By all of which have I none the less felt it but too clear that I must
not pretend in this place to take apart the pieces of his immense
complicated work, to number them or group them or dispose them about.
The most we can do is to pick one up here and there and wonder, as we
weigh it in our hand, at its close compact substance. That is all even
M. Taine could do in the longest and most penetrating study of which our
author has been the subject. Every piece we handle is so full of stuff,
condensed like the edibles provided for campaigns and explorations,
positively so charged with distilled life, that we find ourselves
dropping it, in certain states of sensibility, as we drop an object
unguardedly touched that startles us by being animate. We seem really
scarce to want anything to _be_ so animate. It would verily take Balzac
to detail Balzac, and he has had in fact Balzacians nearly enough
affiliated to affront the task with courage. The “Répertoire de la
Comédie Humaine” of MM. Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Christophe is a
closely-printed octavo of 550 pages which constitutes in relation to his
characters great and small an impeccable biographical dictionary. His
votaries and expositors are so numerous that the Balzac library of
comment and research must be, of its type, one of the most copious. M.
de Lovenjoul has laboured all round the subject; his “Histoire des
Œuvres” alone is another crowded octavo of 400 pages; in connection with
which I must mention Miss Wormeley, the devoted American translator,
interpreter, worshipper, who in the course of her own studies has so
often found occasion to differ from M. de Lovenjoul on matters of fact
and questions of date and of appreciation. Miss Wormeley, M. Paul
Bourget and many others are examples of the passionate piety that our
author can inspire. As I turn over the encyclopedia of his characters I
note that whereas such works usually commemorate but the ostensibly
eminent of a race and time, every creature so much as named in the
fictive swarm is in this case preserved to fame: so close is the
implication that to have _been_ named by such a dispenser of life and
privilege is to be, as we say it of baronets and peers, created. He
infinitely divided moreover, as we know, he subdivided, altered and
multiplied his heads and categories—his “Vie Parisienne,” his “Vie de
Province,” his “Vie Politique,” his “Parents Pauvres,” his “Études
Philosophiques,” his “Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes,” his
“Envers de l’Histoire Contemporaine” and all the rest; so that nominal
reference to them becomes the more difficult. Yet without prejudice
either to the energy of conception with which he mapped out his theme as
with chalk on a huge blackboard, or to the prodigious patience with
which he executed his plan, practically filling in with a wealth of
illustration, from sources that to this day we fail to make out, every
compartment of his table, M. de Lovenjoul draws up the list, year by
year, from 1822 to 1848, of his mass of work, giving us thus the measure
of the tension represented for him by almost any twelvemonth. It is
wholly unequalled, considering the quality of Balzac’s show, by any
other eminent abundance.
I must be pardoned for coming back to it, for seeming unable to leave
it; it enshrouds so interesting a mystery. How was so solidly systematic
a literary attack on life to be conjoined with whatever workable minimum
of needful intermission, of free observation, of personal experience?
Some small possibility of personal experience and disinterested life
must, at the worst, from deep within or far without, feed and fortify
the strained productive machine. These things were luxuries that Balzac
appears really never to have tasted on any appreciable scale. His
published letters—the driest and most starved of those of any man of
equal distinction—are with the exception of those to Madame de Hanska,
whom he married shortly before his death, almost exclusively the audible
wail of a galley-slave chained to the oar. M. Zola, in our time, among
the novelists, has sacrificed to the huge plan in something of the same
manner, yet with goodly modern differences that leave him a
comparatively simple instance. His work assuredly has been more nearly
dried up by the sacrifice than ever Balzac’s was—so miraculously, given
the conditions, was Balzac’s to escape the anti-climax. Method and
system, in the chronicle of the tribe of Rougon-Macquart, an economy in
itself certainly of the rarest and most interesting, have spread so from
centre to circumference that they have ended by being almost the only
thing we feel. And then M. Zola has survived and triumphed in his
lifetime, has continued and lasted, has piled up and, if the remark be
not frivolous, enjoyed in all its _agréments_ the reward for which
Balzac toiled and sweated in vain. On top of which he will have had also
his literary great-grandfather’s heroic example to start from and profit
by, the positive heritage of a _fils de famille_ to enjoy, spend, save,
waste. Balzac had frankly no heritage at all but his stiff subject, and
by way of model not even in any direct or immediate manner that of the
inner light and kindly admonition of his genius. Nothing adds more to
the strangeness of his general performance than his having failed so
long to find his inner light, groped for it almost ten years, missed it
again and again, moved straight away from it, turned his back on it,
lived in fine round about it, in a darkness still scarce penetrable, a
darkness into which we peep only half to make out the dreary little
waste of his numerous _œuvres de jeunesse_. To M. Zola was vouchsafed
the good fortune of settling down to the Rougon-Macquart with the
happiest promptitude; it was as if time for one look about him—and I
say it without disparagement to the reach of his look—had sufficiently
served his purpose. Balzac moreover might have written five hundred
novels without our feeling in him the faintest hint of the breath of
doom, if he had only been comfortably capable of conceiving the short
cut of the fashion practised by others under his eyes. As Alexandre
Dumas and George Sand, illustrious contemporaries, cultivated a personal
life and a disinterested consciousness by the bushel, having, for their
easier duration, not too consistently known, as the true painter knows
it, the obsession of the thing to be done, so Balzac was condemned by
his constitution itself, by his inveterately seeing this “thing to be
done” as part and parcel, as of the very essence, of his enterprise. The
latter existed for him, as the process worked and hallucination settled,
in the form, and the form only, of the thing done, and not in any
hocus-pocus about doing. There was no kindly convenient escape for him
by the little swinging back-door of the thing _not_ done. He desired—no
man more—to get out of his obsession, but only at the other end, that
is by boring through it. “How then, thus deprived of the outer air
almost as much as if he were gouging a passage for a railway through an
Alp, _did_ he live?” is the question that haunts us—with the
consequence for the most part of promptly meeting its fairly tragic
answer. He did _not_ live—save in his imagination, or by other aid than
he could find there; his imagination was all his experience; he had
provably no time for the real thing. This brings us to the rich if
simple truth that his imagination alone did the business, carried
through both the conception and the execution—as large an effort and as
proportionate a success, in all but the vulgar sense, as the faculty
when equally handicapped was ever concerned in. Handicapped I say
because this interesting fact about him, with the claim it makes, rests
on the ground, the high distinction, that more than all the rest of us
put together he went in, as we say, for detail, circumstance and
specification, proposed to himself _all_ the connections of every part
of his matter and the full total of the parts. The whole thing, it is
impossible not to keep repeating, was what he deemed treatable. One
really knows in all imaginative literature no undertaking to compare
with it for courage, good faith and sublimity. There, once more, was the
necessity that rode him and that places him apart in our homage. It is
no light thing to have been condemned to become provably sublime. And
looking through, or trying to, at what is beneath and behind, we are
left benevolently uncertain if the predominant quantity be audacity or
innocence.
It is of course inevitable at this point to seem to hear the colder
critic promptly take us up. He undertook the whole thing—oh exactly,
the ponderous person! But _did_ he “do” the whole thing, if you please,
any more than sundry others of fewer pretensions? The retort to this it
can only be a positive joy to make, so high a note instantly sounds as
an effect of the inquiry. Nothing is more interesting and amusing than
to find one’s self recognising both that Balzac’s pretensions were
immense, portentous, and that yet, taking him—and taking
_them_—altogether, they but minister in the long run to our fondness.
They affect us not only as the endearing eccentricities of a person we
greatly admire, but fairly as the very condition of his having become
such a person. We take them thus in the first place for the very terms
of his plan, and in the second for a part of that high robustness and
that general richness of nature which made him in face of such a project
believe in himself. One would really scarce have liked to see such a job
as La Comédie Humaine tackled without swagger. To think of the thing
really as practicable _was_ swagger, and of the very rarest order. So to
think assuredly implied pretensions, pretensions that risked showing as
monstrous should the enterprise fail to succeed. It is for the colder
critic to take the trouble to make out that of the two parties to it the
body of pretension remains greater than the success. One may put it
moreover at the worst for him, may recognise that it is in the matter of
opinion still more than in the matter of knowledge that Balzac offers
himself as universally competent. He has flights of judgment—on
subjects the most special as well as the most general—that are
vertiginous and on his alighting from which we greet him with a special
indulgence. We can easily imagine him to respond, confessing
humorously—if he had only time—to such a benevolent understanding
smile as would fain hold our own eyes a moment. Then it is that he would
most show us his scheme and his necessities and how in operation they
all hang together. _Naturally_ everything about everything, though how
he had time to learn it is the last thing he has time to tell us; which
matters the less, moreover, as it is not over the question of his
knowledge that we sociably invite him, as it were (and remembering the
two augurs behind the altar) to wink at us for a sign. His convictions
it is that are his great pardonable “swagger”; to them in particular I
refer as his general operative condition, the constituted terms of his
experiment, and not less as his consolation, his support, his amusement
by the way. They embrace everything in the world—that is in his world
of the so parti-coloured France of his age: religion, morals, politics,
economics, physics, esthetics, letters, art, science, sociology, every
question of faith, every branch of research. They represent thus his
equipment of ideas, those ideas of which it will never do for a man who
aspires to constitute a State to be deprived. He must take them with him
as an ambassador extraordinary takes with him secretaries, uniforms,
stars and garters, a gilded coach and a high assurance. Balzac’s
opinions are his gilded coach, in which he is more amused than anything
else to feel himself riding, but which is indispensably concerned in
getting him over the ground. What more inevitable than that they should
be intensely Catholic, intensely monarchical, intensely saturated with
the real genius—as between 1830 and 1848 he believed it to be—of the
French character and French institutions?
Nothing is happier for us than that he should have enjoyed his outlook
before the first half of the century closed. He could then still treat
his subject as comparatively homogeneous. Any country could have a
Revolution—every country _had_ had one. A Restoration was merely what a
revolution involved, and the Empire had been for the French but a
revolutionary incident, in addition to being by good luck for the
novelist an immensely pictorial one. He was free therefore to arrange
the background of the comedy in the manner that seemed to him best to
suit anything so great; in the manner at the same time prescribed
according to his contention by the noblest traditions. The church, the
throne, the noblesse, the bourgeoisie, the people, the peasantry, all in
their order and each solidly kept in it, these were precious things,
things his superabundant insistence on the price of which is what I
refer to as his exuberance of opinion. It was a luxury for more reasons
than one, though one, presently to be mentioned, handsomely
predominates. The meaning of that exchange of intelligences in the rear
of the oracle which I have figured for him with the perceptive friend
bears simply on his pleading guilty to the purport of the friend’s
discrimination. The point the latter makes with him—a beautiful cordial
critical point—is that he truly cares for nothing in the world, thank
goodness, so much as for the passions and embroilments of men and women,
the free play of character and the sharp revelation of type, all the
real stuff of drama and the natural food of novelists. Religion, morals,
politics, economics, esthetics would be thus, as systematic matter, very
well in their place, but quite secondary and subservient. Balzac’s
attitude is again and again that he cares for the adventures and
emotions because, as his last word, he cares for the good and the
greatness of the State—which is where his swagger, with a whole society
on his hands, comes in. What we on our side in a thousand places
gratefully feel is that he cares for his monarchical and hierarchical
and ecclesiastical society because it rounds itself for his mind into
the most congruous and capacious theatre for the repertory of his
innumerable comedians. It has above all, for a painter abhorrent of the
superficial, the inestimable benefit of the accumulated, of strong marks
and fine shades, contrasts and complications. There had certainly been
since 1789 dispersals and confusions enough, but the thick tradition, no
more at the most than half smothered, lay under them all. So the whole
of his faith and no small part of his working omniscience were neither
more nor less than that historic sense which I have spoken of as the
spur of his invention and which he possessed as no other novelist has
done. We immediately feel that to name it in connection with him is to
answer every question he suggests and to account for each of his
idiosyncrasies in turn. The novel, the tale, however brief, the passage,
the sentence by itself, the situation, the person, the place, the motive
exposed, the speech reported—these things were in his view history,
with the absoluteness and the dignity of history. This is the source
both of his weight and of his wealth. What is the historic sense after
all but animated, but impassioned knowledge seeking to enlarge itself? I
have said that his imagination did the whole thing, no other
explanation—no reckoning of the possibilities of personal
saturation—meeting the mysteries of the case. Therefore his imagination
achieved the miracle of absolutely resolving itself into multifarious
knowledge. Since history proceeds by documents he constructed, as he
needed them, the documents too—fictive sources that imitated the actual
to the life. It was of course a terrible business, but at least in the
light of it his claims to creatorship are justified—which is what was
to be shown.