II

We recognise none the less that the finest consequence of these

re-established relations is linked with just that appearance in him,

that obsession of the actual under so many heads, that makes us look at

him, as we would at some rare animal in captivity, between the bars of a

cage. It amounts to a sort of suffered doom, since to be solicited by

the world from all quarters at once, what is that for the spirit but a

denial of escape? We feel his doom to be his want of a private door, and

that he felt it, though more obscurely, himself. When we speak of his

want of charm therefore we perhaps so surrender the question as but to

show our own poverty. If charm, to cut it short, is what he lacks, how

comes it that he so touches and holds us that—above all if we be actual

or possible fellow-workers—we are uncomfortably conscious of the

disloyalty of almost any shade of surrender? We are lodged perhaps by

our excited sensibility in a dilemma of which one of the horns is a

compassion that savours of patronage; but we must resign ourselves to

that by reflecting that our partiality at least takes nothing away from

him. It leaves him solidly where he is and only brings us near, brings

us to a view of _all_ his formidable parts and properties. The

conception of the Comédie Humaine represents them all, and represents

them mostly in their felicity and their triumph—or at least the

execution does: in spite of which we irresistibly find ourselves

thinking of him, in reperusals, as most essentially the victim of a

cruel joke. The joke is one of the jokes of fate, the fate that rode him

for twenty years at so terrible a pace and with the whip so constantly

applied. To have wanted to do so much, to have thought it possible, to

have faced and in a manner resisted the effort, to have felt life

poisoned and consumed by such a bravery of self-committal—these things

form for us in him a face of trouble that, oddly enough, is not

appreciably lighted by the fact of his success. It was the having wanted

to do so much that was the trap, whatever possibilities of glory might

accompany the good faith with which he fell into it. What accompanies

_us_ as we frequent him is a sense of the deepening ache of that good

faith with the increase of his working consciousness, the merciless

development of his huge subject and of the rigour of all the conditions.

We see the whole thing quite as if Destiny had said to him: “You want to

‘do’ France, presumptuous, magnificent, miserable man—the France of

revolutions, revivals, restorations, of Bonapartes, Bourbons, republics,

of war and peace, of blood and romanticism, of violent change and

intimate continuity, the France of the first half of your century? Very

well; you most distinctly _shall_, and you shall particularly let me

hear, even if the great groan of your labour do fill at moments the

temple of letters, how you like the job.” We must of course not appear

to deny the existence of a robust joy in him, the joy of power and

creation, the joy of the observer and the dreamer who finds a use for

his observations and his dreams as fast as they come. The “Contes

Drolatiques” would by themselves sufficiently contradict us, and the

savour of the “Contes Drolatiques” is not confined to these productions.

His work at large tastes of the same kind of humour, and we feel him

again and again, like any other great healthy producer of these matters,

beguiled and carried along. He would have been, I dare say, the last not

to insist that the artist has pleasures forever indescribable; he lived

in short in his human comedy with the largest life we can attribute to

the largest capacity. There are particular parts of his subject from

which, with our sense of his enjoyment of them, we have to check the

impulse to call him away—frequently as I confess in this relation that

impulse arises.

The relation is with the special element of his spectacle from which he

never fully detaches himself, the element, to express it succinctly, of

the “old families” and the great ladies. Balzac frankly revelled in his

conception of an aristocracy—a conception that never succeeded in

becoming his happiest; whether, objectively, thanks to the facts

supplied him by the society he studied, or through one of the strangest

deviations of taste that the literary critic is in an important

connection likely to encounter. Nothing would in fact be more

interesting than to attempt a general measure of the part played in the

total comedy, to his imagination, by the old families; and one or two

contributions to such an attempt I must not fail presently to make. I

glance at them here, however, the delectable class, but as most

representing on the author’s part free and amused creation; by which too

I am far from hinting that the amusement is at all at their expense. It

is in their great ladies that the old families most shine out for him,

images of strange colour and form, but “felt” as we say, to their

finger-tips, and extraordinarily interesting as a mark of the high

predominance—predominance of character, of cleverness, of will, of

general “personality”—that almost every scene of the Comedy attributes

to women. It attributes to them in fact a recognised, an uncontested

supremacy; it is through them that the hierarchy of old families most

expresses itself; and it is as surrounded by them even as some

magnificent indulgent pasha by his overflowing seraglio that Balzac sits

most at his ease. All of which reaffirms—if it be needed—that his

inspiration, and the sense of it, were even greater than his task. And

yet such betrayals of spontaneity in him make for an old friend at the

end of the chapter no great difference in respect to the pathos—since

it amounts to that—of his genius-ridden aspect. It comes to us as we go

back to him that his spirit had fairly made of itself a cage in which he

was to turn round and round, always unwinding his reel, much in the

manner of a criminal condemned to hard labour for life. The cage is

simply the complicated but dreadfully definite French world that built

itself so solidly in and roofed itself so impenetrably over him.

It is not that, caught there with him though we be, we ourselves

prematurely seek an issue: we throw ourselves back, on the contrary, for

the particular sense of it, into his ancient superseded comparatively

_rococo_ and quite patriarchal France—patriarchal in spite of social

and political convulsions; into his old-time antediluvian Paris, all

picturesque and all workable, full, to the fancy, of an amenity that has

passed away; into his intensely differentiated sphere of _la province_,

evoked in each sharpest or faintest note of its difference, described

systematically as narrow and flat, and yet attaching us if only by the

contagion of the author’s overflowing sensibility. He feels in his vast

exhibition many things, but there is nothing he feels with the

communicable shocks and vibrations, the sustained fury of

perception—not always a fierceness of judgment, which is another

matter—that _la province_ excites in him. Half our interest in him

springs still from our own sense that, for all the convulsions, the

revolutions and experiments that have come and gone, the order he

describes is the old order that our sense of the past perversely recurs

to as to something happy we have irretrievably missed. His pages bristle

with the revelation of the lingering earlier world, the world in which

places and people still had their queerness, their strong marks, their

sharp type, and in which, as before the platitude that was to come, the

observer with an appetite for the salient could by way of precaution

fill his lungs. Balzac’s appetite for the salient was voracious, yet he

came, as it were, in time, in spite of his so often speaking as if what

he sees about him is but the last desolation of the modern. His

conservatism, the most entire, consistent and convinced that ever

was—yet even at that much inclined to whistling in the dark as if to

the tune of “Oh how mediæval I _am_!”—was doubtless the best point of

view from which he could rake his field. But if what he sniffed from

afar in that position was the extremity of change, we in turn feel both

subject and painter drenched with the smell of the past. It is preserved

in his work as nowhere else—not vague nor faint nor delicate, but as

strong to-day as when first distilled.

It may seem odd to find a conscious melancholy in the fact that a great

worker succeeded in clasping his opportunity in such an embrace, this

being exactly our usual measure of the felicity of great workers. I

speak, I hasten to reassert, all in the name of sympathy—without which

it would have been detestable to speak at all; and the sentiment puts

its hand instinctively on the thing that makes it least futile. This

particular thing then is not in the least Balzac’s own hold of his

terrible mass of matter; it is absolutely the convolutions of the

serpent he had with a magnificent courage invited to wind itself round

him. We must use the common image—he had created his Frankenstein

monster. It is the fellow-craftsman who can most feel for him—it being

apparently possible to read him from another point of view without

getting really into his presence. We undergo with him from book to book,

from picture to picture, the convolutions of the serpent, we especially

whose refined performances are given, as we know, but with the small

common or garden snake. I stick to this to justify my image just above

of his having been “caged” by the intensity with which he saw his

general matter as a whole. To see it always as a whole is our wise, our

virtuous effort, the very condition, as we keep in mind, of superior

art. Balzac was in this connection then wise and virtuous to the most

exemplary degree; so that he doubtless ought logically but to prompt to

complacent reflections. No painter ever saw his general matter nearly so

much as a whole. Why is it then that we hover about him, if we are real

Balzacians, not with cheerful chatter, but with a consideration deeper

in its reach than any mere moralising? The reason is largely that if you

wish with absolute immaculate virtue to look at your matter as a whole

and yet remain a theme for cheerful chatter, you must be careful to take

some quantity that will not hug you to death. Balzac’s active intention

was, to vary our simile, a beast with a hundred claws, and the spectacle

is in the hugging process of which, as energy against energy, the beast

was capable. Its victim died of the process at fifty, and if what we see

in the long gallery in which it is mirrored is not the defeat, but the

admirable resistance, we none the less never lose the sense that the

fighter is shut up with his fate. He has locked himself in—it is

doubtless his own fault—and thrown the key away. Most of all perhaps

the impression comes—the impression of the adventurer committed and

anxious, but with no retreat—from the so formidably concrete nature of

his plastic stuff. When we work in the open, as it were, our material is

not classed and catalogued, so that we have at hand a hundred ways of

being loose, superficial, disingenuous, and yet passing, to our no small

profit, for remarkable. Balzac had no “open”; he held that the great

central normal fruitful country of his birth and race, overarched with

its infinite social complexity, yielded a sufficiency of earth and sea

and sky. We seem to see as his catastrophe that the sky, all the same,

came down on him. He couldn’t keep it up—in more senses than one. These

are perhaps fine fancies for a critic to weave about a literary figure

of whom he has undertaken to give a plain account; but I leave them so

on the plea that there are relations in which, for the Balzacian,

criticism simply drops out. That is not a liberty, I admit, ever to be

much encouraged; critics in fact are the only people who have a right

occasionally to take it. There is no such plain account of the Comédie

Humaine as that it makes us fold up our yard-measure and put away our

note-book quite as we do with some extraordinary character, some

mysterious and various stranger, who brings with him his own standards

and his own air. There is a kind of eminent presence that abashes even

the interviewer, moves him to respect and wonder, makes him, for

consideration itself, not insist. This takes of course a personage sole

of his kind. But such a personage precisely is Balzac.