in debts and in earnings, but always in work of some kind or another,
for eighteen years from the turning point of 1829. By degrees, as he
gained fame and ceased to be in the most pressing want of money, Balzac
left off to some extent, though never entirely, those miscellaneous
writings--reviews (including puffs), comic or general sketches,
political diatribes, "physiologies" and the like--which, with his
discarded prefaces and much more interesting matter, were at last,
not many years ago, included in four stout volumes of the _Edition
Definitive_. With the exception of the _Physiologies_ (a sort of short
satiric analysis of this or that class, character, or personage), which
were very popular in the reign of Louis Philippe in France, and which
Albert Smith and others introduced into England, Balzac did not do any
of this miscellaneous work extremely well. Very shrewd observations are
to be found in his reviews, for instance his indication, in reviewing La
Touche's _Fragoletta_, of that common fault of ambitious novels, a sort
of woolly and "ungraspable" looseness of construction and story, which
constantly bewilders the reader as to what is going on. But, as a rule,
he was thinking too much of his own work and his own principles of
working to enter very thoroughly into the work of others. His politics,
those of a moderate but decided Royalist and Conservative, were, as has
been said, intelligent in theory, but in practice a little distinguished
by that neglect of actual business detail which has been noticed in his
speculations.
At last, in the summer of 1847, it seemed as if the Rachel for whom
he had served nearly if not quite the full fourteen years already, and
whose husband had long been out of the way, would at last grant herself
to him. He was invited to Vierzschovnia in the Ukraine, the seat
of Madame Hanska, or in strictness of her son-in-law, Count Georges
Mniszech; and as the visit was apparently for no restricted period, and
Balzac's pretensions to the lady's hand were notorious, it might have
seemed that he was as good as accepted. But to assume this would have
been to mistake what perhaps the greatest creation of Balzac's great
English contemporary and counterpart on the one side, as Thackeray was
his contemporary and counterpart on the other, considered to be the
malignity of widows. What the reasons were which made Madame Hanska
delay so long in doing what she did at last, and might just as well, it
would seem, have done years before, is not certainly known, and it would
be quite unprofitable to discuss them. But it was on the 8th of October
1847 that Balzac first wrote to his sister from Vierzschovnia, and it
was not till the 14th of March 1850 that, "in the parish church of
Saint Barbara at Berditchef, by the Count Abbe Czarski, representing
the Bishop of Jitomir (this is as characteristic of Balzac in one way
as what follows is in another) a Madame Eve de Balzac, born Countess
Rzevuska, or a Madame Honore de Balzac or a Madame de Balzac the elder"
came into existence.
It does not appear that Balzac was exactly unhappy during this huge
probation, which was broken by one short visit to Paris. The interest
of uncertainty was probably much for his ardent and unquiet spirit, and
though he did very little literary work for him, one may suspect that
he would not have done very much if he had stayed at Paris, for signs
of exhaustion, not of genius but of physical power, had shown themselves
before he left home. But it is not unjust or cruel to say that by the
delay "Madame Eve de Balzac" (her actual baptismal name was Evelina)
practically killed her husband. These winters in the severe climate of
Russian Poland were absolutely fatal to a constitution, and especially
to lungs, already deeply affected. At Vierzschovnia itself he had
illnesses, from which he narrowly escaped with life, before the
marriage; his heart broke down after it; and he and his wife did not
reach Paris till the end of May. Less than three months afterwards, on
the 18th of August, he died, having been visited on the very day of his
death in the Paradise of bric-a-brac which he had created for his Eve in
the Rue Fortunee--a name too provocative of Nemesis--by Victor Hugo,
the chief maker in verse as he himself was the chief maker in prose of
France. He was buried at Pere la Chaise. The after-fortunes of his house
and its occupants were not happy: but they do not concern us.
In person Balzac was a typical Frenchman, as indeed he was in most ways.
From his portraits there would seem to have been more force and address
than distinction or refinement in his appearance, but, as has been
already observed, his period was one ungrateful to the iconographer. His
character, not as a writer but as a man, must occupy us a little longer.
For some considerable time--indeed it may be said until the publication
of his letters--it was not very favorably judged on the whole. We may,
of course, dismiss the childish scandals (arising, as usual, from clumsy
or malevolent misinterpretation of such books as the _Physiologie de
Mariage_, the _Peau de Chagrin_, and a few others), which gave rise to
the caricatures of him such as that of which we read, representing him
in a monk's dress at a table covered with bottles and supporting a young
person on his knee, the whole garnished with the epigraph: Scenes de la
Vie Cachee. They seem to have given him, personally, a very unnecessary
annoyance, and indeed he was always rather sensitive to criticism. This
kind of stupid libel will never cease to be devised by the envious,
swallowed by the vulgar, and simply neglected by the wise. But Balzac's
peculiarities, both of life and of work, lent themselves rather fatally
to a subtler misconstruction which he also anticipated and tried to
remove, but which took a far stronger hold. He was represented--and
in the absence of any intimate male friends to contradict the
representation, it was certain to obtain some currency--as in his
artistic person a sardonic libeler of mankind, who cared only to take
foibles and vices for his subjects, and who either left goodness and
virtue out of sight altogether, or represented them as the qualities
of fools. In private life he was held up as at the best a self-centered
egotist who cared for nothing but himself and his own work, capable of
interrupting one friend who told him of the death of a sister by the
suggestion that they should change the subject and talk of "something
real, of _Eugenie Grandet_," and of levying a fifty per cent commission
on another who had written a critical notice of his, Balzac's, life and
works.*
* Sandeau and Gautier, the victims in these two stories, were
neither spiteful, nor mendacious, nor irrational, so they are
probably true. The second was possibly due to Balzac's odd notions
of "business being business." The first, I have quite recently
seen reason to think, may have been a sort of reminiscence of one
of the traits in Diderot's extravagant encomium on Richardson.
With the first of these charges he himself, on different occasions,
rather vainly endeavored to grapple, once drawing up an elaborate
list of his virtuous and vicious women, and showing that the former
outnumbered the latter; and, again, laboring (with that curious lack
of sense of humor which distinguishes all Frenchmen but a very few, and
distinguished him eminently) to show that though no doubt it is very
difficult to make a virtuous person interesting, he, Honore de Balzac,
had attempted it, and succeeded in it, on a quite surprising number of
occasions.
The fact is that if he had handled this last matter rather more lightly
his answer would have been a sufficient one, and that in any case the
charge is not worth answering. It does not lie against the whole of his
work; and if it lay as conclusively as it does against Swift's, it would
not necessarily matter. To the artist in analysis as opposed to the
romance-writer, folly always, and villainy sometimes, does supply a much
better subject than virtuous success, and if he makes his fools and
his villains lifelike and supplies them with a fair contrast of better
things, there is nothing more to be said. He will not, indeed, be
a Shakespeare, or a Dante, or even a Scott; but we may be very well
satisfied with him as a Fielding, a Thackeray, or a Balzac. As to the
more purely personal matter I own that it was some time before I could
persuade myself that Balzac, to speak familiarly, was a much better
fellow than others, and I myself, have been accustomed to think him. But
it is also some time since I came to the conclusion that he was so, and
my conversion is not to be attributed to any editorial retainer. His
education in a lawyer's office, the accursed advice about the _bonne
speculation_, and his constant straitenings for money, will account for
his sometimes looking after the main chance rather too narrowly; and as
for the Eugenie Grandet story (even if the supposition referred to in
a note above be fanciful) it requires no great stretch of charity
or comprehension to see in it nothing more awkward, very easily
misconstrued, but not necessarily in the least heartless or brutal
attempt of a rather absent and very much self-centered recluse absorbed
in one subject, to get his interlocutor as well as himself out of
painful and useless dwelling on sorrowful matters. Self-centered and
self-absorbed Balzac no doubt was; he could not have lived his life
or produced his work if he had been anything else. And it must be
remembered that he owed extremely little to others; that he had the
independence as well as the isolation of the self-centered; that he
never sponged or fawned on a great man, or wronged others of what was
due to them. The only really unpleasant thing about him that I know, and
even this is perhaps due to ignorance of all sides of the matter, is
a slight touch of snobbishness now and then, especially in those late
letters from Vierzschovnia to Madame de Balzac and Madame Surville,
in which, while inundating his mother and sister with commissions
and requests for service, he points out to them what great people the
Hanskas and Mniszechs are, what infinite honor and profit it will be
to be connected with them, and how desirable it is to keep struggling
engineer brothers-in-law and ne'er-do-well brothers in the colonies out
of sight lest they should disgust the magnates.
But these are "sma' sums, sma' sums," as Bailie Jarvie says; and
smallness of any kind has, whatever it may have to do with Balzac the
man, nothing to do with Balzac the writer. With him as with some others,
but not as with the larger number, the sense of _greatness_ increases
the longer and the more fully he is studied. He resembles, I think,
Goethe more than any other man of letters--certainly more than any other
of the present century--in having done work which is very frequently, if
not even commonly, faulty, and in yet requiring that his work shall be
known as a whole. His appeal is cumulative; it repeats itself on each
occasion with a slight difference, and though there may now and then be
the same faults to be noticed, they are almost invariably accompanied,
not merely by the same, but by fresh merits.
As has been said at the beginning of this essay, no attempt will be
made in it to give that running survey of Balzac's work which is
always useful and sometimes indispensable in treatment of the kind.
But something like a summing up of that subject will here be attempted
because it is really desirable that in embarking on so vast a voyage the
reader should have some general chart--some notes of the soundings and
log generally of those who have gone before him.
There are two things, then, which it is more especially desirable to
keep constantly before one in reading Balzac--two things which, taken
together, constitute his almost unique value, and two things which not
a few critics have failed to take together in him, being under the
impression that the one excludes the other, and that to admit the other
is tantamount to a denial of the one. These two things are, first, an
immense attention to detail, sometimes observed, sometimes invented or
imagined; and secondly; a faculty of regarding these details through a
mental lens or arrangement of lenses almost peculiar to himself, which
at once combines, enlarges, and invests them with a peculiar magical
halo or mirage. The two thousand personages of the _Comedie Humaine_
are, for the most part, "signaled," as the French official word has it,
marked and denoted by the minutest traits of character, gesture, gait,
clothing, abode, what not; the transactions recorded are very often
given with a scrupulous and microscopic accuracy of reporting which no
detective could outdo. Defoe is not more circumstantial in detail
of fact than Balzac; Richardson is hardly more prodigal of
character-stroke. Yet a very large proportion of these characters, of
these circumstances, are evidently things invented or imagined,
not observed. And in addition to this the artist's magic glass, his
Balzacian speculum, if we may so say (for none else has ever had it),
transforms even the most rigid observation into something flickering and
fanciful, the outline as of shadows on the wall, not the precise contour
of etching or of the camera.
It is curious, but not unexampled, that both Balzac himself when he
struggled in argument with his critics and those of his partisans who
have been most zealously devoted to him, have usually tried to exalt the
first and less remarkable of these gifts over the second and infinitely
more remarkable. Balzac protested strenuously against the use of
the word "gigantesque" in reference to his work; and of course it is
susceptible of an unhandsome innuendo. But if we leave that innuendo
aside, if we adopt the sane reflection that "gigantesque" does not
exceed "gigantic," or assert as constant failure of greatness, but
only indicates that the magnifying process is carried on with a certain
indiscriminateness, we shall find none, I think, which so thoroughly
well describes him.
The effect of this singular combination of qualities, apparently the
most opposite, may be partly anticipated, but not quite. It results
occasionally in a certain shortcoming as regards _verite vraie_,
absolute artistic truth to nature. Those who would range Balzac in
point of such artistic veracity on a level with poetical and universal
realists like Shakespeare and Dante, or prosaic and particular realists
like Thackeray and Fielding, seem not only to be utterly wrong but to
pay their idol the worst of all compliments, that of ignoring his own
special qualifications. The province of Balzac may not be--I do no think
it is--identical, much less co-extensive, with that of nature. But it is
his own--a partly real, partly fantastic region, where the lights, the
shades, the dimensions, and the physical laws are slightly different
from those of this world of ours, but with which, owing to the things it
has in common with that world, we are able to sympathize, which we
can traverse and comprehend. Every now and then the artist uses his
observing faculty more, and his magnifying and distorting lens less;
every now and then he reverses the proportion. Some tastes will like him
best in the one stage; some in the other; the happier constituted
will like him best in both. These latter will decline to put _Eugenie
Grandet_ above the _Peau de Chagrin_, or _Le Pere Goriot_ above the
wonderful handful of tales which includes _La Recherche de l'Absolu_
and _Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, though they will no doubt recognize
that even in the first two named members of these pairs the Balzacian
quality, that of magnifying and rendering grandiose, is present, and
that the martyrdom of Eugenie, the avarice of her father, the blind
self-devotion of Goriot to his thankless and worthless children, would
not be what they are if they were seen through a perfectly achromatic
and normal medium.
This specially Balzacian quality is, I think, unique. It is like--it may
almost be said to _be_--the poetic imagination, present in magnificent
volume and degree, but in some miraculous way deprived and sterilized
of the specially poetical quality. By this I do not of course mean that
Balzac did not write in verse: we have a few verses of his, and they are
pretty bad, but that is neither here nor there. The difference between
Balzac and a great poet lies not in the fact that the one fills the
whole page with printed words, and the other only a part of it--but in
something else. If I could put that something else into distinct words
I should therein attain the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the
_primum mobile_, the _grand arcanum_, not merely of criticism but of
all things. It might be possible to coast about it, to hint at it,
by adumbrations and in consequences. But it is better and really
more helpful to face the difficulty boldly, and to say that Balzac,
approaching a great poet nearer perhaps than any other prose writer in
any language, is distinguished from one by the absence of the very
last touch, the finally constituting quiddity, which makes a great poet
different from Balzac.
Now, when we make this comparison, it is of the first interest to
remember--and it is one of the uses of the comparison, that it suggests
the remembrance of the fact--that the great poets have usually been
themselves extremely exact observers of detail. It has not made them
great poets; but they would not be great poets without it. And when
Eugenie Grandet starts from _le petit banc de bois_ at the reference to
it in her scoundrelly cousin's letter (to take only one instance out
of a thousand), we see in Balzac the same observation, subject to the
limitation just mentioned, that we see in Dante and Shakespeare, in
Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great poets do not as a rule _accumulate_
detail. Balzac does, and from this very accumulation he manages to
derive that singular gigantesque vagueness--differing from the poetic
vague, but ranking next to it--which I have here ventured to note as
his distinguishing quality. He bewilders us a very little by it, and he
gives us the impression that he has slightly bewildered himself. But the
compensations of the bewilderment are large.
For in this labyrinth and whirl of things, in this heat and hurry
of observation and imagination, the special intoxication of Balzac
consists. Every great artist has his own means of producing this
intoxication, and it differs in result like the stimulus of beauty or of
wine. Those persons who are unfortunate enough to see in Balzac little
or nothing but an ingenious piler-up of careful strokes--a man of
science taking his human documents and classing them after an orderly
fashion in portfolio and deed-box--must miss this intoxication
altogether. It is much more agreeable as well as much more accurate
to see in the manufacture of the _Comedie_ the process of a Cyclopean
workshop--the bustle, the hurry, the glare and shadow, the steam and
sparks of Vulcanian forging. The results, it is true, are by no means
confused or disorderly--neither were those of the forges that worked
under Lipari--but there certainly went much more to them than the dainty
fingering of a literary fretwork-maker or the dull rummagings of a
realist _a la Zola_.
In part, no doubt, and in great part, the work of Balzac is dream-stuff
rather than life-stuff, and it is all the better for that. What is
better than dreams? But the coherence of his visions, their bulk, their
solidity, the way in which they return to us and we return to them, make
them such dream-stuff as there is all too little of in this world. If it
is true that evil on the whole predominates over good in the vision
of this "Voyant," as Philarete Chasles so justly called him, two
very respectable, and in one case very large, though somewhat opposed
divisions of mankind, the philosophic pessimist and the convinced and
consistent Christian believer, will tell us that this is at least not
one of the points in which it is unfaithful to life. If the author is
closer and more faithful in his study of meanness and vice than in his
studies of nobility and virtue, the blame is due at least as much to his
models as to himself. If he has seldom succeeded in combining a really
passionate with a really noble conception of love, very few of his
countrymen have been more fortunate in that respect. If in some of his
types--his journalists, his married women, and others--he seems to have
sacrificed to conventions, let us remember that those who know attribute
to his conventions such a power if not altogether such a holy influence
that two generations of the people he painted have actually lived more
and more up to his painting of them.
And last of all, but also greatest, has to be considered the immensity
of his imaginative achievement, the huge space that he has filled for us
with vivid creation, the range of amusement, of instruction, of (after a
fashion) edification which he has thrown open for us all to walk in.
It is possible that he himself and others more or less well-meaningly,
though more or less maladroitly, following his lead, may have
exaggerated the coherence and the architectural design of the _Comedie_.
But it has coherence and it has design; nor shall we find anything
exactly to parallel it. In mere bulk the _Comedie_ probably, if not
certainly, exceeds the production of any novelist of the first class
in any kind of fiction except Dumas, and with Dumas, for various and
well-known reasons, there is no possibility of comparing it. All others
yield in bulk; all in a certain concentration and intensity; none even
aims at anything like the same system and completeness. It must be
remembered that owing to shortness of life, lateness of beginning,
and the diversion of the author to other work, the _Comedie_ is the
production, and not the sole production, of some seventeen or eighteen
years at most. Not a volume of it, for all that failure to reach the
completest perfection in form and style which has been acknowledged,
can be accused of thinness, of scamped work, of mere repetition, of mere
cobbling up. Every one bears the marks of steady and ferocious labor,
as well as of the genius which had at last come where it had been
so earnestly called and had never gone away again. It is possible to
overpraise Balzac in parts or to mispraise him as a whole. But so long
as inappropriate and superfluous comparisons are avoided and as his own
excellence is recognized and appreciated, it is scarcely possible to
overestimate that excellence in itself and for itself. He stands alone;
even with Dickens, who is his nearest analogue, he shows far more
points of difference than of likeness. His vastness of bulk is not more
remarkable than his peculiarity of quality; and when these two things
coincide in literature or elsewhere, then that in which they coincide
may be called, and must be called, Great, without hesitation and without
reserve.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
APPENDIX
THE BALZAC PLAN OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE
The form in which the Comedie Humaine was left by its author, with
the exceptions of _Le Depute d'Arcis_ (incomplete) and _Les Petits
Bourgeois_, both of which were added, some years later, by the Edition
Definitive.
The original French titles are followed by their English equivalents.
Literal translations have been followed, excepting a few instances where
preference is shown for a clearer or more comprehensive English title.
[Note from Team Balzac, the Etext preparers: In some cases more than one
English translation is commonly used for various translations/editions.
In such cases the first translation is from the Saintsbury edition
copyrighted in 1901 and that is the title referred to in the personages
following most of the stories. We have added other title translations of
which we are currently aware for the readers' convenience.]
COMEDIE HUMAINE
SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVEE
SCENES FROM PRIVATE LIFE
La Maison du Chat-qui Pelote
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
Le Bal de Sceaux
The Ball at Sceaux
La Bourse
The Purse
La Vendetta
The Vendetta
Mme. Firmiani
Madame Firmiani
Une Double Famille
A Second Home
La Paix du Menage
Domestic Peace
La Fausse Maitresse
The Imaginary Mistress
Paz
Etude de femme
A Study of Woman
Autre etude de femme
Another Study of Woman
La Grande Breteche
La Grand Breteche
Albert Savarus
Albert Savarus
Memoires de deux Jeunes Mariees
Letters of Two Brides
Une Fille d'Eve
A Daughter of Eve
La Femme de Trente Ans
A Woman of Thirty
La Femme abandonnee
The Deserted Woman
La Grenadiere
La Grenadiere
Le Message
The Message
Gobseck
Gobseck
Le Contrat de Mariage
A Marriage Settlement
A Marriage Contract