true in detail. Walter Scott, obliged as he was to conform to the ideas
of an essentially hypocritical nation, was false to humanity in his
picture of woman, because his models were schismatics. The Protestant
woman has no ideal. She may be chaste, pure, virtuous; but her
unexpansive love will always be as calm and methodical as the fulfilment
of a duty. It might seem as though the Virgin Mary had chilled the
hearts of those sophists who have banished her from heaven with her
treasures of loving kindness. In Protestantism there is no possible
future for the woman who has sinned; while, in the Catholic Church, the
hope of forgiveness makes her sublime. Hence, for the Protestant writer
there is but one Woman, while the Catholic writer finds a new woman in
each new situation. If Walter Scott had been a Catholic, if he had set
himself the task of describing truly the various phases of society which
have successively existed in Scotland, perhaps the painter of Effie
and Alice--the two figures for which he blamed himself in his later
years--might have admitted passion with its sins and punishments,
and the virtues revealed by repentance. Passion is the sum-total of
humanity. Without passion, religion, history, romance, art, would all be
useless.
Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and paint them
as they are, with passion for their motive power, have supposed,
but wrongly, that I must belong to the school of Sensualism and
Materialism--two aspects of the same thing--Pantheism. But their
misapprehension was perhaps justified--or inevitable. I do not share the
belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's
improvement in himself. Those who insist on reading in me the intention
to consider man as a finished creation are strangely mistaken.
_Seraphita_, the doctrine in action of the Christian Buddha, seems to me
an ample answer to this rather heedless accusation.
In certain fragments of this long work I have tried to popularize the
amazing facts, I may say the marvels, of electricity, which in man
is metamorphosed into an incalculable force; but in what way do
the phenomena of brain and nerves, which prove the existence of an
undiscovered world of psychology, modify the necessary and undoubted
relations of the worlds to God? In what way can they shake the Catholic
dogma? Though irrefutable facts should some day place thought in the
class of fluids which are discerned only by their effects while their
substance evades our senses, even when aided by so many mechanical
means, the result will be the same as when Christopher Columbus detected
that the earth is a sphere, and Galileo demonstrated its rotation. Our
future will be unchanged. The wonders of animal magnetism, with which
I have been familiar since 1820; the beautiful experiments of Gall,
Lavater's successor; all the men who have studied mind as opticians have
studied light--two not dissimilar things--point to a conclusion in favor
of the mystics, the disciples of St. John, and of those great thinkers
who have established the spiritual world--the sphere in which are
revealed the relations of God and man.
A sure grasp of the purport of this work will make it clear that I
attach to common, daily facts, hidden or patent to the eye, to the acts
of individual lives, and to their causes and principles, the importance
which historians have hitherto ascribed to the events of public national
life. The unknown struggle which goes on in a valley of the Indre
between Mme. de Mortsauf and her passion is perhaps as great as the most
famous of battles (_Le Lys dans la Vallee_). In one the glory of the
victor is at stake; in the other it is heaven. The misfortunes of the
two Birotteaus, the priest and the perfumer, to me are those of mankind.
La Fosseuse (_Medecin de Campagne_) and Mme. Graslin (_Cure de Village_)
are almost the sum-total of woman. We all suffer thus every day. I have
had to do a hundred times what Richardson did but once. Lovelace has a
thousand forms, for social corruption takes the hues of the medium
in which it lives. Clarissa, on the contrary, the lovely image of
impassioned virtue, is drawn in lines of distracting purity. To create
a variety of Virgins it needs a Raphael. In this respect, perhaps
literature must yield to painting.
Still, I may be allowed to point out how many irreproachable figures--as
regards their virtue--are to be found in the portions of this work
already published: Pierrette Lorrain, Ursule Mirouet, Constance
Birotteau, La Fosseuse, Eugenie Grandet, Marguerite Claes, Pauline
de Villenoix, Madame Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve Chardon,
Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon, Madame Firmiani, Agathe Rouget, Renee de
Maucombe; besides several figures in the middle-distance, who, though
less conspicuous than these, nevertheless, offer the reader an example
of domestic virtue: Joseph Lebas, Genestas, Benassis, Bonnet the cure,
Minoret the doctor, Pillerault, David Sechard, the two Birotteaus,
Chaperon the priest, Judge Popinot, Bourgeat, the Sauviats, the
Tascherons, and many more. Do not all these solve the difficult literary
problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?
It was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous
types of a period; for this is, in fact, the number presented to us by
each generation, and which the Human Comedy will require. This crowd of
actors, of characters, this multitude of lives, needed a setting--if
I may be pardoned the expression, a gallery. Hence the very natural
division, as already known, into the Scenes of Private Life, of
Provincial Life, of Parisian, Political, Military, and Country Life.
Under these six heads are classified all the studies of manners which
form the history of society at large, of all its _faits et gestes_, as
our ancestors would have said. These six classes correspond, indeed, to
familiar conceptions. Each has its own sense and meaning, and answers to
an epoch in the life of man. I may repeat here, but very briefly, what
was written by Felix Davin--a young genius snatched from literature by
an early death. After being informed of my plan, he said that the Scenes
of Private Life represented childhood and youth and their errors, as
the Scenes of Provincial Life represented the age of passion, scheming,
self-interest, and ambition. Then the Scenes of Parisian Life give a
picture of the tastes and vice and unbridled powers which conduce to
the habits peculiar to great cities, where the extremes of good and
evil meet. Each of these divisions has its local color--Paris and
the Provinces--a great social antithesis which held for me immense
resources.
And not man alone, but the principal events of life, fall into classes
by types. There are situations which occur in every life, typical
phases, and this is one of the details I most sought after. I have tried
to give an idea of the different districts of our fine country. My work
has its geography, as it has its genealogy and its families, its places
and things, its persons and their deeds; as it has its heraldry, its
nobles and commonalty, its artisans and peasants, its politicians and
dandies, its army--in short, a whole world of its own.
After describing social life in these three portions, I had to delineate
certain exceptional lives, which comprehend the interests of many
people, or of everybody, and are in a degree outside the general law.
Hence we have Scenes of Political Life. This vast picture of society
being finished and complete, was it not needful to display it in its
most violent phase, beside itself, as it were, either in self-defence or
for the sake of conquest? Hence the Scenes of Military Life, as yet the
most incomplete portion of my work, but for which room will be allowed
in this edition, that it may form part of it when done. Finally, the
Scenes of Country Life are, in a way, the evening of this long day, if
I may so call the social drama. In that part are to be found the purest
natures, and the application of the great principles of order, politics,
and morality.
Such is the foundation, full of actors, full of comedies and tragedies,
on which are raised the Philosophical Studies--the second part of my
work, in which the social instrument of all these effects is displayed,
and the ravages of the mind are painted, feeling after feeling; the
first of the series, _The Magic Skin_, to some extent forms a link
between the Philosophical Studies and Studies of Manners, by a work
of almost Oriental fancy, in which life itself is shown in a mortal
struggle with the very element of all passion.
Besides these, there will be a series of Analytical Studies, of which
I will say nothing, for one only is published as yet--The Physiology of
Marriage.
In the course of time I purpose writing two more works of this class.
First the Pathology of Social Life, then an Anatomy of Educational
Bodies, and a Monograph on Virtue.
In looking forward to what remains to be done, my readers will perhaps
echo what my publishers say, "Please God to spare you!" I only ask to be
less tormented by men and things than I have hitherto been since I began
this terrific labor. I have had this in my favor, and I thank God for
it, that the talents of the time, the finest characters and the truest
friends, as noble in their private lives as the former are in public
life, have wrung my hand and said, Courage!
And why should I not confess that this friendship, and the testimony
here and there of persons unknown to me, have upheld me in my career,
both against myself and against unjust attacks; against the calumny
which has often persecuted me, against discouragement, and against the
too eager hopefulness whose utterances are misinterpreted as those of
overwhelming conceit? I had resolved to display stolid stoicism in
the face of abuse and insults; but on two occasions base slanders have
necessitated a reply. Though the advocates of forgiveness of injuries
may regret that I should have displayed my skill in literary fence,
there are many Christians who are of opinion that we live in times when
it is as well to show sometimes that silence springs from generosity.
The vastness of a plan which includes both a history and a criticism of
society, an analysis of its evils, and a discussion of its principles,
authorizes me, I think, in giving to my work the title under which it
now appears--_The Human Comedy_. Is this too ambitious? Is it not exact?
That, when it is complete, the public must pronounce.
PARIS, July 1842