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 167 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.”
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 168 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.
M. DE BLOWITZ AT HIS SUMMER HOME.
This reticence is superb, and one of its practical results has been the remarkable physical vigor of this man who is after all no longer young. One should see him in his country home. M. de Blowitz went up and down the north coast of France, hunting for an eyry. He found it on the wooded top of one of the side slopes of the thousand and one ravines in which fishermen along that coast had fixed their cabins, at the small hamlet of Les Petites Dalles. Like Alphonse Karr at Etretat, he made the fame of this spot. Your guide-book will tell you the fact. “M. de Blowitz, correspondent of the English newspaper the ‘Times,’ has a villa here.” I defy you to find any other distinction special to this place. The high Normandy coast is always charming, but it is equally so at a hundred other points. And of what charm there is here simply as village, M. Blowitz’s presence would seem to threaten the partial extinction. For this very presence is rendering the spot famous and crowded. Sit in the afternoon listening to the three violins that provide the music, and, taking your absinthe on one of those hard benches within the narrow limits of the space there called Casino, you will run the risk of overhearing a conversation like this:
“This is your first summer here?”