Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
THE HUMAN COMEDY
INTRODUCTIONS AND APPENDIX
By Honore De Balzac
Note:
This reposting is dedicated to Dagny, who, 10 years ago,
was part of the "Balzac Team" which produced 113 eBooks
for Project Gutenberg. I cannot locate her present email
address to thank her for the extraordinarily fine work she
did at a time when we had none of the present easy programs
to help locate errors--and to notify her that all her Balzac
files have been rechecked and reposted.
DW
CONTENTS
Honore de Balzac
Introduction and brief biography by George Saintsbury.
Appendix
List of titles in French with English translations and grouped
in the various classifications.
Author's introduction
Balzac's 1842 introduction to The Human Comedy.
HONORE DE BALZAC
_"Sans genie, je suis flambe!"_
Volumes, almost libraries, have been written about Balzac; and perhaps
of very few writers, putting aside the three or four greatest of all, is
it so difficult to select one or a few short phrases which will in any
way denote them, much more sum them up. Yet the five words quoted above,
which come from an early letter to his sister when as yet he had not
"found his way," characterize him, I think, better than at least some
of the volumes I have read about him, and supply, when they are properly
understood, the most valuable of all keys and companions for his
comprehension.
"If I have not genius, it is all up with me!" A very matter-of-fact
person may say: "Why! there is nothing wonderful in this. Everybody
knows what genius is wanted to make a name in literature, and most
people think they have it." But this would be a little short-sighted,
and only excusable because of the way in which the word "genius" is too
commonly bandied about. As a matter of fact, there is not so very much
genius in the world; and a great deal of more than fair performance is
attainable and attained by more or less decent allowances or exhibitions
of talent. In prose, more especially, it is possible to gain a very
high place, and to deserve it, without any genius at all: though it is
difficult, if not impossible, to do so in verse. But what Balzac felt
(whether he was conscious in detail of the feeling or not) when he used
these words to his sister Laure, what his critical readers must feel
when they have read only a very little of his work, what they must feel
still more strongly when they have read that work as a whole--is that
for him there is no such door of escape and no such compromise. He had
the choice, by his nature, his aims, his capacities, of being a genius
or nothing. He had no little gifts, and he was even destitute of some of
the separate and indivisible great ones. In mere writing, mere style,
he was not supreme; one seldom or never derives from anything of his the
merely artistic satisfaction given by perfect prose. His humor, except
of the grim and gigantic kind, was not remarkable; his wit, for a
Frenchman, curiously thin and small. The minor felicities of the
literature generally were denied to him. _Sans genie, il etait flambe_;
_flambe_ as he seemed to be, and very reasonably seemed, to his friends
when as yet the genius had not come to him, and when he was desperately
striving to discover where his genius lay in those wonderous works
which "Lord R'Hoone," and "Horace de Saint Aubin," and others obligingly
fathered for him.
It must be the business of these introductions to give what assistance
they may to discover where it did lie; it is only necessary, before
taking up the task in the regular biographical and critical way of the
introductory cicerone, to make two negative observations. It did
not lie, as some have apparently thought, in the conception, or the
outlining, or the filling up of such a scheme as the _Comedie Humaine_.
In the first place, the work of every great writer, of the creative
kind, including that of Dante himself, is a _comedie humaine_. All
humanity is latent in every human being; and the great writers are
merely those who call most of it out of latency and put it actually on
the stage. And, as students of Balzac know, the scheme and adjustment
of his comedy varied so remarkably as time went on that it can hardly be
said to have, even in its latest form (which would pretty certainly have
been altered again), a distinct and definite character. Its so-called
scenes are even in the mass by no means exhaustive, and are, as they
stand, a very "cross," division of life: nor are they peopled by
anything like an exhaustive selection of personages. Nor again is
Balzac's genius by any means a mere vindication of the famous definition
of that quality as an infinite capacity of taking pains. That Balzac had
that capacity--had it in a degree probably unequaled even by the dullest
plodders on record--is very well known, is one of the best known things
about him. But he showed it for nearly ten years before the genius came,
and though no doubt it helped him when genius had come, the two things
are in his case, as in most, pretty sufficiently distinct. What the
genius itself was I must do my best to indicate hereafter, always
beseeching the reader to remember that all genius is in its essence and
quiddity indefinable. You can no more get close to it than you can get
close to the rainbow, and your most scientific explanation of it
will always leave as much of the heart of the fact unexplained as the
scientific explanation of the rainbow leaves of that.
Honore de Balzac was born at Tours on the 16th of May, 1799, in the same
year which saw the birth of Heine, and which therefore had the honor
of producing perhaps the most characteristic writers of the nineteenth
century in prose and verse respectively. The family was a respectable
one, though its right to the particle which Balzac always carefully
assumed, subscribing himself "_de_ Balzac," was contested. And there
appears to be no proof of their connection with Jean Guez de Balzac,
the founder, as some will have him, of modern French prose, and the
contemporary and fellow-reformer of Malherbe. (Indeed, as the novelist
pointed out with sufficient pertinence, his earlier namesake had no
hereditary right to the name at all, and merely took it from some
property.) Balzac's father, who, as the _zac_ pretty surely indicates,
was a southerner and a native of Languedoc, was fifty-three years old at
the birth of his son, whose Christian name was selected on the ordinary
principle of accepting that of the saint on whose day he was born.
Balzac the elder had been a barrister before the Revolution, but under
it he obtained a post in the commissariat, and rose to be head of that
department for a military division. His wife, who was much younger than
himself and who survived her son, is said to have possessed both beauty
and fortune, and was evidently endowed with the business faculties so
common among Frenchwomen. When Honore was born, the family had not long
been established at Tours, where Balzac the elder (besides his
duties) had a house and some land; and this town continued to be their
headquarters till the novelist, who was the eldest of the family, was
about sixteen. He had two sisters (of whom the elder, Laure, afterwards
Madame Surville, was his first confidante and his only authoritative
biographer) and a younger brother, who seems to have been, if not a
scapegrace, rather a burden to his friends, and who later went abroad.
The eldest boy was, in spite of Rousseau, put out to nurse, and at seven
years old was sent to the Oratorian grammar-school at Vendome, where he
stayed another seven years, going through, according to his own account,
the future experiences and performances of Louis Lambert, but making no
reputation for himself in the ordinary school course. If, however, he
would not work in his teacher's way, he overworked himself in his own by
devouring books; and was sent home at fourteen in such a state of health
that his grandmother (who after the French fashion, was living with her
daughter and son-in-law), ejaculated: _"Voila donc comme le college nous
renvoie les jolis enfants que nous lui envoyons!"_ It would seem indeed
that, after making all due allowance for grandmotherly and sisterly
partiality, Balzac was actually a very good-looking boy and young man,
though the portraits of him in later life may not satisfy the more
romantic expectations of his admirers. He must have had at all times
eyes full of character, perhaps the only feature that never fails in men
of intellectual eminence; but he certainly does not seem to have been in
his manhood either exactly handsome or exactly "distinguished-looking."
But the portraits of the middle of the century are, as a rule, rather
wanting in this characteristic when compared with those of its first
and last periods; and I cannot think of many that quite come up to one's
expectations.
For a short time he was left pretty much to himself, and recovered
rapidly. But late in 1814 a change of official duties removed the
Balzacs to Paris, and when they had established themselves in the famous
old _bourgeois_ quarter of the Marais, Honore was sent to divers private
tutors or private schools till he had "finished his classes" in 1816
at the age of seventeen and a half. Then he attended lectures at the
Sorbonne where Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin were lecturing, and
heard them, as his sister tells us, enthusiastically, though there are
probably no three writers of any considerable repute in the history of
French literature who stand further apart from Balzac. For all three
made and kept their fame by spirited and agreeable generalizations
and expatiations, as different as possible from the savage labor of
observation on the one hand and the gigantic developments of imagination
on the other, which were to compose Balzac's appeal. His father destined
him for the law; and for three years more he dutifully attended the
offices of an attorney and a notary, besides going through the necessary
lectures and examinations. All these trials he seems to have passed, if
not brilliantly, yet sufficiently.
And then came the inevitable crisis, which was of an unusually severe
nature. A notary, who was a friend of the elder Balzac's and owed him
some gratitude offered not merely to take Honore into his office, but
to allow him to succeed to his business, which was a very good one, in
a few years on very favorable terms. Most fathers, and nearly all French
fathers, would have jumped at this; and it so happened that about
the same time M. de Balzac was undergoing that unpleasant process of
compulsory retirement which his son has described in one of the best
passages of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, the opening scene of _Argow
le Pirate_. It does not appear that Honore had revolted during his
probation--indeed he is said, and we can easily believe it from his
books, to have acquired a very solid knowledge of law, especially in
bankruptcy matters, of which he was himself to have a very close shave
in future. A solicitor, indeed, told Laure de Balzac that he found
_Cesar Birotteau_ a kind of _Balzac on Bankruptcy_; but this may have
been only the solicitor's fun.
It was no part of Honore's intentions to use this knowledge--however
content he had been to acquire it--in the least interesting, if nearly
the most profitable, of the branches of the legal profession; and he
protested eloquently, and not unsuccessfully, that he would be a man of
letters and nothing else. Not unsuccessfully; but at the same time with
distinctly qualified success. He was not turned out of doors; nor were
the supplies, as in Quinet's case only a few months later, absolutely
withheld even for a short time. But his mother (who seems to have been
less placable than her husband) thought that cutting them down to the
lowest point might have some effect. So, as the family at this time
(April 1819) left Paris for a house some twenty miles out of it, she
established her eldest son in a garret furnished in the most Spartan
fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after
him. He did not literally stay in this garret for the ten years of his
astonishing and unparalleled probation; but without too much metaphor
it may be said to have been his Wilderness, and his Wanderings in it to
have lasted for that very considerable time.
We know, in detail, very little of him during the period. For the first
years, between 1819 and 1822, we have a good number of letters to Laure;
between 1822 and 1829, when he first made his mark, very few. He began,
of course, with verse, for which he never had the slightest vocation,
and, almost equally of course, with a tragedy. But by degrees and
apparently pretty soon, he slipped into what was his vocation, and like
some, though not very many, great writers, at first did little better in
it than if it had not been his vocation at all. The singular tentatives
which, after being allowed for a time a sort of outhouse in the
structure of the _Comedie Humaine_, were excluded from the octavo
_Edition Definitive_ five-and-twenty years ago, have never been the
object of that exhaustive bibliographical and critical attention which
has been bestowed on those which follow them. They were not absolutely
unproductive--we hear of sixty, eighty, a hundred pounds being paid for
them, though whether this was the amount of Balzac's always sanguine
expectations, or hard cash actually handed over, we cannot say. They
were very numerous, though the reprints spoken of above never extended
to more than ten. Even these have never been widely read. The only
person I ever knew till I began this present task who had read them
through was the friend whom all his friends are now lamenting and are
not likely soon to cease to lament, Mr. Louis Stevenson; and when I once
asked him whether, on his honor and conscience, he could recommend me
to brace myself to the same effort, he said that on his honor and
conscience he must most earnestly dissuade me. I gather, though I am not
sure, that Mr. Wedmore, the latest writer in English on Balzac at any
length, had not read them through when he wrote.
Now I have, and a most curious study they are. Indeed I am not sorry,
as Mr. Wedmore thinks one would be. They are curiously, interestingly,
almost enthrallingly bad. Couched for the most part in a kind of
Radcliffian or Monk-Lewisian vein--perhaps studied more directly from
Maturin (of whom Balzac was a great admirer) than from either--they
often begin with and sometimes contain at intervals passages not unlike
the Balzac that we know. The attractive title of _Jane la Pale_ (it
was originally called, with a still more Early Romantic avidity for
_baroque_ titles, _Wann-Chlore_) has caused it, I believe, to be
more commonly read than any other. It deals with a disguised duke, a
villainous Italian, bigamy, a surprising offer of the angelic first wife
to submit to a sort of double arrangement, the death of the second wife
and first love, and a great many other things. _Argow le Pirate_ opens
quite decently and in order with that story of the _employe_ which
Balzac was to rehandle so often, but drops suddenly into brigands
stopping diligences, the marriage of the heroine Annette with a retired
pirate marquis of vast wealth, the trial of the latter for murdering
another marquis with a poisoned fish-bone scarf-pin, his execution,
the sanguinary reprisals by his redoubtable lieutenant, and a finale
of blunderbusses, fire, devoted peasant girl with _retrousse_ nose, and
almost every possible _tremblement_.
In strictness mention of this should have been preceded by mention of
_Le Vicaire des Ardennes_, which is a sort of first part of _Argow le
Pirate_, and not only gives an account of his crimes, early history,
and manners (which seem to have been a little robustious for such a
mild-mannered man as Annette's husband), but tells a thrilling tale of
the loves of the _vicaire_ himself and a young woman, which loves are
crossed, first by the belief that they are brother and sister, and
secondly by the _vicaire_ having taken orders under this delusion. _La
Derniere Fee_ is the queerest possible cross between an actual fairy
story _a la_ Nordier and a history of the fantastic and inconstant loves
of a great English lady, the Duchess of "Sommerset" (a piece of
actual _scandalum magnatum_ nearly as bad as Balzac's cool use in his
acknowledged work of the title "Lord Dudley"). This book begins so
well that one expects it to go on better; but the inevitable defects
in craftsmanship show themselves before long. _Le Centenaire_ connects
itself with Balzac's almost lifelong hankering after the _recherche de
l'absolu_ in one form or another, for the hero is a wicked old person
who every now and then refreshes his hold on life by immolating a virgin
under a copper-bell. It is one of the most extravagant and "Monk-Lewisy"
of the whole. _L'Excommunie_, _L'Israelite_, and _L'Heritiere de
Birague_ are mediaeval or fifteenth century tales of the most
luxuriant kind, _L'Excommunie_ being the best, _L'Israelite_ the most
preposterous, and _L'Heritiere de Birague_ the dullest. But it is not
nearly so dull as _Dom Gigadus_ and _Jean Louis_, the former of which
deals with the end of the seventeenth century and the latter with the
end of the eighteenth. These are both as nearly unreadable as anything
can be. One interesting thing, however, should be noted in much of this
early work: the affectionate clinging of the author to the scenery of
Touraine, which sometimes inspires him with his least bad passages.
It is generally agreed that these singular _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_ were
of service to Balzac as exercise, and no doubt they were so; but I think
something may be said on the other side. They must have done a little,
if not much, to lead him into and confirm him in those defects of style
and form which distinguish him so remarkably from most writers of his
rank. It very seldom happens when a very young man writes very much, be
it book-writing or journalism, without censure and without "editing,"
that he does not at the same time get into loose and slipshod habits.
And I think we may set down to this peculiar form of apprenticeship of
Balzac's not merely his failure ever to attain, except in passages and
patches, a thoroughly great style, but also that extraordinary method
of composition which in after days cost him and his publishers so much
money.
However, if these ten years of probation taught him his trade, they
taught him also a most unfortunate avocation or by-trade, which he never
ceased to practise, or to try to practise, which never did him the least
good, and which not unfrequently lost him much of the not too abundant
gains which he earned with such enormous labor. This was the "game
of speculation." His sister puts the tempter's part on an unknown
"neighbor," who advised him to try to procure independence by _une bonne
speculation_. Those who have read Balzac's books and his letters will
hardly think that he required much tempting. He began by trying to
publish--an attempt which has never yet succeeded with a single man of
letters, so far as I can remember. His scheme was not a bad one, indeed
it was one which has brought much money to other pockets since, being
neither more nor less than the issuing of cheap one-volume editions of
French classics. But he had hardly any capital; he was naturally quite
ignorant of his trade, and as naturally the established publishers and
booksellers boycotted him as an intruder. So his _Moliere_ and his
_La Fontaine_ are said to have been sold as waste paper, though if any
copies escaped they would probably fetch a very comfortable price now.
Then, such capital as he had having been borrowed, the lender, either
out of good nature or avarice, determined to throw the helve after the
hatchet. He partly advanced himself and partly induced Balzac's parents
to advance more, in order to start the young man as a printer, to which
business Honore himself added that of typefounder. The story was just
the same: knowledge and capital were again wanting, and though actual
bankruptcy was avoided, Balzac got out of the matter at the cost not
merely of giving the two businesses to a friend (in whose hands they
proved profitable), but of a margin of debt from which he may be said
never to have fully cleared himself.
He had more than twenty years to live, but he never cured himself of
this hankering after _une bonne speculation_. Sometimes it was ordinary
stock-exchange gambling; but his special weakness was, to do him
justice, for schemes that had something more grandiose in them. Thus,
to finish here with the subject, though the chapter of it never actually
finished till his death, he made years afterwards, when he was a
successful and a desperately busy author, a long, troublesome, and
costly journey to Sardinia to carry out a plan of resmelting the slag
from Roman and other mines there. Thus in his very latest days, when he
was living at Vierzschovnia with the Hanska and Mniszech household,
he conceived the magnificently absurd notion of cutting down twenty
thousand acres of oak wood in the Ukraine, and sending it _by railway_
right across Europe to be sold in France. And he was rather reluctantly
convinced that by the time a single log reached its market the freight
would have eaten up the value of the whole plantation.
It was perhaps not entirely chance that the collapse of the printing
scheme, which took place in 1827, the ninth year of the Wanderings in
the Wilderness, coincided with or immediately preceded the conception of
the book which was to give Balzac passage into the Promised Land.
This was _Les Chouans_, called at its first issue, which differed
considerably from the present form, _Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne
en 1800_ (later _1799_). It was published in 1829 without any of the
previous anagrammatic pseudonyms; and whatever were the reasons which
had induced him to make his bow in person to the public, they were well
justified, for the book was a distinct success, if not a great one. It
occupies a kind of middle position between the melodramatic romance of
his nonage and the strictly analytic romance-novel of his later time;
and, though dealing with war and love chiefly, inclines in conception
distinctly to the latter. Corentin, Hulot, and other personages of the
actual Comedy (then by no means planned, or at least avowed) appear; and
though the influence of Scott is in a way paramount* on the surface,
the underwork is quite different, and the whole scheme of the loves of
Montauran and Mademoiselle de Verneuil is pure Balzac.
* Balzac was throughout his life a fervent admirer of Sir Walter,
and I think Mr. Wedmore, in his passage on the subject, distinctly
undervalues both the character and the duration of this esteem.
Balzac was far too acute to commit the common mistake of thinking
Scott superficial--men who know mankind are not often blind to
each other's knowledge. And while Mr. Wedmore seems not to know
any testimony later than Balzac's _thirty-eighth_ year, it is in
his _forty-sixth_, when all his own best work was done, except the
_Parents Pauvres_, that he contrasts Dumas with Scott saying that
_on relit Walter Scott_, and he does not think any one will
re-read Dumas. This may be unjust to the one writer, but it is
conclusive as to any sense of "wasted time" (his own phrase)
having ever existed in Balzac's mind about the other.
It would seem as if nothing but this sun of popular approval had been
wanting to make Balzac's genius burst out in full bloom. Although we
have a fair number of letters for the ensuing years, it is not very easy
to make out the exact sequence of production of the marvelous harvest
which his genius gave. It is sufficient to say that in the three
years following 1829 there were actually published the _Physiologie
du Mariage_, the charming story of _La Maison du Chat-que-Pelote_,
the _Peau de Chagrin_, the most original and splendid, if not the most
finished and refined, of all Balzac's books, most of the short _Contes
Philosophiques_, of which some are among their author's greatest
triumphs, many other stories (chiefly included in the _Scenes de la Vie
Privee_) and the beginning of the _Contes Drolatiques_.*
* No regular attempt will after this be made to indicate the date of
production of successive works, unless they connect themselves
very distinctly with incidents in the life or with general
critical observations. At the end of this introduction will be
found a full table of the _Comedie Humaine_ and the other works.
It may perhaps be worth while to add here, that while the labors
of M. de Lovenjoul (to whom every writer on Balzac must
acknowledge the deepest obligation) have cleared this matter up
almost to the verge of possibility as regards the published works,
there is little light to be thrown on the constant references in
the letters to books which never appeared. Sometimes they are
known, and they may often be suspected, to have been absorbed into
or incorporated with others; the rest must have been lost or
destroyed, or, which is not quite impossible, have existed chiefly
in the form of project. Nearly a hundred titles of such things are
preserved.
But without a careful examination of his miscellaneous work, which is
very abundant and includes journalism as well as books, it is almost
as impossible to come to a just appreciation of Balzac as it is without
reading the early works and letters. This miscellaneous work is all the
more important because a great deal of it represents the artist at quite
advanced stages of his career, and because all its examples, the earlier
as well as the later, give us abundant insight on him as he was "making
himself." The comparison with the early works of Thackeray (in _Punch_,
_Fraser_, and elsewhere) is so striking that it can escape no one who
knows the two. Every now and then Balzac transferred bodily, or with
slight alterations, passages from these experiments to his finished
canvases. It appears that he had a scheme for codifying his
"Physiologies" (of which the notorious one above mentioned is only
a catchpenny exemplar and very far from the best) into a seriously
organized work. Chance was kind or intention was wise in not allowing
him to do so; but the value of the things for the critical reader is
not less. Here are tales--extensions of the scheme and manner of the
_Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, or attempts at the _goguenard_ story of 1830--a
thing for which Balzac's hand was hardly light enough. Here are
interesting evidences of striving to be cosmopolitan and polyglot--the
most interesting of all of which, I think, is the mention of certain
British products as "mufflings." "Muffling" used to be a domestic joke
for "muffin;" but whether some wicked Briton deluded Balzac into the
idea that it was the proper form or not it is impossible to say. Here
is a _Traite de la Vie Elegante_, inestimable for certain critical
purposes. So early as 1825 we find a _Code des Gens Honnetes_, which
exhibits at once the author's legal studies and his constant attraction
for the shady side of business, and which contains a scheme for
defrauding by means of lead pencils, actually carried out (if we may
believe his exulting note) by some literary swindlers with unhappy
results. A year later he wrote a _Dictionnaire des Enseignes de
Paris_, which we are glad enough to have from the author of the
_Chat-que-Pelote_; but the persistence with which this kind of
miscellaneous writing occupied him could not be better exemplified than
by the fact that, of two important works which closely follow this in
the collected edition, the _Physiologie de l'Employe_ dates from 1841
and the _Monographie de la Presse Parisienne_ from 1843.
It is well known that from the time almost of his success as a novelist
he was given, like too many successful novelists (_not_ like Scott), to
rather undignified and foolish attacks on critics. The explanation may
or may not be found in the fact that we have abundant critical work of
his, and that it is nearly all bad. Now and then we have an acute remark
in his own special sphere; but as a rule he cannot be complimented on
these performances, and when he was half-way through his career this
critical tendency of his culminated in the unlucky _Revue Parisienne_,
which he wrote almost entirely himself, with slight assistance from his
friends, MM. de Belloy and de Grammont. It covers a wide range, but
the literary part of it is considerable, and this part contains that
memorable and disastrous attack on Sainte-Beuve, for which the critic
afterwards took a magnanimous revenge in his obituary _causerie_.
Although the thing is not quite unexampled it is not easily to be
surpassed in the blind fury of its abuse. Sainte-Beuve was by no means
invulnerable, and an anti-critic who kept his head might have found, as
M. de Pontmartin and others did find, the joints in his armor. But when,
_a propos_ of the _Port Royal_ more especially, and of the other works
in general, Balzac informs us that Sainte-Beuve's great characteristic
as a writer is _l'ennui, l'ennui boueux jusqu'a mi-jambe_, that his
style is intolerable, that his historical handling is like that of
Gibbon, Hume, and other dull people; when he jeers at him for exhuming
"La mere Angelique," and scolds him for presuming to obscure the glory
of the _Roi Soleil_, the thing is partly ludicrous, partly melancholy.
One remembers that agreeable Bohemian, who at a symposium once
interrupted his host by crying, "Man o' the hoose, gie us less o' yer
clack and mair o' yer Jairman wine!" Only, in human respect and other,
we phrase it: "Oh, dear M. de Balzac! give us more _Eugenie Grandets_,
more _Pere Goriots_, more _Peaux de Chagrin_, and don't talk about what
you do not understand!"
Balzac was a great politician also, and here, though he may not have
been very much more successful, he talked with more knowledge and
competence. He must have given himself immense trouble in reading the
papers, foreign as well as French; he had really mastered a good deal
of the political religion of a French publicist. It is curious to
read, sixty years after date, his grave assertion that "_La France a
la conquete de Madagascar a faire_," and with certain very pardonable
defects (such as his Anglophobia), his politics may be pronounced not
unintelligent and not ungenerous, though somewhat inconsistent and
not very distinctly traceable to any coherent theory. As for the
Anglophobia, the Englishman who thinks the less of him for that must
have very poor and unhappy brains. A Frenchman who does not more or less
hate and fear England, an Englishman who does not regard France with
a more or less good-humored impatience, is usually "either a god or
a beast," as Aristotle saith. Balzac began with an odd but not
unintelligible compound, something like Hugo's, of Napoleonism and
Royalism. In 1824, when he was still in the shades of anonymity, he
wrote and published two by no means despicable pamphlets in favor of
Primogeniture and the Jesuits, the latter of which was reprinted in
1880 at the last _Jesuitenhetze_ in France. His _Lettres sur Paris_ in
1830-31, and his _La France et l'Etranger_ in 1836, are two considerable
series of letters from "Our Own Correspondent," handling the affairs of
the world with boldness and industry if not invariably with wisdom. They
rather suggest (as does the later _Revue Parisienne_ still more) the
political writing of the age of Anne in England, and perhaps a little
later, when "the wits" handled politics and society, literature and
things in general with unquestioned competence and an easy universality.
The rest of his work which will not appear in this edition may be
conveniently despatched here. The _Physiologie du Mariage_ and the
_Scenes de la Vie Conjugale_ suffer not merely from the most obvious
of their faults but from defect of knowledge. It may or may not be that
marriage, in the hackneyed phrase, is a net or other receptacle where
all the outsiders would be in, and all the insiders out. But it is quite
clear that Coelebs cannot talk of it with much authority. His state
may or may not be the more gracious: his judgment cannot but lack
experience. The "Theatre," which brought the author little if any
profit, great annoyance, and a vast amount of trouble, has been
generally condemned by criticism. But the _Contes Drolatiques_ are not
so to be given up. The famous and splendid _Succube_ is only the best of
them, and though all are more or less tarred with the brush which tars
so much of French literature, though the attempt to write in an archaic
style is at best a very successful _tour de force_, and represents an
expenditure of brain power by no means justifiable on the part of a
man who could have made so much better use of it, they are never to be
spoken of disrespectfully. Those who sneer at their "Wardour Street" Old
French are not usually the best qualified to do so; and it is not to be
forgotten that Balzac was a real countryman of Rabelais and a legitimate
inheritor of _Gauloiserie_. Unluckily no man can "throw back" in this
way, except now and then as a mere pastime. And it is fair to recollect
that as a matter of fact Balzac, after a year or two, did not waste much
more time on these things, and that the intended ten _dizains_ never, as
a matter of fact, went beyond three.
Besides this work in books, pamphlets, etc., Balzac, as has been said,
did a certain amount of journalism, especially in the _Caricature_, his
performances including, I regret to say, more than one puff of his own
work; and in this, as well as by the success of the _Chouans_, he became
known about 1830 to a much wider circle, both of literary and of private
acquaintance. It cannot indeed be said that he ever mixed much in
society; it was impossible that he should do so, considering the vast
amount of work he did and the manner in which he did it. This subject,
like that of his speculations, may be better finished off in a single
passage than dealt with by scattered indications here and there. He was
not one of those men who can do work by fits and starts in the intervals
of business or of amusement; nor was he one who, like Scott, could work
very rapidly. It is true that he often achieved immense quantities of
work (subject to a caution to be given presently) in a very few days,
but then his working day was of the most peculiar character. He could
not bear disturbance; he wrote best at night, and he could not work at
all after heavy meals. His favorite plan (varied sometimes in detail)
was therefore to dine lightly about five or six, then to go to bed and
sleep till eleven, twelve, or one, and then to get up, and with the help
only of coffee (which he drank very strong and in enormous quantities)
to work for indefinite stretches of time into the morning or afternoon
of the next day. He speaks of a sixteen hours' day as a not uncommon
shift or spell of work, and almost a regular one with him; and on one
occasion he avers that in the course of forty-eight hours he took but
three of the rest, working for twenty-two hours and a half continuously
on each side thereof. In such spells, supposing reasonable facility of
composition and mechanical power in the hand to keep going all the time,
an enormous amount can of course be accomplished. A thousand words
an hour is anything but an extraordinary rate of writing, and fifteen
hundred by no means unheard of with persons who do not write rubbish.
The references to this subject in Balzac's letters are very numerous;
but it is not easy to extract very definite information from them. It
would be not only impolite but incorrect to charge him with unveracity.
But the very heat of imagination which enabled him to produce his work
created a sort of mirage, through which he seems always to have regarded
it; and in writing to publishers, editors, creditors, and even his own
family, it was too obviously his interest to make the most of his labor,
his projects, and his performance. Even his contemporary, though elder,
Southey, the hardest-working and the most scrupulously honest man of
letters in England who could pretend to genius, seems constantly to have
exaggerated the idea of what he could perform, if not of what he had
performed in a given time. The most definite statement of Balzac's that
I remember is one which claims the second number of _Sur Catherine de
Medicis_, "La Confidence des Ruggieri," as the production of a single
night, and not one of the most extravagant of his nights. Now, "La
Confidence des Ruggieri" fills, in the small edition, eighty pages
of nearer four hundred than three hundred words each, or some thirty
thousand words in all. Nobody in the longest of nights could manage
that, except by dictating it to shorthand clerks. But in the very
context of this assertion Balzac assigns a much longer period to the
correction than to the composition, and this brings us to one of the
most curious and one of the most famous points of his literary history.
Some doubts have, I believe, been thrown on the most minute account of
his ways of composition which we have, that of the publisher Werdet. But
there is too great a consensus of evidence as to his general system to
make the received description of it doubtful. According to this,
the first draft of Balzac's work never presented it in anything like
fulness, and sometimes it did not amount to a quarter of the bulk
finally published. This being returned to him from the printer in
"slip" on sheets with very large margins, he would set to work on the
correction; that is to say, on the practical rewriting of the thing,
with excisions, alterations, and above all, additions. A "revise"
being executed, he would attack this revise in the same manner, and not
unfrequently more than once, so that the expenses of mere composition
and correction of the press were enormously heavy (so heavy as to eat
into not merely his publisher's but his own profits), and that the last
state of the book, when published, was something utterly different from
its first state in manuscript. And it will be obvious that if anything
like this was usual with him, it is quite impossible to judge his actual
rapidity of composition by the extent of the published result.
However this may be (and it is at least certain that in the years above
referred to he must have worked his very hardest, even if some of the
work then published had been more or less excogitated and begun during
the Wilderness period), he certainly so far left his eremitical habits
as to become acquainted with most of the great men of letters of the
early thirties, and also with certain ladies of more or less high
rank, who were to supply, if not exactly the full models, the texts
and starting-points for some of the most interesting figures of
the _Comedie_. He knew Victor Hugo, but certainly not at this time
intimately; for as late as 1839 the letter in which he writes to Hugo to
come and breakfast with him at Les Jardies (with interesting and
minute directions how to find that frail abode of genius) is couched in
anything but the tone of a familiar friendship. The letters to Beyle
of about the same date are also incompatible with intimate knowledge.
Nodier (after some contrary expressions) he seems to have regarded
as most good people did regard that true man of letters and charming
tale-teller; while among the younger generation Theophile Gautier and
Charles de Bernard, as well as Goslan and others, were his real and
constant friends. But he does not figure frequently or eminently in any
of the genuine gossip of the time as a haunter of literary circles,
and it is very nearly certain that the assiduity with which some of his
heroes attend _salons_ and clubs had no counterpart in his own life. In
the first place he was too busy; in the second he would not have been at
home there. Like the young gentleman in _Punch_, who "did not read books
but wrote them," though in no satiric sense, he felt it his business not
to frequent society but to create it.
He was, however, aided in the task of creation by the ladies already
spoken of, who were fairly numerous and of divers degrees. The most
constant, after his sister Laure, was that sister's schoolfellow, Madame
Zulma Carraud, the wife of a military official at Angouleme and the
possessor of a small country estate at Frapesle, near Tours. At both
of these places Balzac, till he was a very great man, was a constant
visitor, and with Madame Carraud he kept up for years a correspondence
which has been held to be merely friendly, and which was certainly
in the vulgar sense innocent, but which seems to me to be tinged with
something of that feeling, midway between love and friendship, which
appears in Scott's letters to Lady Abercorn, and which is probably not
so rare as some think. Madame de Berny, another family friend of higher
rank, was the prototype of most of his "angelic" characters, but she
died in 1836. He knew the Duchesse d'Abrantes, otherwise Madame Junot,
and Madame de Girardin, otherwise Delphine Gay; but neither seems to
have exercised much influence over him. It was different with another
and more authentic duchess, Madame de Castries, after whom he dangled
for a considerable time, who certainly first encouraged him and probably
then snubbed him, and who is thought to have been the model of his
wickeder great ladies. And it was comparatively early in the thirties
that he met the woman whom, after nearly twenty years, he was at last to
marry, getting his death in so doing, the Polish Madame Hanska. These,
with some relations of the last named, especially her daughter, and
with a certain "Louise"--an _Inconnue_ who never ceased to be so--were
Balzac's chief correspondents of the other sex, and, as far as is known,
his chief friends in it.
About his life, without extravagant "pudding" of guesswork or of mere
quotation and abstract of his letters, it would be not so much difficult
as impossible to say much; and accordingly it is a matter of fact that
most lives of Balzac, including all good ones, are rather critical
than narrative. From his real _debut_ with _Le Dernier Chouan_ to his
departure for Poland on the long visit, or brace of visits, from which
he returned finally to die, this life consisted solely of work. One of
his earliest utterances, "_Il faut piocher ferme_," was his motto to
the very last, varied only by a certain amount of traveling. Balzac
was always a considerable traveler; indeed if he had not been so his
constitution would probably have broken down long before it actually
did; and the expense of these voyagings (though by his own account he
generally conducted his affairs with the most rigid economy), together
with the interruption to his work which they occasioned, entered no
doubt for something into his money difficulties. He would go to Baden or
Vienna for a day's sight of Madame Hanska; his Sardinian visit has been
already noted; and as a specimen of others it may be mentioned that he
once journeyed from Paris to Besancon, then from Besancon right
across France to Angouleme, and then back to Paris on some business
of selecting paper for one of the editions of his books, which his
publishers would probably have done much better and at much less
expense.
Still his actual receipts were surprisingly small, partly, it may be,
owing to his expensive habits of composition, but far more, according to
his own account, because of the Belgian piracies, from which all popular
French authors suffered till the government of Napoleon the Third
managed to put a stop to them. He also lived in such a thick atmosphere
of bills and advances and cross-claims on and by his publishers, that
even if there were more documents than there are it would be exceedingly
difficult to get at facts which are, after all, not very important.
He never seems to have been paid much more than 500 pounds for the
newspaper publication (the most valuable by far because the pirates
could not interfere with its profits) of any one of his novels. And to
expensive fashions of composition and complicated accounts, a steady
back-drag of debt and the rest, must be added the very delightful, and
to the novelist not useless, but very expensive mania for the
collector. Balzac had a genuine taste for, and thought himself a genuine
connoisseur in, pictures, sculpture, and objects of art of all kinds,
old and new; and though prices in his day were not what they are in
these, a great deal of money must have run through his hands in this
way. He calculated the value of the contents of the house, which in his
last days he furnished with such loving care for his wife, and which
turned out to be a chamber rather of death than of marriage, at some
16,000 pounds. But part of this was Madame Hanska's own purchasing, and
there were offsets of indebtedness against it almost to the last. In
short, though during the last twenty years of his life such actual "want
of pence" as vexed him was not due, as it had been earlier, to the fact
that the pence refused to come in, but only to imprudent management
of them, it certainly cannot be said that Honore de Balzac, the most
desperately hard worker in all literature for such time as was allotted
him, and perhaps the man of greatest genius who was ever a desperately
hard worker, falsified that most uncomfortable but truest of
proverbs--"Hard work never made money."
If, however, he was but scantily rewarded with the money for which he
had a craving (not absolutely, I think, devoid of a touch of genuine
avarice, but consisting chiefly of the artist's desire for pleasant
and beautiful things, and partly presenting a variety or phase of the
grandiose imagination, which was his ruling characteristic), Balzac had
plenty of the fame, for which he cared quite as much as he cared for
money. Perhaps no writer except Voltaire and Goethe earlier made such
a really European reputation; and his books were of a kind to be more
widely read by the general public than either Goethe's or Voltaire's.
In England (Balzac liked the literature but not the country, and never
visited England, though I believe he planned a visit) this popularity
was, for obvious reasons, rather less than elsewhere. The respectful
vogue which French literature had had with the English in the eighteenth
century had ceased, owing partly to the national enmity revived and
fostered by the great war, and partly to the growth of a fresh and
magnificent literature at home during the first thirty years of the
nineteenth in England. But Balzac could not fail to be read almost at
once by the lettered; and he was translated pretty early, though not
perhaps to any great extent. It was in England, moreover, that by far
his greatest follower appeared, and appeared very shortly. For it would
be absurd in the most bigoted admirer of Thackeray to deny that the
author of _Vanity Fair_, who was in Paris and narrowly watching French
literature and French life at the very time of Balzac's most exuberant
flourishing and education, owed something to the author of _Le Pere
Goriot_. There was no copying or imitation; the lessons taught by Balzac
were too much blended with those of native masters, such as Fielding,
and too much informed and transformed by individual genius. Some
may think--it is a point at issue not merely between Frenchmen and
Englishmen, but between good judges of both nations on each side--that
in absolute veracity and likeness to life, in limiting the operation of
the inner consciousness on the outward observation to strictly artistic
scale, Thackeray excelled Balzac as far as he fell short of him in the
powers of the seer and in the gigantic imagination of the prophet. But
the relations of pupil and master in at least some degree are not, I
think, deniable.