THE PREDATORY ARTIST
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Here is Haldeman-Julius, discussing the thesis of your
book. He says: ‘You may say that because Balzac drew his characters
largely from the bourgeoisie he was conducting a subtle propaganda in
behalf of a class; or, in general, that he was a bourgeois author. But
such a view would be a travesty of literary criticism.’”
Says Ogi: “That is what a great many people are going to call this book.
But let us see what we can make of Balzac.”
At this point the mail arrives, and in it a letter to Mrs. Ogi, telling
some bad news about a friend. A look of deep distress comes upon her
face, and Ogi, watching her, is suddenly inspired. “Hold that
expression!” he cries.
“What do you mean?” falters Mrs. Ogi.
“It’s what I need for a story! I want to get all the details of it--the
trembling of your lips, the look in your eyes. Hold it now! It is copy!”
“I think you are out of your mind,” says Mrs. Ogi; and her face assumes
a quite different expression.
Says her husband: “I am the artist, and I feed on life. My fellow humans
suffer, and a voice within me cries: ‘Magnificent!’ Anguish writes
itself upon their features, and I whisper: ‘There is a great moment!’
They are utterly abased, and I think: ‘Here is my chance of
immortality!’”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are a monster! I have always known it.”
“I am one among thousands of monsters, ranging the earth, competing
furiously for their prey. I explore the whole field of human experience;
I climb the mountain peaks, I ransack the starry spaces, I rummage the
dust-bins of history, collecting great significant moments, climaxes of
emotion, drama, suspense, thrill; when I find it, I slap my knee, like
Thackeray writing the scene of Becky Sharp caught in adultery, and
exclaiming: ‘There is a stroke of genius!’ I see tears falling, and I
think: ‘That will sell!’ Out of that cry of despair I shall make a
feast! From this tale of tragedy I shall build a new house! Upon this
heap of anguish I shall leap to fame! I shall enlarge my ego, expand in
the admiration of my fellow-men, enjoying dominion over their emotions
and their thoughts. Also, of course, I shall not forget my fellow-women,
their thrills and ecstasies; I shall have gorgeous apartments, furnished
with barbaric splendor, to which will come brilliant and fascinating
admirers--”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Is this a dream you want me to psychoanalyze?”
“No,” says her husband, “it is simply the soul of Balzac which I am
putting before you: the most perfect type of the predatory artist that
has existed in human history; the art for art’s sake ideal incarnate;
genius divorced from conscience, save only as applied to the art work
itself--the inexorable duty of portraying the utmost conceivable energy,
fury, splendor, terror, sublimity, melodrama, pity, elegance, greed,
horror, cruelty, anguish, beauty, passion, worship, longing,
wickedness, glory, frenzy, majesty and delight.”
This predatory artist, living in a predatory world, and portraying
predatory emotions, does not seem to us a propagandist, simply because
of the complete identity which exists between him and the thing he
portrays. It is the world which came into existence after the French
revolution, and has prevailed ever since. The masses made the
revolution, hoping to profit from it; but the merchants and bankers and
lawyers took over the power. Alone, this class in France could not have
succeeded; but they had the help of England--it is the triumph of
British gold, taking charge of the continent and making it over in the
image of the “shop-keeper”: the bourgeois world, a society in which
everybody seeks money, and having obtained it, spends it upon the
getting of more money, or upon the expansion of his personality through
the power of money to dominate and impress other men. Those who succeed
enjoy, while those who fail are trampled; such is the “Comédie Humaine,”
as Balzac exhibits it in a total of eighty-five works of prose fiction,
not counting dramas, essays and reviews.
He was born of a bourgeois family and educated for a lawyer. But he
wanted to write, and because his family would not support him, he went
away and starved most hideously in a garret. The hunger which he there
acquired was not merely of the stomach and the senses, but of the
intellect and soul. He became a ferocious, almost an insane worker. He
was greedy for facts, and never forgot anything; he acquired a whole
universe of detail, names, places, technical terms, the appearances of
persons and things, human characteristics, anecdotes, conversations. He
wove these into his stories, he constructed vast panoramas of French
society, colossal processions marching past without end. The bulk of his
work is so enormous that you may spend your lifetime reading Balzac,
exploring the lives of his two or three thousand characters.
What will you know when you get through? You will know French bourgeois
civilization, high and low, rich and poor, good and evil. You will
observe the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer; you will
discover the greedy devouring the good and patient and honest--and then
coming to ruin through their own insensate desires. It is brilliant,
vivid, as real as genius can make it, and at first you are enthralled.
How marvelous, to learn about the world without the trouble of going
into it! But after you have read for a month or two, another feeling
steals over you, a feeling of familiarity: you know all this, why read
any more? Life is odious and cruel, it makes you ill; your one thought
becomes, can anything be done about it? Is there any remedy? And from
that moment you are done with Balzac.
For, so far as this “Comédie Humaine” is concerned, there is no remedy.
Balzac was so much a part of his own corrupt age that he could not have
conceived of a co-operative world. He saw the class struggle, of
course--and took his stand on the side of his money. A passionate Tory,
he referred to “the two eternal truths, the monarchy and the Catholic
church.” His attitude to politics was summed up in the formula that the
people must be kept “under the most powerful yoke possible.” You find in
his novels tremendous loads of philosophic and scientific learning,
practically all of it utter trash. Henry James disposes of him in the
sentence: “He was incapable of a lucid reflexion.” The nearest approach
to a definite proposition to be got out of his writings is the notion
that desire, imagination and intellect are the destroyers of life. Of
course, if that be true, civilization is doomed, and it is a waste of
time to seek moral codes or understanding, or even to produce art.
Such a view was, of course, simply the reflex of the predatory artist’s
own greed for money, luxury, fame and power. He lived alternately for
art and Mammon. He would shut himself up alone in a secret place and
write for weeks, even months, without seeing anyone. He would start work
at midnight, clad in a white Benedictine robe, with a black skull-cap,
by the light of a dozen candles, and under the stimulus of many pots of
coffee. Having thus completed a masterpiece, he would emerge to receive
the applause of Paris, carrying a cane with an enormous jeweled head.
Having made another fortune and paid a small part of what he called his
“floating debt,” he would plunge into the wholesale purchasing of silks
and satins and velvets, furniture and carpets and tapestries and jewels
and “objects of art,” vast store-rooms full of that junk whereby the
bourgeois world sets forth the emptiness of its mind and the futility of
its aims. Lacking money enough, his maniac imagination would evolve new
schemes--book publishing, paper manufacturing, a journal, a secret
society, silver mines in Sardinia, the buried treasure of Toussaint
l’Ouverture, each of which he was sure was going to turn him into a
millionaire overnight.
Balzac gives prominence to that type of men whom the French call
“careerists”; that is to say, men who set out to make their fortune, at
any cost of honor, decency and fair play. Balzac admired such men--for
the simple reason that he himself was that kind. In his later years he
met a wealthy Polish lady, Madame Hanska, who became his mistress;
writing to his sister about it, he set forth what this meant to him, and
his language was such as a “confidence man” would use, writing to a
woman confederate. The alliance, he wrote, would give him access to the
great world, and “opportunity for domination.”
Is the work of such a man propaganda? If you accept the common dogma
that blind egotistical instinct, and the portrayal and glorification
thereof, constitute art, while the effort to understand life, and to
reconstruct it into a thing of order and sense and dignity, is
propaganda--why then undoubtedly the “Comédie Humaine” of Honoré de
Balzac is pure and unadulterated art. If, on the other hand, you admit
my contention that a man who is born into a money-ravenous world, and
who absorbs its poisoned atmosphere, and sets himself to the task of
portraying it, not merely as real and inevitable, but as glorious,
magnificent, fascinating, sublime--if you admit with me that such a man
is a propagandist, why then you must reconcile yourself to enduring the
opposition of all orthodox literary critics.