Under which King?
To Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac's novels had been dug out of
a suffering woman's heart: but Goethe spoke not always wisely, and in
this exacting world there be some that not only have found fault with
Balzac's method and results but have dared to declare his theory of
society the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was less
observer than creator: his views were false, his vision was distorted,
and though he had 'incomparable power' he had not power enough to make
them accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they find
Balzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; he
made room for the work of Flaubert, Feydeau, the younger Dumas, Augier
and Zola and the brothers Goncourt; and to him Charles Baudelaire is as
some fat strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs.
Sainte-Beuve refused to accept him, but his 'Pigault-Lebrun des
duchesses' is only malicious: he resented the man's exuberant and
inordinate personality, and made haste to apply to it some drops of that
sugared vitriol of which he had the secret. Taine is a fitter critic of
the _Comedie humaine_ than Sainte-Beuve; and Taine has come to other
conclusions. Acute, coarse, methodical, exhaustive, he has recognised
the greatness of one still more exhaustive, methodical, coarse, and acute
than himself. English critics fall foul of Balzac's women; but Taine
falls foul of English critics, and with the authority of a Parisian by
profession declares that the _Parisiennes_ of the _Comedie_ are
everything they ought to be--the true daughters of their 'bon gros
libertin de pere.' And while Taine, exulting in his Marneffe and his
Coralie, does solemnly and brilliantly show that he is right and
everybody else is wrong, a later writer--English of course--can find no
better parallel of Balzac than Browning, and knows nothing in art so like
the Pauline of _la Peau de Chagrin_ as the Sistine Madonna. It is
curious, this clash of opinions; and it is plain that one or other party
must be wrong. Which is it? 'Qui trompe-t-on ici?' Is Taine a better
judge than Mr. Leslie Stephen or Mr. Henry James? Or are Messrs. James
and Stephen better qualified to speak with authority than Taine? It may
be that none but a Frenchman can thoroughly and intimately apprehend in
its inmost a thing so essentially French as the _Comedie_; it is a fact
that Frenchmen of all sorts and sizes have accepted the _Comedie_ in its
totality; and that is reason good enough for any commonplace Englishman
who is lacking in the vanity of originality to accept it also.
The Fact.
Balzac's ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque,
and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically,
and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. His Hulot
was to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the love
of woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, in whom is incarnated the
instinct and the science of sexual corruption, is Hulot's Cleopatra, and
only dies because 'elle va faire le bon Dieu'--as who should say 'to mash
the Old Man'; Frenhoeffer, Philippe Bridau, Vautrin, Marsay, Rastignac,
Grandet, Balthazar Claes, Beatrix, Sarrazine, Lousteau, Esther, Lucien
Chardon--the list is, I believe, some thousands strong! Also the
argument is proved in advance: there is the _Comedie_ itself--'the new
edition fifty volumes long.' Bad or good, foul or fair, impossible or
actual, a monstrous debauch of mind or a triumph of realisation, there is
the _Comedie_. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the last
stones of it; and it exists--if a little the worse for wear: the bulk is
enormous--if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten and crumbling.
Truly, he had 'incomparable power.' He was the least capable and the
most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired
and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was
gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of
Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But
he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded
tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate
suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinate
effects. He may be impossible; but there is French literature and French
society to show that he passed that way, and had 'incomparable power.'
The phrase is Mr. Henry James's, and it is hard to talk of Balzac and
refrain from it.