1
The first man who has completely understood Balzac is Rodin, and it
has taken Rodin ten years to realise his own conception. France has
refused the statue in which a novelist is represented as a dreamer,
to whom Paris is not so much Paris as Patmos: "the most Parisian of
our novelists," Frenchmen assure you. It is more than a hundred years
since Balzac was born: a hundred years is a long time in which to be
misunderstood with admiration.
In choosing the name of the _Human Comedy_ for a series of novels in
which, as he says, there is at once "the history and the criticism
of society, the analysis of its evils, and the discussion of its
principles," Balzac proposed to do for the modern world what Dante,
in his _Divine Comedy,_ had done for the world of the Middle Ages.
Condemned to write in prose, and finding his opportunity in that
restriction, he created for himself a form which is perhaps the nearest
equivalent for the epic or the poetic drama, and the only form in
which, at all events, the epic is now possible. The world of Dante was
materially simple compared with the world of the nineteenth century;
the "visible world" had not yet begun to "exist," in its tyrannical
modern sense; the complications of the soul interested only the
Schoolmen, and were a part of theology; poetry could still represent
an age and yet be poetry. But to-day poetry can no longer represent
more than the soul of things; it had taken refuge from the terrible
improvements of civilisation in a divine seclusion, where it sings,
disregarding the many voices of the street. Prose comes offering its
infinite capacity for detail; and it is by the infinity of its detail
that the novel, as Balzac created it, has become the modern epic.
There had been great novels, indeed, before Balzac, but no great
novelist; and the novels themselves are scarcely what we should to-day
call by that name. The interminable _Astrée_ and its companions form
a link between the _fabliaux_ and the novel, and from them developed
the characteristic eighteenth-century _conte,_ in narrative, letters,
or dialogue, as we see it in Marivaux, Laclos, Crebillon _fils,_
Crebillon's longer works, including _Le Sopha,_ with their conventional
paraphernalia of Eastern fable, are extremely tedious; but in two
short pieces, _La Nuit et le Moment_ and _Le Hasard du Coin du Feu,_
he created a model of witty, naughty, deplorably natural comedy, which
to this day is one of the most characteristic French forms of fiction.
Properly, however, it is a form of the drama rather than of the novel.
Laclos, in _Les Liaisons Dangereuses,_ a masterpiece which scandalised
the society that adored Crebillon, because its naked human truth left
no room for sentimental excuses, comes much nearer to prefiguring the
novel (as Stendhal, for instance, is afterward to conceive it), but
still preserves the awkward traditional form of letters. Marivaux had
indeed already seemed to suggest the novel of analysis, but in a style
which has christened a whole manner of writing that precisely which
is least suited to the writing of fiction. Voltaire's _contes, La
Religieuse_ of Diderot, are tracts or satires in which the story is
only an excuse for the purpose. Rousseau, too, has his purpose, even
in _La Nouvelle Héloise,_ but it is a humanising purpose; and with
that book the novel of passion comes into existence, and along with it
the descriptive novel. Yet with Rousseau this result is an accident of
genius; we cannot call him a novelist; and we find him abandoning the
form he has found, for another, more closely personal, which suits him
better. Restif de la Bretonne, who followed Rousseau at a distance, not
altogether wisely, developed the form of half-imaginary autobiography
in _Monsieur Nicolas,_ a book of which the most significant part may be
compared with Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris._ Morbid and even mawkish as it
is, it has a certain uneasy, unwholesome humanity in its confessions,
which may seem to have set a fashion only too scrupulously followed
by modern French novelists. Meanwhile, the Abbé Prévost's one great
story, _Manon Lescaut,_ had brought for once a purely objective study,
of an incomparable simplicity, into the midst of these analyses of
difficult souls; and then we return to the confession, in the works of
others not novelists: Benjamin Constant, Mme. de Staël, Chateaubriand,
in _Adolphe, Corinne, René._ At once we are in the Romantic movement,
a movement which begins lyrically among poets, and at first with a
curious disregard of the more human part of humanity.
Balzac worked contemporaneously with the Romantic movement, but he
worked outside it, and its influence upon him is felt only in an
occasional pseudo-romanticism, like the episode of the pirate in _La
Femme de Trente Ans._ His vision of humanity was essentially a poetic
vision, but he was a poet whose dreams were facts. Knowing that, as
Mme. Necker has said, "the novel should be the better world," he knew
also that "the novel would be nothing if, in that august lie, it were
not true in details." And in the _Human Comedy_ he proposed to himself
to do for society more than Buffon had done for the animal world.
"There is but one animal," he declares, in his _Avant-Propos,_ with
a confidence which Darwin has not yet come to justify. But "there
exists, there will always exist, social species, as there are
zoological species." "Thus the work to be done will have a triple
form: men, women, and things; that is to say, human beings and the
material representation which they give to their thought; in short,
man and life." And, studying after nature, "French society will be the
historian, I shall need to be no more than the secretary." Thus will be
written "the history forgotten by so many historians, the history of
manners." But that is not all, for "passion is the whole of humanity."
"In realizing clearly the drift of the composition, it will be seen
that I assign to facts, constant, daily, open, or secret, to the acts
of individual life, to their causes and principles, as much importance
as historians had formerly attached to the events of the public life
of nations." "Facts gathered together and painted as they are, with
passion for element," is one of his definitions of the task he has
undertaken. And in a letter to Mme. de Hanska, he summarises every
detail of his scheme.
"The _Études des Mœurs_ will represent social effects, without a
single situation of life, or a physiognomy, or a character of man or
woman, or a manner of life, or a profession, or a social zone, or a
district of France, or anything pertaining to childhood, old age, or
maturity, politics, justice, or war, having been forgotten.
"That laid down, the history of the human heart traced link by link,
the history of society made in all its details, we have the base....
"Then, the second stage is the _Études philosophiques,_ for after the
_effects_ come the _causes._ In the _Études des Mœurs_ I shall have
painted the sentiments and their action, life and the fashion of life.
In the _Études philosophiques_ I shall say _why the sentiments, on what
the life...._
"Then, after the _effects_ and the _causes,_ come the _Études
analytiques,_ to which the _Physiologie du mariage_ belongs, for, after
the _effects_ and the _causes,_ one should seek the _principles...._
"After having done the poetry, the demonstration, of a whole system, I
shall do the science in the _Essai sur les forces humaines._ And, on
the bases of this palace I shall have traced the immense arabesque of
the _Cent Contes drolatiques_!"
Quite all that, as we know, was not carried out; but there, in its
intention, is the plan; and after twenty years' work the main part of
it, certainly, was carried out. Stated with this precise detail, it
has something of a scientific air, as of a too deliberate attempt upon
the sources of life by one of those systematic French minds which are
so much more logical than facts. But there is one little phrase to be
noted: "La passion est toute l'humanité." All Balzac is in that phrase.
Another French novelist, following, as he thought, the example of the
_Human Comedy,_ has endeavoured to build up a history of his own time
with even greater minuteness. But _Les Rougon-Macquart_ is no more
than system; Zola has never understood that detail without life is the
wardrobe without the man. Trying to outdo Balzac on his own ground,
he has made the fatal mistake of taking him only on his systematic
side, which in Balzac is subordinate to a great creative intellect,
an incessant, burning thought about men and women, a passionate human
curiosity for which even his own system has no limits. "The misfortunes
of the _Birotteaus,_ the priest and the perfumer," he says, in his
_Avant-Propos,_ taking an example at random, "are, for me, those of
humanity." To Balzac manners are but the vestment of life; it is
life that he seeks; and life, to him (it is his own word) is but the
vestment of thought. Thought is at the root of all his work, a whole
system of thought, in which philosophy is but another form of poetry;
and it is from this root of idea that the _Human Comedy_ springs.
2
The two books into which Balzac has put his deepest thought, the two
books which he himself cared for the most, are _Séraphita_ and _Louis
Lambert._ Of _Louis Lambert_ he said: "I write it for myself and a few
others"; of _Séraphita:_ "My life is in it." "One could write _Goriot_
any day," he adds; "_Séraphita only once_ in a lifetime." I have never
been able to feel that _Séraphita_ is altogether a success. It lacks
the breadth of life; it is glacial. True, he aimed at producing very
much such an effect; and it is, indeed, full of a strange, glittering
beauty, the beauty of its own snows. But I find in it at the same time
something a little factitious, a sort of romanesque, not altogether
unlike the sentimental romanesque of Novalis; it has not done the
impossible, in humanising abstract speculation, in fusing mysticism and
the novel. But for the student of Balzac it has extraordinary interest;
for it is at once the base and the summit of the _Human Comedy._ In a
letter to Mme. de Hanska, written in 1837, four years after _Séraphita_
had been begun, he writes: "I am not orthodox, and I do not believe in
the Roman Church. Swedenborgianism, which is but a repetition, in the
Christian sense, of ancient ideas, is my religion, with this addition:
that I believe in the incomprehensibility of God." _Séraphita_ is a
prose poem in which the most abstract part of that mystical system,
which Swedenborg perhaps materialised too crudely, is presented in a
white light, under a single, superhuman image. In _Louis Lambert_ the
same fundamental conceptions are worked out in the study of a perfectly
human intellect, "an intelligent gulf," as he truly calls it; a sober
and concise history of ideas in their devouring action upon a feeble
physical nature. In these two books we see directly, and not through
the coloured veil of human life, the mind in the abstract of a thinker
whose power over humanity was the power of abstract thought. They show
this novelist, who has invented the description of society, by whom
the visible world has been more powerfully felt than by any other
novelist, striving to penetrate the correspondences which exist between
the human and the celestial existence. He would pursue the soul to its
last resting-place before it takes flight from the body; further, on
its disembodied flight; he would find out God, as he comes nearer and
nearer to finding out the secret of life. And realising, as he does
so profoundly, that there is but one substance, but one ever-changing
principle of life, "one vegetable, one animal, but a continual
intercourse," the world is alive with meaning for him, a more intimate
meaning than it has for others. "The least flower is a thought, a life
which corresponds to some lineaments of the great whole, of which he
has the constant intuition." And so, in his concerns with the world, he
will find spirit everywhere; nothing for him will be inert matter,
everything will have its particle of the universal life. One of those
divine spies, for whom the world has no secrets, he will be neither
pessimist nor optimist; he will accept the world as a man accepts the
woman whom he loves, as much, for her defects as for her virtues.
Loving the world for its own sake, he will find it always beautiful,
equally beautiful in all its parts. Now let us look at the programme
which he traced for the _Human Comedy,_ let us realise it in the light
of this philosophy, and we are at the beginning of a conception of what
the _Human Comedy_ really is.
3
This visionary, then, who had apprehended for himself an idea of God,
set himself to interpret human life more elaborately than any one else.
He has been praised for his patient observation; people have thought
they praised him in calling him a realist; it has been discussed how
far his imitation of life was the literal truth of the photograph.
But to Balzac the word realism was an insult. Writing his novels at
the rate of eighteen hours a day, in a feverish solitude, he never had
the time to observe patiently. It is humanity seen in a mirror, the
humanity which comes to the great dreamers, the great poets, humanity
as Shakespeare saw it. And so in him, as in all the great artists,
there is something more than nature, a divine excess. This something
more than nature should be the aim of the artist, not merely the
accident which happens to him against his will. We require of him a
world like our own, but a world infinitely more vigorous, interesting,
profound; more beautiful with that kind of beauty which nature finds
of itself for art. It is the quality of great creative art to give
us so much life that we are almost overpowered by it, as by an air
almost too vigorous to breathe: the exuberance of creation which makes
the Sibyl of Michelangelo something more than human, which makes
Lear something more than human, in one kind or another of divinity.
Balzac's novels are full of strange problems and great passions turned
aside from nothing which presented itself in nature; and his mind was
always turbulent with the magnificent contrasts and caprices of fate.
A devouring passion of thought burned on all the situations by which
humanity expresses itself, in its flight from the horror of immobility.
To say that the situations which he chose are often romantic is but
to say that he followed the soul and the senses faithfully on their
strangest errands. Our probable novelists of to-day are afraid of
whatever emotion might be misinterpreted in a gentleman. Believing, as
we do now, in nerves and a fatalistic heredity, we have left but little
room for the dignity and disturbance of violent emotion. To Balzac,
humanity had not changed since the days when Œdipus was blind and
Philoctetes cried in the cave; and equally great miseries were still
possible to mortals, though they were French and of the nineteenth
century.
And thus he creates, like the poets, a humanity more logical than
average life; more typical, more sub-divided among the passions, and
having in its veins an energy almost more than human. He realised, as
the Greeks did, that human life is made up of elemental passions and
necessity; but he was the first to realise that in the modern world
the pseudonym of necessity is money. Money and the passions rule the
world of his _Human Comedy._
And, at the root of the passions, determining their action, he saw
"those nervous fluids, or that unknown substance which, in default of
another term, we must call the will." No word returns oftener to his
pen. For him the problem is invariable. Man has a given quantity of
energy; each man a different quantity: how will he spend it? A novel
is the determination in action of that problem. And he is equally
interested in every form of energy, in every egoism, so long as it
is fiercely itself. This pre-occupation with the force, rather than
with any of its manifestations, gives him his singular impartiality,
his absolute lack of prejudice; for it gives him the advantage of an
abstract point of view, the unchanging fulcrum for a lever which turns
in every direction; and as nothing once set vividly in motion by any
form of human activity is without interest for him, he makes every
point of his vast chronicle of human affairs equally interesting to his
readers.
Baudelaire has observed profoundly that every character in the _Human
Comedy_ has something of Balzac, has genius. To himself, his own genius
was entirely expressed in that word "will." It recurs constantly in his
letters. "Men of will are rare!" he cries. And, at a time when he had
turned night into day for his labour: "I rise every night with a keener
will than that of yesterday." "Nothing wearies me," he says, "neither
waiting nor happiness." He exhausts the printers, whose fingers can
hardly keep pace with his brain; they call him, he reports proudly, "a
man-slayer." And he tries to express himself: "I have always had in me
something, I know not what, which made me do differently from others;
and, with me, fidelity is perhaps no more than pride. Having only
myself to rely upon, I have had to strengthen, to build up that self."
There is a scene in _La Cousine Bette_ which gives precisely Balzac's
own sentiment of the supreme value of energy. The Baron Hulot, ruined
on every side, and by his own fault, goes to Josépha, a mistress who
had cast him off in the time of his prosperity, and asks her to lodge
him for a few days in a garret. She laughs, pities, and then questions
him.
"'Est-ce vrai, vieux,' reprit-elle, 'que tu as tué ton frère et ton
oncle, ruiné ta famille, surhypothéqué la maison de tes enfants et
mangé la grenouille du gouvernement en Afrique avec la princesse?'
"Le Baron inclina tristement la tête.
"'Eh bien, j'aime cela!' s'écria Josépha, qui se leva pleine
d'enthousiasme. 'C'est un _brûlage_ général! c'est sardanapale! c'est
grand! c'est complet! On est une canaille, mais on a du cœur.'"
The cry is Balzac's, and it is a characteristic part of his genius to
have given it that ironical force by uttering it through the mouth
of a Josépha. The joy of the human organism at its highest point of
activity: that is what interests him supremely. How passionate, how
moving he becomes whenever he has to speak of a real passion, a mania,
whether of a lover for his mistress, of a philosopher for his idea,
of a miser for his gold, of a Jew dealer for masterpieces! His style
clarifies, his words become flesh and blood; he is the lyric poet. And
for him every idealism is equal: the gourmandise of Pons is not less
serious, nor less sympathetic, not less perfectly realised, than the
search of Claës after the Absolute. "The great and terrible clamour of
egoism" is the voice to which he is always attentive; "those eloquent
faces, proclaiming a soul abandoned to an idea as to a remorse," are
the faces with whose history he concerns himself. He drags to light the
hidden joys of the _amateur,_ and with especial delight those that are
hidden deepest, under the most deceptive coverings. He deifies them
for their energy, he fashions the world of his _Human Comedy_ in their
service, as the real world exists, all but passive, to be the pasture
of these supreme egoists.
4
In all that he writes of life, Balzac seeks the soul; but it is the
soul as nervous fluid, the executive soul, not the contemplative soul,
that, with rare exceptions, he seeks. He would surprise the motive
force of life: that is his _recherche de l'Absolu;_ he figures it to
himself as almost a substance, and he is the alchemist on its track.
"Can man by thinking find out God?" Or life, he would have added; and
he would have answered the question with at least a Perhaps.
And of this visionary, this abstract thinker, it must be said that his
thought translates itself always into terms of life. Pose before him
a purely mental problem, and he will resolve it by a scene in which
the problem literally works itself out. It is the quality proper to
the novelist, but no novelist ever employed this quality with such
persistent activity, and at the same time subordinated faction so
constantly to the idea. With him action has always a mental basis, is
never suffered to intrude for its own sake. He prefers that an episode
should seem in itself tedious rather than it should have an illogical
interest.
It may be, for he is a Frenchman, that his episodes are sometimes too
logical. There are moments when he becomes unreal because he wishes to
be too systematic, that is, to be real by measure. He would never have
understood the method of Tolstoi, a very stealthy method of surprising
life. To Tolstoi life is always the cunning enemy whom one must lull
asleep, or noose by an unexpected lasso. He brings in little detail
after little detail, seeming to insist on the insignificance of each,
in order that it may pass almost unobserved, and be realised only after
it has passed. It is his way of disarming the suspiciousness of life.
But Balzac will make no circuit, aims at an open and an unconditional
triumph over nature. Thus, when he triumphs, he triumphs signally; and
action, in his books, is perpetually crystallising into some phrase,
like the single lines of Dante, or some brief scene, in which a whole
entanglement comes sharply and suddenly to a luminous point. I will
give no instance, for I should have to quote from every volume. I
wish rather to remind myself that there are times when the last fine
shade of a situation seems to have escaped. Even then, the failure is
often more apparent than real, a slight bungling in the machinery of
illusion. Look through the phrase, and you will find the truth there,
perfectly explicit on the other side of it.
For it cannot be denied, Balzac's style, as style, is imperfect. It
has life, and it has an idea, and it has variety; there are moments
when it attains a rare and perfectly individual beauty; as when, in _Le
Cousin Pons,_ we read of "cette prédisposition aux recherches qui fait
faire à un savant germanique cent lieues dans ses guêtres pour trouver
une vérité qui le regard en riant, assise à la marge du puits, sous le
jasmin de la cour." But I am far less sure that a student of Balzac
would recognise him in this sentence than that he would recognise the
writer of this other: "Des larmes de pudeur, qui roulèrent entre les
beaux cils de Madame Hulot, arrêtèrent net le garde national." It is
in such passages that the failure in style is equivalent to a failure
in psychology. That his style should lack symmetry, subordination, the
formal virtues of form, is, in my eyes, a less serious fault. I have
often considered whether, in the novel, perfect form is a good, or even
a possible thing, if the novel is to be what Balzac made it, history
added to poetry. A novelist with style will not look at life with an
entirely naked vision. He sees through coloured glasses. Human life
and human manners are too various, too moving, to be brought into the
fixity of a quite formal order. There will come a moment, constantly,
when style must suffer, or the closeness and clearness of narration
must be sacrificed, some minute exception of action or psychology must
lose its natural place, or its full emphasis. Balzac, with his rapid
and accumulating mind, without the patience oft selection, and without
the desire to select where selection means leaving out something
good in itself, if not good in its place, never hesitates, and his
parenthesis comes in. And often it is into these parentheses that he
puts the profoundest part of his thought.
Yet, ready as Balzac is to neglect the story for the philosophy,
whenever it seems to him necessary to do so, he would never have
admitted that a form of the novel is possible in which the story shall
be no more than an excuse for the philosophy. That was because he was
a great creator, and not merely a philosophical thinker; because he
dealt in flesh and blood, and knew that the passions in action can
teach more to the philosopher, and can justify the artist more fully,
than all the unacting intellect in the world. He knew that though life
without thought was no more than the portion of a dog, yet thoughtful
life was more than lifeless thought, and the dramatist more than
the commentator. And I cannot help feeling assured that the latest
novelists without a story, whatever other merits they certainly have,
are lacking in the power to create characters, to express a philosophy
in action; and that the form which they have found, however valuable it
may be, is the result of this failure, and not either a great refusal
or a new vision.
5
The novel as Balzac conceived it has created the modern novel, but no
modern novelist has followed, for none has been able to follow, Balzac
on his own lines. Even those who have tried to follow him most closely
have, sooner or later, branched off in one direction or another, most
in the direction indicated by Stendhal. Stendhal has written one book
which is a masterpiece, unique in its kind, _Le Rouge et le Noir;_ a
second, which is full of admirable things, _Le Chartreuse de Parme;_
a book of profound criticism, _Racine et Shakspeare;_ and a cold and
penetrating study of the physiology of love, _De l'Amour,_ by the side
of which Balzac's _Physiologie du Mariage_ is a mere _jeu d'esprit._
He discovered for himself, and for others after him, a method of
unemotional, minute, slightly ironical analysis, which has fascinated
modern minds, partly because it has seemed to dispense with those
difficulties of creation, of creation in the block, which the triumphs
of Balzac have only accentuated. Goriot, Valérie Marneffe, Pons,
Grandet, Madame de Mortsauf even, are called up before us after the
same manner as Othello or Don Quixote; their actions express them so
significantly that they seem to be independent of their creator; Balzac
stakes all upon each creation, and leaves us no choice but to accept or
reject each as a whole, precisely as we should a human being. We do not
know all the secrets of their consciousness, any more than we know all
the secrets of the consciousness of our friends. But we have only so
say "Valérie!" and the woman is before us. Stendhal, on the contrary,
undresses Julien's soul in public with a deliberate and fascinating
effrontery. There is not a vein of which he does not trace the course,
not a wrinkle to which he does not point, not a nerve which he does
not touch to the quick. We know everything that passed through his
mind, to result probably in some significant inaction. And at the end
of the book we know as much about that particular intelligence as the
anatomist knows about the body which he has dissected. But mean-while
the life has gone out of the body; and have we, after all, captured a
living soul?
I should be the last to say that Julien Sorel is not a creation, but
he is not a creation after the order of Balzac; it is a difference
of kind; and if we look carefully at Frédéric Moreau, and Madame
Gervaisais, and the Abbé Mouret, we shall see that these also,
profoundly different as Flaubert and Goncourt and Zola are from
Stendhal, are yet more profoundly, more radically, different from the
creations of Balzac. Balzac takes a primary passion, puts it into a
human body, and sets it to work itself out in visible action. But since
Stendhal, novelists have persuaded themselves that the primary passions
are a little common, or noisy, or a little heavy to handle, and they
have concerned themselves with passions tempered by reflection, and the
sensations of elaborate brains. It was Stendhal who substituted the
brain for the heart, as the battle-place of the novel; not the brain
as Balzac conceived it, a motive-force of action, the mainspring of
passion, the force by which a nature directs its accumulated energy;
but a sterile sort of brain, set at a great distance from the heart,
whose rhythm is too faint to disturb it. We have been intellectualising
upon Stendhal ever since, until the persons of the modern novel have
come to resemble those diaphanous jelly-fish, with balloon-like heads
and the merest tufts of bodies, which float up and down in the Aquarium
at Naples.
Thus, coming closer, as it seems, to what is called reality, in this
banishment of great emotions, and this attention upon the sensations,
modern analytic novelists are really getting further and further from
that life which is the one certain thing in the world. Balzac employs
all his detail to call up a tangible world about his men and women,
not, perhaps, understanding the full power of detail as psychology, as
Flaubert is to understand it; but, after all, his detail is only the
background of the picture; and there, stepping out of the canvas, as
the sombre people of Velazquez step out of their canvases at the Prado,
is the living figure, looking into your eyes with eyes that respond to
you like a mirror.
The novels of Balzac are full of electric fluid. To take up one of
them is to feel the shock of life, as one feels it on touching certain
magnetic hands. To turn over volume after volume is like wandering
through the streets of a great city, at that hour of the night when
human activity is at its full. There is a particular kind of excitement
inherent in the very aspect of a modern city, of London or Paris; in
the mere sensation of being in its midst, in the sight of all those
active and fatigued faces which pass so rapidly; of those long and
endless streets, full of houses, each of which is like the body of a
multiform soul, looking out through the eyes of many windows. There is
something intoxicating in the lights, the movement of shadows under the
lights, the vast and billowy sound of that shadowy movement. And there
is something more than this mere unconscious action upon the nerves.
Every step in a great city is a step into an unknown world. A new
future is possible at every street corner. I never know, when I go out
into one of those crowded streets, but that the whole course of my life
may be changed before I return to the house I have quitted.
I am writing these lines in Madrid, to which I have come suddenly,
after a long quiet in Andalusia; and I feel already a new pulse in my
blood, a keener consciousness of life, and a sharper human curiosity.
Even in Seville I, knew that I should see to-morrow, in the same
streets, hardly changed since the Middle Ages, the same people that I
had seen to-day. But here there are new possibilities, all the exciting
accidents of the modern world, of a population always changing, of
a city into which civilisation has brought all its unrest. And as
I walk in these broad, windy streets and see these people, whom I
hardly recognise for Spaniards, so awake and so hybrid are they, I
have felt the sense of Balzac coming back into my veins. At Cordova he
was unthinkable; at Cadiz I could realise only his large, universal
outlines, vague as the murmur of the sea; here I feel him, he speaks
the language I am talking, he sums up the life in whose midst I find
myself.
For Balzac is the equivalent of great cities. He is bad reading for
solitude, for he fills the mind with the nostalgia of cities. When a
man speaks to me familiarly of Balzac I know already something of the
man with whom I have to do. "The physiognomy of women does not begin
before the age of thirty," he has said; and perhaps before that age no
one can really understand Balzac. Few young people care for him, for
there is nothing in him that appeals to the senses except through the
intellect. Not many women care for him supremely, for it is part of
his method to express sentiments through facts, and not facts through
sentiments. But it is natural that he should be the favourite reading
of men of the world, of those men of the world who have the distinction
of their kind; for he supplies the key of the enigma which they are
studying.
6
The life of Balzac was one long labour, in which time, money, and
circumstances were all against him. In 1835 he writes: "I have lately
spent twenty-six days in my study without leaving it. I took the air
only at that window which dominates Paris, which I mean to dominate."
And he exults in the labour: "If there is any glory in that, I alone
could accomplish such a feat." He symbolises the course of his life
in comparing it to the sea beating against a rock: "To-day one flood,
to-morrow another, bears me along with it. I am dashed against a rock,
I recover myself and go on to another reef." "Sometimes it seems to me
that my brain is on fire. I shall die in the trenches of the intellect."
Balzac, like Scott, died under the weight of his debts; and it would
seem, if one took him at his word, that the whole of the _Human Comedy_
was written for money. In the modern world, as he himself realised more
clearly than any one, money is more often a symbol than an entity, and
it can be the symbol of every desire. For Balzac money was the key
of his earthly paradise. It meant leisure to visit the woman whom he
loved, and at the end it meant the possibility of marrying her.
There were only two women in Balzac's life: one, a woman much older
than himself, of whom he wrote, on her death, to the other: "She was
a mother, a friend, a family, a companion, a counsel, she made the
writer, she consoled the young man, she formed his taste, she wept like
a sister, she laughed, she came every day, like a healing slumber, to
put sorrow to sleep." The other was Mme. de Hanska, whom he married in
1850, three months before his death. He had loved her for twenty years;
she was married, and lived in Poland; it was only at rare intervals
that he was able to see her, and then very briefly; but his letters to
her, published since his death, are a simple, perfectly individual,
daily record of a great passion. For twenty years he existed on a
divine certainty without a future, and almost without a present. But we
see the force of that sentiment passing into his work; _Séraphita_ is
its ecstasy, everywhere is its human shadow; it refines his strength,
it gives him surprising intuitions, it gives him all that was wanting
to his genius. Mme. de Hanska is the heroine of the _Human Comedy,_ as
Beatrice is the heroine of the _Divine Comedy._
A great lover, to whom love, as well as every other passion and the
whole visible world, was an idea, a flaming spiritual perception,
Balzac enjoyed the vast happiness of the idealist. Contentedly,
joyously, he sacrificed every petty enjoyment to the idea of love, the
idea of fame, and to that need of the organism to exercise its forces,
which is the only definition of genius. I do not know, among the lives
of men of letters, a life better filled, or more appropriate. A young
man who, for a short time, was his secretary, declared: "I would not
live your life for the fame of Napoleon and of Byron combined!" The
Comte de Gramont did not realise, as the world in general does not
realise, that, to the man of creative energy, creation is at once a
necessity and a joy, and to the lover, hope in absence is the elixir
of life. Balzac tasted more than all earthly pleasures as he sat there
in his attic, creating the world over again, that he might lay it at
the feet of a woman. Certainly to him there was no tedium in life, for
there was no hour without its vivid employment, and no moment in which
to perceive the most desolate of all certainties, that hope is in the
past. His death was as fortunate as his life; he died at the height of
his powers, at the height of his fame, at the moment of the fulfilment
of his happiness, and perhaps of the too sudden relief of that delicate
burden.
1899.