existed in any known literature; it was a product of the same genius
for systématisation which at the beginning of his career had inspired
him with the idea of writing a series of historical romances embracing
a succession of centuries. But this was a far more interesting and
fertile idea. For, if the work were successful, it would possess the
same force of illusion as if it dealt with historic facts, and it
would, moreover, not merely be a little fragment of life symbolically
and artistically enlarged into an image of the whole, but might justly
lay claim to be, in the scientific sense of the word, a whole. In the
_Divina Commedia_ Dante had, as it were, focussed all the philosophy
and experience of life of the Middle Ages; his ambitious rival purposed
giving to the world by means of two to three thousand characters, which
each represented hundreds of others, a complete psychology of all the
different classes of French society, and thus, indirectly, of his age.
It is undeniable that the result was something unique.
Balzac's country has, like the real country, its ministers, its judges,
its generals, its financiers, manufacturers, merchants, and peasants.
It has its priests, its town and country doctors, its men of fashion,
its painters, sculptors, and designers, its poets, prose authors, and
journalists, its old and its newly created aristocracy, its vain and
unfaithful, and its lovable, victimised wives, its authoresses of
genius and its provincial blue-stockings, its old maids, its actresses,
and its host of courtesans. And the illusion is astonishing and
complete.
The personages reappear in one after another of the numerous novels; we
make acquaintance with them in all the different stages of their lives;
they are constantly being alluded to by other characters when they do
not appear themselves; the descriptions of their appearance, dress,
homes, habits, and daily life are as minute and exact as if they had
been given by a dressmaker, a doctor, a tradesman, or a lawyer, and at
the same time so vivid that we feel as if we must certainly find the
person described either in the street and house indicated as his home,
or else paying a call upon the distinguished lady whose salon is the
rendezvous of all the people of fashion in the novels. It seems almost
impossible that these beings, one and all, should be mere figments of
the brain; we involuntarily think of the France of that day as peopled
by them.
And it is the whole of France. For Balzac described in their turn towns
and districts in every part of the country.[1] Far from despising
the provinces, he took a pride in displaying his intimate knowledge
of all the peculiarities of their stagnant life, of their virtues,
all culminating in resignation, and their vices, the offspring of
narrow-mindedness. But Paris in a very special manner lives in his
pages. And Balzac's Paris is not the old city of _Notre-Dame de Paris_,
the picturesque, medieval capital with its marked social contrasts,
its animated street life, and its superstitious ecclesiasticism; still
less is it Victor Hugo's ideal Paris, that impossible New Jerusalem of
intellect and enlightenment; it is the real modern city with its joy,
its sorrow, and its shame--the entrancing wonder of our own age, which
throws the seven of antiquity into the shade--the gigantic polypus with
the hundred thousand tentacles which drag everything, near and far,
into its clutches--the great cancer eating into France. The Paris of
the author's own day lives in his books, with its narrow streets, of
which he gives Rembrandt-like etchings, with its rattle and shrieks,
its street cries in the early morning and its mighty evening chorus of
voices--a sea of sound which he reproduces for us with an orchestral
effect, reminding us of the men initiated into the mysteries of old,
who seemed to have eaten drums and drunk cymbals.[2] Balzac knows about
everything in Paris--the architecture of the houses, the furniture of
the rooms, the pedigrees of the fortunes, the successive owners of the
valuable objects of art, the ladies' toilettes, the dandies tailors'
bills, the lawsuits which divide families, the state of health, means
of subsistence, needs, and desires of all the different classes of the
population. He had absorbed the town through every pore. Contemporary
novelists sought refuge from the mist-veiled sun of Paris and the
commonplace modern Parisian, in Spain, or Africa, or the East; but to
Balzac no sun was fairer than that which shone on Paris. Those about
him endeavoured to conjure forth the shades of a distant or departed
beauty: but to him ugliness was no more repulsive than the nettle is
to the botanist, the snake to the zoologist, or disease to the doctor.
He would never, in Faust's place, have called Helen from the grave; he
would have been much more likely to send for his friend Vidocq, the
Prefect of Police and quondam criminal, and get him to tell tales of
what he had gone through and seen and heard.
By dint of observation he amasses an enormous collection of separate
traits, and the cataloguing of these traits frequently makes the
introductory part of his novel tiresome and confusing; at the end of
an interminable description of a house, a figure, a face, a nose,
the reader sees nothing, is simply bored. But then comes a moment
when the author's glowing imagination melts and fuses together all
these commonplace elements presented to it by his faithful memory,
as Benvenuto Cellini melted down plates and spoons and from them
cast his Perseus. Goethe says (in his diary of February 26, 1780):
"The collecting and putting together of details does not help me to
understand. But after I have long occupied myself in dragging together
sticks and straws, and have attempted to warm myself in vain, although
there is fire at the heart of the heap and smoke everywhere, suddenly
the flame springs up and the whole is in a blaze." In Balzac's novels
the descriptive parts are often smothered in smoke, but the flame never
fails to burst forth.
For Balzac was not merely an observer; he was a seer. If he happened to
meet a workman and his wife going home from the theatre between eleven
and twelve at night, he as likely as not followed them the whole way
to their little house beyond the outer boulevards. He heard them talk
(the mother dragging their child after her by the hand) first of the
play, then of their own affairs. They talked of the money that was to
be paid them next day, spending it in imagination in twenty different
ways, quarrelling during the process and revealing their characters in
the squabble. And Balzac listened so intently to their complaints of
the length of the winter, the dearness of potatoes, the rise in the
price of turf, that he at last lived their life, and, as we are told in
his _Facino Cane_, "felt their rags upon his back and walked with his
feet in their soleless shoes." Their dreams, their necessities, entered
into his soul, and he went about in a kind of waking dream. Whilst this
mental intoxication lasted he gave up all his usual habits and became
something different from himself, became the age. He did not only write
his stories, he lived them; his fictitious characters were so vividly
present to him that he spoke of them to his acquaintances as if they
actually existed. When he undertook a journey to a place he wished to
describe, he would say: "I am going to Alençon, where Mademoiselle
Carmon lives; to Grenoble, where Dr. Bénassis lives." He used to give
his sister the news of his imaginary world. "Do you know who it is
Félix de Vandenesse is marrying? A Mademoiselle de Grandville. It is
a good match, in spite of all Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille has cost
the family." One day when Jules Sandeau was speaking of his sister,
who was ill, Balzac, who had been listening absently for some time,
suddenly said: "This is all very well, my friend; but now to return
to _realities_--let us talk of Eugénie Grandet." It was necessary
that the illusion in his own case should be as strong as this, if
he was to communicate it to others with approximate strength. His
imagination had the commanding power which allows no doubt to arise. It
exercised this quality in practical matters too. Amongst the hundreds
of projects which occurred to him as possible means of freeing himself
from debt, was that of covering the bare fields surrounding the little
country-house of Les Jardies (which he had bought that he might have
a security to give his mother) with enormous forcing-houses, which,
because of the entire absence of shelter from the sun's rays, would
require very little artificial heat. In these forcing-houses a hundred
thousand pine-apples were to be grown, which, sold at five francs each,
instead of at the ordinary price of twenty, would yield the fortunate
grower a yearly income of 400,000 francs "without his requiring to
produce a scrap of manuscript." With such convincing eloquence did
the originator of this plan demonstrate the absolute certainty of its
success, that his friends actually looked out for a shop on one of the
boulevards for the retail of the pine-apples, and consulted him as to
the form and colour of the signboard. At another time he was firmly
persuaded, I know not upon what grounds, that he had discovered the
place in the outskirts of Paris where Toussaint Louverture had buried
his treasure; and so successful was he in communicating his belief
to his friends Sandeau and Gautier, neither of them particularly
simple-minded persons, that these two gentlemen armed themselves with
spades and stole like criminals out of Paris at five o'clock in the
morning to dig at the spot indicated--naturally to find nothing. The
expression, "the _power_ of imagination," is peculiarly applicable in
Balzac's case.
And this imagination which prevailed over others was his own tyrant.
It gave him no peace. Not satisfied with the conception of plans, with
the sweet, but barren joy of artistic dreams, it compelled him to be
continually carrying out his plans, to keep himself in that habit of
producing, without which inspiration so soon vanishes.
When, writing in _La Cousine Bette_ of the gifted sculptor, Wenceslas
Steinbockes idleness, he quotes these words of "a great writer": "I
sit down to my work with despair and rise from it with sorrow," he is
obviously in a half-modest way quoting himself. And he adds: "If the
artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as
Curtius flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings
himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does
not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen
in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by
one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent."
The method of production which he describes is his own; but it is not
the only, not even the highest method. More tranquil, less modern
spirits have kept their heads clear and their eyes undimmed above the
seething crater of their work; and by doing so have preserved a sound
critical sense which has prevented them from ever becoming as tediously
entangled in their material as the author of _Le Curé de Village_ and
_Le Medicin de Campagne_. But, on the other hand, a certain dull glow,
a thrilling, enthralling something which has become a necessity to
modern nerves, is too often lacking in their works.
In the long preface to the _Comédie Humaine_ Balzac sets forth his
intentions and his aim. He begins by expressing his contempt for
the usual method of writing history. "In reading those dry and most
unattractive registers of events which go by the name of history, we
observe," he writes, "that the historians of all countries and ages
have forgotten to give us the history of morals." This deficiency
he intends, as far as it lies in his power, to supply. He purposes
producing a record of the passions, virtues, and vices of society by
condensing kindred characters into types--thus, with patience and
perseverance, writing the book which Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, and
Persia "have unfortunately neglected to bequeath to us." We see what a
low opinion Balzac has of history. His extremely slight acquaintance
with it made it easier for him to be contemptuous. Nor was he himself
really the historian of his age; he was, to use his own striking and
correct expression, its naturalist. He followed the lead of Geoffroy
St. Hilaire, who demonstrated the unity of structure of all the
different species. Among scientists he felt himself a scientist, a
professor of sociology. "Society produces from man, according to
environment, as many different men as there are species in zoology.
The difference between soldier, labourer, official, lawyer, idler,
scientist, statesman, merchant, sailor, poet, priest, is, though more
difficult to grasp, quite as great as the difference between wolf,
lion, horse, raven, shark, seal, and cow." The analogy is not complete,
partly because, as Balzac himself immediately admits, the wife and
husband of society do not always correspond to each other as do the
male and female of the zoologist, partly because it is in the power of
the social individual to pass from one class or calling to another,
whereas in nature transition from one species to another is impossible
during the lifetime of an individual.
What Balzac really means, and what is perfectly true, is that the
standpoint from which he views society corresponds exactly, as a rule,
to the standpoint from which the scientist investigates nature. He
never moralises and condemns; he never, in this unlike most of his
fellows, allows himself to be led by disgust or enthusiasm to describe
otherwise than truthfully; to him, as to the naturalist, nothing is too
small, nothing too great to be examined and explained. Seen through
the microscope, the spider is larger and more complicatedly organised
than the hugest elephant; regarded from the scientific standpoint, the
majestic lion is only a pair of jaws upon four legs. The kind of food
determines the shape of tooth, jaw, shoulder-blade, muscle, and claw,
and explains the majesty. And in exactly the same manner, that which
under certain circumstances seems a foul, despicable crime, reveals
itself, regarded from another standpoint, to be a miniature edition of
one of the grand, brilliant vices of which history tells--and this is
Balzac's standpoint.
Even in as early a work as _Eugénie Grandet_ we come upon expressions
which prove it. The time is approaching when Eugénie will be forced to
confess to the miser who is her father that she no longer possesses
her ducats, that she has actually given them away. "Three days later,"
writes Balzac, "a terrible drama was to be enacted--a bourgeois
tragedy without poison, dagger, or bloodshed, yet more cruel than any
of those which happened in the famous family of the Atrides." This
is as much as to say: My middle-class novel is more tragic than your
classic tragedy. In _Père Goriot_, when the mistress of the famous
boarding-house is loudly and despairingly bewailing the departure of
her boarders, Balzac remarks: "The lamentations which Lord Byron has
put into the mouth of Tasso are beautiful, but they lack the profound
truth of Madame Vauquer's." Which means: The pettiness and vulgarity
which I describe, is, vigorously apprehended, more interesting than
all your noble generalities. In _César Birotteau_ Balzac not only
makes jesting reference in his titles to Montesquieu's famous book
on the Roman Empire, but, with the audacity of genius, compares
his elaborate, lengthy description of a clever Parisian perfumer's
successes and misfortunes with the story of the Trojan wars and the
changeful fortunes of Napoleon. "Troy and Napoleon are only heroic
epics. May this tale be an epic of middle-class life, of destinies to
which no poet has turned his attention, so destitute of all greatness
do they appear. Its subject is not a single man, but a whole host
of sufferings." Which is as much as to say: In literature nothing
is in itself little or great; in a poor hairdresser's struggle for
existence I can read a heroic poem; I show how the events of a humble
private life, if we connect them with their causes and trace these
back to their source, are as important, as interesting and engrossing
as the great revolutions in the lives of nations. And when, in that
masterpiece, _Un Ménage de Garçon_, the cunning, handsome bravo, Max
Gilet, is killed in a duel, the author observes: "Thus died one of
those men who are capable of great things when their environment is
favourable; a man whom nature had treated like a spoiled child, for she
had given him the courage, the coolness, and the political sagacity of
a Cæsar Borgia." So effective is the last of these reflections, that
the reader feels as if he had not understood Max's character until now,
when he sees it in the light of this name.
And virtue is in Balzac's eyes just as much of a result as vice.
Although he is at times weakly sentimental and bombastic in his
descriptions of dutifulness and benevolence, to which he moreover
imparts a strong Roman Catholic colouring, he never fails to direct
attention to the sources of the virtues he describes, which are to be
found, now in a natural frigidity of the senses, now in pride, now in
unconscious calculation, now in inherited nobility of sentiment, now
in feminine remorse, masculine simple-mindedness, or the pious hope of
reward in a future life.
_Un Ménage de Garçon, Cousine Bette_, and _Les Illusions perdues_ are
works which ought to be read by any one who is desirous of appreciating
the growth of their author's literary powers during the last stage of
his career.
The first, which is one of Balzac's least known and read novels, is an
admirable psychological analysis of the life of a small country-town
and of a family with branches there and in Paris. The chief character
is a decayed officer of Napoleon's Guards, originally a strong,
energetic character, now the personification of brutal, passionate
egoism. He is the _miles gloriosus_ of antiquity, except that in place
of being cowardly he is vicious. The second novel mentioned, _La
Cousine Bette_, a well-known and much read one, gives an incomparable
realistic representation of the ruinous power of the erotic passion.
Even Shakespeare (in _Antony and Cleopatra_) does not treat the theme
in a more masterly and convincing manner. _Les Illusions perdues_ is
devoted to demonstrating the degrading results of the abuse of the
press.
The title of this last novel is characteristic of Balzac. It might,
in a manner, be the title of his complete works. But no other single
book of his gives such a good general idea of his attitude to modern
civilisation. The pernicious side of the influence of the newspaper
press is treated as the dark side of public life generally.
Like most great authors who have not lived to be old, Balzac had
little reason to rejoice over the criticism meted out to him by the
press. He was not understood. Even the best critics, men of the type
of Sainte-Beuve, were too unlike him and too near to him in time
to understand his greatness. He lived a solitary life; contrary to
Parisian custom he took no steps to get his books praised; and, as
usually happens, such success as he earned procured him as much envy
as fame. In _Les Illusions perdues_ he gave a picture of the press
which the insulted journalists never forgave him. The most eminent of
them was Jules Janin. His portrait was, not exactly ill-naturedly, but
far from flatteringly painted in the novel under the name of Etienne
Lousteau. This made and still makes his criticism of the book very
amusing. It appeared in the _Revue de Paris_, a periodical to which
Balzac had been a regular contributor until he brought and gained a
lawsuit against it, after which it naturally treated him as an outlaw.
It is a malicious, trivial, witty piece of writing, which has not
survived the book it was intended to ruin.
A young, poor provincial poet, beautiful as a god, but of weak
character and mediocre talent, is brought to Paris by the Muse of the
Department, an elegant, aristocratic bluestocking. They are in love
with each other, and it has been the lady's intention to allow him to
play the part of her accepted lover in the capital; but when she is
received with open arms by the fashionable world, she suddenly sees
herself and her knight in a new light. Coldness and neglect on her part
ensue; Lucien is thrown into the shade by a more than middle-aged man
of the world. And now we are called on to observe the stages of another
of the many processes by which provincials are educated into Parisians.
Lucien hopes to make his way as an author; he has written a novel in
Sir Walter Scott's style and a volume of poems; he is received into a
little circle of poor, proud young authors, artists, and scientific
men, chosen spirits, to whom the future of France belongs. But the
months of poverty, self-denial, laborious study, and ideal hope are too
long for him; he pines for immediate pleasure and fame, for revenge
upon all who humiliated him when he was the ignorant country prophet.
The so-called "minor press" offers him the chance of completely
satisfying his desire; his head is turned, and he plunges, without
cause to advocate or principle to uphold, into daily journalism.
Lousteau takes him to the shop of a rich Palais-Royal bookseller and
newspaper proprietor. "Each time the bookseller opened his lips he grew
in Lucien's eyes; the young man seemed to see politics and literature
converging towards this shop as their true centre. To find an eminent
poet prostituting his muse to a journalist ... was a terrible lesson
to the great man from the country.... Money! in that word lies the
solution of every problem. He is lonely, unknown, has only a doubtful
friendship to look to for happiness. He blames his true and sorrowing
friends of the literary brotherhood for having painted the world to him
in false colours and having hindered him from rushing, pen in hand,
into the great mêlée." From the bookshop Lousteau and Lucien make their
way to the theatre. Lousteau, as a journalist, is welcome everywhere.
The manager tells them how a conspiracy against the play has been
defeated by means of a free use of the purses of his two prettiest
actresses' wealthy admirers. "During these last two hours Lucien had
heard of nothing but money. Everything had resolved itself into money.
At the theatre and in the bookshop, with publisher and with editor,
there had been no question of art or real merit. He felt as if the huge
stamping-machine of the mint were imprinting its mark with dull, heavy
blows on his head and heart." His literary conscience evaporates, and
he becomes the literary and dramatic critic of an impudent, stupid
newspaper. Loved and supported by an actress, he sinks ever deeper in
the life led by the man who has sold his pen. He goes over from the
Liberals to the Conservatives. The depth of his degradation is most
strongly borne in upon us in the scene where, having been compelled by
his editor to write a malicious attack on an admirable book written
by the best and noblest of his own friends (Balzac's ideal author),
he is found knocking at this friend's door, on the evening before
the article appears, to beg his forgiveness. Outward is soon added
to inward misery. His mistress dies, and he is in such straits that
he has to write obscene songs sitting by her death-bed, to raise the
money for her funeral expenses. He ends by accepting from her maid a
louis which the woman has just earned in a shameful manner, and with it
paying his journey home to his native village. And all this bears the
stamp of truth--horrible truth. In this one book Balzac renounces the
impartiality of the scientific observer. Everywhere else he preserves
his equanimity; here he chastises with scorpions.