admitted that the ladies have got into such terrible perplexities from
tampering with the seventh commandment, that there is some excuse for
their breaking the fifth. Whether such an accumulation of horrors is a
legitimate process in art, and whether a healthy imagination would like
to dwell upon such loathsome social sores, is another question. The
comparison suggested with 'King Lear' may illustrate the point. In
Balzac all the subordinate details which Shakespeare throws in with a
very slovenly touch are elaborately drawn, and contribute powerfully to
the total impression. On the other hand, we never reach the lofty
poetical heights of the grandest scenes in 'King Lear.' But the
situation of the two heroes offers an instructive contrast. Lear is
weak, but is never contemptible; he is the ruin of a gallant old king,
is guilty of no degrading compliance, and dies like a man, with his
'good biting falchion' still grasped in his feeble hand. To change him
into Goriot we must suppose that he had licked the hand which struck
him, that he had helped on the adulterous intrigues of Goneril and Regan
from sheer weakness, and that all his fury had been directed against
Cornwall and Albany for objecting to his daughters' eccentric views of
the obligation of the marriage vow. Paternal affection leading a man to
the most trying self-sacrifice is a worthy motive for a great drama or
romance; but Balzac is so anxious to intensify the emotion, that he
makes even paternal affection morally degrading. Everything must be done
to heighten the colouring. Our sympathies are to be excited by making
the sacrifice as complete, and the emotion which prompts it as
overpowering, as possible; until at last the love of children becomes a
monomania. Goriot is not only dragged through the mud of Paris, but he
grovels in it with a will. In short, Balzac wants that highest power
which shows itself by moderation, and commits a fault like that of an
orator who emphasizes every sentence. With less expenditure of horrors,
he would excite our compassion more powerfully. But after all, Goriot
is, perhaps, more really affecting even than King Lear.
Situations of the 'Père Goriot' kind are, in some sense, more
appropriate for heroines than for heroes. Self-sacrifice is, for the
present at least, considered by a large part of mankind as the complete
duty of woman. The feminine martyr can indulge without loss of our
esteem in compliances which would be degrading in a man. Accordingly
Balzac finds the amplest materials for his favourite situation in the
torture of innocent women. The great example of his skill in this
department is Eugénie Grandet, in which the situation of the Père Goriot
is inverted. Poor Eugénie is the victim of a domestic tyrant, who is,
perhaps, Balzac's most finished portrait of the cold-blooded and cunning
miser. The sacrifice of a woman's life to paternal despotism is
unfortunately even commoner in real life than in fiction; and when the
lover, from whom the old miser has divided her during his life, deserts
her after his death, we feel that the mournful catastrophe is demanded
by the sombre prologue. The book may indeed justify, to some extent, one
of the ordinary criticisms upon Balzac, that he showed a special
subtlety in describing the sufferings of women. The question as to the
general propriety of that criticism is rather difficult for a male
critic. I confess to a certain scepticism, founded partly on the general
principle that hardly any author can really describe the opposite sex,
and partly on an antipathy which I cannot repress to Balzac's most
ambitious feminine portraits.
Eugénie Grandet is perhaps the purest of his women; but then Eugénie
Grandet is simply stupid, and interesting from her sufferings rather
than her character. She reminds us of some patient animal of the
agricultural kind, with bovine softness of eyes and bovine obstinacy
under suffering. His other women, though they are not simply courtesans,
after the fashion of some French writers, seem, as it were, to have a
certain perceptible taint; they breathe an unwholesome atmosphere. In
one of his extravagant humours, he tells us that the most perfect
picture of purity in existence is the Madonna of the Genoese painter,
Piola, but that even that celestial Madonna would have looked like a
Messalina by the side of the Duchesse de Manfrigneuse. If the duchess
resembled either personage in character, it was certainly not the
Madonna. And Balzac's best women give us the impression that they are
courtesans acting the character of virgins, and showing admirable
dramatic skill in the performance. They may keep up the part so
obstinately as to let the acting become earnest; but even when they
don't think of breaking the seventh commandment, they are always
thinking about not breaking it. When he has done his best to describe a
thoroughly pure woman, such as Henrietta in the 'Lys dans la Vallée,' he
cannot refrain from spoiling his performance by throwing in a hint at
the conclusion that, after all, she had a strong disposition to go
wrong, which was only defeated by circumstances. Indeed, the ladies who
in his pages have broken loose from all social restraints, differ only
in external circumstances from their more correct sisters. Coralie, in
the 'Illusions Perdues,' is not so chaste in her conduct as the
immaculate Henriette, but is not a whit less delicate in her tastes.
Madame de la Baudraye deserts her husband, and lives for some years with
her disreputable lover at Paris, and does not in the least forfeit the
sympathies of her creator. Balzac's feminine types may be classified
pretty easily. At bottom they are all of the sultana variety--playthings
who occasionally venture into mixing with the serious affairs of life,
but then only on pain of being ridiculous (as in the 'Employés,' or the
'Muse du Département'); but properly confined to their drawing-rooms,
with delicate cajoleries for their policy, and cunning instead of
intellect. Sometimes they are cold-hearted and selfish, and then they
are vicious, making victims of lovers, husbands, or fathers, consuming
fortunes, and spreading ill-will by cunning intrigues; sometimes they
are virtuous, and therefore according to Balzac's logic, pitiable
victims of the world. But their virtue, when it exists, is the effect,
not of lofty principle, but of a certain delicacy of taste corresponding
to a fine organisation. They object to vice, because it is apt to be
coarse; and are perfectly ready to yield, if it can be presented in such
graceful forms as not to shock their sensibilities. Marriage is
therefore a complicated intrigue in which one party is always deceived,
though it may be for his or her good. If you will be loved, says the
judicious lady in the 'Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées,' the secret is
not to love; and the rather flimsy epigram is converted into a great
moral truth. The justification of the lady is, that love is only made
permanent by elaborate intrigue. The wife is to be always on the footing
of a mistress who can only preserve her lover by incessant and
infinitely varied caresses. To do this, she must be herself cool. The
great enemy of matrimonial happiness is satiety, and we are constantly
presented with an affectionate wife boring her husband to death, and
alienating him by over-devotion. If one party is to be cheated, the one
who is freest from passion will be the winner of the game. As a maxim,
after the fashion of Rochefoucauld, this doctrine may have enough truth
to be plausible; but when seriously accepted and made the substantive
moral of a succession of stories, one is reminded less of a really acute
observer than of a lad fresh from college who thinks that wisdom
consists in an exaggerated cynicism. When ladies of this variety break
their hearts, they either die or retire in a picturesque manner to a
convent. They are indeed the raw material of which the genuine _dévote_
is made. The morbid sentimentality directed to the lover passes without
perceptible shock into a religious sentimentality, the object of which
is at least ostensibly different. The graceful but voluptuous mistress
of the Parisian salon is developed without any violent transition into
the equally graceful and ascetic nun. The connection between the
luxurious indulgence of material flirtations and religious mysticism is
curious, but unmistakable.
Balzac's reputation in this respect is founded, not on his little hoard
of cynical maxims, which, to say the truth, are not usually very
original, but on the vivid power of describing the details and scenery
of the martyrdom, and the energy with which he paints the emotion, of
the victim. Whether his women are very lifelike, or very varied in
character, may be doubted; but he has certainly endowed them with an
admirable capacity for suffering, and forces us to listen
sympathetically to their cries of anguish. The peculiar cynicism implied
in this view of feminine existence must be taken as part of his
fundamental theory of society. When Rastignac has seen Goriot buried,
the ceremony being attended only by his daughters' empty carriages, he
climbs to the highest part of the cemetery, and looks over Paris. As he
contemplates the vast buzzing hive, he exclaims solemnly, 'à nous deux
maintenant!' The world is before him; he is to fight his way in future
without remorse. Accordingly, Balzac's view of society is, that it is a
masquerade of devils, engaged in tormenting a few wandering angels. That
society is not what Balzac represents it to be is sufficiently proved by
the fact that society exists; as indeed he is profoundly convinced that
its destruction is only a question of time. It is rotten to the core.
Lust and avarice are the moving forms of the world, while profound and
calculating selfishness has sapped the base of all morality. The type of
a successful statesman is De Marsay, a kind of imaginary Talleyrand, who
rules because he has recognised the intrinsic baseness of mankind, and
has no scruples in turning it to account. Vautrin, who is an open enemy
of society, is simply De Marsay in revolt. The weapons with which he
fights are distinguished from those of greater men, not in their
intrinsic wickedness, but in their being accidentally forbidden by law.
He is less of a hypocrite, and scarcely a greater villain than his more
prosperous rivals. He ultimately recognises the futility of the strife,
agrees to wear a mask like his neighbours, and accepts the congenial
duties of a police agent. The secret of success in all ranks of life is
to be without scruples of morality, but exceedingly careful of breaking
the law. The bankers, Nucingen and Du Tillet, are merely cheats on a
gigantic scale. They ruin their enemies by financiering instead of
picking pockets. Be wicked if you would be successful; if possible let
your wickedness be refined; but, at all events, be wicked.
There is, indeed, a class of unsuccessful villains, to be found chiefly
amongst journalists, for whom Balzac has a special aversion; they live,
he tells us, partly on extortion, and partly on the prostitution of
their talents to gratify political or personal animosities, and are at
the mercy of the longest purse. They fail in life, not because they are
too immoral, but because they are too weak. They are the victims instead
of the accomplices of more resolute evil-doers. Lucien de Rubempré is
the type of this class. Endowed with surpassing genius and personal
beauty, he goes to Paris to make his fortune, and is introduced to the
world as it is. On the one hand is a little knot of virtuous men, called
the _cénacle_, who are working for posterity and meanwhile starving. On
the other is a vast mass of cheats and dupes. After a brief struggle
Lucien yields to temptation, and joins in the struggle for wealth and
power. But he has not strength enough to play his part. His head is
turned by the flattery of pretty actresses and scheming publishers: he
is enticed into thoughtless dissipation, and, after a brilliant start,
finds that he is at the mercy of the cleverer villains who surround him;
that he has been bought and sold like a sheep; that his character is
gone, and his imagination become sluggish; and, finally, he has to
escape from utter ruin by scarcely describable degradation. He writes a
libel on one of his virtuous friends, who is forgiving enough to improve
it and correct it for the press. In order to bury his mistress, who has
been ruined with him, he has to raise money by grovelling in the foulest
depths of literary sewerage. He at last succeeds in crawling back to his
relations in the country, morally and materially ruined. He makes
another effort to rise, backed up by the diabolical arts of Vautrin, and
relying rather on his beauty than his talents. The world is again too
strong for him, and, after being accomplice in the most outrageous
crimes, he ends appropriately by hanging himself in prison. Vautrin, as
we have seen, escapes from the fate of his partner because he retains
coolness enough to practise upon the vices of the governing classes.
The world, in short, is composed of three classes--consistent and,
therefore, successful villains; inconsistent and, therefore,
unsuccessful villains; and virtuous persons, who never have a chance of
success, and enjoy the honours of starvation.
The provinces differ from Paris in the nature of the social warfare, but
not in its morality. Passions are directed to meaner objects; they are
narrower, and more intense. The whole of a man's faculties are
concentrated upon one object; and he pursues it for years with
relentless and undeviating ardour. To supplant a rival, to acquire a few
more acres, to gratify jealousy of a superior, he will labour for a
lifetime. The intensity of his hatred supplies his want of intellect; he
is more cunning, if less far-sighted; and in the contest between the
brilliant Parisian and the plodding provincial we generally have an
illustration of the hare and the tortoise. The blind, persistent hatred
gets the better in the long run of the more brilliant, but more
transitory, passion. The lower nature here, too, gets the better of the
higher; and Balzac characteristically delights in the tragedy produced
by genius which falls before cunning, as virtue almost invariably yields
to vice. It is only when the slow provincial obstinacy happens to be on
the side of virtue that stupidity, doubled with virtue, as embodied for
example in two or three French Caleb Balderstons, generally gets the
worst of it. There are exceptions to this general rule. Even Balzac
sometimes relents. A reprieve is granted at the last moment, and the
martyr is unbound from the stake. But those catastrophes are not only
exceptional, but rather annoying. We have been so prepared to look for a
sacrifice that we are disappointed instead of relieved. If Balzac's
readers could be consulted during the last few pages of a novel, I feel
sure that most thumbs would be turned upwards, and the lions allowed to
have their will of the Christians. Perhaps our appetites have been
depraved; but we are not in the cue for a happy conclusion.
I know not whether it was the cause or the consequence of this sentiment
that Balzac was a thorough legitimist. He does not believe in the
vitality of the old order, any more than he believes in the truth of
Catholicism. But he regrets the extinction of the ancient faiths, which
he admits to be unsuitable; and sees in their representatives the only
picturesque and really estimable elements that still survived in French
society. He heartily despises the modern mediævalists, who try to spread
a thin varnish over a decaying order; the world is too far gone in
wickedness for such a futile remedy. The old chivalrous sentiments of
the genuine noblesse are giving way to the base chicanery of the
bourgeois who supplant them: the peasantry are mean, avaricious, and
full of bitter jealousy; but they are triumphantly rooting out the last
vestiges of feudalism. Democracy and communism are the fine names put
forward to justify the enmity of those who have not, against those who
have. Their success means merely an approaching 'descent of Niagara,'
and the growth of a more debasing and more materialist form of
despotism. But it would be a mistake to assume that this view of the
world implies that Balzac is in a state of lofty moral indignation.
Nothing can be further from the case. The world is wicked; but it is
fascinating. Society is very corrupt, it is true; but intensely and
permanently amusing. Paris is a hell; but hell is the only place worth
living in. The play of evil passions gives infinite subjects for
dramatic interests. The financial warfare is more diabolical than the
old literal warfare, but quite as entertaining. There is really as much
romance connected with bills of exchange as with swords and lances, and
rigging the market is nothing but the modern form of lying in ambush.
Goneril and Regan are triumphant; but we may admire the grace of their
manners and the dexterity with which they cloak their vices. Iago not
only poisons Othello's peace of mind, but, in the world of Balzac, he
succeeds to Othello's place, and is universally respected. The story
receives an additional flavour. In a characteristic passage, Balzac
regrets that Molière did not continue 'Tartufe.' It would then have
appeared how bitterly Orgon regretted the loss of the hypocrite, who, it
is said, made love to his wife, but who, at any rate, had an interest in
making things pleasant. Your conventional catastrophe is a mistake in
art, as it is a misrepresentation of facts. Tartufe has a good time of
it in Balzac: instead of meeting with an appropriate punishment, he
flourishes and thrives, and we look on with a smile not altogether
devoid of complacency. Shall we not take the world as it is, and be
amused at the 'Comédie Humaine,' rather than fruitlessly rage against
it? It will be played out whether we like it or not, and we may as well
adapt our tastes to our circumstances.
Ought we to be shocked at this extravagant cynicism; to quote it, as
respectable English journalists used to do, as a proof of the awful
corruption of French society, or to regard it as semi-humorous
exaggeration? I can't quite sympathise with people who take Balzac
seriously. I cannot talk about the remorseless skill with which he tears
off the mask from the fearful corruptions of modern society, and
penetrates into the most hidden motives of the human heart; nor can I
infer from his terrible pictures of feminine suffering that for every
one of those pictures a woman's heart had been tortured to death. This,
or something like this, I have read; and I can only say that I don't
believe a word of it. Balzac, indeed, as compared with our respectable
romancers, has the merit of admitting passions whose existence we
scrupulously ignore; and the further merit that he takes a far wider
range of sentiment, and does not hold by the theory that the life of a
man or a woman closes at the conventional end of a third volume. But he
is above all things a dreamer, and his dreams resemble nightmares.
Powerfully as his actors are put upon the stage, they seem to me to be,
after all, 'such stuff as dreams are made of.' A genuine observer of
life does not find it so highly spiced, and draws more moderate
conclusions. Balzac's characters run into typical examples of particular
passions rather than genuine human beings; they are generally
monomaniacs. Balthazar Claes, who gives up his life to search for the
philosopher's stone, is closely related to them all; only we must
substitute for the philosopher's stone some pet passion, in which the
whole nature is absorbed. They have the unnatural strain of mind which
marks the approach to madness. It is not ordinary daylight which
illuminates Balzac's dreamland, but some fantastic combination of
Parisian lamps, which tinges all the actors with an unearthly glare, and
distorts their features into extravagant forms. The result has, as I
have said, a strange fascination; but one is half-ashamed of yielding,
because one feels that it is due to the use of rather unholy drugs. The
vapours that rise from his magic caldron and shape themselves into human
forms smell unpleasantly of sulphur, or perhaps of Parisian sewers.
The highest poetry, like the noblest morality, is the product of a
thoroughly healthy mind. A diseased tendency in one respect is certain
to make itself manifest in the other. Now Balzac, though he shows some
powers which are unsurpassed or unequalled, possessed a mind which, to
put it gently, was not exactly well regulated. He took a pleasure in
dwelling upon horrors from which a healthy imagination shrinks, and
rejoiced greatly in gloating over the mysteries of iniquity. I do not
say that this makes his work immoral in the ordinary sense. Probably few
people who are likely to read Balzac would be any the worse for the
study. But, from a purely artistic point of view, he is injured by his
morbid tendencies. The highest triumph of style is to say what everybody
has been thinking in such a way as to make it new; the greatest triumph
of art is to make us see the poetical side of the commonplace life
around us. Balzac's ambition was, doubtless, aimed in that direction. He
wished to show that life in Paris or at Tours was as interesting to the
man of real insight as any more ideal region. In a certain sense, he has
accomplished his purpose. He has discovered food for a dark and powerful
imagination in the most commonplace details of daily life. But he falls
short in so far as he is unable to represent things as they are, and has
a taste for impossible horrors. There are tragedies enough all round us
for him who has eyes to see. Balzac is not content with the materials at
hand, or rather he has a love for the more exceptional and hideous
manifestations. Therefore the 'Comédie Humaine,' instead of being an
accurate picture of human life, and appealing to the sympathies of all
human beings, is a collection of monstrosities, whose vices are
unnatural, and whose virtues are rather like their vices. One feels that
there is something narrow and artificial about his work. It is intensely
powerful, but it is not the highest kind of power. He makes the utmost
of the gossip of a club smoking-room, or the scandal of a drawing-room,
or perhaps of a country public-house; but he represents a special phase
of manners, and that not a particularly pleasant one, rather than the
more fundamental and permanent sentiments of mankind. When shall we see
a writer who can be powerful without being spasmodic, and pierce through
the surface of society without seeking for interest in its foulest
abysses?
_DE QUINCEY_
Little more than fourteen years ago there passed from among us a man who
held a high and very peculiar position in English literature. In 1821 De
Quincey first published the work with which his name is most commonly
associated, and at uncertain intervals he gave tokens to mankind of his
continued presence on earth. What his life may have been in the
intervals seems to have been at times unknown even to his friends. He
began by disappearing from school and from his family, and seems to have
fallen into the habit of temporary eclipses. At one moment he dropped
upon his acquaintance from the clouds; at another he would vanish into
utter darkness for weeks or months together. One day he came to dine
with Christopher North--so we are told in the professor's life--was
detained for the night by a heavy storm of rain, and prolonged his
impromptu visit for a year. During that period his habits must have been
rather amazing to a well-regulated household. His wants, indeed, were
simple, and, in one sense, regular; a particular joint of mutton, cut
according to a certain mathematical formula, and an ounce of laudanum,
made him happy for a day. But in the hours when ordinary beings are
awake he was generally to be found stretched in profound opium-slumbers
upon a rug before the fire, and it was only about two or three in the
morning that he gave unequivocal symptoms of vitality, and suddenly
gushed forth in streams of wondrous eloquence to the supper parties
detained for the purpose of witnessing the display. Between these
irregular apparitions we are lastly given to understand that his life
was so strange that its details would be incredible. What these
incredible details may have been, I have no means of knowing. It is
enough that he was a strange unsubstantial being, flitting uncertainly
about in the twilight regions of society, emerging by fits and starts
into visibility, afflicted with a general vagueness as to the ordinary
duties of mankind, and generally taking much more opium than was good
for him. He tells us, indeed, that he broke off his over-mastering habit
by vigorous efforts; as he also tells us that opium is a cure for most
grievous evils, and especially saved him from an early death by
consumption. It is plain enough, however, that he never really refrained
for any length of time; and perhaps we should congratulate ourselves on
a propensity, unfortunate it may be, for its victim, but leading to the
Confessions as one collateral result.