As for the peculiar accent and stir of life, the life behind the
story, Balzac's manner of finding and expressing it is always
interesting. He seems to look for it most readily, not in the nature
of the men and women whose action makes the story, or not there to
begin with, but in their streets and houses and rooms. He cannot think
of his people without the homes they inhabit; with Balzac to imagine a
human being is to imagine a province, a city, a corner of the city, a
building at a turn of the street, certain furnished rooms, and finally
the man or woman who lives in them. He cannot be satisfied that the
tenor of this creature's existence is at all understood without a
minute knowledge of the things and objects that surround it. So strong
is his conviction upon this point that it gives a special savour to
the many pages in which he describes how the doorway is approached,
how the passage leads to the staircase, how the parlour-chairs are
placed, in the house which is to be the scene of his drama. These
descriptions are clear and business-like; they are offered as an
essential preliminary to the story, a matter that must obviously be
dealt with, once for all, before the story can proceed. And he
communicates his certainty to the reader, he imposes his belief in
the need for precision and fullness; Balzac is so sure that every
detail _must_ be known, down to the vases on the mantelpiece or the
pots and pans in the cupboard, that his reader cannot begin to
question it. Everything is made to appear as important as the author
feels it to be.
His manner is well to be watched in Eugénie Grandet. That account of
the great bare old house of the miser at Saumur is as plain and
straightforward as an inventory; no attempt is made to insinuate the
impression of the place by hints and side-lights. Balzac marches up to
it and goes steadily through it, until our necessary information is
complete, and there he leaves it. There is no subtlety in such a
method, it seems; a lighter, shyer handling of the facts, more
suggestion and less statement, might be expected to make a deeper
effect. And indeed Balzac's confident way is not one that would give a
good result in most hands; it would produce the kind of description
that the eye travels over unperceivingly, the conscientious
introduction that tells us nothing. Yet Balzac contrives to make it
tell everything; and the simple explanation is that he, more than
anyone else, _knows_ everything. The place exists in his thought; it
is not to him the mere sensation of a place, with cloudy corners,
uncertain recesses, which only grow definite as he touches and probes
them with his phrases. A writer of a different sort, an impressionist
who is aware of the effect of a scene rather than of the scene
itself, proceeds inevitably after another fashion; if he attempted
Balzac's method he would have to feel his way tentatively, adding fact
to fact, and his account would consist of that mechanical sum of
details which makes no image. Balzac is so thoroughly possessed of his
image that he can reproduce it inch by inch, fact by fact, without
losing the effect of it as a whole; he can start from the edge of his
scene, from a street of old houses, from the doorstep of one old
house, and leave a perfectly firm and telling impression behind him as
he proceeds. When his description is finished and the last detail in
its place, the home of the Grandets is securely built for the needs of
the story, possessing all the significance that Balzac demands of it.
It will presently be seen that he demands a great deal. I said that
his drama has always the benefit of a reserve of force, stored up for
it beforehand in the general picture; and though in this picture is
included the fortunes and characters of the men and women, of the
Grandets and their neighbours, a large part of it is the material
scene, the very walls that are to witness the coming events. The
figure of Grandet, the old miser, is indeed called up and accounted
for abundantly, in all the conditions of his past; but the house too,
within and without, is laid under strict contribution, is used to the
full in the story. It is a presence and an influence that counts
throughout--and counts particularly in a matter that is essential to
the book's effect, a matter that could scarcely be provided for in
any other way, as it happens. Of this I shall speak in a moment; but
at once it is noticeable how the Maison Grandet, like the Maison
Vauquer, helps the book on its way. It incarnates all the past of its
old owner, and visibly links it to the action when the story opens.
The elaborate summary of Grandet's early life, the scrupulously exact
account of the building of his prosperity, is brought to an issue in
the image of the "cold, dreary and silent house at the upper end of
the town," from whence the drama widens again in its turn. How it is
that Balzac has precisely the right scene in his mind, a house that
perfectly expresses his _donnée_ and all its associations--that, of
course, is Balzac's secret; his method would be nothing without the
quality of his imagination. His use of the scene is another matter,
and there it is possible to reckon how much of his general effect, the
sense of the moral and social foundation of his story, is given by its
inanimate setting. He has to picture a character and a train of life,
and to a great extent he does so by describing a house.
Beyond old Grandet and the kind of existence imposed upon his
household, the drama needs little by way of preparation. The miser's
daughter Eugénie, with her mother, must stand out clearly to the fore;
but a very few touches bring these two women to life in their shadowy
abode. They are simple and patient and devoted; between the dominance
of the old man and the monotony of the provincial routine Eugénie and
her mother are easily intelligible. The two local aspirants to the
girl's fortune, and their supporters on either side--the Cruchotins
and the Grassinistes--are subsidiary figures; they are sufficiently
rendered by their appearance in a flock, for a sociable evening with
the Grandets. The faithful maid-servant, the shrewd and valiant Nanon,
is quickly sketched. And there, then, is the picture that Balzac
prepares for the action, which opens with the arrival of Charles,
Eugénie's young and unknown cousin. Except for Charles, all the
material of the drama is contained in the first impression of the
household and the small country-town; Eugénie's story is implied in
it; and her romance, from the moment it begins, inherits the reality
and the continuity of the experience. Charles himself is so light a
weight that in his case no introduction is needed at all; a single
glance at him is enough to show the charm of his airy elegance. His
only function in the story is to create the long dream of Eugénie's
life; and for that he needs nothing but his unlikeness to the
Cruchotins and the Grassinistes. They and Eugénie, therefore, between
them, provide for his effect before he appears, they by their dull
provinciality, she by her sensitive ignorance. The whole scene, on the
verge of the action, is full of dormant echoes, and the first movement
wakes them. The girl placed as she is, her circumstances known as they
are, all but make the tale of their own accord; only the simple facts
are wanting, their effect is already in the air.
And accordingly the story slips away from its beginning without
hesitation. In a sense it is a very slight story; there is scarcely
anything in it but Eugénie's quick flush of emotion, and then her
patient cherishing of its memory; and this simplicity may seem to
detract, perhaps, from the skilfulness of Balzac's preparation. Where
there is so little in the way of incident or clash of character to
provide for, where the people are so plain and perspicuous and next to
nothing happens to them, it should not be difficult to make an
expressive scene for the drama and its few facts. All that occurs in
the main line of the story is that Eugénie falls in love with her
cousin, bids him good-bye when he goes to make his fortune in the
Indies, trustfully awaits him for a number of years, and discovers his
faithlessness when he returns. Her mother's death, and then her
father's, are almost the only events in the long interval of Charles's
absence. Simple indeed, but this is exactly the kind of story which it
is most puzzling to handle. The material is scanty, and yet it covers
a good many years; and somehow the narrative must render the length of
the years without the help of positive and concrete stuff to fill
them. The whole point of the story is lost unless we are made to feel
the slow crawling of time, while Eugénie waited; but what is there in
her life to account for the time, to bridge the interval, to
illustrate its extent? Balzac has to make a long impression of
vacuity; Eugénie Grandet contains a decidedly tough subject.
In such a case I suppose the first instinct of almost any story-teller
would be to lengthen the narrative of her loneliness by elaborating
the picture of her state of mind, drawing out the record of expectancy
and patience and failing hope. If nothing befalls her from without, or
so little, the time must be filled with the long drama of her
experience within; the centre of the story would then be cast in her
consciousness, in which there would be reflected the gradual drop of
her emotion from glowing newness to the level of daily custom, and
thence again to the chill of disillusion. It is easy to imagine the
kind of form which the book would take. In order to assure its full
value to Eugénie's monotonous suffering, the story would be given from
her point of view, entirely from hers; the external facts of her
existence would all be seen through her eyes, making substance for her
thought. We should live _with_ Eugénie, throughout; we should share
her vigil, morning and evening, summer and winter, while she sat in
the silent house and listened to the noises of life in the street,
while the sun shone for others and not for her, while the light waned,
the wind howled, the snow fell and hushed the busy town--still Eugénie
would sit at her window, still we should follow the flow of her
resigned and uncomplaining meditations; until at last the author could
judge that five years, ten years, whatever it may be, had been
sufficiently shown in their dreary lapse, and that Charles might now
come back from the Indies. So it would be and so it would have to be,
a novelist might easily feel. How else could the due suggestion of
time be given, where there is so little to show for it in dramatic
facts?
But Balzac's treatment of the story is quite unexpected. He lays it
out in a fashion that is worth noting, as a good example of the
freedom of movement that his great pictorial genius allowed him. With
his scene and its general setting so perfectly rendered, the story
takes care of itself on every side, with the minimum of trouble on his
part. His real trouble is over when the action begins; he is not even
disturbed by this difficulty of presenting the sense of time. The plan
of Eugénie Grandet, as the book stands, seems to have been made
without any regard to the chief and most exacting demand of the story;
where another writer would be using every device he could think of to
mark the effect of the succeeding years, Balzac is free to tell the
story as straightforwardly as he chooses. To Eugénie the great and
only adventure of her life was contained in the few days or weeks of
Charles's first visit; nothing to compare with that excitement ever
happened to her again. And Balzac makes this episode bulk as largely
in the book as it did in her life; he pauses over it and elaborates
it, unconcerned by the fact that in the book--in the whole effect it
is to produce--the episode is only the beginning of Eugénie's story,
only the prelude to her years of waiting and watching.
He extends his account of it so far, nevertheless, that he has written
two thirds of the book by the time the young man is finally despatched
to the Indies. It means that the duration of the story--and the
duration is the principal fact in it--is hardly considered at all,
after the opening of the action. There is almost no picture of the
slowly moving years; there is little but a concise chronicle of the
few widely spaced events. Balzac is at no pains to sit with Eugénie in
the twilight, while the seasons revolve; not for him to linger, gazing
sympathetically over her shoulder, tenderly exploring her sentiments.
He is actually capable of beginning a paragraph with the casual
announcement, "Five years went by in this way," as though he belonged
to the order of story-tellers who imagine that time may be expressed
by the mere statement of its length. Yet there is time in his book, it
is very certain--time that lags and loiters till the girl has lost her
youth and has dropped into the dull groove from which she will
evidently never again be dislodged. Balzac can treat the story as
concisely as he will, he can record Eugénie's simple experience from
without, and yet make the fading of her young hope appear as gradual
and protracted as need be; and all because he has prepared in advance,
with his picture of the life of the Grandets, a complete and enduring
impression.
His preliminary picture included the representation of time, secured
the sense of it so thoroughly that there is no necessity for recurring
to it again. The routine of the Maison Grandet is too clearly known to
be forgotten; the sight of the girl and her mother, leading their
sequestered lives in the shadow of their old tyrant's obsession, is a
sensation that persists to the end of their story. Their dreary days
accumulate and fill the year with hardly a break in its monotony; the
next year and the next are the same, except that old Grandet's
meanness is accentuated as his wealth increases; the present is like
the past, the future will prolong the present. In such a scene
Eugénie's patient acquiescence in middle age becomes a visible fact,
is divined and accepted at once, without further insistence; it is
latent in the scene from the beginning, even at the time of the small
romance of her youth. To dwell upon the shades of her long
disappointment is needless, for her power of endurance and her
fidelity are fully created in the book before they are put to the
test. "Five years went by," says Balzac; but before he says it we
already see them opening and closing upon the girl, bearing down upon
her solitude, exhausting her freshness but not the dumb resignation in
which she sits and waits. The endlessness, the sameness, the silence,
which another writer would have to tackle somehow after disposing of
the brief episode of Charles's visit, Balzac has it all in hand, he
can finish off his book without long delay. His deliberate approach to
the action, through the picture of the house and its inmates, has
achieved its purpose; it has given him the effect which the action
most demands and could least acquire by itself, the effect of time.
And there is no doubt that the story immensely gains by being treated
in Balzac's way, rather than as the life of a disappointed girl,
studied from within. In that case the subject of the book might easily
seem to be wearing thin, for the fact is that Eugénie has not the
stuff of character to give much interest to her story, supposing it
were seen through her eyes. She is good and true and devoted, but she
lacks the poetry, the inner resonance, that might make a living drama
of her simple emotions. Balzac was always too prosaic for the creation
of virtue; his innocent people--unless they may be grotesque as well
as innocent, like Pons or Goriot--live in a world that is not worth
the trouble of investigation. The interest of Eugénie would infallibly
be lowered, not heightened, by closer participation in her romance; it
is much better to look at it from outside, as Balzac does for the most
part, and to note the incidents that befell her, always provided that
the image of lagging time can be fashioned and preserved. As for that,
Balzac has no cause to be anxious; it is as certain that he can do
what he will with the subject of a story, handle it aright and compel
it to make its impression, as that he will fail to understand the
sensibility of a good-natured girl.
I cannot imagine that the value of the novelist's picture, as
preparation for his drama, could be proved more strikingly than it is
proved in this book, where so much is expected of it. Eugénie Grandet
is typical of a natural bent on the part of any prudent writer of
fiction, the instinct to relieve the climax of the story by taxing it
as little as possible when it is reached. The climax ought to
complete, to add the touch that makes the book whole and organic; that
is its task, and that only. It should be free to do what it must
without any unnecessary distraction, and nothing need distract it that
can be dealt with and despatched at an earlier stage. The climax in
Grandet is not a dramatic point, not a single incident; it lies in the
slow chill that very gradually descends upon Eugénie's hope. Balzac
carefully refrains from making the book hinge on anything so
commonplace as a sudden discovery of the young man's want of faith.
The worst kind of disappointment does not happen like that, falling as
a stroke; it steals into a life and spreads imperceptibly. Charles's
final act of disloyalty is only a kind of coda to a drama that is
practically complete without it. Here, then, is a climax that is
essentially pictorial, an impression of change and decay, needing time
in plenty above all; and Balzac leads into it so cunningly that a
short summary of a few plain facts is all that is required, when it
comes to the point. He saves his climax, in other words, from the
burden of deliberate expatiation, which at first sight it would seem
bound to incur; he leaves nothing for it to accomplish but just the
necessary touch, the movement that declares and fulfils the intention
of the book.
There is the same power at work upon material even more baffling,
apparently, in La Recherche de l'Absolu. The subject of that perfect
tale is of course the growth of a fixed idea, and Balzac was faced
with the task of showing the slow aggravation of a man's ruin through
a series of outbreaks, differing in no way one from another, save in
their increasing violence. Claes, the excellent and prosperous young
burgher of Douai, pillar of the old civic stateliness of Flanders, is
dragged and dragged into his calamitous experiments by the bare
failure (as he is persuaded) of each one in turn; each time his
researches are on the verge of yielding him the "absolute," the
philosopher's stone, and each time the prospect is more shining than
before; success, wealth enough to restore his deepening losses a
thousand times over, is assured by one more attempt, the money to make
it must be found. And so all other interest in life is forgotten, his
pride and repute are sacrificed, the splendid house is gradually
stripped of its treasures, his family are thrust into poverty; and he
himself dies degraded, insane, with success--surely, surely success,
this time--actually in his grasp. That is all, and on that straight,
sustained movement the book must remain throughout, reiterating one
effect with growing intensity--always at the pitch of high hope and
sharp disappointment, always prepared to heighten and sharpen it a
little further. There can be no development through any variety of
incident; it is the same suspense and the same shock, again and again,
constantly more disastrous than before.
Here, too, Balzac amasses in his opening picture the reserve of effect
that he needs. He recognizes the ample resource of the dignity, the
opulence, the worth, the tradition inherited by families like that of
Claes--merchant-princes of honourable line, rulers of rich cities,
patrons of great art. The house of Claes, with its fine architecture,
its portraits, its dark furniture and gleaming silver, its garden of
rare tulips--Balzac's imagination is poured into the scene, it is
exactly the kind of opportunity that he welcomes. He knows the place
by heart; his description of it is in his most methodical style.
Steadily it all comes out, a Holbein-picture with every orderly detail
duly arranged, the expression of good manners, sound taste and a solid
position. On such a world, created as he knows how to create it, he
may draw without hesitation for the repeated demands of the story; the
protracted havoc wrought by the man's infatuation is represented, step
by step, as the visible scene is denuded and destroyed. His spirit is
worn away and his sanity breaks down, and the successive strokes that
fall on it, instead of losing force (for the onlooker) by repetition,
are renewed and increased by the sight of the spreading devastation
around him, as his precious things are cast into the devouring expense
of his researches. Their disappearance is the outward sign of his own
personal surrender to his idea, and each time that he is thrown back
upon disappointment the ravage of the scene in which he was placed at
the beginning of the book is more evident than before. It spreads
through his pictures and treasures to his family, and still further
into his relations with the respectable circle about him. His position
is shaken, his situation in that beautiful Holbein-world is
undermined; it is slowly shattered as his madness extends. And having
built and furnished that world so firmly and richly, Balzac can linger
upon its overthrow as long as is necessary for the rising effect of
his story. He has created so much that there is plenty to destroy;
only at last, with the man's dying cry of triumph, is the wreck
complete.
Thus the climax of the story, as in Grandet, is laid up betimes in the
descriptive picture. It is needless, I suppose, to insist on the
esthetic value of economy of this kind. Everybody feels the greater
force of the climax that assumes its right place without an effort,
when the time comes, compared with that in which a strain and an
exaggerated stress are perceptible. The process of writing a novel
seems to be one of continual forestalling and anticipating; far more
important than the immediate page is the page to come, still in the
distance, on behalf of which this one is secretly working. The writer
makes a point and reserves it at the same time, creates an effect and
holds it back, till in due course it is appropriated and used by the
page for which it is intended. It must be a pleasure to the writer, it
is certainly a great pleasure to the critic, when the stroke is
cleanly brought off. It is the same pleasure indeed; the novelist
makes the stroke, but the critic makes it again by perceiving it, and
is legitimately satisfied by the sense of having perceived it with
good artistry. It is spoilt, of course, if the stroke is handled
tactlessly and obtrusively; the art of preparation is no art if it
betrays itself at the outset, calling attention to its purpose. By
definition it is unrecognizable until it attains its end; it is the
art of rendering an impression that is found to have been made, later
on, but that evades detection at the moment. The particular variety I
have been considering is one of which Balzac is a great master; and
perhaps his mastery will appear still more clearly if I look at a book
in which his example is _not_ followed in this respect. It is a finer
book, for all that, than most of Balzac's.