Again, as a reason for going back to the tone of literature which he has chosen, he says,—"Les auteurs ont souvent raison dans leurs impertinences contre le tems présent. Le monde nous demande de belles peintures—où en seraient les types? Vos habits mesquins—vos révolutions manquées—vos bourgeois discoureurs—votre religion morte—vos pouvoirs éteints—vos rois en demi-solde—sont-ils donc si poétiques qu'il faille vous les transfigurer?... Nous ne pouvons aujourd'hui que nous moquer—la raillerie est toute la littérature des sociétés expirantes."
M. Balzac concludes this curious essay on modern literature thus:—"Enfin, le tems présent marche si vite—la vie intellectuelle déborde partout avec tant de force, que plusieurs idées ont vieilli pendant que l'auteur imprimait son ouvrage."
This last phrase is admirable, and gives the best and clearest idea of the notions of the school on the subject of composition that I have anywhere met with. Imagine Shakspeare and Spenser, Swift and Pope, Voltaire and Rousseau, publishing a work with a similar prefatory apology!... But M. Balzac is quite right. The ideas that are generated to-day will be old to-morrow, and dead and buried the day after. I should indeed be truly sorry to differ from him on this point; for herein lies the only consolation that the wisdom of man can suggest for the heavy calamity of witnessing the unprecedented perversion of the human understanding which marks the present hour. It will not last: Common Sense will reclaim her rights, and our children will learn to laugh at these spasmodic efforts to be great and original as cordially as Cervantes did at the chronicles of knight-errantry which turned his hero's brain.
LETTER LXXII.
Breaking-up of the Paris season.—Soirée at Madame Récamier's.—Recitation.—Storm.—Disappointment.—Atonement.—Farewell.
My letters from Paris, my dear friend, must now be brought to a close—and perhaps you will say that it is high time it should be so. The summer sun has in truth got so high into the heavens, that its perpendicular beams are beginning to make all the gay folks in Paris fret—or, at any rate, run away. Everybody we see is preparing to be off in some direction or other,—some to the sea, some to philosophise under the shadow of their own vines, and some, happier than all the rest, to visit the enchanting watering-places of lovely Germany.
We too have at length fixed the day for our departure, and this is positively the last letter you will receive from me dated from the beauteous capital of the Great Nation. It is lucky for our sensibilities, or for our love of pleasure, or for any other feeling that goes to make up the disagreeable emotion usually produced by saying farewell to scenes where we have been very happy, that the majority of those whose society made them delightful are going to say farewell to them likewise: leaving Paris a month ago would have been a much more dismal business to us than leaving it now.
Our last soirée has been passed at the Abbaye-aux-Bois; and often as I have taken you there already, I must describe this last evening, because the manner in which we passed it was more essentially un-English than any other.
About ten days before this our farewell visit, we met, at one of Madame Récamier's delightful reception-nights, a M. Lafond, a tragic actor of such distinguished merit, that even in the days of Talma he contrived, as I understand, to obtain a high reputation in Paris, though I do not believe his name is much known to us;—in fact, the fame of Talma so completely overshadowed every other in his own walk, that few actors of his day were remembered in England when the subject of the French drama was on the tapis.