IV

It is very well even in the sketchiest attempt at a portrait of his

genius to try to take particulars in their order: one peeps over the

shoulder of another at the moment we get a feature into focus. The loud

appeal not to be left out prevails among them all, and certainly with

the excuse that each as we fix it seems to fall most into the picture. I

have so indulged myself as to his general air that I find a whole list

of vivid contributive marks almost left on my hands. Such a list, in any

study of Balzac, is delightful for intimate edification as well as for

the fine humour of the thing; we proceed from one of the items of his

breathing physiognomy to the other with quite the same sense of life,

the same active curiosity, with which we push our way through the thick

undergrowth of one of the novels. The difficulty is really that the

special point for which we at the moment observe him melts into all the

other points, is swallowed up before our eyes in the formidable mass.

The French apply the happiest term to certain characters when they speak

of them as _entiers_, and if the word had been invented for Balzac it

could scarce better have expressed him. He is “entire” as was never a

man of his craft; he moves always in his mass; wherever we find him we

find him in force; whatever touch he applies he applies it with his

whole apparatus. He is like an army gathered to besiege a cottage

equally with a city, and living voraciously in either case on all the

country about. It may well be, at any rate, that his infatuation with

the idea of the social, the practical primacy of “the sex” is the

article at the top of one’s list; there could certainly be no better

occasion than this of a rich reissue of the “Deux Jeunes Mariées” for

placing it there at a venture. Here indeed precisely we get a sharp

example of the way in which, as I have just said, a capital illustration

of one of his sides becomes, just as we take it up, a capital

illustration of another. The correspondence of Louise de Chaulieu and

Renée de Maucombe is in fact one of those cases that light up with a

great golden glow all his parts at once. We needn’t mean by this that

such parts are themselves absolutely all golden—given the amount of

tinsel for instance in his view, supereminent, transcendent here, of the

old families and the great ladies. What we do convey, however, is that

his creative temperament finds in such _data_ as these one of its best

occasions for shining out. Again we fondly recognise his splendid, his

attaching swagger—that of a “bounder” of genius and of feeling; again

we see how, with opportunity, its elements may vibrate into a perfect

ecstasy of creation.

Why shouldn’t a man swagger, he treats us to the diversion of asking

ourselves, who has created from top to toe the most brilliant, the most

historic, the most insolent, above all the most detailed and

discriminated of aristocracies? Balzac carried the uppermost class of

his comedy, from the princes, dukes, and unspeakable duchesses down to

his poor barons _de province_, about in his pocket as he might have

carried a tolerably befingered pack of cards, to deal them about with a

flourish of the highest authority whenever there was the chance of a

game. He knew them up and down and in and out, their arms, infallibly

supplied, their quarterings, pedigrees, services, intermarriages,

relationships, ramifications and other enthralling attributes. This

indeed is comparatively simple learning; the real wonder is rather when

we linger on the ground of the patrician consciousness itself, the

innermost, the esoteric, the spirit, temper, tone—tone above all—of

the titled and the proud. The questions multiply for every scene of the

comedy; there is no one who makes us walk in such a cloud of them. The

clouds elsewhere, in comparison, are at best of questions not worth

asking. _Was_ the patrician consciousness that figured as our author’s

model so splendidly fatuous as he—almost without irony, often in fact

with a certain poetic sympathy—everywhere represents it? His

imagination lives in it, breathes its scented air, swallows this element

with the smack of the lips of the connoisseur; but I feel that we never

know, even to the end, whether he be here directly historic or only

quite misguidedly romantic. The romantic side of him has the extent of

all the others; it represents in the oddest manner his escape from the

walled and roofed structure into which he had built himself—his longing

for the vaguely-felt outside and as much as might be of the rest of the

globe. But it is characteristic of him that the most he could do for

this relief was to bring the fantastic into the circle and fit it

somehow to his conditions. Was his tone for the duchess, the marquise

but the imported fantastic, one of those smashes of the window-pane of

the real that reactions sometimes produce even in the stubborn? or are

we to take it as observed, as really reported, as, for all its

difference from our notion of the natural—and, quite as much, of the

artificial—in another and happier strain of manners, substantially

true? The whole episode, in “Les Illusions Perdues,” of Madame de

Bargeton’s “chucking” Lucien de Rubempré, on reaching Paris with him,

under pressure of Madame d’Espard’s shockability as to his coat and

trousers and other such matters, is either a magnificent lurid document

or the baseless fabric of a vision. The great wonder is that, as I

rejoice to put in, we can never really discover which, and that we feel

as we read that we can’t, and that we suffer at the hands of no other

author this particular helplessness of immersion. It is _done_—we are

always thrown back on that; we can’t get out of it; all we can do is to

say that the true itself can’t be more than done and that if the false

in this way equals it we must give up looking for the difference. Alone

among novelists Balzac has the secret of an insistence that somehow

makes the difference nought. He warms his facts into life—as witness

the certainty that the episode I just cited has absolutely as much of

that property as if perfect matching had been achieved. If the great

ladies in question _didn’t_ behave, wouldn’t, couldn’t have behaved,

like a pair of nervous snobs, why so much the worse, we say to

ourselves, for the great ladies in question. We _know_ them so—they owe

their being to our so seeing them; whereas we never can tell ourselves

how we should otherwise have known them or what quantity of being they

would on a different footing have been able to put forth.

The case is the same with Louise de Chaulieu, who besides coming out of

her convent school, as a quite young thing, with an amount of

sophistication that would have chilled the heart of a horse-dealer,

exhales—and to her familiar friend, a young person of a supposedly

equal breeding—an extravagance of complacency in her “social position”

that makes us rub our eyes. Whereupon after a little the same phenomenon

occurs; we swallow her bragging, against our better reason, or at any

rate against our startled sense, under coercion of the total intensity.

We do more than this, we cease to care for the question, which loses

itself in the hot fusion of the whole picture. He has “gone for” his

subject, in the vulgar phrase, with an avidity that makes the attack of

his most eminent rivals affect us as the intercourse between introduced

indifferences at a dull evening party. He squeezes it till it cries out,

we hardly know whether for pleasure or pain. In the case before us for

example—without wandering from book to book, impossible here, I make

the most of the ground already broken—he has seen at once that the

state of marriage itself, sounded to its depths, is, in the connection,

his real theme. He sees it of course in the conditions that exist for

him, but he weighs it to the last ounce, feels it in all its dimensions,

as well as in all his own, and would scorn to take refuge in any

engaging side-issue. He gets, for further intensity, into the very skin

of his _jeunes mariées_—into each alternately, as they are different

enough; so that, to repeat again, any other mode of representing women,

or of representing anybody, becomes, in juxtaposition, a thing so void

of the active contortions of truth as to be comparatively wooden. He

bears children with Madame de l’Estorade, knows intimately how she

suffers for them, and not less intimately how her correspondent suffers,

as well as enjoys, without them. Big as he is he makes himself small to

be handled by her with young maternal passion and positively to handle

her in turn with infantile innocence. These things are the very

flourishes, the little technical amusements of his penetrating power.

But it is doubtless in his hand for such a matter as the jealous passion

of Louise de Chaulieu, the free play of her intelligence and the almost

beautiful good faith of her egotism, that he is most individual. It is

one of the neatest examples of his extraordinary leading gift, his

art—which is really moreover not an art—of working the exhibition of a

given character up to intensity. I say it is not an art because it acts

for us rather as a hunger on the part of his nature to take on in all

freedom another nature—take it by a direct process of the senses. Art

is for the mass of us who have only the process of art, comparatively so

stiff. The thing amounts with him to a kind of shameless personal,

physical, not merely intellectual, duality—the very spirit and secret

of transmigration.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

1913

It is a pleasure to meet M. Émile Faguet[5] on the same ground of

mastered critical method and in the same air of cool deliberation and

conclusion that so favoured his excellent study of Flaubert in the rich

series to which the present volume belongs. It was worth while waiting

these many years for a Balzac to get it at last from a hand of so firm a

grip, if not quite of the very finest manipulative instinct. It can

scarce ever be said of M. Faguet that he tends to play with a subject,

at least a literary one; but nobody is better for circling his theme in

sound and easy pedestrian fashion, for taking up each of its aspects in

order, for a sense, above all, of the order in which they _should_ be

taken, and for then, after doing them successively justice, reaching the

point from which they appear to melt together. He thus gives us one of

those literary portraits the tradition of which, so far at least as they

are the fruit of method, has continued scantily to flourish among

ourselves. We cannot help thinking indeed that an ideally authoritative

portrait of Balzac would be the work of some pondering painter able to

measure the great man’s bequest a little more from within or by a

coincidence of special faculty, or that in other words the particular

initiation and fellow-feeling of some like—that is not too

unlike—imaginative projector as well are rather wanted here to warm and

colour the critical truth to the right glow of appreciation. Which comes

to saying, we quite acknowledge, that a “tribute” to Balzac, of however

embracing an intention, may still strike us as partly unachieved if we

fail to catch yearning and shining through it, like a motive in a

musical mixture or a thread of gold in a piece of close weaving, the all

but overriding sympathy of novelist with novelist. M. Faguet’s

intelligence at any rate sweeps his ground clear of the anecdotal, the

question-begging reference to odds and ends of the personal and

superficial, in a single short chapter, and, having got so promptly over

this second line of defence, attacks at once the issue of his author’s

general ideas—matters apt to be, in any group of contributors to a

“series” of our own, exactly what the contributor most shirks

considering.

It is true that few writers, and especially few novelists, bring up that

question with anything like the gross assurance and systematic

confidence of Balzac, who clearly took for involved in his plan of a

complete picture of the manners and aspects of his country and his

period that he should have his confident “say” about as many things as

possible, and who, throughout his immense work, appears never for an

instant or in any connection to flinch from that complacency. Here it is

easy to await him, waylay him and catch him in the act, with the

consequence, for the most part, of our having to recognise almost with

compassion the disparity between the author of “La Cousine Bette”

exercising his genius, as Matthew Arnold said of Ruskin, in making a

like distinction, and the same writer taking on a character not in the

least really rooted in that soil. The fact none the less than his

generalising remains throughout so markedly inferior to his

particularising—which latter element and very essence of the novelist’s

art it was his greatness to carry further and apply more consistently

than any member of the craft, without exception, has felt the impulse,

to say nothing of finding the way, to do—by no means wholly destroys

the interest of the habit itself or relieves us of a due attention to

it; so characteristic and significant, so suggestive even of his special

force, though in a manner indirect, are the very folds and redundancies

of this philosopher’s robe that flaps about his feet and drags along the

ground like an assumed official train. The interest here—where it is

exactly that a whole face of his undertaking would be most illumined for

the fellow-artist we imagine trying to exhibit him—depends much less on

what his reflection and opinion, his irrepressible _obiter dicta_ and

monstrous _suffisances_ of judgment may be, than on the part played in

his scheme by his holding himself ready at every turn and at such short

notice to judge. For this latter fact probably lights up more than any

other his conception of the range of the novel, the fashion after which,

in his hands, it had been felt as an all-inclusive form, a form without

rift or leak, a tight mould, literally, into which everything relevant

to a consideration of the society surrounding him—and the less relevant

unfortunately, as well as the more—might be poured in a stream of

increasing consistency, the underlapping subject stretched, all so

formidably, to its own constituted edge and the compound appointed to

reproduce, as in finest and subtlest relief, its every minutest feature,

overlying and corresponding with it all round to the loss of no fraction

of an inch.

It is thus the painter’s aspiring and rejoicing consciousness of the

great square swarming picture, the picture of France from side to side

and from top to bottom, which he proposes to copy—unless we see the

collective quantity rather as the vast primary model or sitter that he

is unprecedentedly to portray, it is this that, rendering him enviable

in proportion to his audacity and his presumption, gives a dignity to

everything that makes the consciousness whole. The result is a state of

possession of his material unlike that of any other teller of tales

whatever about a circumjacent world, and the process of his gain of

which opens up well-nigh the first of those more or less baffling

questions, parts indeed of the great question of the economic rule, the

practical secret, of his activity, that beset us as soon as we study

him. To fit what he was and what he did, that is the measure of how he

used himself and how he used every one and everything else, into his

after all so brief career (for twenty years cover the really productive

term of it) is for ourselves, we confess, to renounce any other solution

than that of his having proceeded by a sense for facts, the

multitudinous facts of the scene about him, that somehow involved a

preliminary, a pre-experiential inspiration, a straightness of intuition

truly impossible to give an account of and the like of which had never

before been shown. He had not to learn things in order to know them; and

even though he multiplied himself in more ways than we can reckon up,

going hither and thither geographically, leading his life with violence,

as it were, though always with intention, and wasting almost nothing

that had ever touched him, the natural man, the baptised and registered

Honoré, let loose with harsh promptitude upon a world formed from the

first moment to excite his voracity, can only have been _all_ the

exploiting agent, the pushing inquirer, the infallible appraiser, the

subject of an _arrière-pensée_ as merciless, in spite of being otherwise

genial, as the black care riding behind the horseman. There was thus

left over for him less of mere human looseness, of mere emotion, of mere

naturalness, or of any curiosity whatever, that didn’t “pay”—and the

extent to which he liked things to pay, to see them, think of them, and

describe them as prodigiously paying, is not to be expressed—than

probably marks any recorded relation between author and subject as we

know each of these terms.

So it comes that his mastership of whatever given identity might be in

question, and much more of the general identity of his rounded (for the

artistic vision), his compact and containing France, the fixed, felt

frame to him of the vividest items and richest characteristics of human

life, can really not be thought of as a matter of degrees of confidence,

as acquired or built up or cumbered with verifying fears. He _was_ the

given identity and, on the faintest shade of a hint about it caught up,

became one with it and lived it—this in the only way in which he could

live, anywhere or at any time: which was by losing himself in its

relation to his need or to what we call his voracity. Just so his mind,

his power of apprehension, worked _naturally_ in the interest of a

society disclosed to that appetite; on the mere approach to the display

he inhaled information, he recognised himself as what he might best be

known for, an historian unprecedented, an historian documented as none

had not only ever been, but had ever dreamed of being—and even if the

method of his documentation can leave us for the most part but

wondering. The method of his use of it, or of a portion of it, we more

or less analyse and measure; but the wealth of his provision or outfit

itself, the crammed store of his categories and _cadres_, leaves us the

more stupefied as we feel it to have been honestly come by. All this is

what it is impossible not to regard as in itself a fundamental felicity

as no _confrère_ had known; so far, indeed, as Balzac suffered

_confrères_ or as the very nature of his faculty could be thought of for

them. M. Brunetière’s monograph of some years ago, which is but a couple

of degrees less weighty, to our sense, than this of M. Faguet before us,

justly notes that, whatever other felicity may have graced the exercise

of such a genius, for instance, as that rare contemporary George Sand,

she was reduced well-nigh altogether to drawing upon resources and

enjoying advantages comparatively vague and unassured. She had of course

in a manner her special resource and particular advantage, which

consisted, so to speak, in a finer feeling about what she did possess

and could treat of with authority, and particularly in a finer command

of the terms of expression, than any involved in Balzac’s “happier”

example. But her almost fatal weakness as a novelist—an exponent of the

art who has waned exactly as, for our general long-drawn appreciation,

Balzac has waxed—comes from her having had to throw herself upon ground

that no order governed, no frame, as we have said, enclosed, and no

safety attended; safety of the sort, we mean, the safety of the

constitutive, illustrative fact among facts, which we find in her rival

as a warm socialised air, an element supremely assimilable.

It may freely be pronounced interesting that whereas, in her instinct

for her highest security, she threw herself upon the consideration of

love as the _type_ attraction or most representable thing in the human

scene, so, assuredly, no student of that field has, in proportion to the

thoroughness of his study, felt he could afford to subordinate or almost

even to neglect it to anything like the tune in which we see it put and

kept in its place through the parts of the Comédie Humaine that most

count. If this passion but too often exhales a tepid breath in much

other fiction—much other of ours at least—that is apt to come

decidedly less from the writer’s sense of proportion than from his

failure of art, or in other words of intensity. It is rarely absent by

intention or by intelligence, it is pretty well always there as the

theoretic principal thing—any difference from writer to writer being

mostly in the power to put the principal thing effectively forward. It

figures as a pressing, an indispensable even if a perfunctory motive,

for example, in every situation devised by Walter Scott; the case being

simply that if it doesn’t in fact attractively occupy the foreground

this is because his hand has had so native, so much greater, an ease for

other parts of the picture. What makes Balzac so pre-eminent and

exemplary that he was to leave the novel a far other and a vastly more

capacious and significant affair than he found it, is his having felt

his fellow-creatures (almost altogether for him his contemporaries) as

quite failing of reality, as swimming in the vague and the void and the

abstract, unless their social conditions, to the last particular, their

generative and contributive circumstances, of every discernible sort,

enter for all these are “worth” into his representative attempt. This

great compound of the total looked into and starting up in its element,

as it always does, to meet the eye of genius and patience half way,

bristled for him with all its branching connections, those thanks to

which any figure could _be_ a figure but by showing for endlessly

entangled in them.

So it was then that his huge felicity, to re-emphasise our term, was in

his state of circulating where recognitions and identifications didn’t

so much await as rejoicingly assault him, having never yet in all the

world, grudged or at the best suspected feeders as they were at the

board where sentiment occupied the head, felt themselves so finely

important or subject to such a worried intention. They hung over a scene

as to which it was one of the forces of his inspiration that history had

lately been there at work, with incomparable energy and inimitable art,

to pile one upon another, not to say squeeze and dovetail violently into

each other, after such a fashion as might defy competition anywhere, her

successive deposits and layers of form and order, her restless

determinations of appearance—so like those of the different “states” of

an engraver’s impression; all to an effect which _should_ have

constituted, as by a miracle of coincidence it did, the paradise of an

extraordinary observer. Balzac lived accordingly, extraordinary since he

was, in an earthly heaven so near perfect for his kind of vision that he

could have come at no moment more conceivably blest to him. The later

part of the eighteenth century, with the Revolution, the Empire and the

Restoration, had inimitably conspired together to scatter abroad their

separate marks and stigmas, their separate trails of character and

physiognomic hits—for which advantage he might have arrived too late,

as his hapless successors, even his more or less direct imitators,

visibly have done. The fatal fusions and uniformities inflicted on our

newer generations, the running together of all the differences of form

and tone, the ruinous liquefying wash of the great industrial brush over

the old conditions of contrast and colour, doubtless still have left the

painter of manners much to do, but have ground him down to the sad fact

that his ideals of differentiation, those inherent oppositions from type

to type, in which drama most naturally resides, have well-nigh perished.

They pant for life in a hostile air; and we may surely say that their

last successful struggle, their last bright resistance to eclipse among

ourselves, was in their feverish dance to the great fiddling of Dickens.

Dickens made them dance, we seem to see, caper and kick their heels,

wave their arms, and above all agitate their features, for the simple

reason that he couldn’t make them stand or sit _at once_ quietly and

expressively, couldn’t make them look straight out as for

themselves—quite in fact as through his not daring to, not feeling he

could afford to, in a changing hour when ambiguities and the wavering

line, droll and “dodgy” dazzlements and the possibly undetected

factitious alone, might be trusted to keep him right with an incredibly

uncritical public, a public blind to the difference between a shade and

a patch.

Balzac on the other hand, born as we have seen to confidence, the tonic

air of his paradise, might make character, in the sense in which we use

it, that of the element exposable to the closest verification, sit or

stand for its “likeness” as still as ever it would. It is true that he

could, as he often did, resort to fond extravagance, since he was apt at

his worst to plunge into agitation for mere agitation’s sake—which is a

course that, by any turn, may cast the plunger on the barrenest strand.

But he is at his best when the conditions, the whole complex of

subdivisible form and pressure, are virtually themselves the situation,

the action and the interest, or in other words when these things exhaust

themselves, as it were, in expressing the persons we are concerned with,

agents and victims alike, and when by such vivified figures, whether

victims or agents, they are themselves completely expressed. The three

distinguished critics who have best studied him, Taine, Brunetière and

now (as well as before this) M. Faguet—the first the most eloquent but

the loosest, and the last the closest even if the dryest—are in

agreement indeed as to the vast quantity of waste in him, inevitably

judging the romanticist as whom he so frequently, speculatively,

desperately paraded altogether inferior to the realist whose function he

could still repeatedly and richly and for his greater glory exercise.

This estimate of his particularly greater glory is of a truth not wholly

shared by M. Taine; but the three are virtually at one, where we of

course join them, or rather go further than they, as to the enviability,

so again to call it (and by which we mean the matchless freedom of

play), of his harvesting sense when he gave himself up in fullest

measure to his apprehension of the dense wholeness of reality. It was

this that led him on and kept him true to that happily largest side of

his labour by which he must massively live; just as it is this, the

breath of his real geniality, when every abatement is made, that stirs

to loyalty those who under his example also take his direction and find

their joy in watching him thoroughly at work. We see then how, when

social character and evolved type are the prize to be grasped, the facts

of observation and certification, unrestingly social and historic too,

that form and fondle and retouch it, never relaxing their action, are so

easily and blessedly absolute to him that this is what we mean by their

virtue.

When there were enough of these quantities and qualities flowering into

the definite and the absolute for him to feed on, feed if not to satiety

at least to the largest loosening of his intellectual belt, there were

so many that we may even fall in with most of M. Faguet’s

discriminations and reserves about him and yet find his edifice rest on

proportioned foundations. For it is his assimilation of things and

things, of his store of them and of the right ones, the right for

representation, that leaves his general image, even with great chunks of

surface surgically, that is critically, removed, still coherent and

erect. There are moments when M. Faguet—most surgical he!—seems to

threaten to remove so much that we ask ourselves in wonder what may be

left; but no removal matters while the principle of observation

animating the mass is left unattacked. Our present critic for instance

is “down”—very understandingly down as seems to us—on some of the

sides of his author’s rich temperamental vulgarity; which is accompanied

on those sides by want of taste, want of wit, want of style, want of

knowledge of ever so many parts of the general subject, too

precipitately proposed, and want of fineness of feeling about ever so

many others. We agree with him freely enough, subject always to this

reserve already glanced at, that a novelist of a high esthetic

sensibility must always find more in any other novelist worth

considering seriously at all than he can perhaps hope to impart even to

the most intelligent of critics pure and simple his subtle reasons for.

This said, we lose ourselves, to admiration, in such a matter for

example as the tight hug of the mere material, the supremely important

if such ever was, represented by the appeal to us on behalf of the

money-matters of César Birotteau.

This illustration gains logically, much more than loses, from the rank

predominance of the money-question, the money-vision, throughout all

Balzac. There are lights in which it can scarce not appear to us that

his own interest is greater, his possibilities of attention truer, in

these pressing particulars than in all other questions put together;

there could be no better sign of the appreciation of “things,” exactly,

than so never relaxed a grasp of the part played in the world by just

these. Things for things, the franc, the shilling, the dollar, are the

very most underlying and conditioning, even dramatically, even

poetically, that call upon him; and we have everywhere to recognise how

little he feels himself to be telling us of this, that and the other

person unless he has first given us full information, with every detail,

either as to their private means, their income, investments, savings,

losses, the state in fine of their pockets, or as to their immediate

place of habitation, their home, their outermost shell, with its windows

and doors, its outside appearance and inside plan, its rooms and

furniture and arrangements, its altogether intimate facts, down to its

very smell. This prompt and earnest evocation of the shell and its

lining is but another way of testifying with due emphasis to economic

conditions. The most personal shell of all, the significant dress of the

individual, whether man or woman, is subject to as sharp and as deep a

notation—it being no small part of his wealth of luck that the age of

dress differentiated and specialised from class to class and character

to character, not least moreover among men, could still give him

opportunities of choice, still help him to define and intensify, or

peculiarly to _place_ his apparitions. The old world in which costume

had, to the last refinement of variety, a social meaning happily

lingered on for him; and nothing is more interesting, nothing goes

further in this sense of the way the social concrete could minister to

him, than the fact that “César Birotteau,” to instance that masterpiece

again, besides being a money-drama of the closest texture, the very epic

of retail bankruptcy, is at the same time the all-vividest exhibition of

the habited and figured, the representatively stamped and countenanced,

buttoned and buckled state of the persons moving through it. No livelier

example therefore can we name of the triumphant way in which any given,

or as we should rather say taken, total of conditions works out under

our author’s hand for accentuation of type. The story of poor Birotteau

is just in this supreme degree a hard total, even if every one’s

money-relation does loom larger, for his or her case, than anything

else.

The main thing doubtless to agree with M. Faguet about, however, is the

wonder of the rate at which this genius for an infatuated grasp of the

environment could multiply the creatures swarming, and swarming at their

best to perfection, in that jungle of elements. A jungle certainly the

environment, the rank many-coloured picture of France, would have been

had it not really created in our observer the joy, thanks to his need of

a clear and marked order, of its becoming so arrangeable. Nothing could

interest us more than to note with our critic that such

multiplications—taken after all at such a rush—have to be paid for by

a sort of limitation of quality in each, the quality that, beyond a

certain point and after a certain allowance, ever looks askance at any

approach to what it may be figured as taking for _insolence_ of

quantity. Some inquiry into the general mystery of such laws of payment

would beckon us on had we the space—whereby we might glance a little at

the wondrous why and wherefore of the sacrifice foredoomed, the loss,

greater or less, of those ideals now compromised by the tarnished names

of refinement and distinction, yet which we are none the less, at our

decentest, still ashamed too entirely to turn our backs on, in the

presence of energies that, shaking the air by their embrace of the

common, tend to dispossess the rare of a certified place in it.

Delightful to the critical mind to estimate the point at which, in the

picture of life, a sense for the element of the rare ceases to consort

with a sense, necessarily large and lusty, for the varieties of the real

that super-abound. Reducible perhaps to some exquisite measure is this

point of fatal divergence. It declared itself, the divergence, in the

heart of Balzac’s genius; for nothing about him is less to be gainsaid

than that on the other or further side of a certain line of rareness

drawn his authority, so splendid on the hither or familiar side, is

sadly liable to lapse. It fails to take in whatever fine truth

experience may have vouchsafed to us about the highest kinds of temper,

the inward life of the mind, the _cultivated_ consciousness. His truest

and vividest people are those whom the conditions in which they are so

palpably embedded have simplified not less than emphasised; simplified

mostly to singleness of motive and passion and interest, to quite

measurably finite existence; whereas his ostensibly higher spirits,

types necessarily least observed and most independently thought out, in

the interest of their humanity, as we would fain ourselves think them,

are his falsest and weakest and show most where his imagination and his

efficient sympathy break down.

To say so much as this is doubtless to provoke the question of where and

how then, under so many other restrictions, he is so great—which

question is answered simply by our claim for his unsurpassed mastery of

the “middling” sort, so much the most numerous in the world, the

middling sort pressed upon by the vast variety of their dangers. These

it is in their multitude whom he makes individually living, each with a

clustered bunch of concomitants, as no one, to our mind, has equalled

him in doing—above all with the amount of repetition of the feat

considered. Finer images than the middling, but so much fewer, other

creative talents have thrown off; swarms of the common, on the other

hand, have obeyed with an even greater air of multitude perhaps than in

Balzac’s pages the big brandished enumerative wand—only with a signal

forfeiture in this case of that gift of the sharply separate, the really

rounded, personality which he untiringly conferred. Émile Zola, by so

far the strongest example of his influence, mustered groups and crowds

beyond even the master’s own compass; but as throughout Zola we live and

move for the most part but in crowds (he thinking his best but in terms

of crowdedness), so in Balzac, where he rises highest, we deal, whether

or no more for our sense of ugliness than of beauty, but with memorable

person after person. He thought, on his side—when he thought at least

to good purpose—in terms the most expressively personal, in such as

could even eventuate in monsters and forms of evil the most finished we

know; so that if he too has left us a multitude of which we may say that

it stands alone for solidity, it nevertheless exists by addition and

extension, not by a chemical shaking-together, a cheapening or

diminishing fusion.

It is not that the series of the Rougon-Macquart has not several

distinct men and women to show—though they occur, as a fact, almost in

“L’Assommoir” alone; it is not either that Zola did not on occasion try

for the cultivated consciousness, a thing of course, so far as ever

achieved anywhere, necessarily separate and distinguished; it is that he

tried, on such ground, with a futility only a shade less marked than

Balzac’s, and perhaps would have tried with equal disaster had he

happened to try oftener. If we find in his pages no such spreading waste

as Balzac’s general picture of the classes “enjoying every advantage,”

that is of the socially highest—to the elder writer’s success in

depicting particularly the female members of which Sainte-Beuve, and

Brunetière in his footsteps, have rendered such strange and stupefying

homage—the reason may very well be that such groups could not in the

nature of the case figure to him after the fashion in which he liked

groups to figure, as merely herded and compressed. To Balzac they were

groups in which individualisation might be raised to its very finest;

and it is by this possibility in them that we watch him and his fertile

vulgarity, his peccant taste, so fallible for delicacies, so unerring

for simplicities, above all doubtless the homeliest, strongest and

grimmest, wofully led astray. But it is fairly almost a pleasure to our

admiration, before him, to see what we have permitted ourselves to call

the “chunks” of excision carted off to the disengagement of the values

that still live. The wondrous thing is that they live best where his

grand vulgarity—since we are not afraid of the word—serves him rather

than betrays; which it _has_ to do, we make out, over the greater part

of the field of any observer for whom man is on the whole cruelly,

crushingly, deformedly conditioned. We grant _that_ as to Balzac’s view,

and yet feel the view to have been at the same time incomparably active

and productively genial; which are by themselves somehow qualities and

reactions that redress the tragedy and the doom. The vulgarity was at

any rate a force that simply got nearer than any other could have done

to the whole detail, the whole intimate and evidenced story, of

submission and perversion, and as such it could but prove itself

immensely human. It is on all this considered ground that he has for so

many years stood firm and that we feel him by reason of it and in spite

of them, in spite of all that has come and gone, not to have yielded,

have “given,” an inch.

-----

Footnote 5:

Balzac. Par Émile Faguet, de l’Académie Française. Les Grands Écrivains

Français. Paris, Hachette, 1913.

GEORGE SAND

1897

I have been reading in the Revue de Paris for November 1st, 1896, some

fifty pages, of an extraordinary interest, which have had in respect to

an old admiration a remarkable effect. Undoubtedly for other admirers

too who have come to fifty year—admirers, I mean, once eager, of the

distinguished woman involved—the perusal of the letters addressed by

George Sand to Alfred de Musset in the course of a famous friendship

will have stirred in an odd fashion the ashes of an early ardour. I

speak of ashes because early ardours for the most part burn themselves

out, while the place they hold in our lives varies, I think, mainly

according to the degree of tenderness with which we gather up and

preserve their dust; and I speak of oddity because in the present case

it is difficult to say whether the agitation of the embers results at

last in a returning glow or in a yet more sensible chill. That indeed is

perhaps a small question compared with the simple pleasure of the

reviving emotion. One reads and wonders and enjoys again, just for the

sake of the renewal. The small fry of the hour submit to further

shrinkage, and we revert with a sigh of relief to the free genius and

large life of one of the greatest of all masters of expression. Do

people still handle the works of this master—people other than young

ladies studying French with La “Mare au Diable” and a dictionary? Are

there persons who still read “Valentine”? Are there others capable of

losing themselves in “Mauprat”? Has “André,” the exquisite, dropped out

of knowledge, and is any one left who remembers “Teverino”? I ask these

questions for the mere sweet sound of them, without the least

expectation of an answer. I remember asking them twenty years ago, after

Madame Sand’s death, and not then being hopeful of the answer of the

future. But the only response that matters to us perhaps is our own,

even if it be after all somewhat ambiguous. “André” and “Valentine” then

are rather on our shelves than in our hands, but in the light of what is

given us in the “Revue de Paris” who shall say that we do not, and with

avidity, “read” George Sand? She died in 1876, but she lives again

intensely in these singular pages, both as to what in her spirit was

most attaching and what most disconcerting. We are vague as to what they

may represent for the generation that has come to the front since her

death; nothing, I dare say, very imposing or even very pleasing. But

they give out a great deal to a reader for whom thirty years ago—the

best time to have taken her as a whole—she was a high clear figure, a

great familiar magician. This impression is a strange mixture, but

perhaps not quite incommunicable; and we are steeped as we receive it in

one of the most curious episodes in the annals of the literary race.

I

It is the great interest of such an episode that, apart from its

proportionate place in the unfolding of a personal life it has a

wonderful deal to say on the relation between experience and art at

large. It constitutes an eminent special case, in which the workings of

that relation are more or less uncovered; a case too of which one of the

most striking notes is that we are in possession of it almost

exclusively by the act of one of the persons concerned. Madame Sand at

least, as we see to-day, was eager to leave nothing undone that could

make us further acquainted than we were before with one of the liveliest

chapters of her personal history. We cannot, doubtless, be sure that her

conscious purpose in the production of “Elle et Lui” was to show us the

process by which private ecstasies and pains find themselves transmuted

in the artist’s workshop into promising literary material—any more than

we can be certain of her motive for making toward the end of her life

earnest and complete arrangements for the ultimate publication of the

letters in which the passion is recorded and in which we can remount to

the origin of the volume. If “Elle et Lui” had been the inevitable

picture, postponed and retouched, of the great adventure of her youth,

so the letters show us the crude primary stuff from which the moral

detachment of the book was distilled. Were they to be given to the world

for the encouragement of the artist-nature—as a contribution to the

view that no suffering is great enough, no emotion tragic enough to

exclude the hope that such pangs may sooner or later be esthetically

assimilated? Was the whole proceeding, in intention, a frank plea for

the intellectual and in some degree even the commercial profit, to a

robust organism, of a store of erotic reminiscence? Whatever the reasons

behind the matter, that is to a certain extent the moral of the strange

story.

It may be objected that this moral is qualified to come home to us only

when the relation between art and experience really proves a happier one

than it may be held to have proved in the combination before us. The

element in danger of being most absent from the process is the element

of dignity, and its presence, so far as that may ever at all be hoped

for in an appeal from a personal quarrel, is assured only in proportion

as the esthetic event, standing on its own feet, represents a noble

gift. It was vain, the objector may say, for our author to pretend to

justify by so slight a performance as “Elle et Lui” that sacrifice of

all delicacy which has culminated in this supreme surrender. “If you

sacrifice all delicacy,” I hear such a critic contend, “show at least

that you were right by giving us a masterpiece. The novel in question is

no more a masterpiece,” I even hear him proceed, “than any other of the

loose liquid lucid works of its author. By your supposition of a great

intention you give much too fine an account on the one hand of a

personal habit of incontinence and on the other of a literary habit of

egotism. Madame Sand, in writing her tale and in publishing her

love-letters, obeyed no prompting more exalted than that of exhibiting

her personal (in which I include her verbal) facility, and of doing so

at the cost of whatever other persons might be concerned; and you are

therefore—and you might as well immediately confess it—thrown back for

the element of interest on the attraction of her general eloquence, the

plausibility of her general manner and the great number of her

particular confidences. You are thrown back on your mere curiosity or

sympathy—thrown back from any question of service rendered to ‘art.’ ”

One might be thrown back doubtless still further even than such remarks

would represent if one were not quite prepared with the confession they

propose. It is only because such a figure is interesting—in every

manifestation—that its course is marked for us by vivid footprints and

possible lessons. And to enable us to find these it scarcely need have

aimed after all so extravagantly high. George Sand lived her remarkable

life and drove her perpetual pen, but the illustration that I began by

speaking of is for ourselves to gather—if we can.

I remember hearing many years ago in Paris an anecdote for the truth of

which I am far from vouching, though it professed to come direct—an

anecdote that has recurred to me more than once in turning over the

revelations of the Revue de Paris, and without the need of the special

reminder (in the shape of an allusion to her intimacy with the hero of

the story) contained in those letters to Sainte-Beuve which are

published in the number of November 15th. Prosper Mérimée was said to

have related—in a reprehensible spirit—that during a term of

association with the author of “Lélia” he once opened his eyes, in the

raw winter dawn, to see his companion, in a dressing-gown, on her knees

before the domestic hearth, a candlestick beside her and a red _madras_

round her head, making bravely, with her own hands, the fire that was to

enable her to sit down betimes to urgent pen and paper. The story

represents him as having felt that the spectacle chilled his ardour and

tried his taste; her appearance was unfortunate, her occupation an

inconsequence and her industry a reproof—the result of all of which was

a lively irritation and an early rupture. To the firm admirer of Madame

Sand’s prose the little sketch has a very different value, for it

presents her in an attitude which is the very key to the enigma, the

answer to most of the questions with which her character confronts us.

She rose early because she was pressed to write, and she was pressed to

write because she had the greatest instinct of expression ever conferred

on a woman; a faculty that put a premium on all passion, on all pain, on

all experience and all exposure, on the greatest variety of ties and the

smallest reserve about them. The really interesting thing in these

posthumous _laideurs_ is the way the gift, the voice, carries its

possessor through them and lifts her on the whole above them. It gave

her, it may be confessed at the outset and in spite of all magnanimities

in the use of it, an unfair advantage in every connection. So at least

we must continue to feel till—for our appreciation of this particular

one—we have Alfred de Musset’s share of the correspondence. For we

shall have it at last, in whatever faded fury or beauty it may still

possess—to that we may make up our minds. Let the galled jade wince, it

is only a question of time. The greatest of literary quarrels will in

short, on the general ground, once more come up—the quarrel beside

which all others are mild and arrangeable, the eternal dispute between

the public and the private, between curiosity and delicacy.

This discussion is precisely all the sharper because it takes place for

each of us within as well as without. When we wish to know at all we

wish to know everything; yet there happen to be certain things of which

no better description can be given than that they are simply none of our

business. “What _is_ then forsooth of our business?” the genuine analyst

may always ask; and he may easily challenge us to produce any rule of

general application by which we shall know when to push in and when to

back out. “In the first place,” he may continue, “half the ‘interesting’

people in the world have at one time or another set themselves to drag

us in with all their might; and what in the world in such a relation is

the observer that he should absurdly pretend to be in more of a flutter

than the object observed? The mannikin, in all schools, is at an early

stage of study of the human form inexorably superseded by the man. Say

that we are to give up the attempt to understand: it might certainly be

better so, and there would be a delightful side to the new arrangement.

But in the name of common-sense don’t say that the continuity of life is

not to have some equivalent in the continuity of pursuit, the renewal of

phenomena in the renewal of notation. There is not a door you can lock

here against the critic or the painter, not a cry you can raise or a

long face you can pull at him, that are not quite arbitrary things. The

only thing that makes the observer competent is that he is neither

afraid nor ashamed; the only thing that makes him decent—just

think!—is that he is not superficial.” All this is very well, but

somehow we all equally feel that there is clean linen and soiled and

that life would be intolerable without some acknowledgment even by the

pushing of such a thing as forbidden ground. M. Émile Zola, at the

moment I write, gives to the world his reasons for rejoicing in the

publication of the physiological _enquête_ of Dr. Toulouse—a marvellous

catalogue or handbook of M. Zola’s outward and inward parts, which

leaves him not an inch of privacy, so to speak, to stand on, leaves him

nothing about himself that is _for_ himself, for his friends, his

relatives, his intimates, his lovers, for discovery, for emulation, for

fond conjecture or flattering deluded envy. It is enough for M. Zola

that everything is for the public and no sacrifice worth thinking of

when it is a question of presenting to the open mouth of that apparently

gorged but still gaping monster the smallest spoonful of truth. The

truth, to his view, is never either ridiculous or unclean, and the way

to a better life lies through telling it, so far as possible, about

everything and about every one.

There would probably be no difficulty in agreeing to this if it didn’t

seem on the part of the speaker the result of a rare confusion between

give and take, between “truth” and information. The true thing that most

matters to us is the true thing we have most use for, and there are

surely many occasions on which the truest thing of all is the necessity

of the mind, its simple necessity of feeling. Whether it feels in order

to learn or learns in order to feel, the event is the same: the side on

which it shall most feel will be the side to which it will most incline.

If it feels more about a Zola functionally undeciphered it will be

governed more by that particular truth than by the truth about his

digestive idiosyncrasies, or even about his “olfactive perceptions” and

his “arithmomania or impulse to count.” An affirmation of our “mere

taste” may very supposedly be our individual contribution to the general

clearing up. Nothing often is less superficial than to ignore and

overlook, or more constructive (for living and feeling at all) than to

want impatiently to choose. If we are aware that in the same way as

about a Zola undeciphered we should have felt more about a George Sand

unexposed, the true thing we have gained becomes a poor substitute for

the one we have lost; and I scarce see what difference it makes that the

view of the elder novelist appears in this matter quite to march with

that of the younger. I hasten to add that as to being of course asked

why in the world with such a leaning we have given time either to M.

Zola’s physician or to Musset’s correspondent, this is only another

illustration of the bewildering state of the subject.

When we meet on the broad highway the rueful denuded figure we need some

presence of mind to decide whether to cut it dead or to lead it gently

home, and meanwhile the fatal complication easily occurs. We have

_seen_, in a flash of our own wit, and mystery has fled with a shriek.

These encounters are indeed accidents which may at any time take place,

and the general guarantee in a noisy world lies, I judge, not so much in

any hope of really averting them as in a regular organisation of the

struggle. The reporter and the reported have duly and equally to

understand that they carry their life in their hands. There are secrets

for privacy and silence; let them only be cultivated on the part of the

hunted creature with even half the method with which the love of

sport—or call it the historic sense—is cultivated on the part of the

investigator. They have been left too much to the natural, the

instinctive man; but they will be twice as effective after it begins to

be observed that they may take their place among the triumphs of

civilisation. Then at last the game will be fair and the two forces face

to face; it will be “pull devil, pull tailor,” and the hardest pull will

doubtless provide the happiest result. Then the cunning of the inquirer,

envenomed with resistance, will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything

we to-day conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, with every track

covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the

tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the

siege of all the years.