【英文原著类】Two Poets(两个诗人).pdf

TWO POETS
TWO POETS
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Ellen Marriage
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TWO POETS
DEDICATION
To Monsieur Victor Hugo,
It was your birthright to be, like a Rafael or a Pitt, a great poet at an
age when other men are children; it was your fate, the fate of
Chateaubriand and of every man of genius, to struggle against jealousy
skulking behind the columns of a newspaper, or crouching in the
subterranean places of journalism. For this reason I desired that your
victorious name should help to win a victory for this work that I inscribe
to you, a work which, if some persons are to be believed, is an act of
courage as well as a veracious history. If there had been journalists in the
time of Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like marquises, financiers,
doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the province of the writer of
plays? And why edy, qui castigat ridendo mores, make an
exception in favor of one power, when the Parisian press spares none? I
am happy, monsieur, in this opportunity of subscribing myself your
sincere admirer and friend,
DE BALZAC.
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TWO POETS
TWO POETS
At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the ink-
distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small provincial
printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely connected through
its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only machinery in
use was the primitive wooden invention to which the language owes a
figure of speech--"the press groans" was no mere rhetorical expression in
those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in old-fashioned printing
houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the
movable table on which the form of type was placed in readiness for the
sheet of paper, being made of marble, literally deserved its name of
"impression-stone." Modern machinery has swept all this old-world
mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press which, with all its
imperfections, turned out su