Produced by David Widger
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
It is many days since I wrote to you, and but for your delightful notejust received, reproaching me for silence, I should still be under thespell of that awe which certain words of M. Savarin were well fitted toproduce. Chancing to ask him if he had written to you lately, he said,with that laugh of his, good-humouredly ironical, "No, Mademoiselle, I amnot one of the Facheux whom Moliere has immortalized. If the meetingof lovers should be sacred from the intrusion of a third person, howeveramiable, more sacred still should be the parting between an author andhis work. Madame de Grantmesnil is in that moment so solemn to a geniusearnest as hers,—she is bidding farewell to a companion with whom, oncedismissed into the world, she can never converse familiarly again; itceases to be her companion when it becomes ours. Do not let us disturbthe last hours they will pass together."
These words struck me much. I suppose there is truth in them. I cancomprehend that a work which has long been all in all to its author,concentrating his thoughts, gathering round it the hopes and fears of hisinmost heart, dies, as it were, to him when he has completed its life forothers, and launched it into a world estranged from the solitude in whichit was born and formed. I can almost conceive that, to a writer likeyou, the very fame which attends the work thus sent forth chills your ownlove for it. The characters you created in a fairyland, known but toyourself, must lose something of their mysterious charm when you hearthem discussed and cavilled at, blamed or praised, as if they were reallythe creatures of streets and salons.
I wonder if hostile criticism pains or enrages you as it seems to do suchother authors as I have known. M. Savarin, for instance, sets down inhis tablets as an enemy to whom vengeance is due the smallest scribblerwho wounds his self-love, and says frankly, "To me praise is food,dispraise is poison. Him who feeds me I pay; him who poisons me I breakon the wheel." M. Savarin is, indeed, a skilful and energeticadministrator to his own reputation. He deals with it as if it were akingdom,—establishes fortifications for its defence, enlists soldiers tofight for it. He is the soul and centre of a confederation in which eachis bound to defend the territory of the others, and all those territoriesunited constitute the imperial realm of M. Savarin. Don't think me anungracious satirist in what I am thus saying of our brilliant friend. Itis not I who here speak; it is himself. He avows his policy with thenaivete which makes the charm of his style as writer. "It is thegreatest mistake," he said to me yesterday, "to talk of the Republic ofLetters. Every author who wins a name is a sovereign in his own domain,be it large or small. Woe to any republican who wants to dethrone me!"Somehow or other, when M. Savarin thus talks I feel as if he werebetraying the cause of, genius. I cannot bring myself to regardliterature as a craft,—to me it is a sacred mission; and in hearing this"sovereign" boast of the tricks by which he maintains his state, I seemto listen to a priest who treats as imposture the religion he professesto teach. M. Savarin's favourite eleve now is a young contributor tohis journal, named Gustave Rameau. M. Savarin said the other day in myhearing, "I and my set were Young France; Gustave Rameau and his set areNew