exquisite refinement of taste, and by a delicate sense of humour, which
is the best preservative against all extravagance. Both qualities
combine in that tender delineation of character which is, after all, one
of his greatest charms. His Puritan blood shows itself in sympathy, not
with the stern side of the ancestral creed, but with the feebler
characters upon whom it weighed as an oppressive terror. He resembles,
in some degree, poor Clifford Pyncheon, whose love of the beautiful
makes him suffer under the stronger will of his relatives and the prim
stiffness of their home. He exhibits the suffering of such a character
all the more effectively because, with his kindly compassion there is
mixed a delicate flavour of irony. The more tragic scenes affect us,
perhaps, with less sense of power; the playful, though melancholy, fancy
seems to be less at home when the more powerful emotions are to be
excited; and yet once, at least, he draws one of those pictures which
engrave themselves instantaneously on the memory. The grimmest or most
passionate of writers could hardly have improved the scene where the
body of the magnificent Zenobia is discovered in the river. Every touch
goes straight to the mark. The narrator of the story, accompanied by the
man whose coolness has caused the suicide, and the shrewd, unimaginative
Yankee farmer, who interprets into coarse, downright language the
suspicions which they fear to confess to themselves, are sounding the
depths of the river by night in a leaky punt with a long pole. Silas
Foster represents the brutal, commonplace comments of the outside world,
which jar so terribly on the more sensitive and closely interested
actors in the tragedy. 'Heigho!' he soliloquises, with offensive
loudness, 'life and death together make sad work for us all. Then I was
a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I'm getting to be an old fellow, and
here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads, if I thought
anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o'
sorrowful.' That is the discordant chorus of the gravediggers in
'Hamlet.' At length the body is found, and poor Zenobia is brought to
the shore with her knees still bent in the attitude of prayer, and her
hands clenched in immitigable defiance. Foster tries in vain to
straighten the dead limbs. As the teller of the story gazes at her, the
grimly ludicrous reflection occurs to him that if Zenobia had foreseen
all 'the ugly circumstances of death--how ill it would become her, the
altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially old
Silas Foster's efforts to improve the matter--she would no more have
committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public
assembly in a badly-fitting garment.'
_BALZAC'S NOVELS_
Balzac exacts more attention than most novel-readers are inclined to
give; he is often repulsive, and not unfrequently dull; but the student
who has once submitted to his charm becomes spell-bound. Disgusted for a
moment, he returns again and again to the strange, hideous, grotesque,
but most interesting world to which Balzac alone can introduce him. Like
the opium-eater, he acquires a taste for the visions that are conjured
up before him with so vivid a colouring, that he almost believes in
their objective existence. There are perhaps greater novelists than
Balzac; there are many who preach a purer morality; and many who give a
far greater impression of general intellectual force; but in this one
quality of intense realisation of actors and scenery he is unique.
Balzac, indeed, was apparently himself almost incapable of
distinguishing his dreams from realities. Great wits, we know, are
allied to madness; and the boundaries seem in his case to have been most
shadowy and indistinct. Indeed, if the anecdotes reported of him be
accurate--some of them are doubtless rather overcharged--he must have
lived almost in a state of permanent hallucination. This, for example,
is a characteristic story. He inhabited for some years a house called
_les Jardies_, in the neighbourhood of Paris. He had a difficulty in
providing material furniture, owing to certain debts, which, as some
sceptics insinuated, were themselves a vast mystification. He habitually
ascribed his poverty to a certain 'deficit Kessner,' a loss which
reposed on some trifling foundation of facts, but which assumed
monstrous proportions in his imagination, and recurred perpetually as
the supposed cause of his poverty. In sober reality, however, he was
poor, and found compensation in creating a vast credit, as imaginary as
his liabilities. Upon that bank he could draw without stint. He
therefore inscribed in one place upon the bare walls of his house, 'Ici
un revêtement de marbre de Paros;' in another, 'Ici un plafond peint par
Eugène Delacroix;' in a third, 'Ici des portes, façon Trianon;' and, in
short, revelled in gorgeous decorations made of the same materials as
the dishes of the Barmecides' feast. A minor source of wealth was the
single walnut-tree which really grew in his gardens, and which increased
his dream-revenue by 60_l._ a year. This extraordinary result was due,
not to any merit in the nuts, but to an ancient and imaginary custom of
the village which compelled the inhabitants to deposit round its foot a
material defined by Victor Hugo as 'du guano moins les oiseaux.' The
most singular story, however, and which we presume is to be received
with a certain reserve, tells how he roused two of his intimate friends
at two o'clock one morning, and urged them to start for India without an
hour's delay. The cause of this journey was that a certain German
historian had presented Balzac with a seal, valued by the thoughtless at
the sum of six sous. The ring, however, had a singular history in
Balzac's dreamland. It was impressed with the seal of the Prophet, and
had been stolen by the English from the Great Mogul. Balzac had or had
not been informed by the Turkish ambassador that that potentate would
repurchase it with tons of gold and diamonds, and was benevolent enough
to propose that his friend should share in the stores which would exceed
the dreams of Aladdin.
How far these and other such fancies were a merely humorous protest
against the harsh realities of life, may be a matter of speculation; but
it is less doubtful that the fictitious personages with whom Balzac
surrounded himself lived and moved in his imagination as distinctly as
the flesh-and-blood realities who were treading the pavement of Paris.
He did not so much invent characters and situations as watch his
imaginary world, and compile the memories of its celebrities. All
English readers are acquainted with the little circle of clergymen and
wives who inhabit the town of Barchester. Balzac has carried out the
same device on a gigantic scale. He has peopled not a country town but a
metropolis. There is a whole society, with the members of which we are
intimate, whose family secrets are revealed to us, and who drop in, as
it were, in every novel of a long series, as if they were old friends.
When, for example, young Victurnien d'Esgrignon comes to Paris he makes
acquaintance, we are told, with De Marsay, Maxime de Trailles, Les
Lupeaulx, Rastignac, Vandenesse, Ajuda-Pinto, the Duchesses de
Grandlieu, de Carigliano, de Chaulieu, the Marquises d'Espard,
d'Aiglemont, and De Listomère, Madame Firmiani, the Comtesse de Sérizy,
and various other heads of the fashionable world. Every one of these
special characters has a special history. He or she appears as the hero
or heroine of one story, and plays subsidiary parts in a score of
others. They recall to us innumerable scandalous episodes, with which
anybody who lives in the imaginary society of Balzac's Paris feels it a
duty to be as familiar as a back-stairs politician with the gossip of
the House of Commons. The list just given is a mere fragment of the
great circle to which Balzac introduces us. The history of their
performances is intimately connected with the history of the time; nay,
it is sometimes essential to a full comprehension of recent events.
Bishop Proudie, we fear, would scarcely venture to take an active part
in the Roman Catholic emancipation; he would be dissolved into thin air
by contact with more substantial forms; but if you would appreciate the
intrigues which were going on at Paris during the campaign of Marengo,
you must study the conversations which took place between Talleyrand,
Fouché, Sieyès, Carnot, and Malin, and their relations to that prince of
policemen, the well-known Corentin. De Marsay, we are told, with
audacious precision of time and place, was President of the Council in
1833. There is no tendency on the part of these spectres to shrink from
the light. They rub shoulders with the most celebrated statesmen, and
mingle in every event of the time. One is driven to believe that Balzac
really fancied the banker Nucingen to be as tangible as a Rothschild,
and was convinced that the conversations of Louis XVIII. with Vandenesse
were historic facts. His sister tells us that he discussed the behaviour
of his own creations with the utmost gravity, and was intensely
interested in discovering their fate, and getting the earliest
information as to the alliances which they were about to form. It is a
curious question, upon which I cannot profess to speak positively,
whether this voluminous story ever comes into hopeless conflict with
dates. I have some suspicions that the brilliant journalist, Blondet,
was married and unmarried at the same period; but, considering his very
loose mode of life, the suspicion, if true, is susceptible of
explanation. Such study as I have made has not revealed any case of
inconsistency; and Balzac evidently has the whole secret (for it seems
harsh to call it fictitious) history of the time so completely at his
fingers' ends, that the effect upon the reader is to produce an
unhesitating confidence. If a blunder occurs one would rather believe in
a slip of the pen, such as happens to real historians, not in the
substantial inaccuracy of the narrative. Sir A. Alison, it may be
remembered, brings Sir Peregrine Pickle to the Duke of Wellington's
funeral, which must have occurred after Sir Peregrine's death; and
Balzac's imaginary narrative may not be perfectly free from anachronism.
But, if so, I have not found him out. Everybody must sympathise with the
English lady who is said to have written to Paris for the address of
that most imposing physician, Horace Bianchion.
The startling realisation may be due in part to a mere literary trick.
We meet with artifices like those by which De Foe cheats us into
forgetfulness of his true character. One of the best known is the
insertion of superfluous bits of information, by way of entrapping his
readers into the inference that they could only have been given because
they were true. The snare is more worthy of a writer of begging-letters
than of a genuine artist. Balzac occasionally indulges in somewhat
similar devices; little indirect allusions to his old characters are
thrown in with a calculated nonchalance; we have bits of antiquarian
information as to the history of buildings; superfluous accounts of the
coats-of-arms of the principal families concerned, and anecdotes as to
their ancestry; and, after he has given us a name, he sometimes takes
care to explain that the pronunciation is different from the spelling.
As a rule, however, these irrelevant minutiæ seem to be thrown in, not
by way of tricking us, but because he has so genuine an interest in his
own personages. He is as anxious to set De Marsay or the Père Goriot
distinctly before us, as Carlyle to make us acquainted with Frederick or
Cromwell. Our most vivid painter of historical portraits is not more
charmed to discover a characteristic incident in the life of his heroes,
or to describe the pimples on his face, or the specks of blood on his
collar, than Balzac to do the same duty for the creations of his fancy.
De Foe may be compared to those favourites of showmen who cheat you into
mistaking a flat-wall painting for a bas-relief. Balzac is one of the
patient Dutch artists who exhaust inconceivable skill and patience in
painting every hair on the head and every wrinkle on the face till their
work has a photographic accuracy. The result, it must be confessed, is
sometimes rather trying to the patience. Balzac's artistic instinct,
indeed, renders every separate touch more or less conducive to the
general effect; but he takes an unconscionable time in preparing his
ground. Instead of launching boldly into his story, and leaving his
characters to speak for themselves, he begins, as it were, by taking his
automatons carefully to pieces, and pointing out all their wires and
springs. He leaves nothing unaccounted for. He explains the character of
each actor as he comes upon the stage; and, not content with making
general remarks, he plunges with extraordinary relish into the minutest
personal details. In particular, we know just how much money everybody
has got, and how he has got it. Balzac absolutely revels in elaborate
financial statements. And constantly, just as we hope that the action is
about to begin, he catches us, as it were, by the button-hole, and begs
us to wait a minute to listen to a few more preparatory remarks. In one
or two of the stories, as, for example, in the 'Maison Nucingen,' the
introduction seems to fill the whole book. After expecting some
catastrophe, we gradually become aware that Balzac has thought it
necessary to give us a conscientious explanation of some very dull
commercial intrigues, in order to fill up gaps in other stories of the
cycle. Some one might possibly ask, what was the precise origin of this
great failure of which we hear so much, and Balzac resolves that he
shall have as complete an answer as though he were an accountant drawing
up a balance-sheet. It is said, I know not on what authority, that his
story of 'César Birotteau' has, in fact, been quoted in French courts as
illustrating the law of bankruptcy; and the details given are so ample,
and, to English readers at least, so wearisome, that it really reads
more like a legal statement of a case than a novel. As another example
of this elaborate workmanship I may quote the remarkable story of 'Les
Paysans.' It is intended to illustrate the character of the French
peasant, his profound avarice and cunning, and his bitter jealousy,
which forms a whole district into a tacit conspiracy against the rich,
held together by closer bonds than those of a Fenian lodge. Balzac
resolves that we shall have the whole scene and all the actors
distinctly before us. We have a description of a country-house more
poetical, but far more detailed, than one in an auctioneer's circular;
then we have a photograph of the neighbouring _cabaret_; then a minute
description of its inhabitants, and a detailed statement of their ways
and means. The story here makes a feeble start; but Balzac recollects
that we don't quite know the origin of the quarrel on which it depends,
and, therefore, elaborately describes the former proprietor, points out
precisely how she was cheated by her bailiff, and precisely to what
amount, and throws in descriptions of two or three supplementary
persons. We now make another start in the history of the quarrel; but
this immediately throws us back into a minute description of the old
bailiff's family circumstances, of the characters of several of his
connections, and of the insidious villain who succeeds him. Then we have
a careful financial statement of the second proprietor's losses, and the
commercial system which favours them; this leads to some antiquarian
details concerning the bailiff's house, and to detailed portraits of
each of the four guards who are set to watch over the property. Then
Balzac remarks that we cannot possibly understand the quarrel without
understanding fully the complicated family relations, owing to which the
officials of the department form what in America would be called a
'ring.' By this time we are half-way through the volume, and the
promised story is still in its infancy. Even Balzac makes an apology for
his _longueurs_, and tries to set to work in greater earnest. He is so
much interrupted, however, by the necessity of elaborately introducing
every new actor, and all his or her relations, and the houses in which
they live, and their commercial and social position, that the essence of
the story has at last to be compressed into half-a-dozen pages. In
short, the novel resolves itself into a series of sketches; and reading
it is like turning over a set of photographs, with letterpress
descriptions at intervals. Or we may compare it to one of those novels
of real life, so strange to the English mind, in which a French
indictment sums up the whole previous history of the persons accused,
accumulates every possible bit of information which may or may not throw
light upon the facts, and diverges from the point, as English lawyers
would imagine, into the most irrelevant considerations.
Balzac, it is plain, differs widely from our English authors, who
generally slightly despise their own art, and think that, in providing
amusement for our idle hours, they are rather derogating from their
dignity. Instead of claiming our attention as a right, they try to
entice us into interest by every possible artifice: they give us
exciting glimpses of horrors to come; they are restlessly anxious to get
their stories well under way. Balzac is far more confident in his
position. He never doubts that we shall be willing to study his works
with the seriousness due to a scientific treatise. And occasionally,
when he is seized by a sudden and most deplorable fit of morality, he
becomes as dull as a sermon. The gravity with which he sets before us
all the benevolent schemes of the _médecin de campagne_, and describes
the whole charitable machinery of the district, makes his performance as
dismal as a gigantic religious tract. But when, in his happier and
wickeder moods, he turns this amazing capacity of graphic description to
its true account, the power of his method makes itself manifest. Every
bit of elaborate geographical and financial information has its meaning,
and tells with accumulated force on the final result. I may instance,
for example, the descriptions of Paris, which form the indispensable
background to the majority of his stories, and contribute in no
inconsiderable share to their tragic effect. Balzac had to deal with the
Paris of the Restoration, full of strange tortuous streets and
picturesque corners, of swinging lanterns and defective drainage; the
Paris which inevitably suggested barricades and street massacres, and
was impregnated to the core with old historical associations. It had not
yet lowered itself to the comprehension of New Yorkers, and still
offered such scenery as Gustave Doré has caught in his wonderful
illustrations of the 'Contes Drolatiques.' Its mysterious and not
over-cleanly charm lives in the pages of Balzac, and harmonises with the
strange society which he has created to people its streets. Thus, in one
of his most audacious stories, where the horribly grotesque trembles on
the verge of the ridiculous, he strikes the key-note by an elegant
apostrophe to Paris. There are, he tells us, a few connoisseurs who
enjoy the Parisian flavour like the bouquet of some delicate wine. To
all Paris is a marvel; to them it is a living creature; every man, every
fragment of a house, is 'part of the cellular tissue of this great
courtesan, whose head, heart, and fantastic manners are thoroughly known
to them.' They are lovers of Paris; to them it is a costly luxury to
travel in Paris. They are incessantly arrested before the dramas, the
disasters, the picturesque accidents, which assail one in the midst of
this moving queen of cities. They start in the morning to go to its
extremities, and find themselves still unable to leave its centre at
dinner-time. It is a marvellous spectacle at all times; but, he
exclaims, 'O Paris! qui n'a pas admiré tes sombres paysages, tes
échappées de lumière, tes culs-de-sac profonds et silencieux; qui n'a
pas entendu tes murmures entre minuit et deux heures du matin, ne
connait encore rien de ta vraie poésie, ni de tes bizarres et larges
contrastes.'
In the scenes which follow, we are introduced to a lover watching the
beautiful and virtuous object of his adoration as she descends an
infamous street late in the evening, and enters one of the houses
through a damp, moist, and fetid passage, feebly lighted by a trembling
lamp, beneath which are seen the hideous face and skinny fingers of an
old woman, as fitly placed as the witches in the blasted heath in
'Macbeth.' In this case, however, Balzac is in one of his wildest moods,
and the hideous mysteries of a huge capital become the pretext for a
piece of rather ludicrous melodrama. Paris is full enough of tragedies
without the preposterous beggar Ferragus, who appears at balls as a
distinguished diplomat, and manages to place on a young gentleman's head
of hair a slow poison (invented for the purpose), which brings him to an
early grave. More impressive, because less extravagant, is that Maison
Vauquer, every hole and corner of which is familiar to the real student
of Balzac. It is situated, as everybody should know, in the Rue Neuve
St.-Geneviève, just where it descends so steeply towards the Rue de
l'Arbalète that horses have some trouble in climbing it. We know its
squalid exterior, its creaking bell, the wall painted to represent an
arcade in green marble, the crumbling statue of Cupid, with the
half-effaced inscription--
'Qui que tu sois, voici ton maître,--
Il l'est, le fut, ou le doit être.'
We have visited the wretched garden with its scanty pot-herbs and
scarecrow beds, and the green benches in the miserable arbour, where the
lodgers who are rich enough to enjoy such a luxury indulge in a cup of
coffee after dinner. The salon, with its greasy and worn-out furniture,
every bit of which is catalogued, is as familiar as our own studies. We
know the exact geography even of the larder and the cistern. We catch
the odour of the damp, close office, where Madame Vauquer lurks like a
human spider. She is the animating genius of the place, and we know the
exact outline of her figure, and every article of her dress. The
minuteness of her portrait brings out the horrors of the terrible
process by which poor Goriot gradually sinks from one step to another
of the social ladder, and simultaneously ascends from the first floor to
the garrets. We can track his steps and trace his agony. Each station of
that melancholy pilgrimage is painted, down to the minutest details,
with unflinching fidelity.
Paris, says Balzac, is an ocean; however painfully you explore it and
sound its depths, there are still virgin corners, unknown caves with
their flowers, pearls, and monsters, forgotten by literary divers. The
Maison Vauquer is one of these singular monstrosities. No one, at any
rate, can complain that Balzac has not done his best to describe and
analyse the character of the unknown social species which it contains.
It absorbs our interest by the contrast of its vulgar and intensely
commonplace exterior with the terrible passions and sufferings of which
it is the appropriate scene.
The horrors of a great metropolis, indeed, give ample room for tragedy.
Old Sandy Mackaye takes Alton Locke to the entrance of a London alley,
and tells the sentimental tailor to write poetry about that. 'Say how ye
saw the mouth o' hell, and the twa pillars thereof at the entry, the
pawnbroker's shop on the one side and the gin-palace at the other--two
monstrous deevils, eating up men, women, and bairns, body and soul. Look
at the jaws o' the monsters, how they open and open to swallow in
anither victim and anither. Write about that!' The poor tailor complains
that it is unpoetical, and Mackaye replies, 'Hah! is there no the heaven
above them here and the hell beneath them? and God frowning and the
deevil grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra idee of the classic
tragedy defined to be--man conquered by circumstances? Canna ye see it
here?' But the quotation must stop, for Mackaye goes on to a moral not
quite according to Balzac. Balzac, indeed, was anything but a Christian
socialist, or a Radical reformer; we don't often catch sight in his
pages of God frowning or the devil grinning; his world seems to be
pretty well forgotten by the one, and its inhabitants to be quite able
to dispense with the services of the other. Paris, he tells us in his
most outrageous story, is a hell, which one day may have its Dante. The
prolétaire lives in its lowest circle, and seldom comes into Balzac's
pages except as representing the half-seen horrors of the gulf reserved
for that corrupt and brilliant society whose vices he loves to describe.
A summary of his creed is given by a queer contrast to Mackaye, the
accomplished and able De Marsay. People speak, he says, of the
immorality of certain books; here is a horrible, foul, and corrupt book,
always open and never to be shut; the great book of the world; and
beyond that is another book a thousand times more dangerous, which
consists of all that is whispered by one man to another, or discussed
under ladies' fans at balls. Balzac's pages are flavoured, rather to
excess, with this diabolical spice, composed of dark allusions to, or
audacious revelations of these hideous mysteries. If he is wanting in
the moral elevation necessary for a Dante, he has some of the sinister
power which makes him a fit guide to the horrors of our modern Inferno.
* * * * *