Читать книгу International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1 - Various - Страница 6

We have news from Paris of the death of Honore De Balzac, one of the most eminent French writers of the nineteenth century. "Eighteen months ago," says a Paris letter, "already attacked by dropsy, he quitted France to contract a marriage with a Russian lady, to whom he was devotedly attached. To her he had dedicated 'Seraphitus,' and he had accumulated in his hotel of the Beaujoin quarters all the luxuries which could contribute to her pleasure. He returned to France three months ago, in a state of extreme danger. Last week he underwent an operation for abscess in his legs: mortification ensued. On the morning of the 18th he became speechless, and at midnight he expired. His sister, Madame de Surville, visited his deathbed, and the pressure of her hand was the last sign he gave of intelligence." We must defer for another occasion what we have to say of the great novelist-the idol of women, even at seventy-the Voltaire of our age, as he was accustomed to style himself in private—the historian of society—French society—as it is. The author of Le Peau de Chagrin, Le Physiologie du Marriage, Le Dernier Chauan, Eugene Grandet, and the Scenes de la Vie Parisienne, and Scenes de la Vie de Province, was one of the marks of the era, and being dead, we will speculate upon him. At present we can only translate for the International the following funeral oration by Victor Hugo, pronounced at his grave:

"GENTLEMEN—The man who has just descended into this tomb is one of those whom the public sorrow follows to the last abode. In the times where we are all fictions have disappeared. Henceforth our eyes are fixed not on the heads that reign but on the heads that think, and the whole country is affected when one of them disappears. At this day, the people put on mourning for the man of talent, the nation for the man of genius.

"Gentlemen, the name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace that our epoch will leave in the future.

"M. de Balzac belonged to that potent generation of writers of the nineteenth century who came after Napoleon, just as the illustrious pleiades of the seventeenth century came after Richelieu, and in the development of civilization a law caused the domination of thought to succeed the domination of the sword.

"M. de Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest among the best. This is not the place to say all or that splendid and sovereign intelligence. All his books form only one hook, living, luminous, profound, in which we see moving all our contemporaneous civilization, mingled with I know not what of strange and terrible; a marvelous book, that the poet has entitled comedy, and which he might have called history; which assumes all forms and all styles: which goes beyond Tacitus and reaches Suetonius, which crosses Beaumarchais and reaches Rabelais; a book which is observation itself, and imagination itself; which is prodigal of the true, the passionate, the common, the trivial, the material, and which at moments throws athwart realities, suddenly and broadly torn open, the gleam of the most somber and tragic ideal.

"Without knowing it, whether he will or not, whether he consents or not, the author of this strange and immense work is of the mighty race of revolutionary writers. Balzac goes directly to his object. He assails modern society face to face. From all he forces something: from some illusions, from others hope, from these a cry of pain, from those a mask. He unvails vice and dissects passion. He penetrates and sounds the heart, the soul, the sentiments, the brain, the abyss that each man has within him. And by a gift of his free and vigorous nature, by a privilege of the intelligences of our times,—who, having seen revolutions nearly and with their own eyes, perceive better the end of humanity and comprehend better the course of Providence,—Balzac came forth serene and smiling from those redoubtable studies which produced melancholy in Moliere and misanthropy in Rousseau.

"This is what he has accomplished among us. Such is the work he has left us, lofty and solid, a pile of granite, a monumental edifice, from whose summit his renown will henceforth shine. Great men make their own pedestals: the future charges itself with their statues.

"His death has struck Paris with stupor. But a few months since he returned to France. Feeling that he was about to die, he desired to see his country, like one who on the eve of a long voyage comes to embrace his mother.

"His life was brief, but crowded; fuller of labors than of days.

"Alas, the powerful and indefatigable laborer, the philosopher, the thinker, the poet, the man of genius, lived among us the life of storms, of struggles, of quarrels, of combats, common in all times to all great men. Today, behold him here at peace. He leaves collisions and hostilities. The same day he enters on glory and the tomb. Henceforth he will shine above all the clouds over our heads, among the stars of our country.

"And you all who are here, are you not tempted to envy him?

"Gentlemen, whatever be our sorrow in the presence of such a loss, let us resign ourselves to these catastrophes. Let us accept them in their poignancy and severity. It is good perhaps, and necessary, in an epoch like ours, that from time to time a great death should communicate a religious book to minds devoured by doubt and skepticism. Providence knows what it does when it thus puts a whole people face to face with the supreme mystery, and gives it Death to meditate upon, which is at once the great equality and the great liberty.

"Providence knows what it does, for here is the highest of instructions. There can be in all hearts only austere and serious thoughts when a sublime spirit majestically makes its entrance upon the other life; when one of those beings whom the visible wings of genius have long sustained above the crowd, suddenly puts forth those other wings that we cannot see, and disappears in the unknown!

"No, it is not the unknown! No, I have already said it on another mournful occasion, and I shall not weary in repeating it, it is not darkness, it is light! It is not the end, it is the beginning! It is not nothing, it is eternity! Is not this true, I ask all that hear me? Such graves as this are proofs of immortality. In the presence of the illustrious dead we feel more distinctly the divine destinies of this intelligence called man, which traverses the earth to suffer and to be purified; and we know that those who have shone with genius during life, must be living souls after death."

* * * * *