l'Absolu_, Alençon in _La vieille Fille_, Besançon in _Albert Savarus_,
Saumur in _Eugénie Grandet_, Angoulême in _Les deux Poètes_, Tours in
_Le Curé de Tours_, Limoges in _Le Curé de Village_, Sancerre in _La
Muse du Département_. &c.
[2] See the introduction to the indecent story, _La Fille aux Yeux
d'Or_, in which the hurry, the crowdedness, the whole spirit of
Parisian life, is represented with an incomparable skill in the art of
word-painting.
XVII
BALZAC
In his history of France Michelet dates a new epoch in the intellectual
life of that country from the period when coffee came into general use
as a beverage. This is pushing an idea to the extreme; but there would
be no exaggeration in asserting that in Voltaire's style we can trace
an inspiration of coffee, just as we can trace an inspiration of wine
in the style of earlier authors. Balzac's method of working obliged him
to refresh himself during his long, fatiguing nights of labour with
an injurious quantity of coffee. It has been aptly said: "He lived on
50,000 cups of coffee and died of 50,000 cups of coffee."
One is conscious in his works of his ceaseless toil and of his nervous
excitement, but it is probable that if he had worked more calmly he
would not have communicated the same life to them. While we are reading
his pages we feel the confused tumult of the great capital, its furious
competition, its fever of work and pleasure, the sleepless whirr of the
great loom. All these hearths and lamps and furnaces have lent some
of their fire to his books. He was in his native element when he had
work before him and behind him and round him--when, like a sailor in
mid-ocean who sees nothing but sea, he saw nothing but work as far as
his sight could reach.
During the last seventeen years of his life his labours were
interrupted and enlivened by intellectual intercourse with a lady who
lived at a great distance from Paris, to whom he wrote almost every
day. We have an account of this friendship, only slightly disguised, in
_Albert Savarus_.
In February 1832 a young Polish Countess, Madame Evelina Hanska, then
aged twenty-six or twenty-eight, wrote an anonymous letter to Balzac,
in which she thanked him for his writings and tried to persuade him
to look on things from a more spiritual point of view. This led to a
correspondence between them. Madame Hanska, a gifted, highly educated
woman, belonged by birth to the famous Rzewuski family; the eminent
Polish author, Henri Rzewuski, was her brother. Her husband was a rich
old man, an invalid, with a peculiar temper. They lived a very lonely
life on their estate in Little Russia, and literature and Balzac were
her only interests.
Balzac and she had first met at Neuchatel in Switzerland early in 1833,
but on this occasion they were only for a few minutes alone together;
in December of the same year, however, they spent six weeks together
at Geneva, and, before they parted, agreed that they would marry
whenever Countess Hanska became a widow. Henceforward they met almost
every year, in Switzerland or Austria; and they carried on a constant
correspondence. There is not the slightest doubt that Balzac was
devotedly attached to Countess Hanska, although his devotion to her did
not prevent his having numerous liaisons with other women. She was his
guiding star, and he felt impelled to communicate all his thoughts and
all the events of his life to her.
She undoubtedly loved him in return, with a love which was partly real
passion, partly satisfied vanity; but Balzac's letters to her show that
she never ceased tormenting him with her passionate jealousy. He had
begun to cool when a meeting in Vienna in 1835, arranged by Countess
Hanska, fanned the sinking fire of his passion into a blaze again.
After this a number of years passed without their seeing each other. In
1841 Madame Hanska in her turn manifested a certain coldness, born of
suspicion; and after Count Hanska's death, which happened in November
of that year, she does not seem to have shown much inclination to marry
Balzac. But the agreement remained in force, and Balzac's one wish was
to marry the woman he loved. She held back. They did not meet till 1843
(in St. Petersburg). In 1845 they met in Paris, in 1847 at her home
at Vierzchovnia; and there Balzac spent part of 1848 and the whole of
1849. But it was not till 1850, when his health was already undermined,
that Madame Hanska consented to marry him. A fatal affection of the
heart, the consequence of years of over-exertion, had declared itself
before the wedding took place at Berditsjev in March 1850. Three months
from that date Balzac was dead. He had furnished a beautiful house in
Paris for himself. His friends were reminded of the Turkish proverb:
"When the house is ready, Death enters."
Short as was the married life of the couple, it was long enough for
Balzac to discover how mistaken had been his estimate of the woman he
had worshipped and treated as a higher being for years. She seems to
have been in reality a very heartless creature, with an ill-regulated
mind; and her youthful passion for the great author had entirely
evaporated. In Victor Hugo's book, _Choses Vues_, he tells how in June
1850, hearing disquieting reports of Balzac's condition, he went to
inquire after him. The door was opened by a maid-servant, who said:
"Monsieur is dying. Madame has gone to her own room." Hugo went up to
Balzac's bedroom, and found an old woman, a nurse, and a man-servant
standing by the bed. The old woman was Balzac's mother. His wife was
not with him in his last moments.
It is difficult to define her influence upon him as a writer; but it
was inconsiderable. To it we owe the fanciful Swedenborgian romance,
_Séraphita_, and the delicately finished, clever story, _Modeste
Mignon_.
Death came when Balzac's intellectual powers were in their zenith. He
never wrote better than in the last year of his life. Hence his fame,
too, was at its height. It had grown slowly. The first score of his
novels gained him no widespread reputation among the general public;
but they attracted the attention of the men of talent of the younger
generation, who gathered round him and watched the progress of his
literary career with the deepest interest. To those of them who wished
to succeed in literature he recommended three things--diligence,
a solitary life, and (this half in jest) the vow of chastity. He
sanctioned correspondence with the object of their affections, because
"letter-writing forms one's style." The young men were astonished to
receive such advice from a man whose books were invariably greeted by
the press with angry shrieks of offended morality; they had yet to
learn that the charge of immorality is the invariable insult hurled by
literary impotence at everything in literature that is vigorous and
virile. In spite of all the attacks upon it, his name was held in ever
more honourable repute, and at the time of his death his contemporaries
had almost grasped the fact that in Balzac they possessed one of
the really great authors who imbue a whole school of art with their
spirit. Not only had he laid the foundation of the modern style of
novel-writing, but--true son of a century during which science has
penetrated ever farther into the domain of art--he had introduced a
method of observation which could be followed by others. His name in
itself was a great name, but the name of the founder of a school is
Legion.
The fact that he did not obtain full recognition in his lifetime is
explained by two deficiencies in his works.
His style was uncertain. It was at times vulgarly trivial, at times
bombastic. And deficiency in the matter of style is a serious
deficiency; because what distinguishes art from that which is not
art, is just that determined exclusion of what is almost, but not
quite right, to which we give the name of style. It is, moreover,
a particularly objectionable deficiency in the eyes of Frenchmen,
with their keen rhetorical sense. But after Balzac's death his works
began to be much read abroad as well as in France, and foreigners
made very light of this shortcoming of his. The man who understands
a language well enough to read it, but has not sufficient knowledge
to appreciate all its refinements, easily forgives sins of style when
they are compensated for by rare and attractive qualities. And this
was the position of the great novel-reading European public. Educated
Italians, Austrians, Poles, Russians, &c, read Balzac with unalloyed
pleasure, paying small heed to the inequality of his style. The fault
will, however, undoubtedly affect the duration of his work. Nothing
formless or only half-formed endures. The great _Comédie Humaine_ (like
the 10,000 stadia long painting which Aristotle maintained would not be
a work of art at all) will not be regarded by posterity in the light
of a single work, and the length of time during which its separate
fragments retain their place in the literature of the world will be
exactly proportioned to the degree of artistic perfection possessed
by each. After the lapse of a few centuries they are not likely to be
read simply because of the material they provide for the student of the
history of civilisation.
To deficiency in the matter of form Balzac adds a much greater
deficiency in the matter of abstract ideas. It was impossible that
the man who was great only as a writer of fiction should receive full
recognition in his lifetime. Men had become accustomed to see in the
author the spiritual guide, and Balzac was certainly not that. His
great powers as an analyst of the human soul were obscured by his total
want of understanding of the emancipatory religious and social ideas of
his age, ideas which so early aroused George Sand's enthusiasm, and had
such a powerful influence on Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and others. His
political and religious doctrines, which were a species of homage to
absolutism and Catholic orthodoxy, were obnoxious to many. At first men
smiled when the sensuous writer with the reformatory ideas quoted the
dogmatists of the white banner, Joseph de Maistre and Bonald; but by
degrees they comprehended the confusion that reigned in his mind.
The sensuousness of his temperament and the unbridled strength of his
imagination inclined Balzac to mysticism in both science and religion.
Animal magnetism, which from about 1820 onwards plays such a prominent
part in literature, was a power in the influence of which over men's
minds he had a strong belief. In _La Peau de Chagrin, Séraphita_, and
_Louis Lambert_, will is defined as a force resembling steam, as "a
fluid which according to its density can alter everything, even natural
laws." In spite of the modernity of his intellect Balzac was enough
of the Romanticist to believe in clairvoyance, and to have a leaning
generally to the occult sciences. Nevertheless, in spite of the bias
given to his mind by his age, the age of Romanticism, he belonged, as
Victor Hugo said at his grave, "whether he knew it and desired it or
not, to the mighty race of revolutionary authors."
His nature and education prepared him to understand life in all its
fulness, and, by virtue of this understanding, to enjoy it; but, early
initiated into the corruption of society, his horrified, order-loving
mind sought for a bit and bridle for erring humanity, and could find
it in nothing but the restored Church. Hence the painful contradiction
between sensual and aesthetic tendencies which we so often find in
Balzac's writings, especially when he is treating of the relations
between the sexes. It is this contradiction which gives an unpleasant,
impure tone to _Le Lys dans la Vallée_ (which Balzac himself considered
his masterpiece) and _Les Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariés_. And it also
explains how his philosophic principles and his ecclesiastical leanings
so often contradict each other. In the preface to the complete edition
of his works he first asserts that man is originally neither good nor
bad, and that society invariably makes him better, thus unconsciously
declaring himself directly opposed to the Church's fundamental doctrine
of the corruption of man by sin; a few lines farther on he extols
Catholicism as the "only perfect system for the suppression of the
corrupt tendencies of humanity," and demands that the education of
the nation shall be entrusted to the clergy. His conviction of the
existence of those "corrupt tendencies" led him almost always to
regard and represent the lower classes, servants and peasants, as the
enemies of the propertied class (see his comic pathos on the subject
of servants in _Cousine Bette_ and his peasants in _Les Paysans_);
and he enjoyed making sallies against the populace and democracy, the
Liberals, the two Chambers, and parliamentary government, from the
vantage ground of clericalism and absolutism.
With all his great and brilliant qualities there was something wanting
in Balzac, the something which goes by the name of culture. He lacked
its calm, or, to be more exact, his restless, perpetually producing
imaginative mind never enjoyed the calm which is a condition of culture.
But he possessed what is more important in an author--profoundly
penetrating, truth-loving genius. Those who seek merely the beautiful,
describe only the stem and flower of the human plant; Balzac drew
it with its roots; to him it was of most moment to trace all the
ramifications and workings of that underground life of the plant which
conditions its visible life. The flaws in his artistic and intellectual
culture will not prevent posterity from recognising his genius.
XVIII
BEYLE
From the standpoint of our own day we see side by side with Balzac
another French author whom it would never have occurred to any one
in their day to couple with him, and whose literary existence was as
quiet and unremarked as Balzac's was noisy and obtrusive. Curiously
enough, Balzac was the only one of Henri Beyle's contemporaries who
accorded him full, unqualified recognition. In the eyes of the younger
generation of the France of to-day, Beyle and Balzac complement each
other as unmistakably as do Lamartine and Victor Hugo. It may seem in
so far inappropriate to couple the names of the two authors, that the
one wrote close on a hundred novels, the other only two of any length;
but the quality of Beyle's two is so remarkable that they entitle their
author to rank with the father of the modern novel; and certain of his
other works (he wrote, reckoning everything--novels, tales, critical
and theoretical essays, biographies, and descriptions of travel--a
score of volumes) have exercised as great a literary influence as have
his novels.
Beyle's relation to Balzac is that of the reflective to the observant
mind, of the thinker in art to the seer. We see into the hearts of
Balzac's characters, into the "dark red mill of passion," which is the
motive force of their actions; Beyle's characters receive their impulse
from the head, "the open light-and-sound chamber";[1] the reason being
that Beyle was a logician and Balzac a man of an effusively rich animal
nature. Beyle stands to Victor Hugo in much the same position as
Leonardo da Vinci to Michael Angelo. Hugo's plastic imagination creates
a supernaturally colossal and muscular humanity, fixed in an eternal
attitude of struggle and suffering; Beyle's mysterious, complicated,
refined intellect produces a small series of male and female portraits
which exercise an almost magic fascination on us with their far-away,
enigmatic expressions and their sweet, seductive, wicked smiles. Of
course, Michael Angelo towers as high above Victor Hugo as Leonardo
does above Beyle; but just as there is a resemblance in Hugo's style
to the style of Michael Angelo's Moses, so there is a kinship between
Beyle's Duchess of Sanseverina and Leonardo's Mona Lisa; and, in spite
of the immense superiority of the great Italians, the resemblance
in the relative positions of the two artists and the two authors is
striking. Beyle is the metaphysician among the French authors of his
day, as Leonardo was the metaphysician among the great painters of the
Renaissance.
We have already encountered Beyle as one of the leaders in the
advanced-guard attacks upon the conventional French tragedy style
and the patriotism of the Classicists, which ignored ail foreign
literature simply as being foreign. In those engagements he was one of
the first to break the enemy's ranks; no one dealt more crushing blows
to the Imperialist men of letters than this writer, who in a manner
was himself distinctly a Frenchman of the Empire. Indeed, the very
circumstance that he was the only one of the great authors of 1830 who
had really known the Empire, gives him a prominently peculiar position
in the Romantic group. This man alone among them all had been present
at the battle of Marengo and the entry into Milan, the battle of Jena
and the entry into Berlin, had seen the burning of Moscow and shared
in the horrors of the retreat through Russia. He alone among them all
had spoken to Napoleon and had known Byron. He was only a year younger
than Nodier; but Nodier as forerunner was not much more than a herald
whose trumpet-blast announced and awakened, whereas Beyle as forerunner
was a doughty trooper with lance and pennon, one of those Uhlans who
capture a town single-handed. In Nodier's intellectual life the French
Revolution was the great event which dominated everything--he never
wearied of describing its heroes and its victims, its prison scenes,
its conspiracies, secret societies, &c; in Beyle's, Napoleon's career
and fall were the facts of vital importance.
[Illustration: STENDHAL]
Marie Henri Beyle was born at Grenoble on the 23rd of January 1783.
His family belonged to the upper middle class, the aristocracy of the
law. When only eight years old he lost his mother, a loss which he felt
deeply and to which his thoughts perpetually recurred. His father was a
reserved man, who took little notice of his children, and treated them
with extreme severity. He entrusted the education of his son to needy
abbés, whom the boy hated, regarding them as tyrants and hypocrites.
Between him and his father there was early kindled a feeling of real
animosity, which was never extinguished. Everything good that fell to
Henri's lot in childhood came to him through his maternal grandfather,
a clever and cultured doctor; but so strictly were his father's
cruelly severe educational principles adhered to, that at the age of
fourteen he was not acquainted with more than two or three children
of his own age. This boy, in whose nature there lay germs of profound
originality, in whose character determined independence was a main
feature, whose energetic temperament begot a keen desire to do unusual
deeds, and in whom the life of the senses stirred early and strongly,
was subjected in the process of education to such severe, unrelieved,
oppressive control, that passionate inward revolt was the inevitable
consequence. Because the abbés, who lived in terror of the Revolution,
educated him as a royalist and Catholic, he naturally developed into a
revolutionist, a Bonapartist, and a freethinker in the extreme sense
of the word. But the constant strife between his father's will and his
own desires engendered, besides, a want of confidence, a distrust of
humanity so deeply rooted that it was never eradicated. And ere long
there was added to the fear of being deceived or exploited by others,
the fear of deceiving himself, which bred in him the habit of being
constantly on his guard, of constant self-examination and self-control.
A certain something in his character is traceable to the influence of
the province in which he was born and in which his family had been
settled for at least two centuries. The natives of Dauphiné are a keen,
obstinate, argumentative race, as different from their neighbours of
Provence as they are from the Parisians. The Provençal gives noisy or
eloquent expression to his feelings; he rails and curses when he is
angry or hurt; the Parisian is polite, witty, brilliantly superficial;
the character of the native of Dauphiné is distinguished by a peculiar
obstinacy; there is both depth and refinement in it; he remembers
an insult and avenges it, but his anger never finds vent in abusive
language. Beyle's mother, who read Dante and Ariosto in the original, a
very uncommon accomplishment for a provincial lady in those days, was
understood to be of Italian descent. This may in part explain Beyle's
strong leaning to everything Italian; but it is also to be remembered
that until 1349 Dauphiné did not form part of France, and was in its
politics a semi-Italian state. It was one of Beyle's fancies that Louis
XI, who, as Dauphin, governed the little country for several years, had
imparted to its inhabitants something of his own distinguishing quality
of prudence, of distrust of first inspirations. Improbable as this is,
the surmise is in itself characteristic.
Circumstances early intensified the tendency to distrust with which
Henri's home life had imbued him. When he at last attained to the
liberty after which he had so long aspired, that is to say, when he
was sent to school, a bitter disappointment awaited him. The little
strong, thick-set, heavily built boy with the bright, speaking face
(nicknamed "the walking tower" on account of his determined step,
herculean limbs, and round Hercules head) was, in spite of the ironic
expression of his mouth, an enthusiast. And in his schoolfellows he did
not find the gay, amiable, noble-minded comrades he had pictured to
himself, but a troop of selfish young whelps. When telling his friend
Colomb this, he added: "It was a disappointment which has gone on
repeating itself throughout my whole life." "Nor was I any luckier,"
he continued, "in the impression I made on my schoolfellows; I can see
now that I displayed a ridiculous mixture of haughtiness and desire to
amuse myself. To the other boys' coarse selfishness I responded with
my Spanish hidalgo ideas of honour; and I was overwhelmed with despair
when they went off to play together and simply ignored me." Compare
this utterance with the bitter disappointment of young Fabrice (in
_La Chartreuse de Parme_, published in 1839), when, during the battle
of Waterloo, he begs some soldiers whom he meets for a piece of bread
and is answered with a coarse jest: "These cruel words and the general
laugh which followed were too much for Fabrice. War was not, then, it
appeared, that noble, mutual impulse of souls who loved glory above
everything, which Napoleon's proclamations had led him to understand it
to be." We can easily imagine what memories of wild outbursts of animal
selfishness Beyle brought back with him from his campaign; of these the
tale of Fabrice's experiences is probably composed. He had formed too
high an estimate of the comradeship existing among soldiers, just as he
had over-estimated the comradeship of schoolboys.
About the year 1798 he began to devote himself with great ardour to the
study of mathematics, for the characteristic reason, as he told his
friends, that there was hypocrisy in every other science, but none, so
far as he could discover, in the science of mathematics. But no doubt
his ardour was stimulated by the growing fame of the young French
general in Italy whom mathematics, practically applied in the science
of artillery, had led from one great victory to another.