Chapter IV: Conclusion (3)

Yes, you are right. My progress is real, and my infernal
courage will be rewarded. Persuade my mother of this too, dear
sister; tell her to give me her patience in charity; her
devotion will be laid up in her favor. One day, I hope, a
little glory will pay her for everything. Poor mother, that
imagination of hers which she has given me throws her for ever
from north to south and from south to north. Such journeys tire
us; I know it myself! Tell my mother that I love her as when I
was a child. As I write you these lines my tears start--tears
of tenderness and despair; for I feel the future, and I need
this devoted mother on the day of triumph! When shall I reach
it? Take good care of our mother, Laure, for the present and
the future.... Some day, when my works are unfolded, you will
see that it must have taken many hours to think and write so
many things; and then you will absolve me of everything that
has displeased you, and you will excuse, not the selfishness of
the man (the man has none), but the selfishness of the worker.

Nothing can be more touching than that; Balzac's natural affections were as robust as his genius and his physical nature. The impression of the reader of his letters quite confirms his assurance that the man proper had no selfishness. Only we are constantly reminded that the man had almost wholly resolved himself into the worker, and we remember a statement of Sainte-Beuve's, in one of his malignant foot-notes, to the effect that Balzac was "the grossest, greediest example of literary vanity that he had ever known"--_l'amour-propre litteraire le plus avide et le plus grossier que j'aie connu_. When we think of what Sainte-Beuve must have known in this line, these few words acquire a portentous weight.

By this time (1832) Balzac was, in French phrase, thoroughly _lance_. He was doing, among other things, some of his most brilliant work, certain of the "Contes Drolatiques." These were written, as he tells his mother, for relaxation, as a rest from harder labor. One would have said that no work would have been much harder than compounding the marvellously successful imitation of mediaeval French in which these tales are written. He had, however, other diversions as well. In the autumn of 1832 he was at Aix-les-Bains with the Duchess of Castries, a great lady, and one of his kindest friends. He has been accused of drawing portraits of great ladies without knowledge of originals; but Mme. de Castries was an inexhaustible fund of instruction upon this subject. Three or four years later, speaking of the story of the "Duchesse de Laugeais" to one of his correspondents, another _femme du monde_, he tells her that as a _femme du monde_ she is not to pretend to find flaws in the picture, a high authority having read the proofs for the express purpose of removing them. The authority is evidently the Duchess of Castries.

Balzac writes to Mme. Carraud from Aix: "At Lyons I corrected 'Lambert' again. I licked my cub, like a she bear.... On the whole, I am satisfied; it is a work of profound melancholy and of science. Truly, I deserve to have a mistress, and my sorrow at not having one increases daily; for love is my life and my essence.... I have a simple little room," he goes on, "from which I see the whole valley. I rise pitilessly at five o'clock in the morning, and work before my window until half-past five in the evening. My breakfast comes from the club--an egg. Mme. de Castries has good coffee made for me. At six o'clock we dine together, and I pass the evening with her. She is the finest type (_le type le plus fin_) of woman; Mme. de Beauseant [from "Le Pere Goriot"] improved; only, are not all these pretty manners acquired at the expense of the soul?"

During his stay at Aix he met an excellent opportunity to go to Italy; the Duke de Fitz-James, who was travelling southward, invited him to become a member of his party. He discourses the economical problem (in writing to his mother) with his usual intensity, and throws what will seem to the modern traveller the light of enchantment upon that golden age of cheapness. Occupying the fourth place in the carriage of the Duchess of Castries, his quarter of the total travelling expenses from Geneva to Rome (carriage, beds, food, etc.) was to be fifty dollars! But he was ultimately prevented from joining the party. He went to Italy some years later.

He mentions, in 1833, that the chapter entitled "Juana," in the superb tale of "The Maranas," as also the story of "La Grenadiere," was written in a single night. He gives at the same period this account of his habits of work: "I must tell you that I am up to my neck in excessive work. My life is mechanically arranged. I go to bed at six or seven in the evening, with the chickens; I wake up at one in the morning and work till eight; then I take something light, a cup of pure coffee, and get into the shafts of my cab until four; I receive, I take a bath, or I go out, and after dinner I go to bed. I must lead this life for some months longer, in order not to be overwhelmed by my obligations. The profit comes slowly; my debts are inexorable and fixed. Now, it is certain that I will make a great fortune; but I must wait for it, and work for three years. I must go over things, correct them again, put everything _en etat monumental_; thankless work, not counted, without immediate profit." He speaks of working at this amazing rate for three years longer; in reality he worked for fifteen. But two years after the declaration we have just quoted, it seemed to him that he should break down: "My poor sister, I am draining the cup to the dregs. It is in vain that I work my fourteen hours a day; I can't do enough. While I write this to you I find myself so weary that I have just sent Auguste to take back my word from certain engagements that I had formed. I am so weak that I have advanced my dinner hour in order to go to bed earlier; and I go nowhere." The next year he writes to his mother, who had apparently complained of his silence: "My good mother, do me the charity to let me carry my burden without suspecting my heart. A letter for me, you see, is not only money, but an hour of sleep and a drop of blood."

We spoke just now of Balzac's sentimental consolations; but it appears that at times he was more acutely conscious of what he missed than of what he enjoyed. "As for the soul," he writes to Mme. Carraud in 1833, "I am profoundly sad. My work alone sustains me in life. Is there then to be no woman for me in this world? My physical melancholy and _ennui_ last longer and grow more frequent. To fall from this crushing labor to nothing--not to have near me that soft, caressing mind of woman, for whom I have done so much!" He had, however, a devoted feminine friend, to whom none of the letters in these volumes are addressed, but who is several times alluded to. This lady, Mme. de Berny, died in 1836, and Balzac speaks of her ever afterward with extraordinary tenderness and veneration. But if there had been a passion between them, it was only a passionate friendship. "Ah, my dear mother," he writes on New Year's day, 1836, "I am harrowed with grief. Mme. de Berny is dying; it is impossible to doubt it. No one but God and myself knows what my despair is. And I must work--work while I weep!" He writes of Mme. de Berny at the time of her death as follows. The letter is addressed to a lady with whom he was in correspondence more or less sentimental, but whom he never saw: "The person whom I have lost was more than a mother, more than a friend, more than any creature can be for another. The term _divinity_ only can explain her. She had sustained me by word, by act, by devotion, during my worst weather. If I live, it is by her; she was everything for me. Although for two years illness and time had separated us, we were visible at a distance for each other. She reacted upon me; she was a moral sun. Mme. de Mortsauf, in the 'Lys dans la Vallee,' is a pale expression of this person's slightest qualities." Three years afterward he writes to his sister: "I am alone against all my troubles, and formerly, to help me to resist them, I had with me the sweetest and bravest person in the world; a woman who every day is born again in my heart, and whose divine qualities make the friendships that are compared with hers seem pale. I have now no adviser in my literary difficulties; I have no guide but the fatal thought, 'What would she say if she were living?'" And he goes on to enumerate some of his actual and potential friends. He tells his sister that she herself might have been for him a close intellectual comrade if her duties of wife and mother had not given her too many other things to think about. The same is true of Mme. Carraud: "Never has a more extraordinary mind been more smothered; she will die in her corner unknown! George Sand," he continues, "would speedily be my friend; she has no pettiness whatever in her soul--none of the low jealousies which obscure so many contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this; but she has not the critical sense. Mme. Hanska is all this; but I cannot weigh upon her destiny." Mme. Hanska was the Polish lady whom he ultimately married, and of whom we shall speak. Meanwhile, for a couple of years (1836 and 1837), he carried on an exchange of opinions, of the order that the French call _intimes_, with the unseen correspondent to whom we have alluded, and who figures in these volumes as "Louise." The letters, however, are not love letters; Balzac, indeed, seems chiefly occupied in calming the ardor of the lady, who was evidently a woman of social distinction. "Don't have any friendship for me," he writes; "I need too much. Like all people who struggle, suffer, and work, I am exacting, mistrustful, wilful, capricious.... If I had been a woman, I should have loved nothing so much as some soul buried like a well in the desert--discovered only when you place yourself directly under the star which indicates it to the thirsty Arab."

His first letter to Mme. Hanska here given bears the date of 1835; but we are informed in a note that he had at that moment been for some time in correspondence with her. The correspondence had begun, if we are not mistaken, on Mme. Hanska's side, before they met; she had written to him as a literary admirer. She was a Polish lady of great fortune, with an invalid husband. After her husband's death, projects of marriage defined themselves more vividly, but practical considerations kept them for a long time in the background. Balzac had first to pay off his debts, and Mme. Hanska, as a Polish subject of the Czar Nicholas, was not in a position to marry from one day to another. The growth of their intimacy is, however, amply reflected in these volumes, and the denouement presents itself with a certain dramatic force. Balzac's letters to his future wife, as to every one else, deal almost exclusively with his financial situation. He discusses the details of this matter with all his correspondents, who apparently have--or are expected to have--his monetary entanglements at their fingers' ends. It is a constant enumeration of novels and tales begun or delivered, revised or bargained for. The tone is always profoundly sombre and bitter. The reader's general impression is that of lugubrious egotism. It is the rarest thing in the world that there is an allusion to anything but Balzac's own affairs, and to the most sordid details of his own affairs. Hardly an echo of the life of his time, of the world he lived in, finds its way into his letters; there are no anecdotes, no impressions, no opinions, no descriptions, no allusions to things heard, people seen, emotions felt--other emotions, at least, than those of the exhausted or the exultant worker. The reason of all this is of course very obvious. A man could not be such a worker as Balzac and be much else besides. The note of animal spirits which we observed in his early letters is sounded much less frequently as time goes on; although the extraordinary robustness and exuberance of his temperament plays richly into his books. The "Contes Drolatiques" are full of it, and his conversation was also full of it. But the letters constantly show us a man with the edge of his spontaneity gone--a man groaning and sighing, as from Promethean lungs, complaining of his tasks, denouncing his enemies, and in complete ill humor generally with life. Of any expression of enjoyment of the world, of the beauties of nature, art, literature, history, human character, these pages are singularly destitute. And yet we know that such enjoyment--instinctive, unreasoning, essential--is half the inspiration of the poet. The truth is that Balzac was as little as possible of a poet; he often speaks of himself as one, but he deserved the name as little as his own Canalis or his own Rubempre. He was neither a poet nor a moralist, though the latter title in France is often bestowed upon him--a fact which strikingly helps to illustrate the Gallic lightness of soil in the moral region. Balzac was the hardest and deepest of _prosateurs_; the earth-scented facts of life, which the poet puts under his feet, he had put above his head. Obviously there went on within him a vast and constant intellectual unfolding. His mind must have had a history of its own--a history of which it would be most interesting to have an occasional glimpse. But the history is not related here, even in glimpses. His books are full of ideas; his letters have almost none. It is probably not unfair to argue from this fact that there were few ideas that he greatly cared for. Making all allowance for the pressure and tyranny of circumstances, we may believe that if he had greatly cared to _se recueillir_, as the French say--greatly cared, in the Miltonic phrase, "to interpose a little ease"--he would sometimes have found an opportunity for it. Perpetual work, when it is joyous and salubrious, is a very fine thing; but perpetual work, when it is executed with the temper which more than half the time appears to have been Balzac's, has in it something almost debasing. We constantly feel that his work would have been vastly better if the Muse of "business" had been elbowed away by her larger-browed sister. Balzac himself, doubtless, often felt in the same way; but, on the whole, "business" was what he most cared for. The "Comedie Humaine" represents an immense amount of joy, of spontaneity, of irrepressible artistic life. Here and there in the letters this occasionally breaks out in accents of mingled exultation and despair. "Never," he writes in 1836, "has the torrent which bears me along been more rapid; never has a work more majestically terrible imposed itself upon the human brain. I go to my work as the gamester to the gaming-table; I am sleeping now only five hours and working eighteen; I shall arrive dead.... Write to me; be generous; take nothing in bad part, for you don't know how, at moments, I deplore this life of fire. But how can I jump out of the chariot?" We had occasion in writing of Balzac in these pages more than a year ago[2] to say that his great characteristic, far from being a passion for ideas, was a passion for _things_. We said just now that his books are full of ideas; but we must add that his letters make us feel that these ideas are themselves in a certain sense "things." They are pigments, properties, frippery; they are always concrete and available. Balzac cared for them only if they would fit into his inkstand.

He never "jumped out of his car"; but as the years went on he was able at times to let the reins hang more loosely. There is no evidence that he made the great fortune he had looked forward to; but he must have made a great deal of money. In the beginning his work was very poorly paid, but after his reputation was solidly established he received large sums. It is true that they were swallowed up in great part by his "debts"--that dusky, vaguely outlined, insatiable maw which we see grimacing for ever behind him, like the face on a fountain which should find itself receiving a stream instead of giving it out. But he travelled (working all the while en route). He went to Italy, to Germany, to Russia; he built houses, he bought pictures and pottery. One of his journeys illustrates his singular mixture of economic and romantic impulses. He made a breathless pilgrimage to the island of Sardinia to examine the scoriae of certain silver mines, anciently worked by the Romans, in which he had heard that the metal was still to be found. The enterprise was fantastic and impracticable; but he pushed his excursion through night and day, as he had written the "Pere Goriot." In his relative prosperity, when once it was established, there are strange lapses and stumbling-places. After he had built and was living in his somewhat fantastical villa of Les Jardies at Sevres, close to Paris, he invites a friend to stay with him on these terms: "I can take you to board at forty sous a day, and for thirty-five francs you will have fire-wood enough for a month." In his joke he is apt to betray the same preoccupation. Inviting Charles de Bernard and his wife to come to Les Jardies to help him arrange his books, he adds that they will have fifty sous a day and their wine. He is constantly talking of his expenses, of what he spends in cab hire and postage. His letters to the Countess Hanska are filled with these details. "Yesterday I was running about all day: twenty-five francs for carriages!" The man of business is never absent. For the first representations of his plays he arranges his audiences with an eye to effect, like an _impresario_ or an agent. In the boxes, for "Vautrin," "I insist upon there being handsome women." Presenting a copy of the "Comedie Humaine" to the Austrian ambassador, he accompanies it with a letter calling attention, in the most elaborate manner, to the typographical beauty and the cheapness of the work; the letter reads like a prospectus or an advertisement.

In 1840 (he was forty years old) he thought seriously of marriage--with this remark as the preface to the announcement: "_Je ne veux plus avoir de coeur!..._ If you meet a young girl of twenty-two," he goes on, "with a fortune of 200,000 francs, or even of 100,000, provided it can be used in business, you will think of me. I want a woman who shall be able to be what the events of my life may demand of her--the wife of an ambassador, or a housewife at Les Jardies. But don't speak of this; it's a secret. She must be an ambitious, clever girl." This project, however, was not carried out; Balzac had no time to marry. But his friendship with Mme. Hanska became more and more absorbing, and though their project of marriage, which was executed in 1850, was kept a profound secret until after the ceremony, it is apparent that they had had it a long time in their thoughts.

For this lady Balzac's esteem and admiration seem to have been unbounded; and his letters to her, which in the second volume are very numerous, contain many noble and delicate passages. "You know too well," he says to her somewhere, with a happy choice of words belonging to the writer, whose diction was here and there as felicitous as it was generally intolerable--"_Vous savez trop bien que tout ce qui n'est pas vous n'est que surface, sottise et vains palliatifs de l'absence._" "You must be proud of your children," he writes to his sister from Poland; "such daughters are the recompense of your life. You must not be unjust to destiny; you may now accept many misfortunes. It is like myself with Mme. Hanska. The gift of her affection explains all my troubles, my weariness, and my toil; I was paying to evil, in advance, the price of such a treasure. As Napoleon said, we pay for everything here below; nothing is stolen. It seems to me that I have paid very little. Twenty-five years of toil and struggle are nothing as the purchase money of an attachment so splendid, so radiant, so complete."

Mme. Hanska appears to have come rarely to Paris, and when she came to have shrouded her visits in mystery; but Balzac arranged several meetings with her abroad, and visited her at St. Petersburg and on her Polish estates. He was devotedly fond of her children, and the tranquil, opulent family life to which she introduced him appears to have been one of the greatest pleasures he had known. In several passages which, for Balzac, may be called graceful and playful, he expresses his homesickness for her chairs and tables, her books, the sight of her dresses. Here is something, in one of his letters to her, which is worth quoting: "In short, this is the game that I play; four men will have had, in this century, an immense influence--Napoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell. I should like to be the fourth. The first lived on the blood of Europe; _il s'est inocule des armees_; the second espoused the globe; the third became the incarnation of a people; I--I shall have carried a whole society in my head. But there will have been in me a much greater and much happier being than the writer--and that is your slave. My feeling is finer, grander, more complete, than all the satisfactions of vanity or of glory. Without this plenitude of the heart I should never have accomplished the tenth part of my work; I should not have had this ferocious courage." During a few days spent at Berlin, on his way back from St. Petersburg, he gives his impressions of the "capital of Brandenburg" in a tone which almost seems to denote a prevision of the style of allusion to this locality and its inhabitants which was to become fashionable among his countrymen thirty years later. Balzac detested Prussia and the Prussians.

It is owing to this charlatanism [the spacious distribution of
the streets, etc.] that Berlin has a more populous look than
Petersburg; I would have said "more animated" look if I had
been speaking of another people; but the Prussian, with his
brutal heaviness, will never be able to do anything but crush.
To produce the movement of a great European capital you must
have less beer and bad tobacco, and more of the French or
Italian spirit; or else you must have the great industrial and
commercial ideas which have produced the gigantic development
of London; but Berlin and its inhabitants will never be
anything but an ugly little city, inhabited by an ugly big
people.

"I have seen Tieck _en famille_," he says in another letter. "He seemed pleased with my homage. He had an old countess, his contemporary in spectacles, almost an octogenarian--a mummy with a green eye-shade, whom I supposed to be a domestic divinity.... I am at home again; it is half-past six in the evening, and I have eaten nothing since this morning. Berlin is the city of _ennui_; I should die here in a week. Poor Humboldt is dying of it; he drags with him everywhere his nostalgia for Paris."

Balzac passed the winter of 1848-'49 and several months more at Vierzschovnia, the Polish estate of Mme. Hanska and her children. His health had been gravely impaired, and the doctors had absolutely forbidden him to work. His inexhaustible and indefatigable brain had at last succumbed to fatigue. But the prize was gained; his debts were paid; he was looking forward to owning at last the money that he should make. He could afford--relatively speaking at least--to rest. His fame had been solidly built up; the public recognized his greatness. Already, in 1846, he had written: "You will learn with pleasure, I am sure, that there is an immense reaction in my favor. At last I have conquered! Once more my protecting star has watched over me.... At this moment the public and the papers turn toward me favorably; more than that, there is a sort of acclamation, a general consecration.... It is a great year for me, dear Countess."

To be ill and kept from work was, for Balzac, to be a chained Prometheus; but there was much during these last months to alleviate his impatience. His letters at this period are easier, less painfully preoccupied than at any other; and he found in Poland better medical advice than he deemed obtainable in Paris. He was preparing a house in Paris to receive him as a married man--preparing it apparently with great splendor. At Les Jardies the pictures and divans and tapestries had mostly been nominal--had been present only in grand names, chalked grotesquely upon the empty walls. But during the last years of his life Balzac appears to have been a great collector. He bought many pictures and other objects of value; in particular, there figures in these letters a certain set of Florentine furniture which he was willing to sell again, but to sell only to a royal purchaser. The King of Holland appears to have been in treaty for it. Readers of the "Comedie Humaine" have no need to be reminded of the author's passion for furniture; nowhere else are there such loving or such invidious descriptions of it. "Decidedly," he writes once to Mme. Hanska, "I will send to Tours for the Louis XVI. secretary and bureau; the room will then be complete. It's a matter of a thousand francs; but for a thousand francs what can one get in modern furniture? _Des platitudes bourgeoises, des miseres sans valeur et sans gout._"

Old Mme. de Balzac was her son's factotum and universal agent. His letters from Vierzschovnia are filled with prescriptions of activity for his mother, accompanied always with the urgent reminder that she is to use cabs _ad libitum_. He goes into the minutest details (she was overlooking the preparation of his house in the Rue Fortunee, which must have been converted into a very picturesque residence): "The carpet in the dining-room must certainly be readjusted. Try and make M. Henry send his carpet-layer. I owe that man a good _pour-boire_; he laid all the carpets, and I once was rough with him. You must tell him that in September he can come and get his present. I want particularly to give it to him myself."

His mother occasionally annoyed him by unreasonable exactions and untimely interferences. There is an episode of a letter which she writes to him at Vierzschovnia, and which, coming to Mme. Hanska's knowledge, endangers his prospect of marriage. He complains bitterly to his sister that his mother _cannot_ get it out of her head that he is still fifteen years old. But there is something very touching in his constant tenderness toward her--as well as something very characteristically French--very characteristic of the French sentiment of family consistency and solidarity--in the way in which, by constantly counting upon her practical aptitude and zeal, he makes her a fellow worker toward the great total of his fame and fortune. At fifty years of age, at the climax of his distinction, announcing to her his brilliant marriage, he signs himself _Ton fils soumis_. To his old friend Mme. Carraud he speaks thus of this same event: "The denouement of that great and beautiful drama of the heart which has lasted these sixteen years.... Three days ago I married the only woman I have loved, whom I loved more than ever, and whom I shall love until death. I believe that this union is the recompense that God has held in reserve for me through so many adversities, years of work, difficulties suffered and surmounted. I had neither a happy youth nor a flowering spring; I shall have the most brilliant summer, the sweetest of all autumns." It had been, as Balzac says, a drama of the heart, and the denouement was of the heart alone. Mme. Hanska, on her marriage, made over her large fortune to her daughter.

Balzac had at last found rest and happiness, but his enjoyment of these blessings was brief. The energy that he had expended to gain them left nothing behind it. His terrible industry had blasted the soil it passed over; he had sacrificed to his work the very things he worked for. One cannot do what Balzac did and live. He was enfeebled, exhausted, broken. He died in Paris three months after his marriage. The reader feels that premature death is the logical, the harmonious completion of such a career. The strongest man has but a certain fixed quantity of life to expend, and we may expect that if he works habitually fifteen hours a day, he will spend it while, arithmetically speaking, he is yet young.

We have been struck in reading these letters with the strong analogy between Balzac's career and that of the great English writer whose history was some time since so expansively written by Mr. Forster. Dickens and Balzac take much in common; as individuals they strongly resemble each other; their differences are chiefly differences of race. Each was a man of affairs, an active, practical man, with a temperament of almost phenomenal vigor and a prodigious quantity of life to expend. Each had a character and a will--what is nowadays called a personality--which imposed themselves irresistibly; each had a boundless self-confidence and a magnificent egotism. Each had always a hundred irons on the fire; each was resolutely determined to make money, and made it in large quantities. In intensity of imaginative power, the power of evoking visible objects and figures, seeing them themselves with the force of hallucination, and making others see them all but just as vividly, they were almost equal. Here there is little to choose between them; they have had no rivals but each other and Shakespeare. But they most of all resemble each other in the fact that they treated their extraordinary imaginative force as a matter of business; that they worked it as a gold mine, violently and brutally; overworked and ravaged it. They succumbed to the task that they had laid upon themselves, and they are as similar in their deaths as in their lives. Of course, if Dickens is an English Balzac, he is a very English Balzac. His fortune was the easier of the two, and his prizes were greater than the other's. His brilliant opulent English prosperity, centred in a home and diffused through a progeny, is in strong contrast with the almost scholastic penury and obscurity of much of Balzac's career. But the analogy is still very striking.

In speaking formerly of Balzac in these pages we insisted upon the fact that he lacked charm; but we said that our last word upon him should be that he had incomparable power. His letters only confirm these impressions, and above all they deepen our sense of his strength. They contain little that is delicate, and not a great deal that is positively agreeable; but they express an energy before which we stand lost in wonder, in an admiration that almost amounts to awe. The fact that his devouring observation of the great human spectacle has no echo in his letters only makes us feel how concentrated and how intense was the labor that went on in his closet. Certainly no solider intellectual work has ever been achieved by man. And in spite of the massive egotism, the personal absoluteness, to which these pages testify, they leave us with a downright kindness for the author. He was coarse, but he was tender; he was corrupt in a way, but he was hugely natural. If he was ungracefully eager and voracious, awkwardly blind to all things that did not contribute to his personal plan, at least his egotism was exerted in a great cause. The "Comedie Humaine" has a thousand faults, but it is a monumental excuse.

HENRY JAMES, JR.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Paris: Calmann Levy. 1876.

[2] December, 1875.

LOVE'S REQUIEM.

I.

Bring withered autumn leaves!
Call everything that grieves,
And build a funeral pyre above his head!
Heap there all golden promise that deceives,
Beauty that wins the heart and then bereaves--
For love is dead.

II.

Not slowly did he die!
A meteor from the sky
Falls not so swiftly as his spirit fled;
When with regretful, half-averted eye
He gave one little smile, one little sigh--
And so was sped.

III.

But, oh, not yet, not yet
Can my lost soul forget
How beautiful he was while he did live;
Or, when his eyes were dewy and lips wet,
What kisses, tenderer than all regret,
My love would give!

IV.

Strew roses on his breast!
He loved the roses best;
He never cared for lilies or for snow.
Let be this bitter end of his sweet quest!
Let be the pallid silence that is rest--
And let all go!

WILLIAM WINTER.

STORY OF A LION.

When Smith's Circus and Menagerie Combination Company went to Utica James Rounders was a lusty fellow of twenty, of some natural sagacity, and no school education. An interest in wild beasts had been developing in him for several years, and the odor of sawdust had become grateful to his nostrils. It was, however, only one kind of wild beast with which he was especially occupied. The quadruped of the noble aspect, stately gait, and tremendous roar--the lion--was the animal of Rounders's predilection and the object of his study.

He had gotten together some leading facts--so far as the stories of lion-killers may be regarded as such--concerning his favorite animal. He had heard how a lion had galloped off from the suburbs of the Cape of Good Hope with a two years' old heifer in his mouth, and jumped over a hedge twelve feet high, taking his burden over with him. In the same region of southern Africa another lion was seen bearing off a horse at a canter, the neck in his mouth and the body slung behind across his back. According to one who hunted the animal in the interior of Africa, a lion one day sprang on an ox, his hind feet on the quarters, his fore feet about the horns, and drew the head backward with such force as to break the back of the animal. On another occasion the same hunter saw a lion who took a heifer in his mouth, and though its legs trailed on the ground, he carried it off as a cat would a rat, and jumped across a wide ditch without difficulty. These accounts of the lion's strength were articles of faith with James Rounders. He had been told that the royal Bengal tiger of Asia was the equal in strength, if not the superior, of the African lion, he having been known to smash the head of a bullock by a single blow of his paw; but this Rounders did not believe.

He read with some difficulty, moving his lips as he did so, in order to get the matter clearly before his mind. He regarded it as a laborious task, and would sooner have chopped a cord of wood than read for half an hour. Notwithstanding the irksomeness of reading, there were two books which led him conscientiously through their pages to the end--those of Gordon Cumming and Jules Gerard on the hunting and killing of lions. The two volumes comprised his library, and furnished his mind with all the literary nutriment which it required.

Rounders went to the opening performance of Smith's Circus and Menagerie Combination Company. The ground leading up to the front of the canvas was garnished in the usual way. There were two small parasitic tents near the great one, on which primitive pictures hung of the woman of enormous girth and the calf with six legs. A man stood at the flap entrance of each, inviting people to enter and see these wonders of nature for a moderate sum. Near by was the lemonade wagon, whose proprietor was handing out glasses of his fluid with a briskness that showed that many were athirst.

When he entered the great tent the brass band was blowing blatantly, four cavaliers in rusty spangles and four dowdy women were riding round the ring, going through the old-time preliminary called the grand entry; for whatever else may change, the circus remains faithful to its traditions. The Yorick of the sawdust soon followed, and said the things which convulsed us with laughter in our tender years, and which cause us to smile in our maturity in the recollections they bring back. It was the same bold joke and the same grimace. The quips and quirks force on us the fact that there is but little originality in the human mind, and this was substantially the reflection of Rounders as he turned an indifferent ear to the wearisome wit. He prided himself on his acumen, and was not to be taken in with such worn buffoonery. Yet I trow that even Rounders envied the children who gave themselves over body and soul to the accredited man of humor.

He looked at the woman going through the hoops, the trick pony seeking for the hidden handkerchief, and the bareback rider turning a summerset, with a mild interest, for he had seen them or something like them before. The strong man who threw up the cannon balls into the air, and allowed them to fall on his nape, to roll down the hollow of his back to the ground, hardly aroused this indifferent spectator. What he looked forward to with curiosity was the performance of the lion-tamer, and when it did come it exceeded his expectations.

The master of the ring, attired in what resembled the uniform of an officer of the navy, stepped into the middle of the arena, and with the affectation of good breeding characteristic of the class, said, "Ladies and gentlemen: I have the honor to announce that John Brinton, the most extraordinary and celebrated tamer of lions in the world, will appear before you in his remarkable performance, during which every one is requested to keep his seat. Your attention is especially directed to the third part of it, as one of the marvels of the nineteenth century.

"To-morrow there will be a matinee at one o'clock, and in the evening the performance at the usual hour."

The speaker bowed and retired. The band struck up "See, the Conquering Hero Comes," as the Brinton in question came forward with that dash which belongs to lion-tamers everywhere. He was an athletic man between forty and fifty, of a stern countenance, and of a self-possession that was evident as soon as he appeared. He was arrayed in flesh-colored tights, with embroidered sky-blue velvet around the loins. He bore in one hand a black rod, five or six feet long, and in the other a whip. His hair was short, and he was cleanly shaved. Men who put their heads between lions' jaws generally are, for the titillation of a straggling hair might produce a cough that would prove tragical. He was quick and decided in all his movements, as the lion-tamer should be, in order to leave the beast no time to work itself up to a decision.

The cage which he entered contained two lions. One was large, grumbling, and fierce, who had passed a part of his life in the wilds of Africa; the other, and smaller of the two, was an emasculated beast, born behind the bars, and was as tractable as the animal usually is that has never known freedom. The performance consisted of three parts. The first was of the kind common to menageries. The tamer entered by the little door in a corner, with the celerity which all tamers employ, and stood for a moment in the statuesque immobility to which they are also given, in coming before the public. Having done this, he started forward with the black rod in his left hand, approached the animals, driving them to the end of the cage, the end of the rod nearly touching their faces. Here they stood under protest, growling. Then he raised his whip, struck the smaller beast, making it run from one end of the cage to the other, and leap over his shoulder in a way familiar to people who have visited a menagerie. He threw it down, put his foot on its prostrate body, and folded his arms in the character of victor. He lay down on it, pulled open its jaws, and inserted his head therein. Then he jumped up and dismissed it, with a cut of the whip, to one corner. During this time the larger lion had been an indifferent and surly spectator. The tamer approached, touching him with the rod, when he jumped forward with a growl, half crouching. Quickly the tamer caught hold of his upper jaw and tore it open, as great, rebellious cog-wheel growls issued from the mighty throat. Then he spurned him with his foot, bowed to the audience, went to the door, let himself out like a flash, the two animals making a bound against it as he disappeared.

"A, B, C," said Rounders. "Nothing new about that."

During the interim venders went about holding up photographic portraits of the tamer, lustily shouting his professional and private virtues. Their voices were, however, soon drowned in the clash of the brass band, which played a prelude to what was coming. At the conclusion of this a lone and last voice cried out, "Ice-cold lemonade," but it was promptly suppressed by those near the crier, as Brinton again appeared.

The second part was a short drama enacted with the larger animal, whose name was Brutus, the smaller one being driven into an adjoining cage. In the drama Brutus was the faithful friend of his master, the tamer, who is attacked by his enemies--a dozen supernumeraries in rusty spangles, who simultaneously thrust their spears through the bars from the outside of one end of the cage; when the spears are thus thrust through the bars, the master calls on his faithful servant Brutus to save his master's life, and rid him of his enemies, giving the command in the words:

"To the rescue, Brutus! Down with the miscreants!"

This was the "situation." Brutus advances at the word of command, and with a few blows from his great paws breaks the brittle spears which the somewhat _flasque_ enemies hold from without. At this the tamer strikes an attitude, and shouts in a melodramatic voice:

"Saved! And by this noble animal!"

These words are accompanied with the action of putting an arm affectionately around the neck of Brutus. This is the denouement.

He bows and retires as before, this time amid increased applause.

"Not bad," said the critical Rounders, "but nothing extra."

As Brinton disappeared the voices of the venders arose again, to be drowned as before by the blare of the wind instruments. Silence was restored for his next appearance. It was the third part which Rounders desired especially to see, and a surprise was reserved for him. In it the tamer entered the cage with a great piece of raw meat in each hand, Brutus being still alone, standing in the middle of the cage, eagerly looking out for his master. Brinton threw one of the pieces down in the middle of the floor, and the beast pounced on it as only a wild beast can, holding it between his paws as he gluttonously devoured it--not with a lateral movement of the jaws, but cat-like--amid half stifled, threatening growls, with menacing eyes turned from time to time toward the tamer. What the tamer then did was the most extraordinary performance which Rounders had ever seen, and sent thrills of admiration down his spinal column.

Brinton calmly approached the ferocious animal feeding, and took away from it the half finished piece of meat, and as he did so the beast growled, but submitted! After which he waved the half consumed beef in the air and bowed, amid great applause, in which Rounders heartily joined. Then the tamer said:

"Brutus, you have behaved so well I shall reward you with another piece."

Which he did, the beast seizing it and gorging himself as before. At this point the master of the ring stepped forth again as the tamer disappeared, and said:

"Ladies and gentlemen, when you recollect how difficult it is to take a bone away from even a pet dog, it will give you some idea of the marvellous performance you have just witnessed. It will be repeated to-morrow during the day and evening."

"This is a real show," said Rounders, wound up to enthusiasm. "But how does he do it?" This was the question which at once presented itself, and thereafter gave him no peace. With this perplexing inquiry was mingled a deep and abiding admiration. He was brought to a determination to which he had been moving for two or three years. In a word, he decided then and there to enter the vocation. He sought the man who had sent the tingling, shivering sensation down his vertebrae, and explained that he wanted to go with him on any terms and in any capacity.

Brinton had taken off his professional gear, and was undistinguishable from the sombre mass of his fellow citizens. He was out on the open space near the great tent, looking abstractedly at a man blowing with distended cheeks into a lung-testing machine. Rounders stood before him with the respect due to a man who snatches meat away from a ferocious lion.

After going through his work with the beasts, Brinton was usually tired and somewhat indifferent to the ordinary affairs of life. Other things seemed pale after the emotions of the cage. When Rounders explained to him what he wanted, the tamer said:

"You've got it."

"Got what?"

"The lion fever. You are lion struck. I've seen a good many like you. Its an uphill business. Not one keeper in fifty gets the handling of the brutes, and still the only way of going about it is to be a keeper. Besides handling them, you must have a _specialty_--a trick, you know. You've got to get up one yourself or worm it out of somebody else. As for the lion man telling anybody--that is something I haven't yet met with. You may take his life, but he won't give up his trick; it's his pride, his pleasure, and his bread and butter."

"I want to be a keeper all the same," returned Rounders.

"Come on then," said Brinton; "for we want a keeper, as we left one at the last town. He was a young man who had been reading in natural history about the noble nature of the lion, and he put his hand in between the bars to pat Brutus on the head. The surgeon examined him, and said his arm was fractured in several places--it was a regular chaw. We left him in the hospital. I tell you this as a warning not to go fooling round the beasts--that is, if you're coming."

The fate of the young man of a too trusting faith in the noble nature of the lion did not turn Rounders from his determination, and the next morning he was a part of the establishment.

At first the tongue of the tamer was pretty closely tied touching matters of his profession, but in due time he expanded into talk when he saw the genuine enthusiasm of the keeper for all that related to the subject, yet naturally practised strict reserve in everything concerning his particular work. In a word, professional secrets remained entombed.

He thought men were born to his vocation, and there was no resisting it. He had followed shows and hung around lion cages when he was a boy. Toward manhood the business had exercised such a fascination that he at last obtained employment with a tamer, whom he followed until he was killed by his beasts. This sanguinary spectacle deterred him for the time from the idea of entering a cage, but he continued his work.

There were two kinds of lions in the menageries--those born and raised in the cages and those caught as whelps wild in Asia and Africa. A few full grown were caught in pits. The first time he entered a cage was in a small show in a provincial town. The two lions whom he then encountered were old and sick, and bore the scars of twenty years' whipping on their bald hides; besides, they were born and brought up behind the bars. They growled from force of habit, but there was not much danger in them. The posters of course announced the two brutes as two of the most ferocious kings of the forest.

From these he passed to cage-bred lions in their prime, thence to the wild animals, of which Brutus was one. Until the tamer was able to work with these last, he was not considered as belonging to the rank of real tamers. The sensation he experienced the first time he entered the cage of wild animals was difficult to describe; it was an appreciation of imminent danger coupled with courage. When he issued from the cage his tights and spangled cloth felt as if they had just come out of the wash tub. He was steeled up to the point of bravery before the brutes, but ten minutes afterward a child could have knocked him over.

The principal secret of managing the brutes was not to be afraid of them. When the man showed fear he was lost. The mastery was not acquired so much through violence of treatment as an absolute sense of security in their presence. Audacity and self-possession were necessary every minute, every second; a moment's loss of equilibrium might prove fatal.

The buttery mode of treatment about which bookmen wrote had no existence in fact among showmen. No man managed his beasts with kindness. When his Brutus licked his face in his performance it looked affectionate, but it was not; he did it because he was afraid; and when the animal went through this osculatory business he was obliged to keep his eye on him with all the concentration of his will, for there was something in the beast's eyes which showed that he would sooner use his teeth than his tongue.

There was an impression that a lion once tamed is tamed for good, as a horse is broken to harness. This was an error; the lion had to be tamed every day anew in order to keep him in subjection.

Rounders asked him if he meant to say that all lions were vicious. To which he answered negatively. There were good lions and bad lions, just as there were good and bad men. The bad beasts, however, were more numerous than the others, for it was their nature to kill to provide for their hunger. The book talk about their generosity was not trustworthy; the instinct of the beast was to kill when it was hungry, but when its stomach was full it was less dangerous. He had seen the beast in its wild state, having hunted him in Africa. He had captured Brutus there when the animal was two years old; he was then ten, but always retained something of his wild nature. He was secured in a pit with his mother, the mother being shot.