The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (7 page)

“The Prince de Ligne is the eighteenth century incarnate.” Thus Paul Morand. So accurate is this characterisation that in his old age, which is to say during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, the Prince cut the figure of the last survivor of a bygone age. Today, by contrast, it is precisely to that anachronistic aspect that we feel the closest.

Ligne shares a good many traits with Mozart, apropos of whom George Bernard Shaw made a comment that it may be useful to quote here. Mozart’s greatness, Shaw argued, lay not in innovation, but on
the contrary in his success in bringing a tradition to an unsurpassable perfection: “Many Mozart worshippers cannot bear to be told that their hero was not the founder of a dynasty. But in art the highest success is to be the last of your race, not the first. Anybody, almost, can make a beginning: the difficulty is to make an end, to do what cannot be bettered.”

* * *

Gay and lively, always effervescent and unable to stay still, Ligne was ever on the move, traveling on horseback, by carriage, barge, galley or sleigh; he spent his life rushing from one end of Europe to the other. His prose has a breathless allegro quality that echoes this rollicking mobility. Despite the trials of life, the death of a beloved son, the failure of a military career brilliantly initiated only to be prematurely wrecked by a conspiracy of mediocrities—there was a deep source of joy and a grace in him that never ran dry. He was disarmingly thoughtless, yet astonishing in his psychological insight. His overdeveloped sensitivity tended easily to be concealed behind the mask of a buffoon; he never missed the chance to make a bad pun, for instance, or to play a practical joke. In this way he put idiots off the scent, but in the end they would get their own back. Wagner rebuked Mozart for a “lack of seriousness”;[
2
] a similar reproach took its toll on Ligne: no sooner was he no longer dealing with the great intelligence of a Maria-Theresa of Austria or a Joseph II in Vienna, or of Catherine the Great in Russia, his own “lack of seriousness” concealed his genius from mediocre sovereigns who no longer dared employ him, thus condemning him to a premature semi-retirement.

But parallels with Mozart, no matter how illuminating, should not be overdone.[
3
] We must not forget, above all, that Ligne, as Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Lord of Baudour, Chevalier of the Golden Fleece, Grandee of Spain, Seneschal of Hainaut, and Field-Marshal of the Imperial Armies, was first and foremost an aristocrat who assumed his high birth (going back to Charlemagne!) completely, and remained ever aware of the demanding ethic that it required of him. He wrote on this subject, defining nobility as “the
obligation to do nothing ignoble,” and it was by this yardstick that he measured and lucidly assessed his peers. At the same time he treated his subjects and subordinates with a courtesy that came from the heart: “I have made emperors and empresses wait for me, but never a soldier.” So his vassals, like the simple troopers of his Ligne-Infanterie regiment with whom he shared the dangers and miseries of campaigning, made no mistake when they demonstrated such a fierce loyalty.

Like every true aristocrat, Ligne was basically a man without a profession. If he was a man of war, and indeed he was, as we shall see in a moment, it was by nature rather than by occupation. (Could one ever say of a poet, or a monk, that they practiced their calling
professionally
?) In the worlds of letters and of the arts (including the designing of gardens), Ligne was an amateur in the deepest, most complete and most fruitful sense of the word; free from considerations of utility, he pursued such disciplines for his own satisfaction, following his whims and at his leisure, with grace, nonchalance and detachment, ever guided by sudden inspiration. At bottom there is only one art that matters, and that is the art of life. Hired artisans can achieve great technical mastery, but they have no access to higher values of this kind, the pursuit of which embodies an exquisite
inexpertness
beyond the reach of the professional’s virtuosity.

* * *

I am drawing here on the aesthetic discourse of traditional Chinese scholars, of which of course Ligne knew absolutely nothing; but had he encountered that approach, it would surely not have disconcerted him. After all, it was he who, apropos of the Ottoman Empire, addressed “observers, travellers, spectators” in the following terms: “Instead of thinking trivial thoughts about the nations of Europe, which are all for the most part alike, meditate rather on everything having to do with Asia if you would discover new, beautiful, great, noble, and very often reasonable things.”

This open-mindedness made Ligne into one of the very first, and greatest, of truly modern Europeans. His Belgian birth predisposed him in this respect[
4
]: he described himself as a “Flemish gentleman”
but “a Walloon in the army,”[
5
] and wrote that “I like my standing as a foreigner everywhere, French in Austria, Austrian in France, both of them in Russia. This is the way to succeed everywhere,” for “one loses esteem in a country that one dwells in all the time.” (This is profoundly true; Pascal had said roughly the same thing, in different words.)

Two passions, as noted earlier, dominated the life of the Prince de Ligne: he loved war and he loved women.

* * *

Warfare was the sole function of Ligne’s caste, its very raison d’être, its honour and duty. For Ligne valour was the cardinal virtue, he preferred a country full of bandits to one full of petty criminals, for bandits at least display courage when they risk their lives in the exercise of their skills. War was the chief occupation of Ligne’s life, and was accordingly the subject of a good portion of the thirty-four volumes of his collected works (
Mélanges militaires, littéraires et sentimentaires
[Military, Literary and Sentimental Miscellany]). An anecdote will serve to illustrate the odd intimacy that the Prince entertained with his military vocation. He cherished his son Charles more than any other being in the world, but no sooner was the boy of an age to ride a horse than he led him into action: “I set in motion a small vanguard engagement with the Prussians, and, charging on horseback alongside him I took his little hand in mine as we galloped, and when I had the first shot fired told him: ‘how fine it would be, my Charles, should we suffer a slight wound together.’” (Eventually, some twenty years later, when Charles was thirty-three, he was decapitated by a French cannonball. At the news of his son’s death the Prince passed out. He remained unconsolable.) [
6
]

* * *

As for women, the catalogue of his conquests (by no means all glorious) is longer and more varied that Don Giovanni’s as sung by Leporello: his immense range extended from prostitutes to crowned heads. What kind of hunger drove him in this regard? He was, so to
speak, in love with love: “In love only the beginning is delightful. I am not surprised that we get so much pleasure from beginning over and over again.”

On this topic two remarks of Ligne’s are worth mentioning. The first is a joke, but of course jokes can be more revealing than serious statements. In a letter, the Prince recalls a bantering conversation with the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia; the three were considering what one might most wish to be: “For my part, I told them that
I would like to be a pretty woman until the age of thirty
, then a very lucky and very able army general until sixty, and a cardinal until eighty.” The second observation is a remarkable one, noted in Ligne’s
Mes écarts
, and marks him off in a radical and surprising way from Don Juan as from his old friend and fellow-adventurer Casanova: “It is a real and abominable crime to interfere with a marriage of love. Since this is the highest of joys, he who would seek to deprive two loving spouses of it ought to be punished. Can anything else be worth the continual happiness enjoyed by two people who are made for each other?”

* * *

The Prince de Ligne had scant respect for what we would nowadays call academic knowledge: “I do not care for scholars unless they are scholars without wishing to be or without knowing it. There is nothing easier than becoming a scholar. To acquire learning, it suffices to lock oneself up in one’s house for six months. It is far better to have a good imagination than a good memory.” What would he have thought of those interminable and exhausting biographies, so fashionable today, produced by pen-pushers who, knowing everything and understanding nothing, pile up mountains of ponderous and insignificant data with which to bury some hapless poet, some fine artist or some other victim of their choosing? In stark contrast, Sophie Deroisin, with her intuitive approach and her light (but penetrating) touch, would seem to be well in harmony with the taste and disposition of her seductive subject.

Casanova, who knew his illustrious friend very well, offered him this insightful comment: “Your mind is of the kind which lends
impetus to the minds of others.” It is surely that same impetus which animates the pages you are about to read. Sophie Deroisin was a “sensitive soul” in the Stendhalian sense: she had as much heart as intelligence; she loved to admire, and she suffered joyfully from chronic enthusiasm. “Enthusiasm is the finest of faults,” wrote the Prince de Ligne. “It is better to be wrong with enthusiasm than right in some other way.” But enthusiasm certainly did not lead Sophie Deroisin astray, even if it may have shielded her from certain parts of the picture. Ligne is the incarnation of the eighteenth century, as we said at the outset, and Sophie Deroisin has an admirable grasp of the grace of that era, but she prefers not to see it in all its alarming ferocity, filth, cruelty, mud and blood. Ligne, however, had both feet firmly planted in all that (so did Mozart). On that the academic historians give us plenty of concrete detail. But their view, though perhaps more complete, is not necessarily more true. In his old age, in Vienna, a voluntary exile from his beloved Beloeil—which he was prevented from seeing only by “humour [i.e., mood], horror, and honour”—Ligne knew poverty. Contemporary witnesses describe him as a hirsute, wigless old man who “smelled very bad.” Others report that he had an ass, a sheep and a goat which every morning jumped up on his bed begging for food. The two accounts, equally reliable, are by no means contradictory, but the scholarly biographies retain only the former, Sophie Deroisin only the latter. It seems to me that she was not wrong.

Emerson said that “books are for nothing but to inspire.” There could be no better description of the worth of this one.

*
Preface to Sophie Deroisin,
Le Prince de Ligne.

A
RTHUR
Waley said that he preferred to read Dickens in Chinese translation (Dickens’s first Chinese translator was indeed an exquisite writer). I wonder if Balzac does not also belong to the category of writers who actually benefit from being translated. I suspect that his visionary imagination would remain unaffected by the transposition into another language, whereas it would be relatively easy for tactful translators to soften the jarring notes and straighten the blunders that, in the original, frequently jolt the reader or threaten, at the most dramatic moments, to set off anticlimactic laughter.

Balzac’s prose is littered with ludicrous conceits, mixed metaphors, clichés and various manifestations of naïveté and bad taste. Mere haste and negligence cannot fully account for so much awkwardness; although his first drafts were often dashed off at astounding speed and in enormous creative bursts, Balzac was also a painstaking, obsessive—and notorious—re-writer. His revisions, corrections, re-corrections and corrections of re-corrections that swelled into the margins of his galley proofs, smothering the printed text under their exuberant growth, famously drove typesetters to fury and despair.

That such a great writer should have written so badly was a source of puzzlement for some of the best connoisseurs (who were also his warmest admirers), from Baudelaire to Flaubert. The paradox was aptly summed up by Flaubert himself: “What a man Balzac would have been had he known how to write! But that was the only thing he lacked. After all, an artist would never have accomplished so much, nor had such breadth.”

French literary taste always finds it difficult to deal with those aspects of genius that do not readily fit within a classical frame. An early illustration of this tendency was provided by Voltaire when he apologised for having foolishly introduced Shakespeare on the French stage: “I first showed the French a few pearls I had retrieved from his huge heap of dung . . . I did not realise at the time that I was actually trampling upon the laurels of Racine and Corneille in order to adorn the head of this barbaric play-actor.”[
1
] Later on, native literary giants did not fare much better. Victor Hugo, who was Balzac’s junior by only three years (but whose career lasted nearly twice as long), came to enjoy even greater popularity; yet, for all his triumphs, he never fully succeeded in disarming the reservations of the purists. In our own time, two comments that summarise, with cruel wit, the critical ambivalence that still persists towards Hugo would fit Balzac much better. On being asked who was the greatest French poet, André Gide replied: “Victor Hugo—alas!” And Jean Cocteau added: “Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo.” Both in greatness and in lunacy, Balzac certainly scaled heights that were at least as spectacular.

Balzac’s claim to the title of Greatest French Novelist of All Time can hardly be disputed: he simply bulldozed his way into that position, propelled by the sheer mass and energy of his production. The total cast of his
Comédie humaine
amounts to some 3,500 characters (including a few animals)—in all Western literature, only Shakespeare and Dickens approached such a bewildering fecundity.

To engage in a complete reading of his
Comédie humaine
is akin to climbing onto a raft and attempting the descent of a huge wild river: once you start, you cannot get off, you are powerless to stop, you are carried away into another world—more exciting, more intense, more
real
than the dull scene you left ashore. Everything is larger than life, loaded with energy. In Balzac’s novels, Baudelaire observed, even doorkeepers have genius, and Oscar Wilde added: