THE COMÉDIE HUMAINE.
“One would say he had read the inscription on the gates of
Busyrane,—‘Be bold;’ and on the second gate,—‘Be bold, be bold, and
evermore be bold;’ and then again had paused well at the third
gate,—‘Be not too bold.’”—EMERSON, _Plato._
The general plan and outline of the “Comédie Humaine” originated in a
comparison between humanity and animal existence. That which Buffon had
achieved in zoölogy, Balzac proposed to accomplish in moral science,
and the habits and customs as well as the vices and virtues of his
contemporaries found in him a secretary whose inventory offers to
posterity an elaborate insight into the every-day life of France in the
nineteenth century, and realizes for their future curiosity that work
which the ancient monarchies have neglected to bequeath to us as their
own civilizations.
But the pictures of two or three thousand of the most striking figures
of an epoch required, in a general history of society, not only frames
but galleries, and the work therefore is divided into,
Scènes de la Vie Privée.
Scènes de la Vie de Province.
Scènes de la Vie Parisienne.
Scènes de la Vie Politique.
Scènes de la Vie Militaire.
Scènes de la Vie de Campagne.
These six subdivisions are grouped under the general title of “Études
de Mœurs,” and in them the attempt has been made to examine and explain
the general causes of earthly happiness and misery, as demonstrated in
the results obtainable in the practice of the great principles of order
and mortality, or in the selfish abandonment to purely personal
interests.
Happiness, Balzac considered, consisted in the exercise of our
faculties as applied to realities. But inasmuch as its principles vary
with each latitude, and ideas of right and wrong find their
modifications in the climate, he concluded that morals and convictions
were valueless terms, and that happiness was to be found, first, in
violent emotions which undermine existence; second, in regular
occupations functionating like mechanism; or, lastly, in the study of
the laws of nature and in the application of the lessons thereby
derived.
In his treatment of this subject he has prepared a complete history of
the effects of the agitation of social existence, and each of the
foregoing divisions represents a particular aspect of life.
In the “Scènes de la Vie Privée,” life is represented between the last
developments of childhood and the first calculations of virility. These
scenes contain tableaux of the emotions and undefined sensations
combined with pictures of the errors committed through ignorance of the
exigencies of the world.
The “Scènes de la Vie de Province” represents that phase of existence
in which passions, calculations, and ideas take the place of
sensations, impulses, and illusions. The instincts of the young man of
twenty are generous; at thirty he calculates and turns egotist. These
scenes therefore initiate the reader into the thousand aspects of the
transition through which a man passes when abandoning the thoughtless
impulses of adolescence for the politic attitudes of manhood. Life
becomes serious: positive interests jostle with violent passions,
disillusions begin, the social machinery is revealed, and from the
shock of moral or pecuniary interests the crime bursts in the midst of
the most tranquil household.
Herein are unveiled the petty annoyances by whose periodicity a
poignant interest is concentrated in the slightest detail of existence.
Herein are also exposed the petty rivalries, the jealousies born of
vicinage, and the family worries, whose increasing force degrades and
weakens the most resolute will. The charm of dreams escapes; the
prosaic and the matter of fact alone exist; woman reasons, and no
longer feels; she calculates where before she gave. Life is now ripened
and shaded.
In the “Scènes de la Vie Parisienne” the questions are enlarged, and
existence painted in bold outlines gradually arrives at the frontiers
of decrepitude. Herein purity of sentiment is exceptional: it is broken
in the play of interests and scattered by the mechanism of the world.
Virtue is calumniated, innocence is purchased. Passions become vices,
emotions ruinous gratifications; everything is analyzed, bought, and
sold. Life is a bazaar; humanity has but two forms, that of the
deceiver and the deceived; it is a struggle and a combat, and the
victor is he who best throttles society and moulds it to his own ends.
The death of relatives is awaited; the honest man is a simpleton;
generosity is a means, religion a governmental necessity, probity a
policy; everything is marketable; absurdity is an advertisement,
ridicule a passport, and youth, which has lived a hundred years,
insults old age.
These scenes close the tableaux of individual existence, and their
three frameworks contain representations of youth, manhood, and old
age. First the bloom of life, the expansion of the soul, and the
radiance of love; then come the calculations, the transformation of
affection into passion; and, lastly, the accumulation of interests and
the continual satisfaction of the senses joined to the inevitable
weariness of mind and body.
Nothing but that which affects the individual proper has herein been
treated, and the fragments of the “Scènes de la Vie Politique” express,
in consequence, a wider range of thought. In these pages the actors
represent the interest of the masses, and place themselves above those
laws to which the types in the preceding series were subjected. The
foregoing divisions described the constant antagonism of thought and
sentiment, but in these scenes thought is an organizing force and
sentiment is completely abolished. They are, however, incomplete, as
are also the “Scènes de la Vie Militaire,” in which Balzac proposed to
represent the action as taking place, not in an apartment, but on the
battle-field; not in the struggle of man with man, but in the
concussion of France and Europe, in the slaughter of the conquered and
the pæans of the victors.
After these pages, whose completion was prevented by his sudden death,
the calm and peaceful pictures of the “Scènes de la Vie de Campagne”
follow in orderly sequence. They represent rest after exertion,
landscapes after interiors, the hush of the country after the uproar of
the city, the cicatrice after the wound. This last division contains
the same interests and the same struggles, but weakened now by lack of
contact, like passions grown dull in solitude. It is the twilight of a
busy day, a summer evening solemn with sombre shadows. It contains the
purest characters and the application of the great principles of order,
morality, and religion, and its actors, worn with the fatigues of the
world, mingle complacently with the innocence of childhood.[14]
Thus completed, the entire work has its geography and its own
genealogy, its localities and their concomitants, its personages and
their deeds. It has its own armorial, its nobility and middle class,
its artisans, its peasants, and its army. It is a world in itself. But
its most striking feature is the admirable unity preserved throughout;
and this unity is undoubtedly due to a suggestion derived from the
works of Sir Walter Scott, whom Balzac considered as a gifted sculptor
who chiseled magnificent figures and draped them with genius and
sublimity, but, while presenting the seductive effects of a marvelous
analysis, left them lacking in synthesis and totally unrelated.
“The Waverley Novels,” he said,[15] “resemble the Musée de la Rue des
Petits-Augustins, in which each object, while magnificent in design,
relates but to itself. Genius is complete only when to the faculty of
creating it joins the power of coördinating its creations. The gifts of
observation and description are in themselves insufficient; they must
tend to a certain result. The Scotch bard was possessed of too clear a
vision not to have understood this axiom, but its understanding
assuredly came too late.” To this reflection the unity of the “Comédie
Humaine” is probably due; and that it may not be objected that certain
of its passages are unrelated to the others, it is well to note that
Balzac died too suddenly to be able to connect the broken threads,
which in any event are but few and far between.
But the task of rendering his work at once interesting and instructive
was one of much greater difficulty than that of Scott’s, who drew his
characters from former days, when every class of society was clearly
defined, and clothed them from a wardrobe opulent with historical
effects; whereas Balzac was obliged to offer in clear relief the almost
imperceptible differences of the types of yesterday and to-day, that
through an equality of fortune and education have destroyed the
contrasts which once existed between the different degrees of the
social order. Aided, however, by that peculiar intuition which never
forsook him, he chose from among the physiognomies of his epoch an
assortment of those fugitive traits which are imperceptible to the eyes
of the vulgar; and in scrutinizing face after face, attentive to the
changes of expression and inflections of voice, he was enabled to
present a series of individualities which are far more realistic than
those of his illustrious predecessor.
After displaying in the “Études de Mœurs” all the moral and physical
transformations through which mankind passes, and after describing the
social effects of their natural or civil positions, Balzac sought in
the “Études Philosophiques” to demonstrate the causes of these effects;
and while the first part of the “Comédie Humaine” contains but a series
of individualities typified in the treatment of his subject, in the
second part are to be found the same types individualized: as, for
example, where in the “Études de Mœurs” Grandet is purely and simply a
miser, avarice in the “Études Philosophiques” is incarnated in the
person of Maître Cornélius, and the subject, like a sponge, gains in
weight what it loses in breadth.
The “Études Philosophiques” is the fruit of analyzed comparisons of all
the works which the philosophers of antiquity and the specialists of
his day had produced on the intellect; and starting with the famous
axiom of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that “l’homme qui pense est un animal
dépravé,”—an idea which, as is well known, found its poetic
interpretation in Byron’s “Manfred,” and its dramatic aspect in the
“Faust” of Goethe,—Balzac proceeds to prove that ideas and sentiments
are simply dissolvents of a greater or less activity; and taking as his
premises the admitted fact that instincts violently excited by
factitious or fortuitous circumstances produce unconsciousness and even
death, and also that thought, when augmented by the transitory force of
passion, may become a poison or a dagger, he infers, from the ravages
produced by the intellect, that thought is the most active agent in the
disorganization of man, and consequently of society. “Consider,” he
says in “Louis Lambert,” “the difference between man who desires
nothing and lives like a plant for a hundred years, and the creating
artist who suffers early death. Where the sun is, there is thought and
brevity of existence; where the cold is, there is torpor and
longevity.” Then, after considering man as a simple organization, he
brandishes the proposition that vitality decreases in exact proportion
to the strength of desire and the dissipation of thought, and leads the
reader, therewith, through the gradual development of his theory, which
is first attacked in “La Peau de Chagrin.” This weird and fantastic
production, in which skepticism and the supernatural join hands,
represents the ravages of thought and the supreme expression of egotism
as seared by the hot iron of civilization.
In “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” the theme is continued, but viewed in a
broader and more comprehensive light. In “La Peau de Chagrin,” the
individual is destroyed by the force of desire. In “La Recherche de
l’Absolu,” the pursuit of an idea annihilates an entire family. The
first is the world of pleasure, an epoch in itself; the second is the
world of science, and glitters with brilliant hypotheses. In both
instances, an idea, gradually strengthened, becomes a passion and a
disorganizing force. In “L’Adieu,” happiness, exalted to the highest
degree, becomes a destructive agency. In “Le Réquisitionnaire”, a
mother is killed by the violence of maternal affection. In “El
Verdugo,” a father is slain by his son that a title may be preserved.
In “Le Drame au Bord de la Mer,” a son is slain by his father that an
hereditary instinct may be destroyed. In “Maître Cornélius,” avarice
kills the miser. In “Le Chef d’Œuvre Inconnu,” art kills the artist. In
“Gambara,” the composer is crazed by his own conceptions. In “L’Enfant
Maudit,” terror is the destroyer, and the subject treated herein finds
a natural and logical sequence in the “Auberge Rouge.” In “Les
Proscrits,” the sentiment of religion becomes the destroyer, and in
“Séraphita” the same idea is more vividly presented. “César Birotteau,”
an existence untroubled by misery, is, through sudden good fortune, cut
off as by a scythe. In the “Église,” the agent is incredulity, but in
“Louis Lambert” is to be found the most severe deduction from the
fundamental proposition in that it represents the thinker killed by
thought.
The destructive power of the mind and imagination, from the Neronian
conflagration to the suicide of Castlereagh and Chatterton, the aphasia
of Emerson, and the insanity of Tourgénieff, is too well known and too
thoroughly understood to need further commentary in these pages; and in
connection with this it need but be said that, while the attraction of
gravity had been witnessed by countless generations, as it remained to
Newton to formulate the obvious propositions of cause and effect, so in
this branch of mental science, whose results have been patent since the
beginning of history, a Balzac was necessary for the full elucidation
of the subject, and for the proper presentation of the conclusions
derived from the psycho-mental evidence of ages.
After having, in the “Études de Mœurs,” described society in every
aspect, and demonstrated in the “Études Philosophiques” all the
underlying causes of the general results, Balzac proposed in the third
and last division of the “Comédie Humaine,” namely, in the “Études
Analytiques,” to examine the principles upon which the first two rest.
This last division, however, is one of the few unfinished windows of
his Aladdin’s palace, for, out of the six volumes which it was to
contain, two only were written before death intervened. These two
works, the “Physiologie du Mariage” and the “Petites Misères de la Vie
Conjugale,” are a series of duos between husband and wife, augmented at
times by the tenor notes of the _amant._ The first is dedicated to the
reader, and contains the deceptions of the husband; the second, those
of the wife. At once malicious and diabolically witty, these two books
are as delicately analytical as the deductions of Leuwenhoeck and
Swammerdam, and abound with that peculiar though refreshing condiment
which is generally known as Gallic salt.
It is to be regretted that these two books, the first of which was
published at the outset of the author’s career, and the second towards
the close of his life, were not strengthened and augmented by the
others with which he proposed to accompany them, and whose subjects and
titles—namely, “Anatomie des Corps Enseignants,” “Pathologie de la Vie
Sociale,” “Monographie de la Vertu,” “Dialogue Philosophique et
Politique sur la Perfection du XIXe Siècle”—have alone descended to
us; for this vein of literary treasure can never be profitably worked
save by another Balzac or a modern Aristophanes.
It was in 1844 that Balzac said, “The first half of the present century
will be found to have been greatly influenced by four men,—Napoleon,
Cuvier, O’Connell, and myself. The first lived on the blood of Europe,
the second espoused the globe, the third became the incarnation of an
entire race, while I shall have carried a complete society in my brain.”
Though almost another half century has now elapsed since these words
were uttered, it would seem that the influence which he was then
conscious of exerting is even more vigorous than before. The characters
which he painted formed, it is true, part of a Paris now dead and
forgotten, but the types have survived, and the lessons which he
deduced therefrom are as eminently instructive now as they were in the
days when he wrote; and while, taking the world at large as the
groundwork of his edifice, man was necessarily but the detail, he has,
in his description thereof, painted him in every phase,—consequent and
inconsequent, neither completely good nor completely vicious, logical
at times, and sometimes great, but incessantly opposing his own
interests to the laws of society in that gigantic struggle of customs
and sentiments which is as inconsistent to-day as it was fifty years
ago.
When the “fiat lux” was pronounced, and man completed, Balzac turned to
his natural companion, and in his portraiture of woman not a single
type is lacking. Herein he is unexcelled and unsurpassable. That which
Euripides considered as the most terrible of all misfortunes, and De
Maistre nothing but a beautiful animal, found its most graphic
expression through him. As a faithful naturalist, he has, in descending
the spiral of civilization, described and classified the _femina
simplex_; but the ideal woman, sublime in her errors, magnificent in
her devotion, and royal in her forgiveness, has found her geographer in
him. His descriptions of Madame de Beauséant, the Duchesse de Langeais,
Madame Firmiani, the Countess in “Colonel Chabert,” Madame Claës,
Madame Jules, Madame de Montsauf, Béatrix, and Mademoiselle des Touches
comprise woman almost in her entirety; they are landmarks in
psychological study; and so true to nature are they that their
appearance marked a new era in literature.
It is in these portraits that Balzac is most realistic; and while a few
of the most admirable among them are sometimes erring, yet it will be
admitted that womankind is not composed exclusively of angels;
perfection is often dull, and a fault may be a virtue. By way of
contrast, however, he has, in Eugénie Grandet, Madame Firmiani, Madame
de la Chanterie, Marguerite Claës, Madame Jules, Agathe Rouget,
Pierrette, Madame Hulot, and Ursule Mirouët, not only solved the
difficult problem of rendering virtue interesting, but he has created
in frames of impeccable beauty a series of irreproachable Madonnas.
His revelation of woman is completed in a special and parallel study of
love. Love he considered the mainspring of humanity; without it,
religion, history, romance, and art would be useless; and he has
analyzed, dissected, and explained its every phase, hesitation,
palpitation, and tenderness.
Beyond the scenic effects which he lent to passion, Balzac entered
thoroughly into the specialties of trade and profession, and it seems
almost incredible that one mind could have grappled with the details of
the practice of law which are so admirably described in the “Contrat de
Mariage,” in his portrait of Derville the lawyer, Peerquin the notary,
and the proceedings in “César Birotteau,” while imagining such types as
Vautrin, who dominated Paris from the depths of the galleys, or La
Fille aux yeux d’or languishing in her octagonal boudoir.
As Bianchou he is alienist and physician; in Dr. Mirouët he is medium
and mesmerist; he is a miser in Grandet and discounter in Gobseck; he
is vicar at Tours and old maid at Issoudun. None better than he has
described that class of fascinating scoundrels of which Rastignac is
the type, nor painted more clearly the heralds of _ennui_ and
philosophers of satiety than he has done in De Marsay and Maxime de
Trailles. In “Les Deux Poètes” he is printer and manufacturer of paper;
in the “Cousin Pons” he presents the flower of an imagination
intoxicated with the master paintings of great artists; while in the
“Illusions Perdues” the journalist is dissected and the publisher
decomposed.
In the veins of his characters there is not a drop of ink; they live,
move, and have their being, and their eyelashes are as delicately
finished as their epigrams.
Starting from the mud and vermin of Parisian by-ways, and ascending to
the steps of the throne, Balzac garnered every possible type, no two of
which are similar; each is original and all are profoundly human; and
while the dregs of London are not further removed from the splendors of
Teheran than is mother Nourrison from the Duc de Grandlieu, yet
Balzac’s intuition divined the one as clearly as he described the other.
In his transitions and contrasts, however, there is as little
abruptness as there is in the marriage of the blue of the skies with
the green of a landscape; changes follow in orderly and natural
sequence, and the mind of the reader is only confused at the
multiplicity of his attainments, which present in turn houses and
costumes, interiors and countries, intermingled with plot, science,
religion, politics, agriculture, erudition, mysticism, and wit.
Balzac was also a delicious landscape painter, and his scenes from
Brittany in “Les Chouans,” his landscapes of Touraine and particularly
that of Vouvay in “La Femme de Trente Ans,” the grand sketch of Norway
in “Séraphita,” that of the Mediterranean island in “La Duchesse de
Langeais,” are cited by Davin as masterpieces of graphic description.
The resources of Balzac’s genius are perhaps as clearly exhibited in
“Eugénie Grandet” as in any of his other works, and the appearance of
this romance gave the keynote to the present Realistic school. “Eugénie
Grandet” is the conquest of absolute truth in art. It is the drama
applied to the most simple events of life; the fusion of the trivial
and the sublime, the pathetic and the grotesque. It is a picture of
life as it is, and the model of what a novel should be.
The _motif_ here commenced is admirably continued in “Le Curé de
Tours,” which contains none of those elements heretofore considered
indispensable in the manufacture of fiction. From these pages love and
marriage are banished; there is barely an event to be mentioned, yet
the dumb, tortuous struggle between the two priests is at once clear
cut and peculiarly vivid. Herein the most humble trivialities of the
subject are elevated and dramatized, and to attentive eyes this book
will perhaps contain the secret of Balzac’s superiority; for as no rôle
is poor to a good actor, Balzac in this story demonstrates that nothing
was small beneath his pen.
The interiors of Gerard Dow, with their vast chimneys lit by flickering
flames, their polished floors, walls hung with tapestries, their
sculptured cornices and quaint and curious furniture, their shadowed
backgrounds and doors which seem about to open upon some mysterious
room, are to be found in “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” in which the
opulent detail of the Flemish school is equaled, if not surpassed.
Here, as in “Eugénie Grandet,” the drama is formed of the fusion of the
trivial and the sublime, and for the proper presentation of the subject
he extracted from the past of chemistry its possibilities for the
future.
This work, as is the case with almost all his others, contains evidence
of the most obstinate researches; and in this respect it may be noted
that the majority of his books are the result of patient labor and
prolonged meditations.
“Ursule Mirouët,” one of his most chaste conceptions, is the fruit of
exhaustive experiments in clairvoyance. “Séraphita” was born of the
suggestions of a hundred works of the mystics. “César Birotteau” is a
text-book on bankruptcy.
The production of “Gambara” and “Massimillia Doni” necessitated not
only a thorough musical schooling, but vast operatic knowledge, and
before attacking his subject Balzac engaged a violinist to saturate him
with Rossini. “La Grande Bretèche” is the essence of the Causes
Célèbres, and dowered French literature with a new shudder. The
“Contrat de Mariage” is a code of legal _finesse._
“Maître Cornélius,” which with the exception of “Catherine de Médicis”
contains the only ghosts that he has evoked from the night of the past,
is an attempt to rehabilitate Louis XI., and to refute the historical
portion of “Quentin Durward.”
“Les Deux Proscrits” was the result of prolonged meditations on the
works of Dante, while “La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin” is a
dictionary of prison slang.
But the works for which he cared the most and on which he expended the
greatest amount of labor were “Louis Lambert” and “Le Médecin de
Campagne.”
In “Louis Lambert,” he asks whether electricity is not the basis of the
particular fluid from which ideas are derived, and proceeds thereupon
to consider thought as a complete system similar to that of vegetation;
and after analyzing the birth, life, or death of certain thoughts,[16]
he expresses the opinion that ideas and sentiments are endowed with
physical properties, such as weight and movement; and after fortifying
it with striking examples of expectation, fear, anger, and
determination, he concludes that facts do not exist, that ideas alone
endure, and that volition is a material force, similar to that of steam.
In spite of the amount of labor which a work of this kind necessitated,
a still greater amount was expended on “Le Médecin de Campagne,” of
which every line and every phrase was weighed, rewritten, and corrected
again and again. In this work he attempted to grasp the simple beauty
of the Scriptures, to surpass the “Vicar of Wakefield,” and to put the
“Imitation of Christ” into action; but its pages were written above the
level of the ordinary reader, and in spite of its profundity of thought
it is perhaps the least known of all his writings.
The romance, however, which gained for him the greatest favor in the
boudoirs of Europe was the “Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées,” which is
one of the few works in which happy and satisfied love has been
successfully depicted. In Rousseau there was too much rhetoric, in
Richardson too much pretension; Scott was hampered by English prudery,
and is consequently chill as an icicle; the poets as a rule were too
extravagant and too much engrossed in metaphors; and it remained to
Balzac to describe the insensate fears and unreasoning jealousies of
that passion of which many speak, but few have known.
The masterful handling of these widely contrasting subjects shows not
only an equipment of profound penetration and power of observation, but
also an erudition at once varied and luminous. His works are those of
an anatomist from whom nothing escaped, a psychologist from whom
nothing was hidden, and a realist who described all. Joined thereto was
the gift of adjective: in this he is the Benvenuto Cellini of
literature, for his words seem less like symbols of speech than
awakeners of trains of thought.
His originality is entirely undisputed. It would not be a difficult
task to point out the buried hands which modeled the grandiose figure
of Hugo, and the tombs ransacked by Shakespeare are still open to
inspection; but Balzac was totally without literary ancestry. The
influence of Scott and Hoffmann, at that time enormous, possibly
presided at the conception of some of his earlier works, and brought to
them strength from the massiveness of the one and coloring from the
unexpectedness of the other; they were perhaps the transitory models of
a necessary apprenticeship, in which the masters were soon to be
neglected and surpassed. Aside from this early schooling, Balzac is
indebted to no one,—neither to the Greeks nor to the Romans, to the
Italian school, to the Trouvères of feudal France nor to the
Minnesingers of the Middle Ages; and even where Hoffmann is not, he at
least is entirely modern and absolutely original; for the fantastic
effects of the former were drawn from Micromegas, who had already
extracted them from Cyrano de Bergerac,—a well into which, it may be
noted, Voltaire himself has dipped; and in this respect, that it may
not be objected that the “Contes Drolatiques” are but a continuation of
Rabelais, Béroalde de Verville, and the Reine de Navarre, it is well to
point out that where but the female was seen by these writers Balzac
discovered the woman, a difference surely as great as between the
bottle and the wine.
And here perhaps a word may be said in regard to the present Realistic
school, of which he was the founder, and whose influence is daily
becoming more noticeable and apparent.
The term _present_ Realistic school is used advisedly; for though it
was only about twenty-five or thirty years ago that realism began to be
seriously considered, it is erroneous to suppose that it is of purely
modern origin. For realism as expressed in literature is but the
sentiment of the obvious and the true; and in the days when art was a
splendid novelty, the first poets, as also the first painters, sought
their inspirations directly from the primal source of all
reality,—that is, from Nature herself.
Nature, therefore, is the mother of realism, artistically considered,
and Homer was its first exponent; for not only was the actuality of his
subject never neglected for the purely ideal, but it was also a first
experience.
But the impressions produced by the real undergo in the mere
transcription certain modifications, which are greater or less
according to the organization of the exponent; and while some of the
subject’s delicate aroma invariably escapes in its passage, however
transitory, from brain to canvas, the proper conservation of what
remains constitutes the work of art on whose opulence succeeding
generations are nourished, and from which, in turn, other impressions
are derived; and where the original exponent has artistically
transcribed that which he has seen and felt, his followers express not
that which reality suggests to them, but that which Nature suggested to
him, and the original types of the one become the modified models of
the others, until in descending the centuries reality becomes
unrecognizable, and art and literature through constant copying of
copies become at last enervated and meaningless.
When, therefore, the poetry of the Greeks was becoming entangled in the
subtleties of versification, it received a fresh and vigorous impulsion
from Theocritus, who, disregarding the set rules of his contemporaries,
and returning to the direct observation of reality, expressed not only
the ideal, as poetry should, but also Nature in her most humble and
familiar details, and represented his Shepherdess as beautiful but
unkempt, the odor of cattle about her, and with her hands hardened by
contact with the horns of the steers. Pictures of the obvious and the
true should represent, therefore, not only the beautiful but the
repulsive, not only that which is unpleasant but that which is
agreeable; and the Shepherdess of Theocritus, in her unkempt beauty,
would be as untrue to nature had she not the odor of the cattle about
her as are the patched and powdered bergères with which Watteau charmed
the Pompadour.
Nature loves and abounds in contrasts, as witness the toad squatting
beneath the rose bush; and while either may afford a separate study,
yet the union of the two is necessary in a faithful picture of what
actually exists.
When, therefore, Villon broke away from the stilted and flowery
madrigals of the school of Charles d’Orléans, and sought anew for the
simplicity of Nature, he was but continuing Theocritus and paving the
way for Diderot and Rétif de la Bretonne. The current of opinion,
however, was adverse to these writers, and it was not until the early
part of the present century, when the Romantic school, with its
vanguards led by Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand and with Victor Hugo
for its subsequent chief, had succeeded after a terrible struggle in
freeing themselves from the established rules and conventional phrasing
of the classicists and had raised the standard of liberty in art, that
many of the prejudices which the Academicians had engendered
disappeared, and the ground, swept clean and clear, was prepared for
the advent of a new teacher.
It was at this propitious moment that Balzac, already famous through
his “Physiologie du Mariage,” presented his credentials in the “Peau de
Chagrin,” and with an audacity unparalleled in literature represented
his hero as troubled not only about the state of his mistress’
affections, but also as to whether he would have money enough to pay
her fare in a cab.
The stupefaction and indignation of the purists at this unheard-of
infraction of their formal style were indescribable, but the Romantic
school upheld the innovation, and the new generation applauded the
realistic portrayal of the penniless student who went to an evening
entertainment on the points of his shoes, while dreading a splash of
mud more than a shot from a pistol.
In this respect, therefore, the “Peau de Chagrin” marked the first
return in the nineteenth century to the real and to the true; it gave a
fresh impulse to an expiring literature, and constituted the
corner-stone of the Realistic school, which has found such able
exponents not only in the De Goncourts and Flaubert, but in Dickens,
Thackeray, Tourgénieff, and a host of lesser lights.
But Balzac’s incontestable superiority over other writers consists in
his descriptions of the habits and customs of every-day life, and in
his perception and rendition of the delicate and innumerable shadings
which accompany their thousand complications, in the scenes of private
life which he depicted, in the little mysterious dramas which take
place every day in every social sphere, and especially in his
portraits. The exactitude of the transcription, the delicacy of the
shading, and the profusion and realism of detail are such that it would
almost seem as though reality itself had been transported and placed
before the eyes of the reader.
The third and last number of the “Revue Parisienne” contains a
criticism of Balzac’s on the “Chartreuse de Parme,” in which, in
alluding to the author, he says, “Stendhal is one of the most
remarkable writers of the day, but in his work form is neglected; he
writes as a bird sings.”
Form, the absence of which he noticed in Stendhal, was to him a source
of continued care and preoccupation, and he would often spend an hour
in burnishing a single sentence. With all his facility of conception,
execution was exceedingly laborious, and his admiration of Gautier’s
ability to dash off without an erasure a warm-colored and impeccable
article, while unbounded, was not unmixed with a certain conviction
that the work would be improved by a thorough revision.
As has been seen, Balzac spent almost ten years in forming his hand and
chastening his style, and the courage which he then manifested was
equaled only by the patience with which he sought to improve the
coloring of his afterwork. As a grammarian he is unsurpassed, and the
faults which are noticeable in many of his works are for the most part
purely clerical, and due to his mania for writing his books on
proof-sheets instead of in manuscript. As an innovator he was of course
attacked,—all innovators are,—and Sainte-Beuve, whose manner of
writing Balzac had characterized as macaroni, continually ridiculed his
style and form of expression. In this respect, however, it should be
remembered that at the time of Balzac’s advent into literature the
French language had been passed through a strainer so fine that no
terms remained to express anything beyond the purely conventional; and
Balzac, who was thoroughly impressed with Aristotle’s idea that the
inexpressible does not exist, was almost obliged to create a language
of his own; and in his endeavor to express himself with realistic
clearness he seized upon every suggestive technicality which he
encountered in science, in the green room, the alcoves of the hospital,
or the by-ways of Paris, and built a vocabulary from all that was most
expressive in the different strata of existence. It was he who invented
“chic” and many other terms of an equally felicitous nature.
“As for neologisms, as the critics call them,” he said, “who, I would
like to know, has a right to give alms to a language, unless it be its
writers? Of course I create words, but my parvenus will become nobles
in time.”
But through discipline and constant attention Balzac’s style assumed at
last the undulatory rhythm of the Romantic school, and became not only
picturesque, mathematical, and peculiarly incisive, but the model of
many of the prominent writers of to-day.
The attacks of the critics were not confined, however, to his style and
form of expression; charges of personal as well as literary immorality
were brought against him, and it is curious to note that while Venice
reveled through an entire carnival in a masquerade of his characters
his books were prohibited in Rome and Madrid.
Personally considered, Balzac was much more of a Benedictine than a
disciple of Rabelais; even his student days were those of an anchorite,
and purity of life was to him not only a refinement, but a basis
indispensable to elevation of thought, and an essential in the
production of any work of enduring value. Disorder he regarded as fatal
to talent, and Gautier says that he preached what he practiced, and
recommended to him that he should visit his Dulcinea but once a year,
and then only for half an hour. “Write to her, if you wish to,” he
said; “it forms the style.” In his books he has, it is true, agreeably
painted the seductions of vice, but its contagious and destructive
effects are rigorously exposed; and through all the struggles of his
characters probity, purity, and self-denial are alone triumphant. In
what, then, does his immorality consist? In his vast conception, it was
necessary, he explained,[17] here to signalize an abuse and here to
point out an evil; but every writer who has an aim and who breaks a
fresh lance in the domain of thought is invariably considered immoral.
Socrates was immoral; Christ was immoral: both were persecuted by the
people whom they reformed.
In describing in the “Comédie Humaine” all the elements of society, in
grasping it in the immensity of its agitations, it was inevitable that
one part should expose more wickedness than virtue, that one part of
the fresco represented a culpable group: hence the critic has brought
his charge of immorality without observing the morality of other parts
destined to form a perfect contrast. And in this particular we must
observe that the most conscientious moralists are agreed that society
is incapable of producing as many good as evil actions, yet in the
“Comédie Humaine” the virtuous characters exceed in number those of a
reprehensible disposition.
Blamable actions, faults, crimes, from the slightest to the most grave,
find therein an invariable punishment, human or divine, evident or
secret; and while it would be impossible to clothe two or three
thousand characters in white and orange blossoms, it must be evident
even to the most careless observer that the Marneffes, male and female,
the Hulots, Brideaus _e tutti quanti_, are not imagined,—they are
simply described.
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Footnote 14:
See Introduction by M. Felix Davin to the first edition of the
_Comédie Humaine_.
Footnote 15:
_Correspondance de H. de Balzac_.
Footnote 16:
See also _La Peau de Chagrin_.
Footnote 17:
Preface to the _Comédie Humaine_.