Do you forgive me? whispered I to Madame DAnville, as I handed her to the salle a manger. Does not love forgive every thing? was her answer.
At least, thought I, it never talks in those pretty phrases.
The conversation soon turned upon books. As for me, I never at that time took a share in those discussions; indeed, I have long laid it down as a rule, that a man never gains by talking to more than one person at a time. If you dont shine, you are a foolif you do, you are a bore. You must become either ridiculous or unpopulareither hurt your own self-love by stupidity, or that of others by wit. I therefore sat in silence, looking exceedingly edified, and now and then muttering good! true! Thank heaven, however, the suspension of one faculty only increases the vivacity of the others; my eyes and ears always watch like sentinels over the repose of my lips. Careless and indifferent as I seem to all things, nothing ever escapes me: the minutest erreur in a dish or a domestic, the most trifling peculiarity in a criticism or a coat, my glance detects in an instant, and transmits for ever to my recollection.
You have seen Jouys Hermite de la Chaussee DAntin? said our host to Lord Vincent.
I have, and think meanly of it. There is a perpetual aim at something pointed, which as perpetually merges into something dull. He is like a bad swimmer, strikes out with great force, makes a confounded splash, and never gets a yard the further for it. It is a great effort not to sink. Indeed, Monsieur DA, your literature is at a very reduced ebb; bombastic in the dramashallow in philosophymawkish in poetry, your writers of the present day seem to think, with Boileau
Souvent de tous nos maux la raison est le pire.
Surely, cried Madame DAnville, you will allow De la Martines poetry to be beautiful?
I allow it, said he, to be among the best you have; and I know very few lines in your language equal to the two first stanzas in his Meditation on Napoleon, or to those exquisite verses called Le Lac; but you will allow also that he wants originality and nerve. His thoughts are pathetic, but not deep; he whines, but sheds no tears. He has, in his imitation of Lord Byron, reversed the great miracle; instead of turning water into wine, he has turned wine into water. Besides, he is so unpardonably obscure. He thinks, with Bacchus(you remember, DA, the line in Euripides, which I will not quote), that there is something august in the shades; but he has applied this thought wronglyin his obscurity there is nothing sublimeit is the back ground of a Dutch picture. It is only a red herring, or an old hat, which he has invested with such pomposity of shadow and darkness.
But his verses are so smooth, said Lady.
Ah! answered Vincent.
Quand la rime enfin se trouve au bout des vers, Quimporte que le reste y soit mis des travers.
Helas said the Viscount DAt, an author of no small celebrity himself; I agree with youwe shall never again see a Voltaire or a Rousseau.
There is but little justice in those complaints, often as they are made, replied Vincent. You may not, it is true, see a Voltaire or a Rousseau, but you will see their equals. Genius can never be exhausted by one individual. In our country, the poets after Chaucer in the fifteenth century complained of the decay of their artthey did not anticipate Shakspeare. In Hayleys time, who ever dreamt of the ascension of Byron? Yet Shakspeare and Byron came like the bridegroom in the dead of night; and you have the same probability of producingnot, indeed, another Rousseau, but a writer to do equal honour to your literature.
I think, said Lady, that Rousseaus Julie is over-rated. I had heard so much of La Nouvelle Heloise when I was a girl, and been so often told that it was destruction to read it, that I bought the book the very day after I was married. I own to you that I could not get through it.
I am not surprised at it, answered Vincent; but Rousseau is not the less a genius for all that: there is no story to bear out the style, and he himself is right when he says ce livre convient a tres peu de lecteurs. One letter would delight every onefour volumes of them are a surfeitit is the toujours perdrix. But the chief beauty of that wonderful conception of an empassioned and meditative mind is to be found in the inimitable manner in which the thoughts are embodied, and in the tenderness, the truth, the profundity of the thoughts themselves: when Lord Edouard says, cest le chemin des passions qui ma conduit a la philosophie, he inculcates, in one simple phrase, a profound and unanswerable truth. It is in these remarks that nature is chiefly found in the writings of Rousseau: too much engrossed in himself to be deeply skilled in the characters of others, that very self-study had yet given him a knowledge of the more hidden recesses of the heart. He could perceive at once the motive and the cause of actions, but he wanted the patience to trace the elaborate and winding progress of their effects. He saw the passions in their home, but he could not follow them abroad. He knew mankind in the general, but not men in the detail. Thus, when he makes an aphorism or reflection, it comes home at once to you as true; but when he would analyze that reflection, when he argues, reasons, and attempts to prove, you reject him as unnatural, or you refute him as false. It is then that he partakes of that manie commune which he imputes to other philosophers, de nier ce qui est, et dexpliquer ce qui nest pas.
There was a short pause. I think, said Madame DAnville, that it is in those pensees which you admire so much in Rousseau, that our authors in general excel.
You are right, said Vincent, and for this reasonwith you les gens de letters are always les gens du monde. Hence their quick perceptions are devoted to men as well as to books. They make observations acutely, and embody them with grace; but it is worth remarking, that the same cause which produced the aphorism, frequently prevents its being profound. These literary gens du monde have the tact to observe, but not the patience, perhaps not the time, to investigate. They make the maxim, but they never explain to you the train of reasoning which led to it. Hence they are more brilliant than true. An English writer would not dare to make a maxim, involving, perhaps, in two lines, one of the most important of moral truths, without bringing pages to support his dictum. A French essayist leaves it wholly to itself. He tells you neither how he came by his reasons, nor their conclusion, le plus fou souvent est le plus satisfait. Consequently, if less tedious than the English, your reasoners are more dangerous, and ought rather to be considered as models of terseness than of reflection. A man might learn to think sooner from your writers, but he will learn to think justly sooner from ours. Many observations of La Bruyere and Rochefoucaultthe latter especiallyhave obtained credit for truth solely from their point. They possess exactly the same merit as the very sensiblepermit me to addvery French line in Corneille:
Ma plus douce esperance est de perdre lespoir.
The Maquis took advantage of the silence which followed Vincents criticism to rise from table. We all (except Vincent, who took leave) adjourned to the salon. Qui est cet homme la? said one, comme il est epris de lui-meme. How silly he is, cried anotherhow ugly, said a third. What a taste in literaturesuch a talkersuch shallowness, and such assurancenot worth the answeringcould not slip in a worddisagreeable, revolting, awkward, slovenly, were the most complimentary opinions bestowed upon the unfortunate Vincent. The women called him un horreur, and the men un bete. The old railed at his mauvais gout, and the young at his mauvais coeur, for the former always attribute whatever does not correspond with their sentiments, to a perversion of taste, and the latter whatever does not come up to their enthusiasm, to a depravity of heart.
As for me, I went home, enriched with two new observations; first, that one may not speak of any thing relative to a foreign country, as one would if one was a native. National censures become particular affronts.
Secondly, that those who know mankind in theory, seldom know it in practice; the very wisdom that conceives a rule, is accompanied with the abstraction, or the vanity, which destroys it. I mean that the philosopher of the cabinet is often too diffident to put into action his observations, or too eager for display to conceal their design. Lord Vincent values himself upon his science du monde. He has read much upon men, he has reflected more; he lays down aphorisms to govern or to please them. He goes into society; he is cheated by the one half, and the other half he offends. The sage in the cabinet is but a fool in the salon; and the most consummate men of the world are those who have considered the least on it.
CHAPTER XXV
Falstaff. What money is in my purse?
Page. Seven groats and two-pence.
En iterum Crispinus.
The next day a note was brought me, which had been sent to my former lodgings in the Hotel de Paris: it was from Thornton.
My dear Sir, (it began)
I am very sorry that particular business will prevent me the pleasure of seeing you at my rooms on Sunday. I hope to be more fortunate some other day. I should like much to introduce you, the first opportunity, to my friends in the Rue Gretry, for I like obliging my countrymen. I am sure, if you were to go there, you would cut and come againone shoulder of mutton drives down another.
I beg you to accept my repeated excuses, and remain,
Dear Sir,
Your very obedient servant,
Thomas Thornton.
Rue St. Dominique,
Friday Morning.
This letter produced in me many and manifold cogitations. What could possibly have induced Mr. Tom Thornton, rogue as he was, to postpone thus of his own accord, the plucking of a pigeon, which he had such good reason to believe he had entrapped? There was evidently no longer the same avidity to cultivate my acquaintance as before; in putting off our appointment with so little ceremony, he did not even fix a day for another. What had altered his original designs towards me? for if Vincents account was true, it was natural to suppose that he wished to profit by any acquaintance he might form with me, and therefore such an acquaintance his own interests would induce him to continue and confirm.
Either, then, he no longer had the same necessity for a dupe, or he no longer imagined I should become one. Yet neither of these suppositions was probable. It was not likely that he should grow suddenly honest, or suddenly rich: nor had I, on the other hand, given him any reason to suppose I was a jot more wary than any other individual he might have imposed upon. On the contrary, I had appeared to seek his acquaintance with an eagerness which said but little for my knowledge of the world. The more I reflected, the more I should have been puzzled, had I not connected his present backwardness with his acquaintance with the stranger, whom he termed Warburton. It is true, that I had no reason to suppose so: it was a conjecture wholly unsupported, and, indeed, against my better sense; yet, from some unanalysed associations, I could not divest myself of the supposition.
I will soon see, thought I; and wrapping myself in my cloak, for the day was bitterly cold, I bent my way to Thorntons lodgings. I could not explain to myself the deep interest I took in whatever was connected with (the so-called) Warburton, or whatever promised to discover more clearly any particulars respecting him. His behaviour in the gambling house; his conversation with the woman in the Jardin des Plantes; and the singular circumstance, that a man of so very aristocratic an appearance, should be connected with Thornton, and only seen in such low scenes, and with such low society, would not have been sufficient so strongly to occupy my mind, had it not been for certain dim recollections, and undefinable associations, that his appearance when present, and my thoughts of him when absent, perpetually recalled.
As, engrossed with meditations of this nature, I was passing over the Pont Neuf, I perceived the man Warburton had so earnestly watched in the gambling house, and whom I identified with the Tyrrell, who had formed the subject of conversation in the Jardin des Plantes, pass slowly before me. There was an appearance of great exhaustion in his swarthy and strongly marked countenance. He walked carelessly on, neither looking to the right nor the left, with that air of thought and abstraction which I have remarked as common to all men in the habit of indulging any engrossing and exciting passion.
We were just on the other side of the Seine, when I perceived the woman of the Jardin des Plantes approach. Tyrrell (for that, I afterwards discovered, was really his name) started as she came near, and asked her, in a tone of some asperity, where she had been? As I was but a few paces behind, I had a clear, full view of the womans countenance. She was about twenty-eight or thirty years of age. Her features were decidedly handsome, though somewhat too sharp and aquiline for my individual taste. Her eyes were light and rather sunken; and her complexion bespoke somewhat of the paleness and languor of ill-health. On the whole, the expression of her face, though decided, was not unpleasing, and when she returned Tyrrells rather rude salutation, it was with a smile, which made her, for the moment, absolutely beautiful.
Where have I been to? she said, in answer to his interrogatory. Why, I went to look at the New Church, which they told me was so superbe.
Methinks, replied the man, that ours are not precisely the circumstances in which such spectacles are amusing.
Nay, Tyrrell, said the woman, as taking his arm they walked on together a few paces before me, nay, we are quite rich now to what we have been; and, if you do play again, our two hundred pounds may swell into a fortune. Your losses have brought you skill, and you may now turn them into actual advantages.
Tyrrell did not reply exactly to these remarks, but appeared as if debating with himself. Two hundred poundstwenty already gone!in a few months all will have melted away. What is it then now but a respite from starvation?but with luck it may become a competence.
And why not have luck? many a fortune has been made with a worse beginning, said the woman.
True, Margaret, pursued the gambler, and even without luck, our fate can only commence a month or two soonerbetter a short doom than a lingering torture.
What think you of trying some new game where you have more experience, or where the chances are greater than in that of rouge et noir? asked the woman. Could you not make something out of that tall, handsome man, who Thornton says is so rich?
Ah, if one could! sighed Tyrrell, wistfully. Thornton tells me, that he has won thousands from him, and that they are mere drops in his income. Thornton is a good, easy, careless fellow, and might let me into a share of the booty: but then, in what games can I engage him?
Here I passed this well-suited pair, and lost the remainder of their conversation. Well, thought I, if this precious personage does starve at last, he will most richly deserve it, partly for his designs on the stranger, principally for his opinion of Thornton. If he was a knave only, one might pity him; but a knave and fool both, are a combination of evil, for which there is no intermediate purgatory of opinionnothing short of utter damnation.