M. DE BLOWITZ'S MEMOIRS.* A CERTAIN amount of the interest
attaching to these Memoirs has been discounted by serial publication, four of the most exciting chapters having already appeared in the pages of Harper's. But, as we are informed in the preface, "almost the whole of the remaining chapters is entirely new to the English public." Thus even those who have already • MY Memoirs. By Henri Stephan de Elowitz. London : Edward Arnold. 1158. net.1 perused the famous correspondent's account of how he became a journalist, of the proclamation of King Alfonso XII., of the French scare of 1875, and of the Berlin Congress, will find much to entertain and instruct them in the volume now given to the public. To say that these pages should be read with a certain amount of reserve involves no slur on the honesty of the writer. It is expressly stated in the preface that M. de Blowitz never kept a diary, and hardly ever took a note. The• bulk of these reminiscences were dictated, we understand, long after he had passed his seventieth year, and no one who, has had any practical experience in verifying the autobio- graphical reminiscences of septuagenarians can fail to be im- pressed by the strange tricks that memory playa with the most truthful of men. M. de Blowitz's one ambition in writing his reminiscences, so he tells us, was that of telling the truth, the whole truth. Yet the simple test of internal evidence shows that many of his statements will not satisfy the requirements of the scientific historian. We acquit him entirely of any conscious intent to mislead. But it was inevitable that a man who was, to quote his own phrase, always searching for " the soul concealed behind the silenb immobility of things," and who was gifted with a singularly robust imagination, should occasionally have been at fault in, his interpretation, and it is a curious fact that in recording at great length from memory his conversations with eminent personages, they should almost invariably adopt the peculiarly impressive style of their interlocutor.
The early days of the great journalist were passed at the- paternal chateau of Blowsky in Bohemia, where his father, the Seigneur Marc Opper de Blowitz, led the dignified life of a country gentleman. He was baptised on the day following his birth, the• doctors thinking that he would not live. " The parish register leaves no doubt as to my having been born a Catholic, baptised twenty-four hours after my birth, and that I did not have time to become a Jew. I regret it, moreover—for Israel V' At the age of six, when the Seigneur was away hunting " with some of his lordly friends," young de Blowitz was kidnapped by gipsies, but fortunately rescued by the hunting party;. He never went to school or University, " read and worked but little, but walked a great deal," acquired a mastery of poetic legends, and at fifteen, accompanied by a tutor who had taken his degree of Doctor of Philosophy, started out on a grand tour on foot which lasted five years. He traversed the whole of the Empire of Austria, and " went through " Germany, Russia, Italy, and Switzerland. On his return at the age of twenty he found his father ruined by a defaulting notary, and immediately set out again to try his fortune in America. On the way to Havre, however, he fell in with a Bohemian nobleman, a friend of his father's, who carried him to Paris,. and introduced him to Thiers and M. de Falloux. The latter on becoming Minister of Public Instruction appointed M. de Blowitz to a Professorship at Angers. In 1856 he was ap- pointed to the Chair of Foreign Literature at Marseilles,. where he married, combined academical duties with com- merce, and invented a flax-combing machine, which on its trial trip blew up the inventor and effectually cured him of his taste for mechanics. In 1869 the services he rendered to Gambetta in his candidature at Marseilles exposed him, still. a foreigner without protection, to the violent animosity of the Imperialist Government, and he was obliged to withdraw into the country. From his seclusion he wrote constantly to M. Thiers, warning him of the designs of Germany and the =- preparedness of France,—warnings speedily justified by the war. On the proclamation of the Republic M. de Blowitz applied for his naturalisation papers and returned to Mar- seilles. During the Commune he obtained command of the- telegraph and informed the Versailles Government of the doings of the Communists. On the recapture of the town by the Regular troops he was despatched to Paris by General Espivent de la Villeboisnet to report personally to M. Thiers, who urged him to stay in Paris, and promised to give him a.. Consul-Generalship at Riga. Riga served as a stepping- stone to higher things for Wagner, but fate, in the person. of Laurence Oliphant, the special correspondent of the Times, intervened to save M. de Blowitz from exile, and in July, 1871, he began his long connection with the great London daily by characteristically reporting a conversation with M. Thiers without the consent of that statesman. Beginning as a locum tenens for Oliphant's assistant, he was not officially appointed
chief correspondent in Paris until nearly two years after Oliphant's resignation. With what fidelity, energy, and enterprise he served his employers for the subsequent twenty- eight years is too well known to need detailed illustration.
Of his chief journalistic coups — his interview with Alfonso XII., his intervention at the time of the scare of
1875, and his capture of the text of the Berlin Treaty—M. de Blowitz writes with a mixture of complacency, naivete, and
gusto which is most entertaining. All through his career, he
tells us, he was actuated by a firm belief in " the constant intervention of a Supreme Power, directing not only our destiny in general, but such actions of ours as influence our destiny By virtue of this theory it will be easily understood that I have always endeavoured to divine the intentions and designs of the Supreme Will which directs us. I have always sought, not to thwart that ubiquitous guidance, but to enter on the path which it seemed to point out to me." This guidance was vouchsafed in the case of M. de Blowitz in a variety of ways,—sometimes by the visits of mysterious strangers, sometimes by anonymous communications written on mauve letter-paper. " According to my humour at the time, or to the presentiment I felt, or the sensations aroused in me, I either flung them into the waste-paper basket or religiously heeded their contents. And when I adopted the latter resolution I never had cause to regret it."
With regard to the chapters respectively headed " Alva," "The Revenge of Venus," and "A Life Struggle," we must be pardoned for saying that we are quite unable to decide whether they are to be taken as excursions into the domain of romantic fiction in the manner of the elder Dumas, or records of actual episodes in the writer's long and adventurous exist- ence. The account of the interview with Abd-ul-Hamid, when all Constantinople was apparently convulsed by the conflict between those who wished M. de Blowitz to gain audience of the Sultan and those who sought to prevent it, is a classic example of much ado about nothing, besides showing how totally the writer's vaunted perspicacity failed him as a student of character. As for M. de Blowitz's views on the ethics of journalism, we cannot do better than quote his advice to his successors :-
" I am going, for the benefit of younger journalists, to give a hint which a good many of them whom I know would do well to bear in mind. When a man gives a correspondent an important piece of news, the latter should continue to remain with him for some time, but change the conversation, and not leave him until it has turned to something quite insignificant. If the corre- spondent take his departure abruptly, a flash of caution will burst upon his informant. He will reflect rapidly, and will beg the journalist not to repeat what he has said till he sees him again. The information would be lost, and the correspondent would suffer annoyance that might have been avoided if he had heard nothing. A newspaper has no use for confidential communica- tions it cannot transmit to its readers."
On the inadequate recognition of journalistic services M. de Blowitz writes with something like bitterness. We quote the passage at length because it illustrates several characteristic traits of the writer,—his grandiose and pontifical utterance, his picturesque employment of the concrete instance, his loyalty to his employers :—
"In the journalistic career posthumous enthusiasm is never noisy. Even beyond the tomb the fame of the dead is an offence, and the very haters seem to prefer to hold their peace, lest in attempting to gain satisfaction they revive the memory of the combatants who have disappeared. Nothing is more melancholy than the startling rapidity with which these turbulent existences, linked to a merely ephemeral want, enter into the dark oblivion of the tomb. The most distinguished among them scarcely survive, and future generations know them not, because even living generations have passed them by in silence. The Royer Collards, the Benjamin Constants, the Thiers, have survived in the memory of men, not because they were journalists, but in spite of it. Armand Carrel is not yet forgotten, because he was killed in a duel with Girardin ; and the latter, who was a man of business as well as a journalist, lives because he was the promoter of postal reform rather than because for forty years he had been the most active of journalists. Laurence Oliphant's life was written because he lived an existence full of agitation, because he was nearly assassinated in Japan, because he published books of satire and philosophy, because his ever- inquiring mind pursued, beyond the barriers of reality, the solu- tion of problems that constantly escaped his insight and his power, and because in the solitude of Haifa, sealing in his turn Mount Cannel, he sought to preach from its heights a new law which he believed to be true. But no one has dreamed, or dreams, so far as I know, of writing the life of that admirable journalist., John Delane, the Editor of The Times For thirty-two years he allowed notahtg to prevent his going to his room at The Times office at half-past ten in the• evening and leaving it at half-past four. He gave his entire life to this silent work by night, subordinating to it everything save independence of judgment, and having as his only recom- pense the one single ambition to be true. During these thirty- two years he made and unmade hundreds of reputations which the world, by involuntary homage rendered to the infallibility of his judgment, has left in the place to which he assigned them. It has forgotten one thing, however—to reserve for John Delano a corner in its memory. It has forgotten that its duty was not to allow him to be so promptly submerged by events. It is almost with a feeling of bitterness that I have recalled, in the inadequate and unworthy lines that precede, the great career of this toiler unknown among the crowd, and yet so worthy to figure among those who are placed in the front ranks of their times."
The translation of these Memoirs—for M. de Blowitz never mastered the language of the country be served so well— conveys the sonorous rhetoric of the original adequately enough, but is marred by occasional ineptitudes. Thus on p. 314 we read of a lady that " her whole bearing, thanks to her Marseilles extraction, betrayed the suppleness of the Phocians [sic] and the wavy motion of the Greeks."
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