Lost Illusions | Page 3

by the press--agree more or
less as to England. For myself, I can only say that I do not believe
things have ever been quite so bad in England, and that I am quite sure
there never has been any need for them to be. There are, no doubt,
spiteful, unprincipled, incompetent practitioners of journalism as of
everything else; and it is of course obvious that while advertisements,
the favor of the chiefs of parties, and so forth, are temptations to
newspaper managers not to hold up a very high standard of honor,
anonymity affords to newspaper writers a dangerously easy shield to
cover malice or dishonesty. But I can only say that during long practice
in every kind of political and literary journalism, I never was seriously
asked to write anything I did not think, and never had the slightest
difficulty in confining myself to what I did think.
In fact Balzac, like a good many other men of letters who abuse
journalism, put himself very much out of court by continually
practising it, not merely during his struggling period, but long after he
had made his name, indeed almost to the very last. And it is very hard
to resist the conclusion that when he charged journalism generally not
merely with envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, but with
hopeless and pervading dishonesty, he had little more ground for it than

an inability to conceive how any one, except from vile reasons of this
kind, could fail to praise Honore de Balzac.
At any rate, either his art by itself, or his art assisted and strengthened
by that personal feeling which, as we have seen counted for much with
him, has here produced a wonderfully vivid piece of fiction--one, I
think, inferior in success to hardly anything he has done. Whether, as at
a late period a very well-informed, well-affected, and well-equipped
critic hinted, his picture of the Luciens and the Lousteaus did not a little
to propagate both is another matter. The seriousness with which Balzac
took the accusation perhaps shows a little sense of galling. But putting
this aside, Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris must be ranked, both
for comedy and tragedy, both for scheme and execution, in the first
rank of his work.
The bibliography of this long and curious book--almost the only one
which contains some verse, some of Balzac's own, some given to him
by his more poetical friends--occupies full ten pages of M. de
Lovenjoul's record. The first part, which bore the general title, was a
book from the beginning, and appeared in 1837 in the Scenes de la Vie
de Province. It had five chapters, and the original verse it contained had
appeared in the Annalaes Romantiques ten years earlier with slight
variants. The second part, Un Grand Homme de Province, likewise
appeared as a book, independently published by Souverain in 1839 in
two volumes and forty chapters. But two of these chapters had been
inserted a few days before the publications in the Estafette. Here
Canalis was more distinctly identified with Lamartine than in the
subsequent texts. The third part, unlike its forerunners, appeared
serially in two papers, _L'Etat_ and Le Parisien, in the year 1843,
under the title of _David Sechard, ou les Souffrances d'un Inventeur_,
and next year became a book under the first title only. But before this
last issue it had been united to the other two parts, and had appeared as
Eve et David in the first edition of the _Comedie.
George Saintsbury

I

TWO POETS (Lost Illusions

Part I)
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION
To Monsieur Victor Hugo,
It was your birthright to be, like a Rafael or a Pitt, a great poet at an age
when other men are children; it was your fate, the fate of Chateaubriand
and of every man of genius, to struggle against jealousy skulking
behind the columns of a newspaper, or crouching in the subterranean
places of journalism. For this reason I desired that your victorious name
should help to win a victory for this work that I inscribe to you, a work
which, if some persons are to be believed, is an act of courage as well
as a veracious history. If there had been journalists in the time of
Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like marquises, financiers,
doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the province of the writer
of plays? And why should Comedy, qui castigat ridendo mores, make
an exception in favor of one power, when the Parisian press spares
none? I am happy, monsieur, in this opportunity of subscribing myself
your sincere admirer and friend,
DE BALZAC.

TWO POETS

At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the