THE COMEDIE HUMAINE
The idea of joining his separate books together and forming them into
a coherent whole was one that matured slowly in Balzac's mind. Its
genesis is to be found in his first collection of short novels
published in 1830 under the titles: _Scenes of Private Life_, and
containing _The Vendetta_, _Gobseck_, _The Sceaux Ball_, _The House of
the Tennis-playing Cat_, _A Double Family_, and _Peace in the
Household_. Between these stories there was no real connexion except
that certain characters in one casually reappeared or were alluded to
in another. By 1832, the _Scenes of Private Life_ had been augmented,
and, in a second edition, filled four volumes. The additions comprised
_The Message_, _The Bourse_, _The Adieu_, _The Cure of Tours_, and
several chapters of _The Woman of Thirty Years Old_, some of which had
previously come out as serials in the _Revue de Paris_ or the _Mode_.
It has already been related how the novelist all at once realized what
a gain his literary production might have in adopting a plan and
building up a social history of his epoch. And, in fact, this
conception did stimulate his activity for some time, serving too, as
long as it was uncrystallized, to concentrate his visions upon
objective realities.
Needing, between 1834 and 1837, a more comprehensive title for the
rapidly increasing list of his works, he called them _Studies of
Manners and Morals in the Nineteenth Century_, subdividing them into
_Scenes of Private Life_, _Scenes of Parisian Life_, and _Scenes of
Provincial Life_. However, some things he had written were classible
conveniently neither under the specific names nor under the generic
one. These outsiders he called _Tales and Philosophic Novels_,
subsequently shortening the title, between 1835 and 1840, to
_Philosophic Studies_. The question was what wider description could
be chosen which might embrace also this last category. Writing to
Madame Hanska in 1837, he used the expression _Social Studies_,
telling her that there would be nearly fifty volumes of them. Either
she, or he himself, must, on reflection, have judged the title
unsatisfactory, for no edition of his works ever bore this name. Most
likely the thought occurred to him that such an appellation was more
suitable to a strictly scientific treatise than to fiction.
The expression _Comedie Humaine_, which he ultimately adopted, is said
to have been suggested to him by his whilom secretary, the Count
Auguste de Belloy, after the latter's visit to Italy, during which
Dante's _Divine Comedy_ had been read and appreciated. But already,
some years prior to this journey, the novelist would seem to have had
the Italian poet's masterpiece before his mind. In his _Girl with the
Golden Eyes_, he had spoken of Paris as a hell which, perhaps, one day
would have its Dante. De Belloy's share in the matter was probably an
extra persuasion added to Balzac's own leaning, or the Count may have
been the one to substitute the word _human_.[*]
[*] A communication has been made to me, while writing this book,
by Monsieur Hetzel, the publisher, tending to show that his
father, who was also known in the literary world, had a large
share in the choice of the _Comedie Humaine_ as a title.
Madame Hanska was at once informed of the choice. "The _Comedie
Humaine_, such is the title of my history of society depicted in
action," he told her in September 1841. And when, between 1841 and
1842, Hetzel, together with Dubochet and Turne, brought out sixteen
octavo volumes of his works illustrated, they each carried his name,
while a preface set forth the reasons which had led the author to
choose it. Thereafter, every succeeding edition was similarly styled,
including Houssiaux' series in 1855, and the series of Calmann-Levy,
known as the definitive one, between 1869 and 1876.
Against the appellation itself no objection can reasonably be made.
Balzac's fiction takes in a world--an underworld might appropriately
be said--of Dantesque proportions. As soon as it was fully fledged, it
started with a large ambition. "My work," he said to Zulma Carraud in
1834, "is to represent all social effects without anything being
omitted from it, whether situation of life, physiognomy, character of
man or woman, manner of living, profession, zone of social existence,
region of French idiosyncrasy, childhood, maturity, old age, politics,
jurisdiction, war." And in the Forties the same intention was stated
as clearly. "I have undertaken the history of the whole of society.
Often have I summed up my plan in this simple sentence: A generation
is a drama in which four or five thousand people are the chief actors.
This drama is my book."
When Hetzel decided to publish a so-far complete edition of the
_Comedie_, he induced the novelist to insert a preface composed for
the occasion. Balzac wished at first to use an old preface that he had
written in conjunction with Felix Davin, and placed, under the
latter's signature, at the beginning of the _Study of Manners and
Morals in the Nineteenth Century_. Hetzel objected to this, and urged
that so important an undertaking ought to be preceded by an author's
apology. His advice was accepted, and the preface was developed into a
veritable doctrine and defence. Here are some of its essential
passages:--
"The _Comedie Humaine_," says Balzac, "first dawned on my brain like a
dream--one of those impossible projects, it seemed, that are caressed
and allowed to fly away; a chimera which smiles, shows its woman's
face, and forthwith unfolds its wings, mounting again into a fancied
heaven. But the chimera, as many chimeras do, changed into reality. It
had its commands and its tyranny to which I was obliged to yield.
"It was born from a comparison between humanity and animality. It
would be an error to believe that the great quarrel which in recent
times has arisen between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire is
concerned with a scientific innovation. The _unity of composition_
involved in it had already, under other terms, occupied the greatest
minds of the two preceding centuries. On reading over again the
extraordinary works of such mystic writers as Swedenborg,
Saint-Martin, etc., who have studied the relations of science with the
infinite, and the writings of the finest geniuses in natural history,
such as Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., one finds in the
monads of Leibnitz, in the organic molecules of Buffon, in the
vegetative force of Needham, in the _jointing_ of similar parts of
Charles Bonnet--who was bold enough to write in 1760: 'The animal
vegetates like the plant;' one finds, I say, the rudiments of the
beautiful law of _self for self_ on which the unity of composition
reposes. There is only one animal. The Creator has made use only of
one and the same pattern for all organized beings. The animal is a
principle which acquires its exterior form, or, to speak more exactly,
the differences of its form, in the surroundings in which it is called
upon to develop. The various zoologic species result from these
differences. The proclamation and upholding of this system, in
harmony, moreover, with the ideas we have of the Divine power, will be
the eternal honour of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who was the vanquisher
of Cuvier on this point of high science, and whose triumph was
acknowledged in the last article written by the great Goethe."
Continuing his exposition, the novelist says all men resemble each
other, but in the same manner as a horse resembles a bird. They are
also divided into species. These species differ according to social
surroundings. A peasant, a tradesman, an artist, a great lord are as
distinct from each other as a wolf is from a sheep. Besides, there is
another thing peculiar to man, viz. that male and female are not
alike, whereas among the rest of the animals, the female is similar to
the male. The wife of a shopkeeper is sometimes worthy to be the
spouse of a prince, and often a prince's wife is not worth an
artist's. Then, again, there is this difference. The lower animals are
strictly dependent on circumstances, each species feeding and housing
itself in a uniform manner. Man has not such uniformity. In Paris, he
is not the same as in a provincial town; in the provinces, not the
same as in rural surroundings. When studying him, there are many
things to be considered--habitat, furniture, food, clothes, language.
In fine, the subject taken up by a novelist who wishes to treat it
properly, comprises man as an integral portion of a social species,
woman as not peculiarly belonging to any, and _entourage_ from its
widest circumference of country down to the narrowest one of home.
"But," he goes on, "how is it possible to render the drama of life
interesting, with the three or four thousand varying characters
presented by a society? How please at the same time the philosopher,
and the masses who demand poetry and philosophy under striking images?
If I conceived the importance and poetry of this history of the human
heart, I saw no means of execution; for, down to our epoch, the most
celebrated narrators had spent their talent in creating one or two
typical characters, in depicting one phase of life. With this thought,
I read the works of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, the modern _trouvere_,
was then giving a gigantic vogue to a kind of composition unjustly
called secondary. Is it not really harder to compete with the registry
of births, marriages, and deaths by means of Daphnis and Chloe,
Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa,
Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Ossian, Julie d'Etanges, My Uncle Toby,
Werther, Rene, Corinne, Adolphe, Gil Blas, Paul and Virginia, Jeanie
Deans, Claverhouse, Ivanhoe, Manfred, Mignon, than to arrange facts
almost similar among all nations, to seek for the spirit of laws
fallen into decay, to draw up theories which lead people astray, or,
as certain metaphysicians, to explain what exists? First of all,
nearly all these characters, whose existence becomes longer, more
genuine than that of the generations amid which they are made to be
born, live only on condition of being a vast image of the present.
Conceived in the womb of the century, the whole human heart moves
beneath their outward covering; it often conceals a whole philosophy.
Walter Scott, therefore, raised to the philosophic value of history
the novel--that literature which from century to century adorns with
immortal diamonds the poetic crown of the countries where letters are
cultivated. He put into it the spirit of ancient times; he blended in
it at once drama, dialogue, portraiture, landscape, description; he
brought into it the marvellous and the true, those elements of the
epopee; he made poetry mingle in it with the humblest sorts of
language. But having less invented a system than found out his manner
in the ardour of work, or by the logic of this work, he had not
thought of linking his compositions to each other so as to co-ordinate
a complete history, each chapter of which would have been a novel and
each novel an epoch. Perceiving this want of connection, which, indeed
does not render the Scotchman less great, I saw both the system that
was favourable to the execution of my work, and the possibility of
carrying it out. Although, so to speak, dazzled by the surprising
fecundity of Walter Scott, always equal to himself and always
original, I did not despair, for I found the reason of such talent in
the variety of human nature. _Chance is the greatest novelist in the
world._ To be fertile, one has only to study it. French society was to
be the historian. I was to be only the secretary. By drawing up an
inventory of virtues and vices, by assembling the principal facts of
passions, by painting characters, by choosing the principal events of
society, by composing types through the union of several homogeneous
characters, perhaps I should succeed in writing the history forgotten
by so many historians, that of _manners and morals_. With much
patience and courage, I should realize, with regard to France in the
nineteenth century, the book we all regret which Rome, Athens, Tyre,
Memphis, Persia, India have not unfortunately left about their
civilizations, and which like the Abbe Barthelemy, the courageous and
patient Monteil had essayed for the Middle Ages, but in a form not
very attractive."
One may well believe the novelist when he explains that "it was no
small task to depict the two or three thousand prominent figures of an
epoch," representing typical phases in all existences, which, says he,
"is one of the accuracies I have most sought for. I have tried to give
a notion also of the different parts of our beautiful land. My work
has its geography, as it has its genealogy and its families, its
places and things, its persons and its facts, as it has its blazonry,
its nobles and its commoners, its artisans and its peasants, its
politicians and its dandies, its army, in fine, its epitome of life
--all this in its settings and galleries."
The Human Comedy, as finally arranged and classified in 1845, had
three chief divisions: _Studies of Manners and Morals_, _Philosophic
Studies_, _Analytic Studies_; and the first of these was subdivided
into _Scenes of Private Life_, _Scenes of Provincial Life_, _Scenes of
Parisian Life_, _Scenes of Military Life_, _Scenes of Political Life_,
_Scenes of Country Life_.
Even if we include the unwritten books, the diminution from first to
second and from second to third is considerable. In the novelist's
mind, this difference was intentional. According to his conception,
the first large series represented the broad base of effects, upon
which was superposed the second plane of causes, less numerous and
more concentrated. In the latter, he strove to answer the why and
wherefore of sentiments; in the former, to exhibit their action in
varying modes. In the former, therefore, he represented individuals;
in the latter, his individuals became types. All this he detailed to
Madame Hanska, insisting on the statement that everywhere he gave life
to the type by individualizing it, and significance to the individuals
by rendering them typical. At the top of the cone he treated, in his
analytical studies, of the principles whence causes and effects
proceed. The manners and morals at the base, he said, were the
spectacle; the causes above were the side-scenes; and the principles
at the top were the author.
Coming to the subdivisions, he explains that his _Scenes of Private
Life_ deal with humanity's childhood and adolescence, and the errors
of these, in short, with the period of budding passions; the _Scenes
of Provincial Life_, with passions in full development--calculation,
interest, ambition, etc.; the _Scenes of Parisian Life_, with the
peculiar tastes, vices and temptations of capitals, that is to say,
with passion unbridled. The interpretation assigned to these
categories is a fanciful one. Passions are born and bred and produce
their full effect in every place and phase of life. They may assume
varying forms in divers surroundings, but such variation has no
analogy with change of age. Only by forcing the moral of his stories
was the author able to give them these secondary significations.
Indeed, he was often in straits to decide in which category he ought
to class one and another novel. _Pere Goriot_ was originally in the
_Scenes of Parisian Life_, where it has a certain _raison d'etre_.
Ultimately, it found its way into the _Scenes of Private Life_. And a
greater alteration was made by removing _Madame Firmiani_ and the
_Woman-Study_ from the _Philosophic Studies_, and placing them also in
the _Private Life_ series.
Be it granted that the plan of the _Comedy_ was grandiose in its
scope; it was none the less doomed in its execution to suffer for its
ambitiousness, since an attempt was made to subordinate imagination to
science in a domain where the rights of imagination were paramount.
That which Balzac has best rendered in it is the struggle for life on
the social plane; and that which forms its most legitimate claim to be
deemed in some measure a whole is the general reference to this in all
the so-called parts. Before the Revolution, the action of the law was
narrower, being chiefly limited to members of one class. With the fall
of ancient privilege the sphere of competition was opened to the
entire nation; and, instead of nobles contending with nobles,
churchmen with churchmen, tradesmen with tradesmen, there was an
interpenetration of combatants over all the field of battle, or
rather, the several smaller fields of battle became one large one.
Balzac's fiction reproduces the later phase in minute detail, and,
mostly, with a treatment suited to the subject.
Brunetiere, whose chapter on the _Comedy_ is written more gropingly
than the rest of his study of the novelist, makes use of an ingenious
comparison with intent to persuade that the stories had from the very
first a predestined organic union, with ramifications which the author
saw but obscurely and which were joined together more closely--as also
more consciously--during the lapse of years. "Thus," he says,
"brothers and sisters, in the time of their infancy or childhood, have
nothing in common except a certain family resemblance--and this not
always. But, as they advance in age, the features that individualized
them become attenuated, they return to the type of their progenitors,
and one perceives that they are children of the same father and
mother. Balzac's novels," he concludes, "have a connection of this
kind. In his head, they were, so to speak, contemporary."
The simile is not a happy one. It does not help to reconcile us to an
artificial approximation of books that are heterogeneous, unequal in
value, and, frequently, composed under influences far removed from the
after-thought that was given to them by a putative father. Balzac was
not well inspired in relating his novels to each other logically. Such
natural relationship as they possess is that of issuing from the same
brain, though acting under varying conditions and in different states
of development; and it is true that, if the story of this brain is
known, and its experiences understood, a certain classification might
be made--perhaps more than one--of its creations, on account of common
traits, resemblances of subject or treatment, which could serve to
link them together loosely. But, between this arrangement and the
artificial hierarchy of the _Comedy_, it is impossible to find a bridge
to pass over.
One of the real links betwixt the novels is the reappearance of the
same people in many of them, which thing is not in itself displeasing.
It has the advantage of allowing the author to display his men and
women in changed circumstances, to cast side-lights upon them, and to
reveal them more completely. However, here and there, we pay for the
privilege in meeting with bores whose further acquaintance we would
fain have been spared. And then, also, we are likely enough to come
across a hero or heroine as a child, after learning all about his or
her maturer life; to accompany people to the grave and see them
buried, and yet, in a later book, to be introduced to them as alive as
ever they were. This is disconcerting. Usually, Balzac remembers his
characters well enough to be consistent in other respects when he
makes them speak and act, or lets us into his confidence about them.
Still, he is guilty of a few lapses of memory. In _The Woman of Thirty
Years Old_, Madame d'Aiglemont has two children in the early chapters;
subsequently, one is drowned, and, instead of one remaining, we learn
there are three--a new reading of Wordsworth's _We are seven_. Again,
in the _Lost Illusions_, Esther Gobseck has blond hair in one
description of her, and black in another. We are reduced to supposing
she had dyed it. Mistakes of the kind have been made by others writers
of fiction who have worked quickly. In the _Comedy_, the number of
_dramatis personae_ is exceedingly large. Balzac laughingly remarked
one day that they needed a biographical dictionary to render their
identity clear; and he added that perhaps somebody would be tempted to
do the work at a later date. He guessed rightly. In 1893, Messrs.
Cerfbeer and Cristophe undertook the task and carried it through in a
book that they call the _Repertory of the Comedie Humaine_.[*] All the
fictitious personages or petty folk that live in the novelist's pages
are duly docketed, and their births, marriages, deaths, and stage
appearances recorded in this _Who's Who_, a big volume of five hundred
and sixty-three pages, constituting a veritable curiosity of
literature.
[*] This work has been made available at Project Gutenberg by Team
Balzac. It is in two volumes.--Preparer's Note.
Much has been said in the preceding chapters of the large use Balzac
made of his own life, his adventures, his experiences, in composing
the integral portions of his _Comedy_, so that its contents, for any
one who can interpret, becomes a valuable autobiography. And the
lesser as well as the greater novels supply facts. In the _Forsaken
Woman_, Madame de Beauseant, who has been jilted by the Marquis of
Ajuda-Pinto, permits herself to be wooed by Gaston de Nueil, a man far
younger than herself. After ten years, he, in turn, quits her to marry
the person his mother has chosen for him; but, unable to bear the
combined burden of his remorse and yearning regret, he commits
suicide. This tale, like the _Lily in the Valley_, is a adaptation of
Balzac's liaison with Madame de Berny. It was written in the very year
he severed the material ties that bound them. The only distinction
between his case and that of Gaston de Nueil was that he had no desire
to kill himself, and was content to be no more than a friend, since he
was the freer to flirt with Madame de Castries. And when the latter
lady kept him on tenter-hooks, tormenting him, tempting him, but never
yielding to him, he revenged himself by writing the _Duchess de
Langeais_, attributing to the foolish old general his own hopes,
fears, and disappointments at the hands of the coquettish, capricious
duchess. "I alone," he said in a letter, "know the horrible that is in
this narrative." And, if, in _Albert Savarus_, we have a confession of
his political ambitions and campaigns, we get in _Cesar Birotteau_ and
the _Petty Bourgeois_ his financial projects, which never brought him
anything; in _A Man of Business_--as well as elsewhere--his continual
money embarrassments. How deeply he felt them, he often lets us gather
from his fiction. "I have been to a capitalist," he wrote in one of
his epistles to Madame Hanska, "a capitalist to whom are due
indemnities agreed on between us for works promised and not executed;
and I offered him a certain number of copies of the _Studies of
Manners and Morals_. I proposed five thousand francs with deferred
payment, instead of three thousand francs cash. He refused everything,
even my signature and a bill, telling me my fortune was in my talent
and that I might die any time. This scene is one of the most infamous
I have known. Some day I will reproduce it."
And he did, with many things else that happened to him in his dealings
with his fellows. There is biography too, as well as autobiography in
the _Comedy_--this notwithstanding his disclaimers. Exact portraiture
he avoided for obvious reasons, but intentional portraiture he
indulged in largely; and life and character were sufficiently near the
truth for shrewd contemporaries to recognize the originals. To add one
or two examples to the number already given. Claire Brunne (Madame
Marbouty) seems to have suggested his _Muse of the County_, a
Berrichon blue-stocking; Madame d'Agoult and Liszt became Madame de
Rochfide and the musician Conti in _Beatrix_; a cousin of Madame
Hanska, Thaddeus Wylezinski, who worshipped her discreetly, is
depicted under the traits of Thaddeus Paz, a Polish exile in the
_False Mistress_, who assumes a feigned name to conceal his love;
Lamartine furnished the conception of the poet Canalis in _Modeste
Mignon_, the resemblance being at first so striking that the novelist
afterwards toned it away a little; and Monnier, the caricaturist,
certainly supplied the essential elements in Bixiou, who is so well
drawn in _Cousin Bette_ and the _Firm of Nucingen_. The Baron Nucingen
himself has some of the features of the James de Rothschild whom
Balzac knew; and Rastignac embodied the author's impression of Thiers
in the statesman's earlier years. One might go further and couple
Delacroix the painter's name with that of Joseph Bridau in _A
Bachelor's Household_, Frederick Lemaitre, the actor's, with Medal's
in _Cousin Pons_, Emile de Girardin's with du Tillet's in _Cesar
Birotteau_. At last, however, owing to the mingling of one personality
with another, identification is increasingly difficult, unless the
novelist comes to our assistance, as in the story _Cousin Bette_,
where he confesses Lisbeth the old maid, to be made up out of three
persons, Madame Valmore, Madame Hanska's aunt, and his own mother.
Summing up Balzac's entire literary production, which in Monsieur de
Lovenjoul's catalogue occupies no fewer than fourteen pages, we find
that it comprises, besides the ninety-six different works of the
_Comedie Humaine_ properly so called, ten volumes of his early novels;
six complete dramatic pieces--one, the _School for Husbands and Wives_
recently published;[*] thirty _Contes Drolatiques_; and three hundred
and fourteen articles and opuscles, some of them fairly long, since
the _Reminiscences of a Pariah_ has a hundred and eighty-four pages
octavo, the _Theory of Walking_ fifty, the _Code of Honest People_ a
hundred and twelve, the _Impartial History of the Jesuits_ eighty;
these exclusive of the _Revue Parisienne_ with its two hundred and
twenty pages, which, as we have seen, was written entirely by himself.
When we remember that the whole of this, with the exception of the
early novels and six of the opuscles, was produced in twenty years, we
can better appreciate the man's industry, which, as Monsieur Le Breton
calculates, yielded an average of some two thousand pages, or four to
five volumes a year.
[*] Played for the first time March 13, 1910, at the Odeon Theatre.
In the miscellanies one meets with much that is curious, amusing, and
instructive, quite worthy to figure in the _Comedy_--witty dialogues,
light stories containing deductions _a la_ Sherlock Holmes or Edgar
Allan Poe, plenty of satire, sometimes acidulated as in his _Troubles
and Trials of an English Cat_, and theories about everything,
indicative of extensive reading, large assimilation and quick
reasoning. The miscellanies really stand to the novels in the relation
of a sort of prolegomenon. They serve for its better understanding,
and are agreeable even for independent study.