FRENCH AND ENGLISH SOCIAL FAILURES.

The French social failure is generally a radical.  If he had cared to do as plenty of others do (and seeing you prosperous, he accompanies this with an expressive glance), if he had cared to intrigue and curry favor, he too could have cut a figure in the world.  But unhappily for himself, he does not know how to disguise his opinions; he is, according to the formula, poor but honest.

It is his pride that leads him to avoid the lucky ones of the earth; he has no desire to be taken for a schemer.  If he has lost all else, honor still is left, and this, his only remaining treasure, he intends to preserve intact.

He despises money, and if he does not return that little loan he borrowed of you, it is because he presumes that your contempt for filthy lucre is equal to his own.

Yet the sight of gold melts him, and there flits across his face a smile of satisfaction, mingled, however, with a tinge of sadness at the thought of being caught capitulating with the enemy.  But to convince himself that he has lost none of his independence of character, he goes straightway and says evil of you, so that no man shall say of him that he was corrupted by the loan of a paltry coin.

You will generally find that he has been bankrupt once or twice; but as that has not made a rich man of him, you conclude that, if he has not a great love of money, neither has he a great talent for business.

He lays his poverty at everyone’s door but his own.  Society does not understand him.  He shall go to his grave without having had a chance of revealing himself to the world.  Meanwhile he opens a general agency.  Not having been successful with his own affairs, he hopes to have better luck with other people’s.

As a rule, you find that he has married a servant or a laundress, “to pay a debt he owed to Society,” as he puts it.  But Society, who is but a thankless jade, turns her back upon him and his wife.  Never mind, he has done his duty.  Upon this point he finds nothing to reproach himself with.  Some men marry for money; thank Heaven, he is not one of that sort.

Let anything you undertake prove a success, and you will hear him say that he had thought of doing it long ago; it was only his idea stolen from him.  But there’s the rub; what is the use of ideas, when one has no capital?

And, instead of setting to work to get a capital, he writes anonymous letters.

He occasionally talks of committing suicide, of throwing himself into the sea; but this idea of his has been stolen so many times over that he gives it up in disgust.

When he does die, it will be of spite.

You will survive the loss of him without difficulty.

His presence is a hair in your soup, a crumb in your bed.

The French social failure is not uncommonly a philosopher, and even keeps a spark of facetiousness through all his misfortunes.

About ten years ago, I was talking one day with a Frenchman, who had been established in England some time. Established! I am getting facetious, too, you see.

I was erroneously maintaining to him that imprisonment was still inflicted in England for debt.

“You are mistaken, I can assure you,” said he.

“I do not think so,” I replied.

“Imprisonment for debt was abolished two years ago.”

“Are you quite sure?” said I, seeing him so positive.

“Parbleu! I ought to know better than you,” he said.  “I was the last to come out.”

The English social failure is much more humble than his like in France, for the simple reason that, in France, poverty is no crime, while in England, as in America, it is.  Apart from this the two types do not differ much.

In the commercial world, the English social failure is an agent of some sort; generally wine or coal.  In the exercise of his calling, he requires no capital, nor even a cellar.  He not unfrequently entitles himself General Agent:  this, when the wreck is at hand.  Such are the straws he clutches at; if they should break, he sinks, and is heard of no more, unless his wife comes to the rescue, by setting up a lodging house or a boarding school for young ladies.  There, once more in smooth water, he wields the blacking brush, makes acquaintance with the knife board, or gets in the provisions.  In allowing himself to be kept by his wife, he feels he loses some dignity, but if she should adopt any airs of superiority over him, he can always bring her to a sense of duty by beating her.

In the republics of art and letters, you generally find him playing the part of critic, consoling himself for his failures by abusing the artists who sell their pictures, or the authors who sell their books.  For these he knows no pity.  He can all the more easily abuse his dear brethren of the quill or brush that he has not to sign his invectives; his prose is anonymous.  Once a week, in the columns of some penny paper, he can, with perfect impunity, relieve his heart of the venom it contains.

The mud he scatters has one good quality-it does not stain; one fillip ... and it is gone.

Here is a sample of this kind of production.  I extract it from a paper as pretentious as it is little read: 

“The fortunate writer woke up one morning to find himself famous, and his book on a tide of popularity which carried it, in one year, through some fifty editions.  A grand stroke of this kind insures the ambition to repeat it....  His new book bears throughout manifest evidences of having been scrambled through, and put together anyhow, in order to recapture the notice and the money of the public.”

Now Carlyle, who was very sensitive to adverse criticism, used to call these revengeful failures in literature “dirty puppies,” and it was kind of him to so far notice them.

But if I were the author in question, an answer somewhat in the following style would rise to my pen: 

“My Dear Sir:  I admire your independence and your contempt for the money and the favors of the public.  But one question I would ask of you:  Why do you send your invectives to the wrong address?  If I am famous, as you are pleased to say, without believing it any more than myself, do not lay the blame upon me, my dear sir; lay it rather upon that ‘fool of a public’ who is silly enough to prefer my scribblings to your chefs-d’oeuvre.  Not for the world would I say anything that might be disagreeable to you, but I would fain remind you that, ever since the days of Horace, the authors of books that sell have never been appreciated by the authors of the books that do not.”

The bitterness of Mr. Tommy Hawk’s criticisms forms a curious contrast with the fairness and good-nature of the serious English critic.

The latter possesses a large stock of good sense, good taste, learning, and independence.  He can blend counsel and encouragement, and he has a conscience; that is to say, as much aversion to disparaging as to flattering.  The same author whom he praised yesterday because his work was worthy of praise, he blames to-day because his work is deserving of blame; he is no respecter of persons.

Criticism should be taken with thanks and deference, if fair and kind; with deference and no thanks, if fair but unkind; with silence and contempt, if insulting and unfair.

So says D’Alembert.

May I now permit myself to indulge in a little personality?

Mr. George Augustus Sala, the wittiest and best-humored of English journalists, in one of his interesting Echoes of the Week, not long ago accused a book of my own, after paying it one or two compliments, of being as full of blunders as an egg is full of meat.

Now, could Mr. George Augustus Sala, with his knowledge of London dairy produce, pay my book a more witty and graceful compliment?