St. Augustine or the genius of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in order to merit, by indiscretions as sacred and touching, the pardon of tender hearts and the condemnation of narrow minds, that take every movement of the soul for an obscenity, and hide their faces whenever they are shown a heart.
BALZAC
We have news from Paris of the death of Honore De Balzac, one of the most eminent French writers of the nineteenth century. "Eighteen months ago," says a Paris letter, "already attacked by dropsy, he quitted France to contract a marriage with a Russian lady, to whom he was devotedly attached. To her he had dedicated 'Seraphitus,' and he had accumulated in his hotel of the Beaujoin quarters all the luxuries which could contribute to her pleasure. He returned to France three months ago, in a state of extreme danger. Last week he underwent an operation for abscess in his legs: mortification ensued. On the morning of the 18th he became speechless, and at midnight he expired. His sister, Madame de Surville, visited his deathbed, and the pressure of her hand was the last sign he gave of intelligence." We must defer for another occasion what we have to say of the great novelist-the idol of women, even at seventy-the Voltaire of our age, as he was accustomed to style himself in private—the historian of society—French society—as it is. The author of Le Peau de Chagrin, Le Physiologie du Marriage, Le Dernier Chauan, Eugene Grandet, and the Scenes de la Vie Parisienne, and Scenes de la Vie de Province, was one of the marks of the era, and being dead, we will speculate upon him. At present we can only translate for the International the following funeral oration by Victor Hugo, pronounced at his grave:
"GENTLEMEN—The man who has just descended into this tomb is one of those whom the public sorrow follows to the last abode. In the times where we are all fictions have disappeared. Henceforth our eyes are fixed not on the heads that reign but on the heads that think, and the whole country is affected when one of them disappears. At this day, the people put on mourning for the man of talent, the nation for the man of genius.
"Gentlemen, the name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace that our epoch will leave in the future.
"M. de Balzac belonged to that potent generation of writers of the nineteenth century who came after Napoleon, just as the illustrious pleiades of the seventeenth century came after Richelieu, and in the development of civilization a law caused the domination of thought to succeed the domination of the sword.
"M. de Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest among the best. This is not the place to say all or that splendid and sovereign intelligence. All his books form only one hook, living, luminous, profound, in which we see moving all our contemporaneous civilization, mingled with I know not what of strange and terrible; a marvelous book, that the poet has entitled comedy, and which he might have called history; which assumes all forms and all styles: which goes beyond Tacitus and reaches Suetonius, which crosses Beaumarchais and reaches Rabelais; a book which is observation itself, and imagination itself; which is prodigal of the true, the passionate, the common, the trivial, the material, and which at moments throws athwart realities, suddenly and broadly torn open, the gleam of the most somber and tragic ideal.
"Without knowing it, whether he will or not, whether he consents or not, the author of this strange and immense work is of the mighty race of revolutionary writers. Balzac goes directly