type-founder, printer, bookseller, and author in one; for he himself,
full of enthusiasm for his grand projects, wrote the prefaces for his
editions of the classics. But, after he had persuaded his parents to
put the greater part of their capital into the undertaking, after he
had set agoing a type-foundry and printing establishment, and printed
good, illustrated, one-volume editions of Molière and La Fontaine, the
French booksellers to a man combined against their would-be colleague,
flatly refused to circulate his editions, and quietly awaited his
commercial ruin, to take up his idea and profit by it themselves.
At the end of three years Balzac was compelled to sell his books as
waste-paper, and dispose of his printing machinery at a great loss. He
himself underwent all the misfortunes of the poor inventive printer in
_Ève et David_. He was left not only poor, but so overburdened with
debt that he had to work all the rest of his life simply to pay his
creditors, regain his independence, and restore his mother's fortune.
And this debt, to demolish which he had no weapon but his pen, was not
a passive enemy; it grew, and attacked him from new quarters; as for
long his only means of meeting one engagement was to incur another.
It was in the course of these transactions that he became acquainted
with all the various types of Parisian money-lenders, of whom he has
given such striking portraits in Gobseck and kindred characters; and
the words: "My debts! my creditors!" are constantly in his thoughts
and of constant recurrence in those letters to his intimate friends in
which the warm heart of the heavily burdened man allows itself free
expression. "Remorse," he writes in one of his novels, "is not so bad
as debt, for it cannot clap us into prison." He actually had a short
experience of life in a debtor's prison, and to avoid a repetition of
it had often to hide, to change his place of residence, or have his
letters sent to misleading addresses. The genuine poet, he lived with
his debts as with an inexhaustible source of emotion; his imagination
received, as it were, a daily spur to industry when the thought of his
debts awoke him and he seemed, as soon as he opened his eyes, to see
his promissory notes appearing out of every corner and jumping like
grasshoppers all over the room.
He set to work with herculean energy, and worked, one may say without
a pause, through all the years of his youth and manhood, until, at the
age of fifty, he collapsed from over-exertion--fell as suddenly as the
bull that has received its death-thrust on a Spanish arena. The reason
of production being so little of a pleasure, so entirely a labour to
him, is to be sought in the fact that, though his great and active
imaginative power was unceasingly impelling him to write, it was not
supported by any innate or early acquired stylistic skill. In mastery
of form Balzac was not the equal of many of his contemporaries. He
never succeeded in writing a pleasing poem (those which are to be found
in his novels are the work of others--Madame de Girardin, Théophile
Gautier, Charles de Bernard, Lasailly), and he and none other was the
author of the much derided, halting line with which his Louis Lambert
begins the epic of the Incas:
"O Inca! ô roi infortuné et malheureux!"
Novel after novel did he write under a pseudonym and repudiate before
he attained to a style; his struggle to obtain the mastery of French
prose was a desperate one; and it was one of his greatest griefs that
the young Romanticists who followed in the steps of Victor Hugo long
refused to acknowledge him as a real artist. The delicately sympathetic
Gautier, ever ready to admire, was the only author to greet him with
prompt recognition. But Balzac's astonishment was boundless when he saw
young Gautier, without preparation or any great exertion, and without
needing to make any corrections, fling off, at a desk in the printer's
office, an article irreproachable in both style and matter. It was long
before he could be persuaded that Gautier had not had his _feuilleton_
ready in his head. At last he grasped the fact that there is such a
thing as innate faculty of style, a faculty which had been denied him.
How he toiled to acquire it! How ardently he admired Gautier when he
really comprehended the quality of his plastic talent! We come upon
a curious proof of this so late as the year 1839, when Balzac, in
describing the principal female characters in his novel _Beatrix_,
employs almost word for word descriptions from articles written by
Gautier two years previously on Jenny Colon and Mademoiselle Georges,
the actresses.[1] We feel, in comparing the passages, how eagerness
when we see how commonplace and feeble the additions from his own
vocabulary are.
Balzac was bound to fail in his attempt to rival Gautier in the
latter's special province, for this reason, that he sees and feels in
a perfectly different way. Gautier the stylist is an artist of the
first rank, but Gautier the author, in spite of his poetic qualities,
is cold and at times arid. His talent may be defined as the talent
of the plastic artist who has won a place for himself in literature.
Balzac, on the other hand, is an inferior stylist, but an author of
the highest rank. He cannot place his characters before us with a few
telling words, because he does not himself see them in one single
plastic situation. When, conjured up by his imagination, they present
themselves to the eye of his mind, he sees them, not gradually, but at
once, in different stages of their lives and in different costumes;
he overlooks their whole career; he observes all the multitude of
their peculiar movements and gestures, and hears the sound of their
voices in utterances so characteristic that they bring the speaker
bodily before us. It is not, as in the case of the stylist, a single
picture, the result of a single, perhaps subtle, but somewhat dry
association of ideas, which reveals the character to us; no, Balzac's
character is composed of a hundred thousand associations of ideas which
unconsciously blend and form a unit, complicatedly rich as nature
itself, as that real human unit, which consists of a strange mixture of
innumerable physical and spiritual elements. It would require a whole
book to give a sufficient number of examples of Balzac's incomparable
power of bringing personalities vividly before us by means of their
manner of expressing themselves, or even simply by some peculiarity
in their dress, their household arrangements, and the like.[2]
His difficulty lay in the proper disposal of the wealth of material
which his memory and his inspirations thrust upon him. At one time
he would compress too many ideas, the association between which was
intelligible to himself alone, into a few words (as when he says of an
innocent, unoffending lady that "her ears were the ears of the slave
and the mother"); at another, he would write down, one after the other,
all the observations and fancies which his prolific brain suggested
every time he invented a fictitious personage, and lose himself in a
diffuse, descriptive, argumentative flow of words, which conveyed no
distinct impression to the reader--the reason being that the electric
communication between the organs of poetic vision and poetic eloquence
in the author's brain was faulty, and at times altogether broken off.
Tenfold labour had to supply the bitterly felt deficiency.
When we remember that, in those days of collaboration, Balzac never had
a collaborator, never even a copyist, we can understand what patience
and what stupendous exertion were required to produce, in the course
of twenty years, the novels, tales, and plays, more than a hundred in
number, which proceeded from his pen.
Whilst Hugo writes as the artists of the Renaissance painted,
surrounded by a company of youthful admirers and pupils, Balzac
sits alone in his study. He allows himself little sleep. He goes to
bed between seven and eight, gets up again at midnight and works
in his white, Dominican monk's, habit, with a gold chain round his
waist, until daybreak, when, feeling the want of exercise, he rushes
off himself to the printer's to deliver his manuscript and correct
proofs. His is no ordinary proof-correcting. He demands eight or ten
impressions of each sheet. This is partly because he is not certain of
having found the final, correct expressions, but also because it is
his habit to complete the general outline of his story first, and fill
in the details by degrees. Half, sometimes more than half, the payment
he receives, goes into the pocket of the printer; but not even extreme
need will induce him to allow his work to appear before it seems to him
as perfect as he can make it. He is the despair of the type-setter,
but his proof-reading is also his own most painful task. The first
impression is set with wide spaces between the paragraphs, and gigantic
margins; and both of these are by degrees filled to overflowing. When
he has done with it, the page, with its dots and dashes, strokes and
stars, looks like a picture of a firework. Then the heavily built,
untidily dressed man with the crushed felt hat and the sparkling
eyes, hurries home along the crowded street, every here and there
respectfully made way for by some one who knows or guesses him to be a
genius. More hours of work follow. Before dinner he seeks recreation
in a call on a lady, or a raid on the old curiosity shops in search of
a rare piece of furniture or an old painting. Not till evening comes
again does this indefatigable worker think of rest.
"Sometimes," writes Gautier, "he would come to my house in the morning,
groaning, exhausted, dizzy with the fresh air, like a Vulcan escaped
from his forge, and fling himself down on the sofa. His long night's
work had made him ravenously hungry, and he would pound sardines and
butter into a kind of paste which reminded him of a dish he had been
accustomed to at home, and which he ate spread upon bread. This was
his favourite food. As soon as he had eaten he would fall asleep,
begging me, before he closed his eyes, to wake him in an hour. Paying
no attention to this request, I took care that no noise in the house
should disturb this well-earned slumber. When he awoke at last and saw
the evening twilight spreading its grey shadows over the sky, he would
jump up and overwhelm me with abuse, call me traitor, robber, murderer.
I had been the means of his losing 10,000 francs, for he would have
earned as much as that with the novel which he would have planned if
he had been awake, even leaving possible second and third editions out
of the question; I was causing the most terrible catastrophes and most
inconceivable complications; I had made him miss appointments with
financiers, publishers, duchesses; he would not be in a position to
meet his engagements; this fatal sleep would cost him millions....
I was consoled by seeing the fresh Touraine colour returning to his
cheeks."
When, taking Charles de Lovenjoul's bibliographical work as a guide,
we follow Balzac's labours week by week; when we see from his own
letters how, never allowing himself to be distracted by those Parisian
gaieties in which he nevertheless often took part, nor to be scared by
the literary cannonades of his frequently envious critics, he steadily,
stone by stone, raised the pyramid of his life's work, determined to
make it as broad and as high as possible, we are inspired by a feeling
of respect for the man and his courage. The good-natured, stout, noisy
Balzac was no Titan; indeed, in that generation of heaven-storming
Titans and Titanesses he appears a peculiarly earth-bound creature.
But he is of the race of the Cyclopes; he was a mighty master-builder
who worked with a giant's strength; and the uncouth, brick-laying,
carpentering Cyclops raised his building as high as the two great lyric
geniuses of the day, Victor Hugo and George Sand, mounted on their
wings.
He had never any doubt of his own ability. A self-confidence which
corresponded to his talent, and which sometimes displayed itself in
naïve boastfulness, but never in petty vanity, carried him bravely
through all the trials and struggles of the first years; and in the
moments of depression which occurred in his, as they do in every
artist's life, he was, as we understand from his letters, comforted
and strengthened by faithful, secret love. A woman whose name he never
mentioned to his friends, whom he only alludes to with reverence as "an
angel," "a moral sun," and who to him was "more than a mother, more
than a friend, more than one human being can be to another," supported
him with her self-sacrificing devotion, with word and deed, in the many
troubles which beset his youth. We know that he was acquainted with her
in 1822, and for twelve years (she died in 1837) she managed from time
to time "to steal away from duty, family, society, all the hampering
ties of Parisian life," and spend two hours with him.[3]
Balzac, always ardent in his praise, naturally employs the strongest
expressions where he loves; what is really worthy of notice is the
delicacy of feeling displayed by this man, who is so invariably decried
for his cynical sensuality--the admiration and gratitude in which his
love takes shape.
[1] Compare the following sentences:--
GAUTIER. Les cheveux ... _scintillent_ et se contournent aux faux jours
en manière de _filigranes d'or bruni_....
BALZAC.
Cette chevelure, au lieu d'avoir une couleur indécise, _scintillait_ au
jour comme des _filigranes d'or bruni_....
GAUTIER. Le nez, fin et _mince_, d'un _contour assez aquiline_ et
presque _royal_....
BALZAC. Ce nez d'un contour _aquilin, mince_, avec je ne sais quoi de
_royal_....
GAUTIER. Elle ressemble à s'y méprendre à une ... _Isis des bas-reliefs
éginétiques_....
BALZAC. Ce visage, plus rond qu'oval, ressemble à celui de quelque
belle _Isis des bas-reliefs éginétiques_.
GAUTIER. Une singularité remarquable du col de Mademoiselle Georges,
c'est qu'au lieu de s'arrondir intérieurement du côté de la nuque, il
_forme un contour renflé_ et soutenu, _qui lie les épaules au fond de
sa tête sans aucune sinuosité_, diagnostic de tempérament _athlétique,
développé_ au plus haut point chez l'hercule Farnése. _L'attache des
bras_ a quelque chose de formidable.... Mais ils sont très-blancs,
très-purs, _terminés par un poignet dune délicatesse_ enfantine et des
_mains mignonnes frappées de fossettes_.
BALZAC. Au lieu de se creuser à la _nuque_, le col de Camille _forme
un contour renflé qui lie les épaules à la tête sans sinuosité_, le
caractère le plus évident de la force. Ce col présente par moments
des plis d'une magnificence _athlétique. L'attache des bras_, d'un
superbe contour, semble appartenir à une femme colossale. Les bras sont
vigoureusement modelés, _terminés par un poignet d'une délicatesse_
anglaise et _des mains mignonnes et pleines de fossettes_.
[2] Merely to show exactly what I mean, I give a single example. The
courtesan Josépha asks the old, worn-out roué, Baron Hulot, one of
Napoleon's generals, if it is true that he has caused the death of his
brother and his uncle, brought misery and disgrace upon his family, and
defrauded the government, all to gratify his mistress's whims.
"Le baron inclina tristement la tête.--Eh bien! j'aime cela! s'écria
Josépha, qui se leva pleine d'enthousiasme. C'est un _brûlage
générale_! c'est Sardanapale! c'est grand! c'est complet! On est une
canaille, mais on a du cœur. Eh bien! moi j'aime mieux un mange-tout
passionné comme toi pour les femmes que ces froids banquiers sans âme
qu'on dit vertueux et qui ruinent des milliers de familles avec leurs
rails.... Ça n'est pas comme toi, mon vieux; tu es un homme à passions;
on te ferait vendre ta patrie! Aussi, vois-tu, je suis prête à tout
faire pour toi! Tu es mon père, tu m'as lancée! c'est sacré. Que te
faut-il? Veux-tu cent mille francs? On s'exterminera le tempérament
pour te les gagner."
Do not these words give life to the woman who speaks and the man she
addresses?
[3] (The lady's name was Madame de Bemy. Letters to Louise, Nos. I.
and XXII., the letter to his mother, dated Jan. I, 1836, and that of
October 1836 to Madame Hanska, taken in combination, show this plainly.
XIII
BALZAC
Balzac's earliest literary model was, as already mentioned, Sir Walter
Scott, an author of whom he can never have reminded any one, and with
whom, when his genius reaches its maturity, he has hardly anything
in common. The writer of the _Comédie Humaine_ was a man of far too
modern a spirit to be able to remain faithful to historic fiction.
He felt no home-sickness for any past century; he had amassed a vast
wealth of observation, and involuntarily chose themes in which he
could turn this to the best account. He was dimly conscious that the
writer of historical novels, unless he be content simply to thrust the
characters which he has before him as models into antiquated costumes,
must take his modern, personal, psychological observations, and, as
it were, force them back into a more primitive age--a difficult task,
the attempt at which seldom resulted in more than a thinly disguised
reproduction of the manners and customs of the writer's contemporaries,
or at any rate of their ideas. It was not in Balzac's nature to collect
information laboriously from old chronicles; he studied the living men
and women of his own day.
_La Physiologie du Mariage_, the first of his works to arouse
attention, supplemented Brillat-Savarin's harmless _Physiologie du
Goût_ with a half-jocose, half-scientific, wholly coarse analysis
of that institution of society which French literature from time
immemorial has treated as a butt for witticisms, an object of ironical
homage, and a matter for unsparing investigation. Balzac regards it in
the light of a tragi-comic social necessity, defends it, and assists
it with good advice in its struggle with those destructive elements,
masculine and feminine caprices and passions. Marriage has a special
attraction for Balzac as being the battle-ground of two egoisms; he
rushes with the ruthlessness of a wild boar through its boundless
domain of attractions and repulsions, snuffing and poking his nose into
everything. In France marriage has always been a tolerably external,
public matter; it need not surprise us that Balzac has little reverence
for its mysteries. He writes of them with Molière's outspokenness, but
less healthily--more pessimistically and more grossly. The book is
full of clever, coarse conceits and laughable anecdotes, and is often
extremely amusing from the contrast between the frivolous, licentious
matter and the professorial or father-confessor style in which it is
expounded by the youthful lecturer on the science of marriage. It is,
nevertheless, an immature production of a writer who has been early
robbed of all beautiful illusions; and it must certainly be a repulsive
book to most readers of the female sex, though we are told that a
considerable proportion of its contents was communicated to the author
by two women, neither of them young--Madame Hamelin and Madame Sophie
Gay. _La Physiologie du Mariage_ reveals none of Balzac's nobility of
thought and delicacy of feeling--nothing but his gift of ruthless,
searching analysis.
It would seem as if the opening of his authorial vein in this book
had freed him for a long time from bad blood. His conception of life
is henceforward a more elevated one, or rather, it divides itself
into two conceptions, a serious and a sportive. The serious and the
sensually cynic philosophy of human life, which in _La Physiologie
du Mariage_ blent into one repulsive whole, now separate, displaying
themselves in the form of tragedy and satyric comedy. In 1831 he both
writes his first philosophic novel, _La Peau de Chagrin_ (which laid
the foundation of his fame as an author) and begins, with _La belle
Impéria_, the long series of the _Contes drôlatiques_, a collection of
tales in the freest Renaissance style, reminiscent of Queen Marguerite
and Brantôme in matter and of Rabelais in language. Told in the
language of our own day, they would be both disgusting and dull; but
the grand, simple, old-fashioned prose style, which lends more nobility
to the subject than even the severest metrical forms, metamorphoses
these deifications of the flesh into genuine works of art, burlesque as
the tales told by one of those worldly-minded, handy, jovial monks who
swarm in the legendary lore of every country.
In one of the masterly prologues to this collection of tales the author
tells how, having lost his patrimony in his youth, and being reduced
to the direst poverty, he cried to heaven, like the woodcutter in the
fable who had lost his axe, in hopes that the gods might take pity
on him and give him another axe. What Mercury threw down to him was
an ink-horn, on which were engraved the three letters AVE. He stood
turning the heavenly gift round and round in his hands until he caught
sight of the letters backwards, EVA. What was Eva? What but all women
in one? A heavenly voice had called to him: "Think of woman; she will
heal thy woes and fill thy pockets; she is thy fortune, thy property.
Ave, I salute thee! Eva, O woman!" Which, being interpreted, meant that
what he was now to attempt was to win a smile from the unprejudiced
reader by mad and merry love stories. And he succeeded. In none of
his other writings did his style attain such brilliance and vigour;
Rubens's colouring is not bolder nor richer, and Rubens hardly equals
this herculean wantonness with his fauns and drunken bacchantes. But it
is difficult to find ten successive lines that are fit for quotation or
reading aloud.
_La Peau de Chagrin_ is Balzac's first literary tussle with the reality
of his age; it is a spirited, many-sided work, rich in germs and
shoots; and with its fine, simple symbols it anticipates that almost
comprehensive picture of modern society which its author was to give to
the world in his complete works. The externalities of modern life, such
as the theatre and the fashionable lady's boudoir; the dissatisfied
and hopeless poverty of the talented young author thrown into relief
by the orgies of wealthy journalists and women of the demi-monde; the
contrast, in the two principal female characters, between the worldly
and the loving heart--all this is shown us in a strange, fantastic
light. The book consists of a few connected gaudy spectacular scenes;
there is more reflection and symbolic art than plastic talent in
it. The youthful hero, who is on the point of committing suicide in
despair over his hopeless poverty, receives from an aged dealer in
curiosities a piece of wild ass's skin, on which neither steel nor fire
produces the smallest effect, and which secures to its possessor the
fulfilment of his every wish, but which shrinks a line or two with the
gratification of each; simultaneously with the final disappearance of
the ass's skin the life of its owner comes to an end. The persuasive
powers of a marvellous imagination have succeeded in imparting
credibility to the supernatural part of this profound allegory. Balzac
has given the fantastic element in it a form which permits of its
blending with the modern realistic elements, Aladdin's lamp, when it
was rubbed, instantly worked a direct miracle; even in Oehlenschläger's
_Aladdin_ it supersedes the law of cause and effect. Not so the ass's
skin; it does nothing directly; it only ensures the fortunate issue of
events, steadily shrinking the while. It seems to be made of the fabric
of which our lives are composed. The gradual annihilation of the human
being is brought about, we are told, by two instinctive actions, which
exhaust its sources of life. "Deux verbes expriment toutes les formes
que prennent ces deux causes de mort: vouloir et pouvoir. _Vouloir_
nous brûle et _pouvoir_ nous détruit." That is to say, we die at last
because we go on killing ourselves every day.
The ass's skin is, like ourselves, at last annihilated by "vouloir
et pouvoir." With real profundity Balzac shows in this powerful
representation of the chief impulse of the younger generation of
his day--to drink the cup of life greedily to the very dregs--what
emptiness there is in satiety, how certain it is that death lies
cowering in the satisfaction of desire. Youthful, fertile, suggestive,
and vaguely melancholy, like all books produced by genius before the
acquirement of personal experience, _La Peau de Chagrin_ made its
mark abroad as well as in France. Goethe read it during the last year
of his life. Riemer (who attributes the authorship of the book to
Victor Hugo) reports Goethe to have said on October 11, 1831: "I have
been reading more of _La Peau de Chagrin_. It is an excellent work in
the newest style, distinguished by the vigour and cleverness of its
back-and-forward movement between the impossible and the painful, and
by the logical manner in which the marvellous is employed in producing
the most extraordinary chains of thought and events, of which, taken in
detail, much that is favourable might be said." In a letter of the 17th
November of the same year he writes of the same work: "This book, the
production of an intellect of very high order, points to a deep-seated,
incurable corruption in the French nation, which will spread steadily
unless the provinces, which can neither read nor write, restore it to
health again, as far as that is possible." (_Goethe-Jahrbuch_, 1880,
pp. 287, 289.)