own experience the feelings of the impecunious youth, who, descending
from his garret, picks his way in his solitary pair of white silk
stockings and dancing-shoes across the muddy street, in deadly fear
of being splashed by a passing carriage, and consequently deprived of
the sight of his beloved. But what interests us more, is the sum of
inward experience which is contained in the book, and which amounts
to this: Society detests misfortune and suffering, avoids them like
infectious diseases, never hesitates in choosing between a misfortune
and a crime. Let a misfortune be never so sublime, society will manage
to belittle it, to make it ridiculous by some witty sally; it has no
sympathy to spare for the fallen gladiator. To Balzac, in short, even
now in his youth, society appears devoid of every higher religious or
moral feeling; it shrinks from the old, the sick, and the poor; it does
homage to luck, to strength, and, above all, to wealth; it tolerates no
misfortune out of which it cannot by some means or other coin money.
Before Balzac's day the novel had occupied itself almost exclusively
with one theme--love; but the god of Balzac's contemporaries was
money; therefore in his books money, or rather the lack of money, the
desire of money, is the pivot on which society turns. The idea was
audacious and novel. To enter in a work of fiction, a romance, into
accurate details regarding the incomes and expenditure of the principal
characters, in short, to treat money as of prime importance, was a
perfectly new departure; and many denounced it as prosaic, nay, coarse;
for it is always considered coarse to say what every one thinks, and
what consequently all have tacitly agreed to conceal or to prevaricate
about--and especially coarse to proclaim it in an art which is often
regarded as the art of beautiful lying.
XIV
BALZAC
But Balzac was young yet; his poet's soul, though winter fell early in
it, had its spring; he, too, felt constrained to make love and woman
the central interest of a whole series of novels; and he treated the
old theme with an originality which made it seem quite new. The stories
in which he most successfully varied it form a distinct group among his
works.
It was not beauty, at least not plastic beauty, which Balzac
worshipped in woman. And one thing that distinguished him from many
of his contemporaries was, that beauty did not impress him most when
seen through the medium of art. A great proportion of the Romantic
literature of France, as well as of Germany and Scandinavia, was art
literature. Such an art-loving author as, for instance, Gautier (who
soon became the head of a whole school), was actually prevented by
his love of art from appreciating reality. He himself has told how
disappointed he was the first time he went to paint a female figure
from the life in Rioult's studio, and this in spite of the unquestioned
beauty of the model and the classical grace of her outlines. "I have
always," he confesses, "preferred the statue to the woman, marble to
flesh." Significant words! Picture Gautier and Balzac together in the
museum of antiquities in the Louvre, in that holy of holies, where
the Venus of Milo shines in solitary majesty. The plastic poet hears,
resounding from the marble, the loveliest of all the hymns of Greek
art to the perfection of the human form. Gazing at Venus, he forgets
his surroundings. Not so Balzac! His attention is promptly diverted
from the goddess by the first Parisian lady who stops in front of her,
wearing, in the fashion of the day, a long shawl in which there is not
a fold from neck to heel, a coquettish hat, and tightly fitting gloves.
He takes in at a glance all the little artifices of the fashionable
toilette, the secrets of which are no secrets to him.[1]
Here, then, we have the first characteristic feature in Balzac's work.
No artistic tradition stands between him and the woman of the period.
He studied no statue, worshipped no goddess, did no homage to ideal
beauty; he saw and understood woman exactly as she was then, with her
gowns, shawls, gloves, and hats, her caprices, virtues, temptations,
and faults, her nerves and passions, with all their traces of
unnaturalness, morbidness, and ennui. He loves her as she is. And he
is not satisfied with studying her in the street, in the boudoir, or
even in the bedchamber; he is not satisfied with analysing her soul; he
inquires into the physiological causes of the psychological phenomena,
into the sufferings and the diseases of women. He does more than merely
indicate all that the weak and suffering sex silently endures.
The second characteristic feature is, that it is not the young girl,
nor even the young married woman, whom Balzac represents as the object
of love; his chief female type, which has taken its name from the title
of one of his stories, is _la femme de trente ans_. He discovered and
proclaimed the simple truth that in such a climate as that of the
north of France, a woman is not at her best, either physically or
spiritually, at the age of eighteen. He described the woman who has
left her first youth behind her, who feels more profoundly, thinks more
maturely, has already suffered disappointments, but is still capable
of intense, unalloyed feeling. Life has already set its mark upon
her--here a line of suffering, and there a wrinkle--but she is still in
full possession of all the attractions of her sex. She is melancholy;
she has tasted happiness and has tasted suffering, is misunderstood
or lonely; she has often been deceived, but is still waiting, capable
of inspiring the strong, ardent passions which draw their nourishment
from compassion. And, curiously enough, she is not seen and described
from the point of view of the man of her own age, but from that of a
younger man, with little experience of life. The vernal emotion, the
ardent desire, the naïve enthusiasm, the unconscious idealisation of
youthful passion, surround this no longer perfectly youthful figure
with a glorifying halo, embellish, rejuvenate, deify the woman whose
real attractions are her refinement, her feminine seriousness, and the
grace born of genuine passion. The delineation is never idealistic
in the sense that George Sand's delineations are; for nothing is
suppressed of what women, when they talk or write of their own sex, are
accustomed to ignore--of what even George Sand passes over in silence
when she is describing women for whom she desires to awaken sympathy
and admiration. To George Sand woman is above all a soul; to Balzac she
is a natural phenomenon, and therefore not flawless, either physically
or spiritually. His idealisation is either purely external (the
transfiguring power of certain lights, of the erotic situation, &c),
or else it consists in passion for a certain limited time invalidating
everything else, everything previous, and ennobling with its glow.
Maternal love, wifely love, the bashful tenderness of the young girl,
are painted by Balzac during this period with as masterly a touch as
the unbridled erotic passion of the courtesan.[2]
He shows us the Frenchwoman of four different historical periods.
First, the Frenchwoman of the days of the Revolution. In that
little masterpiece, _Le Réquisitionnaire_, one of his few perfectly
proportioned stories, he represents, with the Reign of Terror as a
background, a mother's love for her son. The little out-of-the-way
town and Madame de Dey's curious house are drawn with a few strokes.
Apprehension of the possible fate of a son who has been condemned to
death; the expectation of his arrival in the disguise of a soldier who
is to be quartered on her; the terrible anxiety, increasing from hour
to hour till late at night; the apparently mysterious arrival of the
young soldier who, unseen by the mistress of the house, is at once
conducted to the bedchamber comfortably prepared for him; the mother's
torturing restlessness and almost uncontrollable joy when she hears his
steps in the room above, but feels obliged, in order not to betray his
arrival, to continue her conversation in the drawing-room; her hurried
entrance into his room, and the frightful discovery that the person who
has arrived is not her son, but a real recruit--all this, compressed
into a few pages, is described with extraordinary power and truth to
nature.
Next Balzac paints the women of the Napoleonic period, upon a
background of military pomp and splendour, in all the glow and warmth
of their admiration for the successful warriors. His picture bears the
impress of the restless, pleasure-seeking haste with which life was
lived at a time when it was possible for the young woman "to become
fiancée, wife, mother, and widow between a first and a fifth bulletin
from the Grande Armée," and when the near prospect of widowhood or
honours or an immortal name, made the women more reckless and the
officers more seductive. A period and a distinct female type are
represented in the description of the review in the Tuileries Gardens,
and of the evening party at the time of the battle of Wagram (in _La
Femme de trente Ans_ and _La Paix du Ménage_).
But it is not until the plots of his stories are laid in the days of
the restored Legitimist monarchy that Balzac finds his true province,
and produces his most acutely observed, skilfully drawn female types
and his most wonderful psychological analyses. Eminently fitted as he
was, with his unshrinking eye and his hard hand, to paint the dullness
and the dishonesty of the reign of the Citizen King, he was poet enough
to look back regretfully from the prosaic days of the plutocracy to the
refined elegance and freer, gayer tone of the days of the Legitimist
Monarchy. That had still been an aristocratic period; and Balzac,
who, without any proper claim to the title, regarded himself as an
aristocrat, had no small respect for the aristocracy; the high-born,
well-bred, beautiful woman was in his eyes the flower of humanity.
He was of the generation that worshipped Napoleon; Napoleon's name
appears on every tenth page of his novels, and (like Victor Hugo) he
dreamed of rivalling, in his own domain of literature, the Emperor's
world-wide dominion; in his study stood a statuette of Napoleon, and
on the scabbard of the sword he had written: "What he has conquered
with the sword I will conquer with the pen." But, granted all this,
he nevertheless, with his dreams, his weaknesses, his vanities and
his refinements, belonged to the Legitimist Monarchy, for which,
moreover, the fact that his youth had been spent under it gave him a
warmer feeling. In the days of gilded state-coaches and old French
ceremonial, under the shelter of ecclesiasticism and frivolity, it had
been possible for liberal ideas and humane morals to thrive in the
higher classes of society; they disappeared when money ascended the
throne. The social life of Paris lost that refined charm for which it
had been so famous. It is not surprising, then, that Balzac painted
the fair sinners of the Faubourg St. Germain with a lenient hand and
flattering colours. One of the most eminent women of the day, the
charming Delphine de Girardin, whose salon was a fashionable resort,
was a true friend to Balzac as well as to Hugo and Gautier; but as far
as his works are concerned, he undoubtedly learned more from the two
duchesses who personified to him the greatness of Imperial France and
the gay refinement of the _ancien régime_, and with whom he became
intimate almost at the beginning of his literary career. These were
Madame Junot, the Duchess of Abrantés, whom he assisted in her literary
pursuits, and the Duchesse de Castries, who began their acquaintance by
writing anonymously to him of her interest in his works, and to whom a
probably unrequited passion on his side and violent jealousy on hers
long bound him. She appears in his _Histoire des Treize_ under the name
of the Duchesse de Langeais.
At the beginning of the Thirties, Balzac has, of course, not yet begun
to write of society under the Constitutional Monarchy, its women and
their passions. This happens later. And when it does happen, what we
observe is, that he as a rule envisages this new material much more
gloomily and austerely. The feeling of spring has vanished. Woman
and love still form the centre of interest in many of the books. But
affection has become passion and passion has become depravity. We
read little of unselfish feeling and innocent sympathies, much of
self-interested calculation, on the part of women as well as of men,
nay, especially on the part of women; even in love, and still more when
it is only a substitute for love which is described. In many of these
novels the courtesan thrusts the fine lady into the background, and
occasionally the former is represented as more disinterested than the
latter. Abysses of selfishness and vice open before the reader's eyes.
[1] _Cf_. Th. Gautier, _Portraits contemporains_, p. 108.
[2] See _Le Message, La Grenadière, La Femme abandonnée, La grande
Brétèche, Madame Firmiani, Une Fille d'Eve_, and _La Femme de trente
Ans_, which last work is a collection of stories not originally written
in connection with each other.
XV
BALZAC
Of the books published by Balzac in 1833 and 1834, two are especially
deserving of notice--the delicately wrought, classic tale,
_Eugénie Grandet_, and the powerful, fateful _Père Goriot_. In the
first-mentioned work Balzac competes with Molière (_l'Avare_) in the
second with no less a writer than Shakespeare (_King Lear_).
_Eugénie Grandet_ does not represent the full measure of Balzac's
talent, though he long went by the name of its author as a kind of
title of honour. The book interested because of its careful and
accurate descriptions of provincial life with its virtues and vices;
it could be recommended for family reading, because the heroine was a
chaste and noble-minded young girl; but its chief distinction lay in
the wonderful manner in which Balzac's genius makes of covetousness
and avarice, qualities of which hitherto only the comical side had
been displayed, imposing vices. He shows how the instinct of amassing
money, which it is the custom to regard as a laughable weakness, by
degrees stifles every human feeling, and, raising its terrible Medusa
head, tyrannises over the miser's surroundings; and he at the same
time makes the miser himself a more human figure. To Balzac he is not
the stereotyped comedy bourgeois, but a power-loving monomaniac, a
petrified enthusiast, a poet, who at the sight of his gold revels in
satisfied desire, but also in wild dreams. The miser is simply a man
who is more thoroughly impressed than other men with the truth that
money represents all human powers and pleasures. In the representation
of such a character, Balzac displays his peculiar gift, which is that
of producing a powerful effect with small means, with what others have
overlooked or despised. From the symbolic standpoint the horizon of
_Eugénie Grandet_ is not narrow; but it was narrow in comparison with
Balzac's characteristic and usual one.
In _Père Goriot_ it widens. Here it is not an out-of-the-way
provincial nook, but the great city of Paris which is studied, and
which is unrolled, like a panorama, before our eyes. And there is no
generalising and symbolising, as in _La Peau de Chagrin_; each class
of society and each character in each class is provided with its own
characteristic features. I have spoken of _King Lear_; but the story
of the two cold-hearted daughters and their father, full of deep
meaning and feeling as it is, is only in an external sense the theme of
the book. The real theme is the comparatively uncorrupted provincial
youth's introduction to the world of Paris, his gradual discovery of
the real nature of that world, his horror at the discovery, his refusal
to do what others do, his temptations, and his gradual, yet rapidly
completed, education for the life that is being lived around him.
Nothing more profound than this study of the development of Rastignac's
character has been produced by Balzac, or indeed by any modern
novelist. He shows with marvellous art how on every side, except where
men's words are dictated by hypocrisy or extreme naïveté, the young
man meets with the same conception of society and receives the same
advice. His relative and protectress, the charming and distinguished
Madame de Beauséant, says to him: "The more coldly you calculate, the
higher you will rise. Think of men and women simply as post-horses to
be left behind you, broken-winded, at each stage of your journey....
If you have any real feeling, hide it; never let it be suspected, or
you are lost.... If you can manage to make women think you clever, men
will soon believe that you are, unless you destroy their illusion too
rudely.... You will find out what society is--a company of dupes and
rogues. Be neither the one nor the other." And the escaped galley-slave
Vautrin says to him: "One must either force a way for one's self into
the heart of that crowd as a cannon-ball does, or sneak in like the
plague. Honesty is of no use. Men bend and submit to the power of
genius; they hate it, they try to calumniate it, because it takes
without sharing; but they yield if it persists; they adore it on their
bended knees if they have not succeeded in burying it in the mud....
I defy you to take two steps in Paris without stumbling on infernal
machinations. Hence the honest man is the common enemy. But who do you
suppose is the honest man? In Paris he is the man who keeps silence and
refuses to share."
Rastignac is the typical young Frenchman of that period. He is
talented, but not in any uncommon degree, and has no idealism beyond
that which is begotten by the inexperience of youth. Profoundly
impressed by all that he sees and experiences, he begins to aspire
with steadily diminishing conscientiousness, steadily growing desire,
after fortune's favours. How indignantly he repudiates the idea when
Vautrin first puts the old hypothetical question to him--whether, if
a mere act of will could do it, he would kill an unknown mandarin in
China to obtain the millions he desires! Yet how short a time elapses
before "the mandarin" is lying in his death-throes! Rastignac says to
himself at first, as all men do in their youth, that to resolve to
become great or wealthy at any cost is the same as to resolve to lie,
cheat, and cringe to and flatter those who have lied, cheated, cringed,
and flattered. Presently he dismisses the thought, determining not to
think at all, but to follow the instincts of his heart. There comes
a time when he is still too young to make definite calculations, but
old enough to be haunted by vague ideas and hazy visions, which, if
they could be chemically condensed, would leave no very pure deposit.
His liaison with the fashionable lady, Delphine de Nucingen, Goriot's
daughter, completes his education. And whilst he has been acquiring
a full and perfect understanding of that sum of small and great
meannesses which constitutes fashionable life, he has been influenced
by Vautrin's satirical cynicism. "One or two more such political
reflections, and you will see the world as it is. If he will but act
an occasional little virtuous scene, the man of superior powers may
satisfy all his fancies and receive loud applause from the fools in the
pit.... I give you leave to despise me to-day, being certain that ere
long you will love me. You will find in me those yawning abysses, those
great concentrated feelings, which the foolish call vices; but you will
never find me either cowardly or ungrateful."
Rastignac's eyes are opened; he sees all the shams by which he is
surrounded, sees that morals and laws are simply screens behind
which impudent vice acts unrestrainedly. Everywhere, everywhere,
sham respectability, sham friendship, sham love, sham kindness, sham
sacredness, sham marriages! With masterly skill Balzac has seized
and immortalised that moment in the young man's life when, as I have
already put it, his heart swells and becomes strangely heavy, and he
feels, when he looks about him, as if a fountain of scorn were surging
in his breast. "His reflections whilst he was dressing were of the
saddest and most depressing. Society appeared to him like an ocean of
mud, in which the man who dipped his foot at once sank up to the neck.
'In society men commit only mean crimes,' he said to himself; 'Vautrin
is greater.'" In the end, after he has taken all the measurements of
this hell, he settles down comfortably in it, and prepares to scale the
heights of society, to rise to the elevated official position which we
find him occupying when we meet him again in later novels.
Almost all Balzac's characteristic qualities stood him in good stead
in the evolution of this broadly planned work. His almost animal
liveliness, his inexhaustible flow of cutting epithet, lent themselves
naturally to the reproduction of the conversation of the mixed, shabby,
wanton, impudently clever company who sat at the table of the Pension
Vauquer. There are hardly any noble characters in the book, and the
author has consequently no opportunity of indulging in tasteless
pathos; but the reader has countless opportunities of rejoicing in the
unerring eye and the precision with which Balzac dissects the soul
of a criminal, a coquette, a millionaire, an envious old maid. The
neglected, disowned old father, from whom the book takes its title, is
by no means an entirely successful character. Père Goriot is a victim,
and Balzac always waxes sentimental over victims. With extremely bad
taste he calls the old man "the Christ of paternal love"; and to the
paternal love he imparts such a sensually hysterical character that he
almost disgusts us with it.[1] Nevertheless the fact that the
whole plot centres round this forsaken old man, upon whose heart his
own daughters trample, gives to the composition a satisfactory unity
and solidity. The whole Juvenal-like satire of society is concentrated,
is compressed, as it were, into an epigram, in the passage which
describes how Delphine does not visit her dying father because it is
imperative, if she desires to mount a step higher on the social ladder,
that she should avail herself of the long-coveted invitation to Madame
Beauséant's ball--a ball to which "the whole of Paris" is crowding
merely to spy with cruel curiosity for traces in the hostess's face of
the pain caused her by the engagement of her lover, the news of which
had only reached her that morning.
We follow Delphine as she drives, with Rastignac by her side, in her
own carriage to the ball. The young man, who is well aware that she
would drive over her father's corpse to show herself at this ball,
but who is neither able to give her up nor brave enough to incur her
displeasure by reproaching her, cannot refrain from saying a few
words about the old man's pitiable condition. The tears come into her
eyes. "I shall look ugly if I cry," she thinks; and they dry at once.
"To-morrow morning I shall go to my father," she says, "and nurse him,
and never leave his pillow." And she means what she says. She is not
a radically bad woman, but she is a living picture of the discords of
society; she belongs to the lower classes by birth, to the upper by
marriage; she is rich, but the humiliating conditions of her marriage
deprive her of the control of her fortune; she is pleasure-loving,
empty-minded, and ambitious. Balzac's creative power was not equal to
the production of a simple, pure, Shakespearean Cordelia; his region is
not the region of the noble; but he has created a Regan and a Goneril
who are more human and true to life than the great Englishman's.
[1] "Mon Dieu! pleurer, elle a pleuré?"--"La tête sur mon gilet," dit
Eugène.--"Oh! donnez-le-moi, ce gilet," dit le père Goriot.
XVI
BALZAC
One day in 1836 Balzac appeared in his sister's room in the wildest of
spirits. Imitating the gestures of a drum-major with his thick cane
(on the cornelian handle of which was engraved in Turkish a sultan's
motto: "I am the destroyer of obstacles"), he shouted to her during
the pauses of an accompaniment of martial music made with his tongue:
"Congratulate me, little one, for I am on the point of becoming a
genius." He had conceived the idea of combining all his novels, those
already published and those yet to be written, into one great work--_La
Comédie Humaine_.