From Hedge’s translation.

BALZAC, whose “Letters,” once so admired, would furnish an inexhaustible fund of antitheses, concetti, and other witticisms for epigrammatists by profession, was often in the predicament of saying something very flat when he imagined that he had said something very ingenious. Nevertheless, he sometimes made a good hit, as one who spends his whole life in chasing after thoughts necessarily must.

  In the following passage I am pleased with the concluding thought, notwithstanding its epigrammatic turn, on account of the simplicity and luminous truth of the image in which it is clothed. “We must have books,” he says, “for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business. The former are agreeable, the latter useful; and the human mind requires both. The canon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities, but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.”

  I have two remarks to make, however, respecting this passage. In the first place, Balzac concedes too much to those pedants who turn up their noses at the favorites of the Muses and their works, when he reckons the Homers and the Virgils among the merely agreeable writers. Antiquity, more wise in this respect, thought differently; and Horace maintains with good reason that there is more practical philosophy to be learned from Homer than from Crantor and Chrysippus.

  In the next place, it seems to me on the whole to indicate rather a mercantile than a philosophical way of thinking, when people place the agreeable and the useful in opposition to each other, and look upon the former with a kind of contempt in comparison with the latter.

  Presuming that what we understand by the agreeable is something that violates neither law nor duty nor sound moral sentiment, I say that the useful, as opposed to the agreeable and the beautiful, is common to us with the lowest brute; and that when we love and honor that which is useful in this sense, we do only what the ox and the ass do likewise. The value of such utility depends on the greater or less degree of indispensableness which attaches to it. So far therefore as a thing is necessary to the preservation of the human species and of civil society, so far it is good indeed, but not on that account excellent. Accordingly, we desire the useful, not on its own account, but only on account of certain advantages which we derive from it. The beautiful, on the other hand, we love by virtue of an intrinsic superiority of our nature over the merely animal. For man alone of all animals is endowed with a delicate feeling for order and beauty and grace. Hence, he is so much the more perfect, so much the more a man, the more extended and intense his love for the beautiful, and the greater the refinement and accuracy with which, by mere sensation, he can distinguish different degrees and kinds of beauty. And therefore, moreover, it is only the beautiful in art as well as in the mode of life and in morals, that distinguishes social, developed, refined man from savages and barbarians. Nay, all the arts without exception, and the sciences, too, owe their growth almost exclusively to this love for the beautiful and the perfect, inherent in man, and would still be infinitely removed from that degree of perfection to which they have risen in Europe, if men had attempted to confine them within the narrow limits of the necessary and the useful, in the common acceptation of those words.

  Socrates did so, and if ever he was mistaken in anything, it was in this. Kepler and Newton would never have discovered the laws of the mundane system,—the noblest product of human thought,—if, in conformity with his precepts, they had confined geometry to mere mensuration, and astronomy to the mere necessities of travel by land and sea, and to the making of almanacs.

  Socrates exhorted painters and sculptors to combine the agreeable and the beautiful with the useful; just as he urged mimic dancers to ennoble the pleasure which their art was capable of yielding, and to entertain the heart together with the senses. According to the same principle, he behooved to admonish those laborers who occupy themselves with things essential, to combine the useful as far as possible with the beautiful. But to deny the name of beautiful to everything that is not useful is to confound ideas.

  It is true, Nature herself has established a relation between the useful, and the beautiful and graceful. But these are not desirable because they are useful, but because it is the nature of man to enjoy a pure satisfaction in the contemplation of them, a satisfaction altogether similar to that which we derive from the contemplation of moral excellence, and as much a want of rational beings as food, clothing, shelter, are wants of the animal man.

  I say of the animal man because they are common to him with all other, or at least, with most other animals. But neither these animal necessities, nor the power and the effort to satisfy them, constitute him a man. In providing food, in building his nest, in choosing a mate, in training his young, in battling with others who would deprive him of his food, or take possession of his dwelling,—in all this he acts, materially considered, as an animal. It is the way and manner in which man—unless reduced to the condition of a brute, and kept therein by cogent, external circumstances—performs these animal functions, that distinguishes him from and raises him above all other orders of animals, and characterizes his humanity. For this animal that calls itself man, and this only, possesses an inborn feeling for beauty and order, possesses a heart disposed to communication of itself, to sympathy with sorrow and with joy, and to an infinite diversity of agreeable and beautiful sentiments. Only this animal possesses a strong propensity to imitate and to create, and labors unceasingly to improve what he has invented and made.

  All these qualities together distinguish him essentially from other animals, make him their lord and master, subject land and sea to his dominion, and lead him from step to step so far that, by the almost unlimited extension of his artistic powers, he is enabled to transform Nature herself, and, from the materials which she furnishes, to create for himself a new world, more perfectly adapted to his particular ends.

  The first thing in which man displays this his superiority is the refinement and ennobling of all those wants, impulses, and functions which he has in common with other animals. The time which he requires for this purpose is not to be considered. Enough that he finally arrives at that point where he is no longer necessitated to beg his sustenance from mere chance, and where the greater certainty of a richer and better support allows him leisure to think also of perfecting the other necessities of life. He invents one art after another, and each increases the security or the pleasure of his existence. And so he ascends continually from the indispensable to the convenient, from the convenient to the beautiful.

  The natural society into which he is born, combined with the necessity of securing himself against the injurious consequences of a too great extension of the human species, leads him at last to civil society and civilized modes of life.

  But here, too, no sooner has he provided for the necessary, for the means of internal and external security, than we find him occupied, in thousandfold ways, with beautifying this his new condition. Imperceptibly small villages are transformed into large cities, the abodes of the arts and of commerce, and points of union for the different nations of the earth. Man spreads himself ever further in all senses and in all directions. Navigation and traffic multiply relations and pursuits by multiplying the wants and the goods of life. Wealth and luxury refine every art whose mother was want and necessity; leisure, ambition, and public encouragement promote the growth of the sciences, which, by the light they diffuse over all the objects of human life, become rich sources of new advantages and enjoyments.

  But in the same proportion in which man adorns and improves his external condition, his feeling for the morally beautiful is also unfolded. He renounces the rude and inhuman uses of the savage state, he learns to abhor all violent conduct toward his kind, and accustoms himself to laws of justice and propriety. The manifold relations of the social condition unfold and determine the ideas of politeness and etiquette, and the desire of pleasing others and of gaining their esteem teaches him to restrain his passions, to conceal his faults, to turn his best side out, and to perform whatsoever he does in a decent manner. In a word, his manners improve with the rest of his condition.

  Through all these gradations he raises himself at last to the highest perfection of mind possible in this present life, to the great idea of the whole of which he is a part, to the ideal of the fair and good, to wisdom and virtue, and to the worship of the inscrutable, original Power of Nature, the universal Father of Spirits, to know whose laws and to do them is his greatest privilege, his first duty, and his purest pleasure.

  All this we denominate, with one word, the progress of Humanity. And now let every one answer for himself the question, whether man would have made this progress if that inborn feeling of the beautiful and the graceful had remained inactive in him? Take from him this, and all the results of his dormant power, all the monuments of his greatness, all the riches of Nature and Art of which he has possessed himself, disappear; he relapses into the brutal condition of the inhabitants of New Holland; and, with him, Nature herself relapses into savage and formless chaos.

  What are all these steps by which man gradually approaches perfection but successive embellishments, embellishments of his necessities, his mode of living, his habitation, his apparel, his implements, embellishments of his mind and heart, his sentiments and passions, his language, manners, customs, pleasures?

  What a distance from the earliest hovel to a building of Palladio! From the canoe of a Carib to a ship of the line! From the three blocks by which, in the remotest ages, the Bœotians represented the three Graces, to the Graces of Praxiteles! From a village of Hottentots or wild Indians to a city like London! From the ornaments of a woman of New Zealand to the state dress of a sultana! From the dialect of the natives of Otaheite to the languages of Homer, of Virgil, Tasso, Milton, and Voltaire!

  What innumerable gradations of embellishment must men and human things have passed through before they could overcome this almost measureless interval!

  The desire to beautify and refine, and the dissatisfaction with the lower grade as soon as a higher was known, are the true, the only, and the very simple forces by which man has been urged onward to the point at which we find him. All nations which have perfected themselves are a proof of this proposition. And if there are any to be found which, without any special impediment, physical or moral, have always remained stationary in the same degree of imperfection, or which betray an entire want of those motives to progress, which have been mentioned, we should have reason to regard them rather as a particular species of manlike animals than as actual men of our own race and kind.

  If now, as no one will deny, everything which tends to perfect man and his condition deserves the name of useful, where is there any ground for this hateful antithesis which certain Ostrogoths still make between the useful and the beautiful? Probably these people have never thought what the consequences would be, if a nation, which has reached a high degree of refinement, should banish or let starve its musicians, its actors, its poets, its painters, and other artists; in a word, all who minister in the kingdom of the Muses and the Graces;—or, what would be quite as bad, if it should lose its taste in all these arts.

  The loss of things which are incomparably less important would make a great gap in its prosperity. If one should reckon up to you what the consequences would be to the French, if only the two little articles, fans and snuffboxes, were stricken out from the number of European necessities, and if you were to consider that these are but two little twigs of the countless branches of that industry elicited by the love for playthings and trinkets, wherewith all the large children in trousers and long coats around us are affected, and if you were to calculate how useful to the world even these useless things are, and were to reflect that the departments of the beautiful and the useful are not exclusive departments, but are so manifoldly intertwined with each other that it is impossible ever to define with certainty and precision their respective boundaries,—in short, that there exists such an intimate relation between them that almost all that is useful is or may be made beautiful, and all that is beautiful useful;—if you were to consider all this, you would—

  But there are some people who, like the Abderites, grow no wiser by considering. He whose head has, once for all, a crook in it, will never, in his life, be brought to see things as they are seen by all the rest of the world who look straight before them.

  And then there is still another class of incorrigible people who have always been avowed contemners of the beautiful, not because their head is placed awry, but because they call nothing useful that does not fill their purse. Now, the trade of a sycophant, a quack, a dealer in charms, a clipper of ducats, a pimp, a Tartuffe, is certainly not beautiful; it is therefore perfectly natural that this gentry should manifest on every occasion a profound contempt for that kind of beauty which yields them nothing. Besides, to how many a blockhead is stupidity useful! How many would lose their whole authority, if those among whom they had won or stolen it had taste enough to distinguish the genuine from the false, the beautiful from the ugly! Such persons, to be sure, have weighty, personal reasons to be enemies of wit and taste. They are in the condition of the honest fellow who had married his homely daughter to a blind man, and was unwilling that his son-in-law should be couched.

  But the rest of us, who can only gain by being made wiser,—what Abderites we should be if we suffered ourselves to be persuaded by these gentlemen who are interested in the matter, to become blind or to remain blind, in order that the ugliness of their daughters may not come to light!