Your L——.
LETTER XI.
London, Jan. 19th, 1827.
Dearest Julia,
R—— left London to-day for Harwich, and will be with you in a fortnight. I know how glad you will be to have a living witness of the sayings and doings of your L——; one whom you can question about so many things which, even with the best intentions cannot always find place in letters.
I have now settled myself into a town life again. Yesterday I dined with Prince E——, where the—— secretary of legation kept us in an incessant laugh. He is a kind of agreeable buffoon, and although of very mean extraction, a superlative ultra; (‘tel le maitre, tel le valet.’) I have often admired the talent of the French, and envied it too, for making the most amusing stories out of the most common-place incidents;—such as lose all their salt coming from any mouth but theirs.
Nobody possesses this talent in a higher degree than Monsieur R——. He affords another proof that it is entirely the result of a language so admirably adapted to produce it, and of an education which springs from the same source; for Monsieur R—— is a German—I think a Swabian; but was brought to France when only two years old, and educated as a Frenchman. Language makes the man, more than blood;—though ’tis true, blood has first made the language.
‘Au reste,’ one must acknowledge that however brilliant such agreeable chatter may be at the moment, it goes out like a fusee, and leaves nothing on the memory; so that the pedantic German feels a sort of uneasiness after listening to it, and regrets having spent his time so unprofitably. Had it been possible to that element of Germanism which formed our language, to give it that lightness, roundness, agreeable equivocalness, and at the same time precision and definiteness,—qualities which are called into full play in society by French audacity,—the conversation of the German would certainly have been the more satisfactory of the two, for he would never have neglected to connect the useful with the agreeable. As it is, we Germans have nothing left in society, but that sort of talent which the French call ‘l’esprit des escaliers;’—that, namely, which suggests to a man as he is going down stairs, the clever things he might have said in the ‘salon.’
Of this Frenchman’s fireworks and crackers I retain nothing but the following anecdote. A diplomatic writer, who passed as authority in the time of Louis the Fourteenth, concluded a treatise on the great privileges pertaining to foreign envoys, with the following words;—‘mais dès qu’un ambassadeur est mort, il rentre dans la vie privée.’
January 22nd.