deration
extraordinary enough to vitiate the whole method? A much more
important thing to know than what determined this or that product,
whether it be the Book of Judges, or the Panama trial, or M. Taine, or
M. de Blowitz, is what they themselves determined; what followed,
because of their existence; and though this be reasoning in a dizzy
circle, I cling to the remark as a not unapt way to introduce my
subject. A chief reason why M. de Blowitz is worth considering is,
that he is and always has been a producer himself, a fact pregnant
with a thousand others, rather than the resultant of many vague facts
that have gone before. Most of us must be content with being,
comparatively speaking, only results. M. de Blowitz, prodigious result
as he is, is even more striking as initiator, as himself the creator
of a special environment, as himself in his own way a "final cause."

[Illustration: THE DINING-ROOM IN M. DE BLOWITZ'S PARIS HOME.]

Cosmopolite in a world becoming rapidly no larger than the tiniest
of the asteroids, M. de Blowitz is one of those who have most
contributed to this planetary shrinkage. His career is a continual
and entertaining illustration of the truth that tact can render even
tolerance successful. For he is the most amiable, the most tolerant
of men, and yet he has blazed a wide path through the woodland of
warring interests in which every man who seeks to succeed runs risk,
not only of losing his way, but of setting all the other denizens of
the forest against him. Ordinarily, success implies that a man is a
man of only one idea. What Frenchman said: "Truth is a wedge that
makes its way only by being struck"? I have forgotten. At all events,
isn't the remark nine times out of ten true? But M. de Blowitz
could apply for the honor of being the proverbial exception. His
workshop is full of wedges, and a more impatient man would have
used up all of them long ago, after having hammered the battered
tops into a condition of splay disfigurement. M. de Blowitz does not
do this. He knew and knows a better way. He can afford to wait. He
likes to wait. He has the good and amiable heart of a man who, like
Odysseus, has seen many men and countries, and knows that all
things--I include even people who are "bores"--have a point of
view that may be rendered interesting. Himself one of the most
individualized of contemporary institutions, his own career is a
standing argument against the sacredness of the idea of in