touch upon another peculiarity. Balzac's genius for skilfully-combined
photographic detail explains his strange power of mystification. A word
is wanting to express that faint acquiescence or mimic belief which we
generally grant to a novelist. Dr. Newman has constructed a scale of
assent according to its varying degrees of intensity; and we might,
perhaps, assume that to each degree there corresponds a mock assent
accorded to different kinds of fiction. If Scott, for example, requires
from his readers a shadow of that kind of belief which we grant to an
ordinary historian, Balzac requires a shadow of the belief which Dr.
Pusey gives to the Bible. This still remains distinctly below any
genuine assent; for Balzac never wishes us really to forget, though he
occasionally forgets himself, that his most lifelike characters are
imaginary. But in certain subordinate topics he seems to make a higher
demand on our faith. He is full of more or less fanciful heresies, and
labours hard to convince us either that they are true or that he
seriously holds them. This is what I mean by mystification, and one
fears to draw a line as to which he was probably far from clear himself.
Thus, for example, he is a devout believer in physiognomy, and not only
in its obvious sense; he erects it into an occult science. Lavater and
Gall, he says, 'prove incontestably' that ominous signs exist in our
heads. Take, for example, the chasseur Michu, his white face injected
with blood and compressed like a Calmuck's; his ruddy, crisp hair; his
beard cut in the shape of a fan; the noble forehead which surmounts and
overhangs his sunburnt, sarcastic features; his ears well detached, and
possessing a sort of mobility, like those of a wild animal; his mouth
half open, and revealing a set of fine but uneven teeth; his thick and
glossy whiskers; his hair, close in front, long on the sides and behind,
with its wild, ruddy hue throwing into relief the strange and fatal
character of the physiognomy; his short, thick neck, designed to tempt
the hatchet of the guillotine: these details, so accurately
photographed, not only prove that M. Michu was a resolute, faithful
servant, capable of the profoundest secresy and the most disinterested
attachment, but for the really skilful reader of mystic symbols foretell
his ultimate fate--namely, that he will be the victim of a false
accusation. Balzac, however, ventures into still more whimsical
extremes. He accepts, in all apparent seriousness, the theory of his
favourite, Mr. Shandy, that a man's name influences his character. Thus,
for example, a man called Minoret-Levrault must necessarily be 'un
éléphant sans trompe et sans intelligence,' and the occult meaning of Z.
Marcas requires a long and elaborate commentary. Repeat the word Marcas,
dwelling on the first syllable, and dropping abruptly on the second, and
you will see that the man who bears it must be a martyr. The zigzag of
the initial implies a life of torment. What ill wind, he asks, has blown
upon this letter, which in no language (Balzac's acquaintance with
German was probably limited) commands more than fifty words? The name is
composed of seven letters, and seven is most characteristic of
cabalistic numbers. If M. Gozlan's narrative be authentic, Balzac was
right to value this name highly, for he had spent many hours in seeking
for it by a systematic perambulation of the streets of Paris. He was
rather vexed at the discovery that the Marcas of real life was a tailor.
'He deserved a better fate!' said Balzac pathetically; 'but it shall be
my business to immortalise him.'
Balzac returns to this subject so often and so emphatically that one
half believes him to be the victim of his own mystification. Perhaps he
was the one genuine disciple of Mr. Shandy and Slawkenbergius, and
believed sincerely in the occult influence of names and noses. In more
serious matters it is impossible to distinguish the point at which his
feigned belief passes into real superstition; he stimulates conviction
so elaborately, that his sober opinions shade off imperceptibly into
his fanciful dreamings. For a time he was attracted by mesmerism, and in
the story of Ursule Mirouet he labours elaborately to infect his readers
with a belief in what he calls 'magnetism, the favourite science of
Jesus, and one of the powers transmitted to the apostles.' He assumes
his gravest airs in adducing the cases of Cardan, Swedenborg, and a
certain Duke of Montmorency, as though he were a genuine historical
inquirer. He almost adopts the tone of a pious missionary in describing
how his atheist doctor was led by the revelations of a _clairvoyante_ to
study Pascal's 'Pensées' and Bossuet's sublime 'Histoire des
Variations,' though what those works have to do with mesmerism is rather
difficult to see. He relates the mysterious visions caused by the
converted doctor after his death, not less minutely, though more
artistically, than De Foe described the terrible apparition of Mrs.
Veal, and, it must be confessed, his story illustrates with almost equal
force the doctrine, too often forgotten by spiritualists, that ghosts
should not make themselves too common. When once they begin to mix in
general society, they become intolerably prosaic.
The ostentatious belief which is paraded in this instance is turned to
more artistic account in the wonderful story of the 'Peau de Chagrin.'
Balzac there tries as conscientiously as ever to surmount the natural
revolt of our minds against the introduction of the supernatural into
life. The _peau de chagrin_ is the modern substitute for the
old-fashioned parchment on which contracts were signed with the devil.
M. Valentin, its possessor, is a Faust of the boulevards; but our
prejudices are softened by the circumstance that the _peau de chagrin_
has a false air of scientific authenticity. It is discovered by a
gentleman who spends a spare half-hour before committing suicide in an
old curiosity shop, which occupies a sort of middle standing-ground
between a wizard's laboratory and the ordinary Wardour Street shop.
There is no question of signing with one's blood, but simply of
accepting a curious substance with the property--rather a startling one,
it is true--that its area diminishes in proportion to the amount of
wishes gratified, and vanishes with the death of the possessor. The
steady flesh-and-blood men of science treat it just as we feel certain
that they would do. After smashing a hydraulic press in the attempt to
compress it, and exhausting the power of chemical agents, they agree to
make a joke of it. It is not so much more wonderful than some of those
modern miracles, which leave us to hesitate between the two incredible
alternatives that men of science are fallible, or that mankind in
general, like Sir Walter Scott's grandmother, are 'awfu' leears.' Every
effort is made to reduce the strain upon our credulity to that moderate
degree of intensity which may fairly be required from the reader of a
wild fiction. When the first characteristic wish of the
proprietor--namely, that he may be indulged in a frantic orgie--has been
gratified without any apparent intervention of the supernatural, we are
left just in that proper equilibrium between scepticism and credulity
which is the right mental attitude in presence of a marvellous story.
Balzac, it is true, seems rather to flag in continuing his narrative.
The symbolical meaning begins to part company with the facts. Stories of
this kind require the congenial atmosphere of an ideal world, and the
effort of interpreting such a poetical legend into terms of ordinary
life is perhaps too great for the powers of any literary artist. At any
rate M. Valentin drops after a time from the level of Faust to become
the hero of a rather commonplace Parisian story. The opening scenes,
however, are an admirable specimen of the skill by which our
irrepressible scepticism may be hindered from intruding into a sphere
where it is out of place; or rather--for one can hardly speak of belief
in such a connection--of the skill by which the discord between the
surroundings of the nineteenth century and a story of grotesque
supernaturalism can be converted into a pleasant harmony. A similar
effect is produced in one of Balzac's finest stories, the 'Recherche de
l'Absolu.' Every accessory is provided to induce us, so long as we are
under the spell, to regard the discovery of the philosopher's stone as a
reasonable application of human energy. We are never quite clear whether
Balthazar Claes is a madman or a commanding genius. We are kept
trembling on the verge of a revelation till we become interested in
spite of our more sober sense. A single diamond turns up in a crucible
which was unluckily produced in the absence of the philosopher, so that
he cannot tell what are the necessary conditions of repeating the
process. He is supposed to discover the secret just as he is struck by a
paralysis, which renders him incapable of revealing it, and dies whilst
making desperate efforts to communicate the crowning success to his
family. Balzac throws himself into the situation with such energy that
we are irresistibly carried away by his enthusiasm. The impossibility
ceases to annoy us, and merely serves to give additional dignity to the
story.
* * * * *
One other variety of mystification may introduce us to some of Balzac's
most powerful stories. He indulges more frequently than could be wished
in downright melodrama, or what is generally called sensational writing.
In the very brilliant sketch of Nathan in 'Une Fille d'Eve,' he remarks
that 'the mission of genius is to search, through the accidents of the
true, for that which must appear probable to all the world.' The common
saying, that truth is stranger than fiction, should properly be
expressed as an axiom that fiction ought not to be so strange as truth.
A marvellous event is interesting in real life, simply because we know
that it happened. In a fiction we know that it did not happen; and
therefore it is interesting only as far as it is explained. Anybody can
invent a giant or a genius by the simple process of altering figures or
piling up superlatives. The artist has to make the existence of the
giant or the genius conceivable. Balzac, however, often enough forgets
this principle, and treats us to purely preposterous incidents, which
are either grotesque or simply childish. The history of the marvellous
'Thirteen,' for example, that mysterious band which includes statesmen,
beggars, men of fortune, and journalists, and goes about committing the
most inconceivable crimes without the possibility of discovery, becomes
simply ludicrous. Balzac, as usual, labours to reconcile our minds to
the absurdity; but the effort is beyond his powers. The amazing disease
which he invents for the benefit of the villains in the 'Cousine Bette'
can only be accepted as a broad joke. At times, as in the story of the
'Grande Bretêche,' where the lover is bricked up by the husband in the
presence of the wife, he reminds us of Edgar Poe's worst extravagances.
There is, indeed, this much to be said for Balzac in comparison with the
more recent school, who have turned to account all the most refined
methods of breaking the ten commandments and the criminal code; the
fault of the so-called sensation writer is, not that he deals in murder,
bigamy, or adultery--every great writer likes to use powerful
situations--but that he relies upon our interest in startling crimes to
distract our attention from feebly-drawn characters and conventional
details. Balzac does not often fall into that weakness. If his criminals
are frequently of the most outrageous kind, and indulge even in
practices unmentionable, the crime is intended at least to be of
secondary interest. He tries to fix our attention on the passions by
which they are caused, and to attract us chiefly by the legitimate
method of analysing human nature--even, it must be confessed, in some of
its most abnormal manifestations. Macbeth is not interesting because he
commits half-a-dozen murders; but the murders are interesting because
they are committed by Macbeth. We may generally say as much for Balzac's
villains; and it is the only justification for a free use of blood and
brutality. In applying these remarks, we come to the real secret of
Balzac's power, which will demand a fuller consideration.
It is common to say of all great novelists, and of Balzac in particular,
that they display a wonderful 'knowledge of the human heart.' The chief
objection to the phrase is that such knowledge does not exist. Nobody
has as yet found his way through the complexities of that intricate
machine, and described the springs and balances by which its movement is
originated and controlled. Men of vivid imagination are in some respects
less competent for such a work than their neighbours. They have not the
cool, hard, and steady hand required for psychological dissection.
Balzac gave a queer specimen of his own incapacity in an attempt to
investigate the true history of a real murder, celebrated in its day,
and supposed by everybody but Balzac to have been committed by one
Peytel, who was put to death in spite of his pleading. His skill in
devising motives for imaginary atrocities was a positive
disqualification for dealing with facts and legal evidence. The greatest
poet or novelist describes only one person, and that is himself; and he
differs from his inferiors, not necessarily in having a more systematic
knowledge, but in having wider sympathies, and so to speak, possessing a
great number of characters. Cervantes was at once Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza; Shakespeare was Hamlet and Mercutio and Othello and Falstaff;
Scott was at once Dandie Dinmont and the Antiquary and the Master of
Ravenswood; and Balzac embodies his different phases of feeling in
Eugénie Grandet and Vautrin and the Père Goriot. The assertion that he
knew the human heart must be interpreted to mean that he could
sympathise with, and give expression to, a wide range of human passions;
as his supposed knowledge of the world implies merely that he was deeply
impressed by certain phenomena of the social medium in which he was
placed. Nobody, I should be inclined to think, would have given a more
unsound judgment than Balzac as to the characters of the men whom he
met, or formed a less trustworthy estimate of the real condition of
society. He was totally incapable of stripping the bare facts given by
observation of the colouring which they received from his own
idiosyncrasy. But nobody, within certain points, could express more
vividly in outward symbols the effect produced upon keen sympathies and
a powerful imagination by the aspect of the world around him.
The characteristic peculiarities of Balzac's novels may be described as
the intensity with which he expresses certain motives, and the vigour
with which he portrays the real or imaginary corruption of society. Upon
one particular situation, or class of situations, favourable to this
peculiar power, he is never tired of dwelling. He repeats himself
indeed, in a certain sense, as a man must necessarily repeat himself who
writes eighty-five stories, besides doing other work, in less than
twenty years. In this voluminous outpouring of matter the machinery is
varied with wonderful fertility of invention, but one sentiment recurs
very frequently. The great majority of Balzac's novels, including all
the most powerful examples, may thus be described as variations on a
single theme. Each of them is in fact the record of a martyrdom. There
is always a virtuous hero or heroine who is tortured, and most
frequently, tortured to death, by a combination of selfish intrigues.
The commonest case is, of course, that which has become the staple plot
of French novelists, where the interesting young woman is sacrificed to
the brutality of a dull husband: that, for example, is the story of the
'Femme de Trente Ans,' of 'Le Lys dans la Vallée,' and of several minor
performances; then we have the daughter sacrificed to the avaricious
father, as in 'Eugénie Grandet;' the woman sacrificed to the imperious
lover in the 'Duchesse de Langeais;' the immoral beauty sacrificed to
the ambition of her lover in the 'Splendeurs et Misères des
Courtisanes;' the mother sacrificed to the dissolute son in the 'Ménage
de Garçon;' the woman of political ambition sacrificed to the
contemptible intriguers opposed to her in 'Les Employés;' and, indeed,
in one way or other, as subordinate character or as heroine, this figure
of a graceful feminine victim comes into nearly every novel. Virtuous
heroes fare little better. Poor Colonel Chabert is disowned and driven
to beggary by the wife who has committed bigamy; the luckless curé,
Birotteau, is cheated out of his prospects and doomed to a broken heart
by the successful villainy of a rival priest and his accomplices; the
Comte de Manerville is ruined and transported by his wife and his
detestable mother-in-law; Père Goriot is left to starvation by his
daughters; the Marquis d'Espard is all but condemned as a lunatic by the
manoeuvres of his wife; the faithful servant Michu comes to the
guillotine; the devoted notary Chesnel is beggared in the effort to save
his scape-grace of a master; Michaud, another devoted adherent, is
murdered with perfect success by the brutal peasantry, and his wife dies
of the news; Balthazar Claes is the victim of his devotion to science;
and Z. Marcas dies unknown and in the depths of misery as a reward for
trying to be a second Colbert. The old-fashioned canons of poetical
justice are inverted; and the villains are dismissed to live very
happily ever afterwards, whilst the virtuous are slain outright or
sentenced to a death by slow torture. Thackeray, in one or two of his
minor stories, has touched the same note. The history of Mr. Deuceace,
and especially its catastrophe, is much in Balzac's style; but, as a
rule, our English novelists shrink from anything so unpleasant.
Perhaps the most striking example of this method is the 'Père Goriot.'
The general situation may be described in two words, by saying that
Goriot is the modern King Lear. Mesdames de Restaud and de Nucingen are
the representatives of Regan and Goneril; but the Parisian Lear is not
allowed the consolation of a Cordelia; the cup of misery is measured out
to him drop by drop, and the bitterness of each dose is analysed with
chemical accuracy. We watch the poor old broken-down merchant, who has
impoverished himself to provide his daughters' dowries, and has
gradually stripped himself, first of comfort, and then of the
necessaries of life to satisfy the demands of their folly and luxury,
as we might watch a man clinging to the edge of a cliff and gradually
dropping lower and lower, catching feebly at every point of support till
his strength is exhausted, and the inevitable catastrophe follows. The
daughters, allowed to retain some fragments of good feeling and not
quite irredeemably hateful, are gradually yielding to the demoralising
influence of a heartless vanity. They yield, it is true, pretty
completely at last; but their wickedness seems to reveal the influence
of a vague but omnipotent power of evil in the background. There is not
a more characteristic scene in Balzac than that in which Rastignac, the
lover of Madame de Nucingen, overhears the conversation between the
father in his wretched garret and the modern Goneril and Regan. A gleam
of good fortune has just encouraged old Goriot to anticipate an escape
from his troubles. On the morning of the day of expected release Madame
Goneril de Nucingen rushes up to her father's garret to explain to him
that her husband, the rich banker, having engaged all his funds in some
diabolical financial intrigues, refuses to allow her the use of her
fortune; whilst, owing to her own misconduct, she is afraid to appeal to
the law. They have a hideous tacit compact, according to which the wife
enjoys full domestic liberty, whilst the husband may use her fortune to
carry out his dishonest plots. She begs her father to examine the facts
in the light of his financial experience, though the examination must be
deferred, that she may not look ill with the excitement when she meets
her lover at the ball. As the poor father is tormenting his brains,
Madame Regan de Restaud appears in terrible distress. Her lover has
threatened to commit suicide unless he can meet a certain bill, and to
save him she has pledged certain diamonds which were heirlooms in her
husband's family. Her husband has discovered the whole transaction,
and, though not making an open scandal, imposes some severe conditions
upon her future. Old Goriot is raving against the brutality of her
husband, when Regan adds that there is still a sum to be paid, without
which her lover, to whom she has sacrificed everything, will be ruined.
Now old Goriot had employed just this sum--all but the very last
fragment of his fortune--in the service of Goneril. A desperate quarrel
instantly takes place between the two fine ladies over this last scrap
of their father's property. They are fast degenerating into Parisian
Billingsgate, when Goriot succeeds in obtaining silence and proposes to
strip himself of his last penny. Even the sisters hesitate at such an
impiety, and Rastignac enters with some apology for listening, and hands
over to the countess a certain bill of exchange for a sum which he
professes himself to owe to Goriot, and which will just save her lover.
She accepts the paper, but vehemently denounces her sister for having,
as she supposes, allowed Rastignac to listen to their hideous
revelations, and retires in a fury, whilst the father faints away. He
recovers to express his forgiveness, and at this moment the countess
returns, ostensibly to throw herself on her knees and beg her father's
pardon. She apologises to her sister, and a general reconciliation takes
place. But before she has again left the room she has obtained her
father's endorsement to Rastignac's bill. Even her most genuine fury had
left coolness enough for calculation, and her burst of apparent
tenderness was a skilful bit of comedy for squeezing one more drop of
blood from her father and victim. That is a genuine stroke of Balzac.