BEYLE AND BALZAC
There may possibly be some readers who might prefer that the two
novelists whose names head this chapter should be treated each in a
chapter to himself. But after trying several plans (for I can assure
such readers that the arrangement of this History has been the reverse
of haphazard) I have thought it best to yoke them. That they have more
in common with each other, not merely than either has with Hugo or
Dumas, or even George Sand, but than either of these three has with the
others, few will deny. And as a _practising_ novelist Beyle has hardly
substance enough to stand by himself, though as an influence--for a time
and that no short one and still existing--scarcely any writer in our
whole list has been more efficacious. It is not my purpose, nor, I
think, my duty, to say much about their relations to each other; indeed
Beyle delayed his novel-work so long, and Balzac codified his own so
carefully and so early, that the examination of the question would need
to be meticulous, and might even be a little futile in a general
history, though it is an interesting subject for a monograph. It is
enough to say that, _generally_, both belong to the analytical rather
than to the synthetical branch of novel-writing, and may almost be said
between them to have introduced the analytical romance; that they
compose their palettes of sombre and neutral rather than of brilliant
colours; that actual "story interest" is not what they, as a rule,[124]
aim at. Finally--though this may be a proposition likely to be disputed
with some heat in one case if not in both--their conception of humanity
has a certain "other-worldliness" about it, though it is as far as
possible from being what is usually understood by the adjective
"unworldly" and though the forms thereof in the two only partially
coincide.
[Sidenote: Beyle--his peculiarity.]
Of the books of Henri Beyle, otherwise Stendhal,[125] to say that they
are not like anything else will only seem banal to those who bring the
banality with them. To annoy these further by opposing pedantry to
banality, one might say that the aseity is quintessential. There
never--to be a man of great power, almost genius, a commanding
influence, and something like the founder of a characteristic school of
literature--was such a _habitans in sicco_ as Beyle; indeed his
substance and his atmosphere are not so much dry as _desiccated_. The
dryness is not like that which was attributed in the last volume to
Hamilton, which is the dryness of wine: it is almost the dryness of
ashes. By bringing some humour of your own[126] you may confection a
sort of grim comedy out of parts of his work, but that is all. At the
same time, he has an astonishing command of such reality, and even
vitality, as will (one cannot say survive but) remain over the process
of desiccation.
That Beyle was not such a passionless person as he gave himself out to
be in his published works was of course always suspected, and more than
suspected, by readers with any knowledge of human nature. It was finally
proved by the autobiographic _Vie de Henri Brulard_, and the other
remains which were at last given to the world, nearly half a century
after the author's death, by M. Casimir Stryienski. But the great part
which he played in producing a new kind of novel is properly concerned
with the earlier and larger division of the work, though the posthumous
stuff reinforces this.
[Sidenote: _Armance._]
Some one, I believe, has said--many people may have said--that you never
get a much truer notion, though you may afterwards get a clearer and
fuller, of a writer than from his earliest work.[127] _Armance_, Beyle's
first published novel,[128] though by no means the one which has
received most attention, is certainly illuminating. Or rather, perhaps
one should say that it poses the puzzle which Beyle himself put briefly
in the words quoted by his editor and biographer: "Qu'ai-j'été? que
suis-je? En vérité je serais bien embarrassé de le dire." To tell equal
truth, it is but a dull book in itself, surcharged with a vague
political spite, containing no personage whom we are permitted to like
(it would be quite possible to like Armance de Zohiloff if we were only
told less _about_ her and allowed to see and hear more _of_ her), and
possessing, for a hero, one of the most obnoxious and foolish prigs that
I can remember in any novel. Octave de Malivert unites varieties of
detestableness in a way which might be interesting if (to speak with
only apparent flippancy) it were made so. He is commonplace in his
adoration of his mother and his neglect (though his historian calls it
"respect") of his father; he is constantly a prig, as when he is shocked
at people for paying more attention to him when they hear that his
parents are going to be indemnified to a large extent for the thefts of
their property at the Revolution; he is such a sneak and such a snob
that he is always eavesdropping to hear what people say about him; such
a bounder that he disturbs his neighbours by talking loud at the play;
such a brute that he deliberately kills a rather harmless coxcomb of a
marquis who rebukes him for making this _tapage_; and such a still
greater brute (for in the duel he had himself been wounded) that he
throws out of the window an unfortunate lackey who gets in his way at a
party where Octave has, as usual, lost his temper. Finally, he is a
combination of prig, sneak, cad, brute, and fool when (having picked up
and read a forged letter which is not addressed to him, though it has
been put by enemies in his way) he believes, without any enquiry, that
his unlucky cousin Armance, to whom he is at last engaged, is deceiving
him, but marries her all the same, lives with her (she loves him
frantically) for a few days, and then, pretending to go to the succour
of the Greeks, poisons himself on board ship--rather more, as far as one
can make out, in order to annoy her than for any other reason. That
there are the elements, and something more than the elements, of a
powerful story in this is of course evident; there nearly always are
such elements in Beyle, and that is why he has his place here. But, as
has been said, the story is almost as dull as it is disagreeable.
Unluckily, too, it is, like most of his other books, pervaded by an
unpleasant suggestion that the disagreeableness is intimately connected
with the author's own nature. As with Julien Sorel (_v. inf._) so with
Octave de Malivert, one feels that, though Beyle would never have
behaved exactly like his book-child, that book-child has a great deal
too much of the uncanny and semi-diabolical doubles of some occult
stories in it--is, in fact, an incarnation of the bad Beyle, the seamy
side of Beyle, the creature that Beyle might have been but for the grace
of that God in whom he did not believe. Which things, however one may
have schooled oneself not to let book and author interfere with each
other, are not comfortable.
It ought, however, to be said that _Armance_ is an early and remarkable
Romantic experiment in several ways, not least in the foreign mottoes,
English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, which are prefixed to the
chapters. Unluckily some of them[129] are obviously retranslated from
French versions unverified by the originals, and once there is a most
curious blunder. Pope's description of Belinda's neck and cross, not
quite in the original words but otherwise exact, is attributed
to--Schiller!
[Sidenote: _La Chartreuse de Parme._]
I have read, I believe, as much criticism as most men, possibly, indeed,
a little more than most, and I ought long ago to have been beyond the
reach of shocking, startling, or any other movement of surprise at any
critical utterance whatsoever. But I own that an access of _fou rire_
once came upon me when I was told in a printed page that _La Chartreuse
de Parme_ was a "very lively and very amusing book." A book of great and
peculiar power it most undoubtedly is, a book standing out in the
formidable genealogy of "psychological" novels as (_salva reverentia_)
certain names stand out from the others in the greater list that opens
the first chapter of St. Matthew. But "lively"? and "amusing"? Wondrous
hot indeed is this snow, and more lustrous than any ebony are the
clerestories towards the south-north of this structure.
[Sidenote: The Waterloo episode.]
[Sidenote: The subject and general colour.]
To begin with, there rests on the whole book that oppression of _récit_
which has been not unfrequently dwelt upon in the last volume, and
sometimes this. Of the 440 pages, tightly printed, of the usual reprint,
I should say that two-thirds at least are solid, or merely broken by one
or two paragraphs, which are seldom conversational. This, it may be
said, is a purely mechanical objection. But it is not so. Although the
action is laid in the time contemporary with the writer and writing,
from the fall of Napoleon onwards, and in the country (Italy) that he
knew best, the whole cast and scheme are historical, the method is that
of a lecturer at a panorama, who describes and points while the panorama
itself passes a long way off behind a screen of clear but thick glass.
In two or perhaps three mostly minute parts or scenes this description
may seem unjust. One, the first, the longest, and the best, is perhaps
also the best-known of all Beyle's work: it is the sketch of the
_débâcle_ after Waterloo. (It is not wonderful that Beyle should know
something about retreats, for, though he was not at Waterloo, he had
come through the Moscow trial.) This is a really marvellous thing and
intensely interesting, though, as is almost always the case with the
author, strangely unexciting. The interest is purely intellectual, and
is actually increased by comparison with Hugo's imaginative account of
the battle itself; but you do not care the snap of a finger whether the
hero, Fabrice, gets off or not. Another patch later, where this same
Fabrice is attacked by, and after a rough-and-tumble struggle kills, his
saltimbanque rival in the affections of a low-class actress, and then
has a series of escapes from the Austrian police on the banks of the Po,
has a little more of the exciting about it. So perhaps for some--I am
not sure that it has for me--may have the final, or provisionally final,
escape from the Farnese Tower. And there is, even outside of these
passages, a good deal of scattered incident.
But these interesting plums, such as even they are, are stuck in an
enormous pudding of presentation of the intrigues and vicissitudes of a
petty Italian court,[130] in which, and in the persons who take part in
them, I at least find it difficult to take the very slightest interest.
Fabrice del Dongo himself,[131] with whom every woman falls in love, and
who candidly confesses that he does not know whether he has ever been
really in love with any woman--though there is one possible exception
precedent, his aunt, the Duchess of Sanseverina, and one subsequent,
Clélia Conti, who saves him from prison, as above--is depicted with
extraordinary science of human nature. But it is a science which, once
more, excludes passion, humour, gusto--all the _fluids_ of real or
fictitious life. Fabrice is like (only "much more also") the simulacra
of humanity that were popular in music-halls a few years ago. He walks,
talks, fights, eats, drinks, _thinks_ even, and makes love if he does
not feel it, exactly like a human being. Except the "fluids" just
mentioned, it is impossible to mention anything human that he lacks. But
he lacks these, and by not having them lacks everything that moves the
reader.
And so it is more or less with all of them: with the Duchess and Clélia
least perhaps, but even with them to some extent; with the Duchess's
first _cicisbeo_ and then husband, Count Mosca, prime minister of the
Duke of Parma; with his master, the feebly cruel and feebly tyrannical
Ranuce-Ernest IV.; with the opposition intriguers at court; with the
Archbishop, to whom Fabrice is made, by the influence of Count and
Duchess, coadjutor and actual successor; with Clélia's father and her
very much belated husband--with all of them in short. You cannot say
they are "out"; on the contrary they do and say exactly what in the
circumstances they would do and say. Their creator's remarks about them
are sometimes of a marvellous subtlety, expressed in a laconism which
seems to regard Marivaudage or Meredithese with an aristocratic disdain.
But at other times this laconic letter literally killeth. Perhaps two
examples of the two effects should be given:
(_Fabrice has found favour in the eyes and arms of the
actress Marietta_)
The love of this pretty Marietta gave Fabrice all the charms
of the sweetest friendship. _And this made him think of the
happiness of the same kind which he might have found with
the Duchess herself._
If this is not "piercing to the accepted hells beneath" with a
diamond-pointed plunger, I know not what is.
But much later, quite towards the end of the book, the author has to
tell how Fabrice again and Clélia "forgot all but love" in one of their
stolen meetings to arrange his escape.
(_He has, by the way, told a lie to make her think he is
poisoned_)
She was so beautiful--half-dressed and in a state of extreme
passion as she was--that Fabrice could not resist an almost
involuntary movement. No resistance was opposed.[132]
Now I am not (see _Addenda and Corrigenda_ of the last volume) avid of
expatiations of the Laclosian kind. But this is really a little too much
of the "Spanish-fleet-taken-and-burnt-as-per-margin" order.
[Sidenote: _L'Abbesse de Castro_, etc.]
Much the same characteristics, but necessarily on a small scale, appear
in the short stories usually found under the title of the first and
longest of them, _L'Abbesse de Castro_. Two of these, _Mina de Wangel_
and _Le Philtre_, are _historiettes_ of the passion which is absent from
_La Chartreuse de Parme_; but each is tainted with the _macabre_ touch
which Beyle affected or which (for that word is hardly fair) was natural
to him. In one a German girl of high rank and great wealth falls in love
with a married man, separates him from his wife by a gross deception,
lives with him for a time; and when he leaves her on finding out the
fraud, blows her brains out. In the other a Spanish lady, seduced and
maltreated by a creole circus-rider of the worst character, declares to
a more honourable lover her incurable passion for the scoundrel and
takes the veil. The rest are stories of the Italian Renaissance, grimy
and gory as usual. Vittoria Accoramboni herself figures, but there is no
evidence that Beyle (although he had some knowledge of English
literature[133]) knew at the time our glorious "White Devil," and his
story dwells little on her faults and much on the punishment of her
murderers. _L'Abbesse de Castro_ itself, _La Duchesse de Palliano_, _San
Francesco à Ripa_, _Vanina Vanini_ are all of the same type and all full
of the gloomier items seen by the Dreamer of Fair Women--
Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes,
Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,
and blood everywhere. And these unmerry tales are always recounted _ab
extra_; in fact, many of them are real or pretended abstracts from
chronicles of the very kind which furnished Browning with the matter of
_The Ring and the Book_. It is, however, more apt and more curious to
compare them with the scenes of Gerard's experiences with the princess
in _The Cloister and the Hearth_, as instances of different handling of
the same matter by two novelists of talent almost, if not quite,
reaching genius.
[Sidenote: _Le Rouge et le Noir._]
This singular aloofness, this separation of subject and spectator by a
vast and impenetrable though translucent wall, as in a museum or a
_morgue_, is characteristic of all Beyle's books more or less. In fact,
he somewhere confesses--the confession having, as always in persons of
anything like his stamp, the nature of a boast--that he cannot write
otherwise than in _récit_, that the broken conversational or dramatic
method is impossible to him. But an almost startling change--or perhaps
it would be more accurate to say reinforcement--of this method appears
in what seems to me by far the most remarkable and epoch-making of his
books, _Le Rouge et le Noir_. That there is a strong autobiographic
element in this, though vigorously and almost violently "transposed,"
must have been evident to any critical reader long ago. It became not
merely evident but _evidenced_ by the fresh matter published thirty
years since.
[Sidenote: Beyle's masterpiece, and why.]
The book is a long one; it drags in parts; and, long as it is, there is
stuff in it for a much longer--indeed preferably for two or three. It is
not only a _roman passionnel_, as Beyle understood passion, not only a
collection of Parisian and Provincial scenes, but a romance of secret
diplomacy, and one of Seminarist life, with constant side-excursions of
Voltairianism, in religion, of the revolutionary element in politics
which Voltaire did not ostensibly favour, however much he may have been
responsible for it, of private cynicism, and above all and most
consistently of all, of that psychological realism, which is perhaps a
more different thing from psychological reality than our clever ones for
two generations have been willing to admit, or, perhaps, able to
perceive.
That--to adopt a division which foolish folk have sneered at directly
and indirectly, but which is valuable and almost necessary in the case
of second-class literature--it is rather an unpleasant than a pleasant
book, must be pretty well apparent from what has been already said of
its author and itself. That it is a powerful one follows almost in the
same way. But what has to be said, for the first, if not also the last,
time in reference to Beyle's fiction, is that it is interesting.
[Sidenote: Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole.]
The interest depends almost entirely--I really do not think it would be
rash to say entirely--upon the hero and one of the heroines. The other
personages are dramatically and psychologically competent, but Beyle
has--perhaps save in one or two cases intentionally--made them something
of _comparses_ or "supers." There may be two opinions about the other
heroine, Madame de Rênal, Julien Sorel's first and last love, his victim
in two senses and directly the cause of his death, though he was not
directly the cause of hers. She seems to me merely what the French call
a _femmelette_, feebly amorous, feebly fond of her children, feebly
estranged from and unfaithful to her husband, feebly though fatally
jealous of and a traitress to her lover--feebly everything. Shakespeare
or Miss Austen[134] could have made such a character interesting, Beyle
could not. Nor do the other "seconds"--Julien's brutal peasant father
and brothers, the notables of Verrières, the husband, M. de Rênal
(himself a _gentillâtre_, as well as a man of business, a bully, and a
blockhead), and the hero's just failure of a father-in-law, the Marquis
de la Mole--seem to me to come up to the mark. But, after all, they
furnish forth the action, and are necessary in their various ways to set
forth the character of that hero and his second love, almost in the
mediaeval sense his wife and his widow, Mathilde de la Mole, heiress,
great lady, _fille folle de son corps_, and, in a kind of way, Queen
Whims.
Julien Sorel, allowance being made for his date, is one of the most
remarkable heroes of fiction. He is physically handsome, in fact
beautiful,[135] intellectually very clever, and possessed, in especial,
of a marvellous memory; also, though not well educated early, capable of
learning anything in a very short time--but presented in these
favourable lights without any exaggeration. A distinguished Lord Justice
was said by his admirers, at the beginning of his manhood, to have
obtained more marks in examinations than any youthful person in the
United Kingdom: and Julien, with equal opportunities, would probably
have done the same in France. Morally, in no limited sense of the word,
he does not possess a single good quality, and does possess most bad
ones, with the possible exceptions of gluttony and avarice. That, being
in each case a family tutor or _employé_ under trust, he seduces the
wife of his first employer and the daughter of the second, cannot, in
the peculiar circumstances, be said to count. This is, as it were, the
starting-point, the necessary handicap, in the competition of this kind
of novel. It is as he is, and in reference to what he does, after this
is put aside, that he has to be considered. He is not a stage villain,
though he has the peculiar, and in the circumstances important, if
highly-to-be-deprecated habit of carrying pocket-pistols. He is not a
Byronic hero with a terrible but misty past. He is not like Valmont of
the _Liaisons Dangereuses_,[136] a professional and passionless
lady-killer. He is not a swindler nor (though he sometimes comes near to
this also) a conspirator like Count Fosco of _The Woman in White_. One
might make a long list of such negatives if it were worth while. He is
only an utterly selfish, arrogant, envious, and generally
bad-blooded[137] young man, whom circumstances partly, and his own
misdeeds helping them, first corrupt and then destroy. You never
sympathise with him for one moment, except in a peculiar fashion to be
noted presently; but at the same time he neither quite bores you nor
quite disgusts you. _Homo est_, and it is Beyle's having made him so
that makes Beyle a sort of genius and much more than a sort of novelist.
But I am not certain that Mathilde is not even a greater creation,
though again it is, except quite towards the end, equally impossible to
like her. _Femina est_, though sometimes _furens_, oftener still
_furiosa_ (in a still wider sense than that in which Mr. Norris has[138]
ingeniously "feminated" Orlando _Furioso_), and, in part of her conduct
already alluded to, as destitute of any morality as Julien himself.
Although there could hardly be (and no doubt had better not be) many
like her, she is real and true, and there are not a few redeeming
features in her artistically and even personally. She is, as has been
said, both rich and noble, the famous lover of the third Valois
Marguerite being an (I suppose collateral) ancestor of hers.[139] Her
father is not merely a patrician but a Minister at the close of the
French Restoration; she may marry any one she likes; and has, in fact, a
train of admirers whom she alternately cajoles and snubs. Julien is
taken into the household as half private secretary, half librarian; is
especially favoured by her father, and treated by her brother (one of
Beyle's few thoroughly good fellows) almost on equal terms. But his bad
blood and his want of breeding make him stiff and mysterious, and
Mathilde takes a perverse fancy to him, the growth of which is skilfully
drawn. Although she is nothing so little as a Lélia or an Indiana or a
Valentine (_vide_ next chapter), she is idiosyncratically romantic, and
at last it is a case of ladders up to the window, "the irreparable," and
various wild performances on her part and her lover's. But this is all
comparatively banal. Beyle's touch of genius only reappears later. An
extraordinary but (when one comes to think of it) not in the least
unnatural series of "ups and downs" follows. Julien's bad blood and
vulgar nature make him presume on the advantage he has obtained;
Mathilde's _morgue_ and hot-headedness make her feel degraded by what
she has given. She neglects him and he becomes quite frantic about
_her_; he takes sudden dudgeon and she becomes frantically desirous of
_him_. This spiritual or emotional man-and-woman-in-the-weather-house
business continues; but at last, with ambages and minor peripeteias
impossible to abstract, it so comes about that the great and proud
Marquis de La Mole, startlingly but not quite improbably, chooses to
recognise this traitor and seducer as a possible by-blow of nobility,
gets him a commission, endows him handsomely, and all but gives his
consent to a marriage.
Then the final revolution comes. With again extraordinary but, as it is
told, again not inconceivable audacity, Julien refers for character to
his first mistress in both senses, Madame de Rênal, and she "gives him
away." The marquis breaks off the treaties, and Julien, leaving his
quarters, journeys down to Verrières and shoots Madame de Rênal (with
the pocket-pistols) in church. She does not die, and is not even very
seriously wounded; but he is tried, is (according, it would seem, to a
state of French law, which contrasts most remarkably with one's recent
knowledge of it) condemned, and after a time is executed for a murder
which has not been committed. Mathilde (who is to bear him a child and
always considers herself his wife) and Madame de Rênal both visit him in
prison, the former making immense efforts to save him. But Julien,
consistently with his character all through, is now rather bored by
Mathilde and exceedingly fond of Madame de Rênal, who dies shortly
after him. What becomes of Mathilde we are not told, except that she
devotes herself to her paulo-post-future infant. The mere summary may
seem rather preposterous; the book is in a way so. But it is also, in no
ordinary sense, once more real and true. It has sometimes been regarded
as a childish, but I believe it to be a true, criterion of novels that
the reader should feel as if he would like to have had personal dealings
with the personages. I should very much like to have shot[140] Julien
Sorel, though it would have been rather an honour for him. And I should
very much like to have made Mathilde fall in love with me. As for Madame
de Rênal, she was only good for suckling fools and telling tales out of
school. But I do not find fault with Beyle for drawing her, and she,
too, is very human.
In fact the book, pleasant or unpleasant, if we reflect on what the
French novel was at the time, deserves a very high place. Compare it
with others, and nowhere, except in Balzac, will you find anything like
it for firm analysis of character, while I confess that it seems to me
to be more strictly human of this world, and at the same time more
original,[141] than a good deal of the _Comédie_.
[Sidenote: The resuscitated work--_Lamiel_.]
The question, "Would a novelist in altered circumstances have given us
more or better novels?" is sometimes treated as _ultra vires_ or _nihil
ad rem_ on the critic's part. I myself have been accused rather of
limiting than of extending the province of the literary critic; yet I
think this question is, sometimes at least, in place. If so, it can
seldom be more in place than with Beyle, first because of the unusually
mperfect character of his actual published work; and secondly, because
of the still more unusual abundance of half-done work, or of fragments
of self-criticism, which what has been called the "Beyle resurrection"
of the close of the last century has furnished. Indeed the unfinished
and scarcely more than half-drafted novel of _Lamiel_ almost by itself
suggests the question and supplies the answer. That answer--except from
favourers of the grime-novel which, oddly enough, whether by coincidence
or common causation became so popular at about the time of this
"resurrection"--can hardly be favourable. _Lamiel_ is a very grubby
little book. The eponymous heroine is adopted as a child by a parish
beadle and his wife, who do not at all maltreat her, except by bringing
her up in ways of extreme propriety, which she detests, taking delight
in the histories of Mandrin, Cartouche and Co. At early maidenhood she
is pitched upon as _lectrice_, and in a way favourite, by the great lady
of the neighbourhood, the Duchess of Miossens; and in this position
first attracts the attention of a peculiarly diabolical little dwarf
doctor, who, bar the comic[142] element, reminds one rather of Quilp.
His designs are, however, baulked in a most Beylian manner; for Lamiel
(who, by a pleasing chance, was at first called "Amiel"--a delightfully
_other_ Amiel!) coolly bestows some money upon a peasant to "teach her
what love is," and literally asks the Gebirian question about the ocean,
"Is this all?" after receiving the lesson. Further, in the more and more
unfinished parts of the book, she levants for a time with the young
duke, quits him, becomes a professional hetaera in Paris, but never
takes any fancy to the business of her avocation till she meets an
all-conquering criminal, Valbayre.[143] The scenario tells us that,
Valbayre having been caught by justice, she sets fire to the Palace
thereof, and her own bones are discovered in the ashes.
This, though Beyle at least meant to season the misanthropy with irony
(he might be compared with Meredith for some slightly cryptic views of
"the Comic Spirit"), is rather poor stuff, and certainly shows no
improvement or likelihood of improvement on the earlier productions. It
is even somewhat lamentable, not so much for the presence of grime as
because of the absence of any other attraction. _Le Rouge et le Noir_ is
not exactly rose-pink, but it derives hardly any, if any, interest from
its smirches of mud and blood and blackness. In _Lamiel_ there is little
else. Moreover, that unchallengeable "possibility of humanity" which
redeems not merely _Le Rouge et le Noir_ but the less exciting books, is
wanting here. Sansfin, the doctor, is a mere monstrosity in mind as well
as in body, and, except perhaps when she ejaculates (as more briefly
reported above), "Comment! ce fameux amour, _ce n'est que ça_?" Lamiel
herself is not made interesting.
[Sidenote: The _Nouvelles Inédites_.]
The _Vie de Henri Brulard_, of high importance for a History of
Novelists, is in strictness outside the subject of a historian of the
Novel, though it might be adduced to strengthen the remarks made on
Rousseau's _Confessions_.[144] And the rest of the "resurrected" matter
is also more autobiographical, or at best illustrative of Beyle's
restless and "masterless" habit of pulling his work to pieces--of "never
being able to be ready" (as a deservedly unpopular language has
it)--than contributory to positive novel-achievement. But the first and
by far the most substantive of the _Nouvelles Inédites_, which his
amiable but not very strong-minded literary executor, Colomb, published
soon after his death, needs a little notice.
[Sidenote: _Le Chasseur Vert._]
_Le Chasseur Vert_[145] (which had three other titles, three successive
prefaces, and in its finished, or rather unfinished, form is the salvage
of five folio volumes of MS., the rest being at best sketched and at
worst illegible) contains, in what we have of it, the account of the
tribulations of a young sub-lieutenant of Lancers (with a great deal of
money, a cynical but rather agreeable banker-papa, an adoring mother,
and the record of an expulsion from the Polytechnique for supposed
Republicanism) suddenly pitchforked into garrison, soon after the
Revolution of July, at Nancy. Here, in the early years of the July
monarchy, the whole of decent society is Legitimist; a very small but
not easily suppressible minority Republican; while officialdom, civil
and military, forms a peculiar _juste milieu_, supporting itself by
espionage and by what Their Majesties of the present moment, the Trade
Unions, call "victimisation," but in a constant state of alarm for its
position, and "looking over its shoulder" with a sort of threefold
squint, at the white flag, the eagles--and the guillotine. Nothing
really happens, but it takes 240 pages to bring us to an actual meeting
between Lieutenant Lucien Leeuwen and his previously at distance adored
widow, the Marquise de Chasteller.
The book is not a _very_ good novel, even as a fragment, and probably
nothing would ever have made it so as a whole. But there is good
novel-stuff in it, and it is important to a student of the novel and
almost indispensable to a student of this novelist. Of the cynical
papa--who, when his son comes to him in a "high-falutin" mood, requests
him to go to his (the papa's) opera-box, to replace his sire with some
agreeable girl-officials of that same institution, and to spend at least
200 francs on a supper for them at the Rocher--one would gladly see
more. Of the barrack (or rather _not_-barrack) society at Nancy, the
sight given, though not agreeable, is interesting, and to any one who
knew something of our old army, especially before the abolition of
purchase, very curious. There is no mess-room and apparently no common
life at all, except on duty and at the "pension" hotel-meals, to
which,--rather, it would seem, at the arbitrary will of the colonel than
by "regulation,"--you have to subscribe, though you may, and indeed
must, live in lodgings exactly like a _particulier_. Of the
social-political life of the place we see rather too much, for Beyle,
not content with making the politics which he does not like make
themselves ridiculous--or perhaps not being able to do so--himself tells
us frequently that they _are_ ridiculous, which is not equally
effective. So also, instead of putting severe or "spiritual" speeches in
Lucien's mouth, he tells us that they _were_ spiritual or severe, an
assurance which, of course, we receive with due politeness, but which
does not give us as much personal delectation as might be supplied by
the other method. No doubt this and other things are almost direct
results of that preference for _récit_ over semi-dramatic evolution of
the story by deed and word, which has been noticed. But they are
damaging results all the same: and, after making the fairest allowance
for its incomplete condition, the thing may be said to support, even
more than _Lamiel_ does, the conclusion already based upon the
self-published stories (and most of all upon that best of them, _Le
Rouge et le Noir_) that Beyle could never have given us a thoroughly
hit-off novel.
[Sidenote: Beyle's place in the story.]
Still, there is always something unfair in making use of "Remains," and
for my part I do not think that, unless they are of extraordinary merit,
they should ever be published. "Death _should_ clear all scores" in this
way as in others. Yet no really critical person will think the worse of
Beyle's published work because of these _anecdota_, though they may, as
actually before us, be taken as throwing some light on what is not so
good in the _publicata_. There can be no doubt that Beyle occupies a
very important position in the history of the novel, and not of the
French novel only, as the first, or almost the first, analyst of the
ugly for fictitious purposes, and as showing singular power in his
analysis. Unfortunately his synthetic gifts were not equally great. He
had strange difficulty in making his stories _march_; he only now and
then got them to _run_; and though the real life of his characters has
been acknowledged, it is after all a sort of "Life-in-Death," a new
manifestation of the evil power of that mysterious entity whom
Coleridge, if he did not discover, first named and produced in
quasi-flesh, though he left us without any indication of more than one
tiny and accidental part of her dread kingdom.
He has thus the position of _père de famille_, whether (to repeat the
old joke) of a _famille déplorable_ in the moral, not the sentimental,
sense, must, I suppose, be left matter of opinion. The plentiful crop of
monographs about him since M. Stryienski's Pompeian explorations and
publications is in a manner--if only in a manner--justified by the
numerous followers--not always or perhaps often conscious followers, and
so even more important--in his footsteps. Nobody can say that the
picaresque novelists, whether in their original country or when the
fashion had spread, were given to _berquinades_ or fairy-tales. Nobody
can say that the tale-writers who preceded and followed them were
apostles of virtue or painters of Golden-Age scenes. But, with some
exceptions (chiefly Italian) among the latter, they did not, unless
their aim were definitely tragical--an epithet which one could show, on
irrefragable Aristotelian principles, to be rarely if ever applicable to
Beyle and his school--they did not, as the common phrase goes, "take a
gloomy view" only. There were cakes and ale; and the cakes did not
always give internal pains, nor the ale a bad headache. As even Hazlitt
(who has been selected, not without reason, as in many ways like Beyle)
said of himself on his death-bed, rather to some folks' surprise though
not to mine, most of the characters "had a happy life," though the
happiness might be chequered: and some of them were "good." It is
scarcely an exaggeration to say that in Beyle's books happiness does not
exist, and virtue has hardly a place. There are some characters who may
be said to be neutral or "on the line"; they may be not definitely
unhappy or definitely bad. But this is about as far as he ever goes in
that direction. And accordingly he and his followers have the fault of
one-sidedness; they may (he did) see life steadily, but they do not see
it whole. There is no need to preach a sermon on the text: in this book
there is full need to record the fact.[146]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Balzac--conditions of the present dealing.]
In dealing with Beyle's greater companion here there are certain
things--not exactly difficulties, but circumstances conditioning the
treatment--which should be stated. That it is well to know something
about your subject has been an accepted doctrine with all save very
young persons, idle paradoxers, and (according to Sir Walter Scott) the
Scottish Court of Session in former days.[147] That it is also well not
to know too much about it has sometimes been maintained, without any
idleness in either sense of the word; the excess being thought likely to
cause weariness, "staleness," and absence of interest. If this were
necessarily so, it might be better for the writer once more to leave
this part of the chapter (since at least the heading of it could not
possibly be omitted in the history) a blank or a constellation of
asterisks in Sternian fashion. For it has fallen to his lot to translate
one whole novel of Balzac's,[148] to edit a translation of the entire
_Comédie_,[149] superintending some of the volumes in narrow detail, and
studying each in short, but (intentionally at least) thorough
_Introductions_, with a very elaborate preface-study of the whole; to
read all Balzac's rather voluminous miscellanea from the early
novel-attempts to posthumous things, including letters; and, finally, to
discuss the subject once more, with the aid or burden of many previous
commentaries, in a long _Review_ article.[150] Nevertheless, he does not
feel that any disgust forbids while a clear duty calls: and he hopes to
show that it is not always necessary to weary of quails as in the
Biblical, partridges as in the old _fabliau_, and pigeons in the Dumas
_fils_ (_v. inf._) version of the Parable of Satiety.
[Sidenote: Limitations of Subject.]
In no case, however, not even in that of Victor Hugo, is the easement
given by the general plan of the book, in regard to biographical and
other not strictly literary details, more welcome. We shall say nothing
on the point whether the author of the _Comédie Humaine_ should be
called M. de Balzac or M. Balzac or M. Balssa; nothing about his family,
his friends, his enemies, his strangely long-deferred, and, when it
came, as strangely ill-fated marriage; little, though something
necessarily, about his tastes, his commercial and other enterprises, and
so forth; and not very much--something here also becoming obligatory--on
his manner of producing the immense and wonderful work which he has left
us. Those who are curious about such things will find ample satisfaction
in the labours of M. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, of MM. Christophe and
Cerfbeer, and of others.[151] Here he is, for us, Honoré de Balzac,
author of the _Juvenilia_ (saved from, as it is understood, a larger
bulk still) in ten volumes; of the mighty "Comedy" itself, and, more
incidentally, of the considerable epistolary and miscellaneous
production referred to above. The manner in which this enormous output
was put out has perhaps too much to do with its actual character to be
passed over in total silence. It represents thirty years' working time
almost entirely spent upon it,[152] the alternatives being the
above-mentioned commercial speculations (which were almost invariably
unfortunate, and involved him, during the whole of his career, in
complicated indebtedness) and a good deal of travel, very frequently
connected with these speculations. Of the society which formed so large
a part of the life of the time and of which he wrote so often, Balzac
saw little. He worked at enormous stretches, and he rewrote his work, in
MS., in proof and in temporarily final print, with insatiable and
indefatigable industry. To no writer could the commonplace extravagance
about burning the candle at both ends be applied so truly as to Balzac.
Only, his candle was shaped like a wheel with no felloes, and he burnt
it at the end of every spoke and at the nave as well. How he managed to
last, even to fifty, is one of the major curiosities of literary
biography.
[Sidenote: And of Balzac himself.]
Of the three divisions of this vast but far from chaotic production, the
miscellaneous, of course, concerns us least. It shows Balzac as a
failure of a dramatist, a critic of very varying competence,[153] not a
particularly effective _writer_ merely as such, not possessed of much
logical power, but having pretty wide interests and abundantly provided
with what we may call the odd tools of the novelist's workshop. As a
correspondent his writing has absolutely none of what may be called the
"departmental" interest of great letter-writers--of Madame de Sévigné or
Lady Mary, of Horace Walpole or Cowper; its attraction is not epistolary
but wholly autobiographic. And it is only fair to say that, despite
Balzac's immense and intense self-centredness, it leaves one on the
whole with a much better opinion of him as a man than might be derived
from his books or from the anecdotes about him. To adapt one of the best
known of these, there was, in fact, nothing real to him but Honoré de
Balzac, Honoré de Balzac's works and schemes, and, in rare cases (of
which Madame Hanska was the chief), Honoré de Balzac's loves. These
constituted his subject, his universe of thought and feeling, of action
and passion. But at the same time he stands apart from all the other
great egotists. He differs from those of whom Byron is the chief in that
he does not introduce himself prominently in his fictitious creations.
He does not, like those who may take their representative in Goethe,
regard everything merely as it relates to his personality. His chief
peculiarity, his unique literary character, and, it may be added at
once, his greatness and his weakness, all consist in the fact that he
evolves a new world out of himself. Now and then he may have taken an
actual human model--George Sand, Madame d'Agoult, Madame de Castries,
Liszt, Latouche,[154] Rémusat--as many others as anybody likes. But
always these had not merely to receive the Balzacian image and
superscription, but to be transmuted into creatures of a _Balzacium
Sidus_. And it is the humanity of this planet or system, much more than
of our world, whereof his _Comédie_ is the Comedy--a _Comédie
Balzacienne_.
[Sidenote: Balzac's "general ideas."]
But, it has been said, and the saying has been attributed to no less a
critic than M. Faguet, there are no "general ideas" in Balzac.[155] One
can only reply, "Heavens! Why should there be?" The celebrated unreason
of "going to a gin-palace for a leg of mutton" (already quoted, and
perhaps to be quoted again) is sound and sensible as compared with
asking general ideas from a novelist. They are not quite absolutely
forbidden to him, though he will have to be very careful lest they get
in his way. But they are most emphatically not his business, except as
very rare and very doubtful means to a quite different end, means
absolutely insufficient by themselves and exceedingly difficult to
combine with the other means which--more or fewer of them--are not only
sufficient but necessary. The "slice of human life," not necessarily,
but preferably ordinary, presenting probable and interesting
characters, connected by sufficient plot, diversified and adorned by
descriptive and other devices, and abundantly furnished with the
conversation of men and women of this world, the whole forming such a
whole as will amuse, thrill, affect, and in other ways, to use the
all-important word once more, _interest_ the reader,--that is what is
wanted. And this definition is as rigid at least as the Aristotelian
definition of tragedy and perhaps more exhaustive, as concerns the
novel, including, with the necessary modifications, the romance--and the
romance, including, with the necessary modifications, the novel. In it
"general ideas," unless a very special and not at all usual meaning is
attached to the term, can have no right of place. They may be brought
in, as almost anything may be brought in if the writer is Samson enough
to bring it. But they cannot be demanded of him as facts, images,
emotions, style, and a very large number of other things can or may be,
not, of course, all at once, but in larger or smaller selection. General
ideas may and perhaps should be demanded from the philosopher, the
historian, the political student. From the poet and the novelist they
cannot be. And that they should be so demanded is one of the chief
instances of what seems to the present writer to be the greatest mistake
of French novel, as of other, criticism--its persistent relapse upon the
rule-system and its refusal to judge by the result.[156]
It is all the more unreasonable to demand general _ideas_ from Balzac
himself, because he is so liberal of general _imagery_, and what is
more, general _prosopopoeia_. Be the Balzacian world real, as some
would have it to be, or be it removed from our mundane reality by the
subtle "other-planetary" influence which is apparent to others, its
complexity, its fullness, its variety, its busy and by no means
unsystematic life and motion, cannot be denied. Why on earth cannot
people be content with asking Platonism from Plato and Balzacity from
Balzac? At any rate, it is Balzacity which will be the subject of the
following pages, and if anybody wants anything else let him go
elsewhere.
[Sidenote: Abstinence from abstract.]
There is hardly likely to be much grumbling at the absence of such
detailed abstract or survey of individual books as has been given in
cases of what may seem to be much less importance. To begin with, such a
survey as is possible[157] exists already from these hands in the
Introductions to the translated edition above referred to, and to
paraphrase or refashion it here would probably occupy a hundred pages,
if not more. Nor would the plan, elsewhere adopted, of analysing afresh
one, or two, or more examples, as representative, be satisfactory.
Although Balzac is in a sense one of the most intensely individual of
all novelists, his individuality, as in a very few others of the
greatest cases, cannot be elicited from particular works. Just as
_Hamlet_ will give you no idea of the probable treatment of _As You Like
It_, so _Eugénie Grandet_ contains no key to _La Cousine Bette_. Even
the groups into which he himself rather empirically, if not quite
arbitrarily, separated the _Comédie_, though they lend themselves a
little more to specification, do not yield very much to the classifier.
The _Comédie_, once more, is a world--a world open to the reader, "all
before him." Chronological order may tell him a little about Balzac, but
it will not tell him very much about Balzac's work that he cannot gain
from the individual books, except in the very earliest stages. There is
no doubt that the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, if not very delightful to the
reader (I have myself read them not without pleasure), are very
instructive; the instruction increases, while the pleasure is actually
multiplied, when you come to _Les Chouans_ and the _Peau de Chagrin_.
But it is, after a fashion, only beyond these that the true Balzac
begins, and the beginning is, to a large extent, a reaction from
previous work in consequence of a discovery that the genius, without
which he had acknowledged that it was all up with him,[158] did not lie
that way, and that he had no hope of finding it there. Not that there is
no genius in the two books mentioned; on the contrary, it is there first
to be found, and in _La Peau_ is of the first order. But their ways are
not the ways in which he was to find it--and himself--more specially.
[Sidenote: The _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_.]
As to _Argow le Pirate_[159] and _Jane la Pâle_ (I have never ceased
lamenting that he did not keep the earlier title, _Wann-Chlore_) and the
rest, they have interest of various kinds. Some of it has been glanced
at already--you cannot fully appreciate Balzac without them. But there
is another kind of interest, perhaps not of very general appeal, but not
to be neglected by the historian. They are almost the only accessible
body, except Pigault-Lebrun's latest and Paul de Kock's earliest, of the
popular fiction _before_ 1830, of the stuff of which, as previously
mentioned, Ducray-Duminil, the lesser Ducange, and many others are
representatives, but representatives difficult to get at. This class of
fiction, which arose in all parts of Europe during the last years of the
eighteenth century and the earlier of the nineteenth, has very similar
characteristics, though the examples differ very slightly in different
countries. What are known with us as the Terror Novel, the Minerva
Press, the Silver Fork school, etc. etc., all have their part in it, and
even higher influences, such as Scott's, are not wanting. _Han
d'Islande_ and _Bug-Jargal_ themselves belong to some extent to the
class, and I am far from certain that the former is at all better than
some of these _juvenilia_ of Balzac's. But as a whole they are of course
little more than curiosities.
Whether these curiosities are more widely known than they were some
five-and-twenty, or thirty, years ago, when Mr. Louis Stevenson was the
only friend of mine who had read them, and when even special writers on
Balzac sometimes unblushingly confessed that they had not, I cannot say.
Although printed in the little fifty-five-volume[160] edition which for
so many years represented Balzac, they were excluded, as noted above,
from the statelier "Définitive," and so may have once more "gone into
abscondence." I do not want to read them again, but I no more repent the
time once spent on them than I did earlier. In fact I really do not
think any one ought to talk about Balzac who has not at least gained
some knowledge of them, for many of their defects remained with him when
he got rid of the others. These defects are numerous enough and serious
enough. The books are nothing if not uncritical, generally extravagant,
and sometimes (especially in _Jean Louis_) appallingly dull. Scarf-pins,
made of poisoned fish-bones (_Argow le Pirate_), extinction of virgins
under copper bells (_Le Centénaire_), attempts at fairy-tales (_La
Dernière Fée_) jostle each other. The weaker historical kind figures
largely in _L'Excommunié_ (one of the least bad), _L'Israëlite_,
_L'Héritière de Birague_, _Dom Gigadas_. There is a _Vicaire des
Ardennes_ (remarkably different from him of Wakefield), which is a kind
of introduction to _Argow le Pirate_, and which, again, is not the
worst. When I formerly wrote about these curious productions, after
reading them, I had not read Pigault-Lebrun, and therefore did not
perceive, what I now see to be an undoubted fact, that Balzac was,
sometimes at least, trying to follow in Pigault's popular footsteps. But
he had not that writer's varied knowledge of actual life or his power of
telling a story, and though he for the most part avoided Pigault's
_grossièreté_, the chaotic plots, the slovenly writing, and other
defects of his model abode with him.
[Sidenote: _Les Chouans._]
There are not many more surprising things, especially _in pari materia_,
to be found in literary history than the sun-burst of _Les Chouans_
after this darkness-that-can-be-felt of the early melodramas. Not that
_Les Chouans_ is by any means a perfect novel, or even a great one. Its
narrative drags, in some cases, almost intolerably; the grasp of
character, though visible, is inchoate; the plot is rather a polyptych
of separate scenes than a connected action; you see at once that the
author has changed his model to Sir Walter and think how much better Sir
Walter would have done the thing. But there is a strange air of "coming
alive" in some of the scenes, though they are too much separated, as in
the case of the finale and of the execution of the rather hardly used
traitor earlier. These possess a character of thrill which may be looked
for in vain through all the ten volumes of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_.
Montauran _is_ a hero in more than one sense, and Mlle. de Verneuil is
still more a heroine. Had Balzac worked her out as he worked out others,
who did not deserve it so well, later, she might have been one of the
great characters in fiction. Even as it is, the "jour sans lendemain,"
which in one sense unites, and in another parts, her and her lover for
ever, is one of the most really passionate things that the French novel,
in its revival, had yet seen. Besides this, there is a sort of extrinsic
appeal in the book, giving that curious atmosphere referred to already,
and recalling the old prints of the earth yawning in patches and animals
rearing themselves from it at the Creation. The names and personages of
Hulot and Corentin were to be well known later to readers of the "fifty
volumes," and even the ruffianly patriot[161] Marche-à-Terre had his
future.
[Sidenote: _La Peau de Chagrin._]
The second[162] blast of the horn with which Balzac challenged admission
to the Inner Sanctuaries or strongholds of the novel, _La Peau de
Chagrin_, had that character of _difference_ which one notices not
seldom in the first worthy works of great men of letters--the absence of
the mould and the rut. _Les Chouans_ was a Waverley novel Gallicised and
Balzacified; _La Peau de Chagrin_ is a cross between the supernatural
romance and the novel of psychology. It is one of the greatest of
Balzac's books. The idea of the skin--a new "wishing" talisman, which
shrinks with every exercise of the power it gives, and so threatens
extinction at once of wishing and living--is of course not wholly novel,
though refreshed in detail. But then nothing is wholly novel, and if
anything could be it would probably be worthless. The endless changes of
the eternal substance make the law, the curse, and the blessing of life.
In the working out of his theme it may possibly be objected that Balzac
has not _interested_ the reader quite enough in his personages--that he
seems in a way to be thinking more of the play than of the actors or the
audience. His "orgie" is certainly not much of a success; few orgies in
print are, except when they are burlesqued. But, on the other hand, the
curiosity-shop is splendid. Yet it is not on the details of the book,
important as these have been allowed to be throughout Balzac, that
attention should be mainly concentrated. The point of it is the way in
which the necessary atmosphere of bad dream is kept up throughout, yet
with an appropriate contrast of comparatively ordinary life. A competent
critic who read _Les Chouans_, knowing nothing about its author or his
work, should have said, "Here is more than a promising craftsman";
reading _La Peau de Chagrin_ in the same conditions he should have said,
"Here is a great, though by no means a faultless, artist." One who read
both ought to have had no doubt as to the coming of something and
somebody extraordinary.
[Sidenote: The short stories.]
Thenceforward Balzac, though hardly ever faultless except in short
stories, was almost always great, and showed what may be called a
diffused greatness, to which there are few parallels in the history of
the novel. Some of the tales are simply wonderful. I cannot think of
any one else, even Mérimée, who could have done _La Grande
Bretèche_--the story of a lover who, rather than betray his mistress,
allows himself to suffer, without a word, the fate of a nun who has
broken her vows--as Balzac has done it. _La Recherche de l'Absolu_ is
one, and _Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_ is another, of the greatest known
masterpieces in the world of their kind. _La Fille aux Yeux d'Or_ and
_Une Passion dans le Désert_ have not the least need of their
"indexable" qualities to validate them. In the most opposite styles
_Jésus Christ en Flandre_ and _La Messe de l'Athée_ have their warmest
admirers. In fact it is scarcely too much to say that, in the whole list
of nearer two than one score--as they were published in the old
collection from _Le Bal de Sceaux_ to _Maître Cornélius_--scarcely any
are bad or insignificant, few mediocre, and not a few equal, or hardly
inferior, to those specially pointed out just now. As so often
happens, the short story estopped Balzac from some of his usual
delinquencies--over-detail, lingering treatment, etc.,--and encouraged
his virtues--intensity, grandeur, and idiosyncratic tone.
[Sidenote: The _Contes Drolatiques_.]
Of his one considerable collection of such stories--the _Contes
Drolatiques_--it is not possible to speak quite so favourably as a
whole; yet the reduction of favour need not be much. Of its greatest
thing, _La Succube_, there have hardly been two opinions among competent
and unprejudiced judges. "Pity and terror" are there well justified of
their manipulator. The sham Old French, if not absolutely "according to
Cocker" (or such substitute for Cocker as may be made and provided by
scholarly authority), is very much more effective than most such things.
Not a few of the stories are good and amusing in themselves, though of
course the votaries of prunes and prism should keep clear of them. The
book has perhaps only one serious fault, that of the inevitable and no
doubt invited suggestion of, and comparison with, Rabelais. In some
points this will hold not so badly, for Balzac had narrative power of
the first order when he gave it scope; the deficiencies of mere style
which sometimes affect his modern French do not appear so much in this
_pastiche_, and he could make broad jokes well enough. But--and this
"but" is rather a terrible one--the saving and crowning grace of
Pantagruelist humour is not in him, except now and then in its grimmer
and less catholic variety or manifestation. And this absence haunts one
in these _Contes Drolatiques_, though it is to some extent compensated
by the presence of a "sentiment" rare elsewhere in Balzac.
[Sidenote: Notes on select larger books: _Eugénie Grandet_.]
Turning to the longer books, the old double difficulty of selection and
omission comes on one in full force. There are, I suppose, few
Balzacians who have not special favourites, but probably _Eugénie
Grandet_, _Le Père Goriot_, and the two divisions of _Les Parents
Pauvres_ would unite most suffrages. If I myself--who am not exactly a
Balzacian, though few can admire him more, and not very many, I think,
have had occasion for knowing his work better--put _Eugénie Grandet_ at
the head of all the "scenes" of ordinary life, it is most certainly not
because of its inoffensiveness. It _is_ perhaps partly because, in spite
of that inoffensiveness, it fixes on one a grasp superior to anything of
Beyle's and equal to anything of Flaubert's or Maupassant's. But the
real cause of admiration is the nature of the grasp itself. Here, and
perhaps here only--certainly here in transcendence--Balzac grapples
with, and vanquishes, the bare, stern, unadorned, unbaited, ironic facts
of life. It is not an intensely interesting book; it is certainly not a
delightful one; you do not want to read it very often. Still, when you
have read it you have come to one of the ultimate things: the
_flammantia moenia_ of the world of fiction forbid any one to go
further at this particular point. And when this has been said of a
novel, all has been said of the quality of the novelist's genius, though
not of its quantity or variety.
[Sidenote: _Le Père Goriot_ and _Les Parents Pauvres_.]
The other three books selected have greater "interest" and, in the case
of the _Parents Pauvres_ at least, much greater variety; but they do not
seem to me to possess equal consummateness. _Le Père Goriot_ is in its
own way as pathetic as _Eugénie Grandet_, and Balzac has saved its
pathos from being as irritating as that of the all but idiotic
grandfather in _The Old Curiosity Shop_. But the situation still has a
share of that fatal helpless ineffectiveness which Mr. Arnold so justly
denounced. Of the remaining pair, _La Cousine Bette_ is, I suppose,
again the favourite; but I am not a backer. I have in other places
expressed my opinion that if Valérie Marneffe is part-model[163] of
Becky Sharp, which is not, I believe, absolutely certain, the copy
far--indeed infinitely--exceeds the original, and not least in the facts
that Becky is attractive while Valérie is not, and that there is any
amount of possibility in her. I should not wonder if, some day, a
novelist took it into his head to show Becky as she would have been if
she had had those thousands a year for which, with their accompanying
chances of respectability, she so pathetically sighed. Now Valérie is,
and always must have been, a _catin_, and nothing else. Lisbeth, again,
though I admit her possibility, is not, to me, made quite probable.
Hulot, very possible and probable indeed, does not interest or amuse me,
and the angelic Adeline is good but dull. In fact the book, by its very
power, throws into disastrous eminence that absence of _delightfulness_
which is Balzac's great want, uncompensated by the presence of the
magnificence which is his great resource. _La Peau de Chagrin_ and some
of the smaller things have this relief; _La Cousine Bette_ has not. And
therefore I think that, on the whole, _Le Cousin Pons_ is the better of
the two, though it may seem to some weaker, further "below proof."
Everything in it is possible and probable, and though the comedy is
rather rueful, it is comedy. It is a play; its companion is rather too
much of a sermon.
[Sidenote: Others--the general "scenic" division.]
The "Scènes de la Vie Privée" (to pass to a rapid general survey of the
"Acts" of the Comedy) provide an especially large number of short
stories, almost the only ones of length being _Modeste Mignon_ and
_Béatrix_, a strongly contrasted couple. _Modeste Mignon_ is perhaps one
of the best of Balzac's _second_ best. _Béatrix_, a book of more power,
appeals chiefly to those who may be interested in the fact (which
apparently _is_ the fact) that the book contains, almost more than any
other, figures taken from real people, such as George Sand--the
"Camille" of the novel--and some of those about her. The "Scènes de la
Vie de Province" are richer in "magnums." _Eugénie Grandet_ is here,
with a sort of companion, cheerfuller generally, in _Ursule Mirouet_.
The shorter stories are grouped under the titles of _Les Parisiens en
Province_ (with the first appearance of _Gaudissart_) and _Les
Rivalités_. _Le Lys dans la Vallée_ (which one is sometimes anxiously
begged to distinguish from "the lily _of_ the valley," otherwise
_muguet_) holds, for some, an almost entirely unique place in Balzac's
work, or one shared only in part by _Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées_. I
have never, I think, cared much for either. But there is more strength
in two pairs of volumes which contain some of the author's
masterpieces--_Les Célibataires_ with _Pierrette_, _Le Curé de Tours_,
and the powerful, if not particularly pleasant, _Un Ménage de
Garçon_;[164] and _Illusions Perdues_, running up well with _Un Grand
Homme de Province à Paris_ and the semi-idyllic _Ève et David_.
But I suppose the "Scenes of Parisian Life" seem to be the citadel to
most people. Here are three of the four books specially selected above,
_Le Père Goriot_ and both the constituents of _Les Parents Pauvres_.
Here are the _Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes_, which some rank
among the very first; not a few short stories in the volumes taking
their titles from _La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin_ and _La Maison
Nucingen_; with _César Birotteau_ (_Balzac on Bankruptcy_, as it has
been profanely called) and the celebrated _Histoire des Treize_.
This last, I confess frankly, has always bored me, even though the
volume contains _La Fille aux Yeux d'Or_. The idea of a secret society
in Society itself was not new; it was much more worthy of Sue or Soulié
than of Balzac, and it does not seem to me to have been interestingly
worked out. But perhaps this is due to my perverse and elsewhere
confessed objection to crime and conspiracy novels generally.
Neither have I ever cared much for the group of "Scenes de la Vie
Politique," ranging from _Une Ténébreuse Affaire_ to _Le Député
d'Arcis_, the last being not entirely Balzac's own. The single volume,
"Scènes de la Vie Militaire," consisting merely of _Les Chouans_ and
_Une Passion dans le Désert_, is much better, and the "Scènes de la Vie
de Campagne" reach a high level with _Le Médecin de Campagne_, _Le Curé
de Village_, and the late, grim, but very noteworthy _Les Paysans_.
None, however, of these sometimes rather arbitrary groups of Balzac's
contains such thoroughly satisfactory matter as that which he chose to
call "Études Philosophiques." It includes only one full-volume novel,
but that is the _Peau de Chagrin_ itself.[165] And here are most of the
short stories singled out at first, _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, _Jésus
Christ en Flandre_, _Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, with _Melmoth
Réconcilié_[166] in the same batch. The two volumes entitled _L'Enfant
Maudit_ and _Les Marana_ contain all but a dozen remarkable tales. Here,
too, is the curious treatise _Sur Cathérine de Médicis_, with another,
to some people among the most interesting of all, the autobiographic
_Louis Lambert_, and also the mystical, and in parts very beautiful,
_Séraphita_.
The "Études Analytiques," which complete the original _Comédie_ with the
two notorious volumes of _Physiologie du Marriage_ and _Petites Misères
de la Vie Conjugale_, are not novels or tales, and so do not concern
us. They are not the only instance in literature showing that the
sarcasm
The _God_ you took from a printed book
extends to other things besides divinity. The old conventional satires
on marriage are merely rehashed with some extra garlic. Balzac had no
personal experience of the subject till just before his death, and his
singular claustral habits of life could not give him much opportunity
for observation.
[Sidenote: "Balzacity": its constitution.]
Experience, indeed, and observation (to speak with only apparent
paradox), though they played an important, yet played only a subordinate
part at any time in the great Balzacian achievement. Victor Hugo, in
what was in effect a funeral oration, described that achievement as "un
livre qui est l'Observation et qui est l'Imagination." But no one
familiar with the Victorian rhetoric will mistake the _clou_, the
dominating and decisive word of that sentence. It is the conjunction.
Hugo meant to draw attention to the astonishing _union_ of Imagination
with Observation--two things which, except in the highest poetry, are
apt to be rather strangers to each other--and by putting Imagination
last he meant also doubtless that this was the dominating--the
masculine--element in the marriage. In the immense volume of discussion
of Balzac which the long lifetime succeeding his death has seen, and
which thickened and multiplied towards the close of the last century and
a little later--owing to the conclusion of the _Édition Définitive_ with
its additions and illustrative matter--this point has perhaps been too
frequently lost sight of. The great critics who were his contemporaries
and immediate survivors were rather too near. The greatest of the later
batch, M. Brunetière, was a little too eager to use Balzac as a stick to
beat the Romantics with for one thing, and to make him out a pioneer of
all succeeding French fiction for another. But, quite early, Philarète
Chasles hit the white by calling him a _voyant_ (a word slightly varying
in signification from our "seer"), and recently a critic of less repute
than Brunetière, but a good one--M. Le Breton--though perhaps sometimes
not quite fair to Balzac, recognises his Romanticism, his _frénésie_,
and so the Imagination of which the lunatic and the lover are--and of
which the devotee of Romance in verse and prose should be--compact.
Nevertheless it would be of course highly improper, and in fact absurd,
to deny the "observation"--at least in detail of all kinds. Although--as
we have seen and may see again when we come to Naturalism and look
back--M. Brunetière was quite wrong in thinking that Balzac _introduced_
"interiors" to French, and still more wrong in thinking that he
introduced them to European, novel-writing, they undoubtedly make a
great show in his work--are, indeed, one of its chief characteristics.
He actually overdoes them sometimes; the "dragging" of _Les Chouans_ is
at least partly due to this, and he never got complete mastery of his
tendency that way. But undoubtedly this tendency was also a source of
power.
Yet, while this observation of _things_ is not to be denied, Balzac's
observation of _persons_ is a matter much more debatable. To listen to
some of the more uncritical--especially among the older and now almost
traditional--estimates of him, an unwary reader who did not correct
these, judging for himself, might think that Balzac was as much of an
"observational" realist in character as Fielding, as Scott when it
served his turn, as Miss Austen, or as Thackeray. Longer study and
further perspective seem recently to have put more people in the
position which only a few held some years ago. The astonishing force,
completeness, _relative_ reality of his creations is more and more
admitted, but it is seen (M. Le Breton, for instance, admits it in
almost the very words) that the reality is often not _positive_. In fact
the _Comédie_ may remind some of the old nautical laudation of a ship
which cannot only sail close to the wind, but even a point or two on the
other side of it. If even Frenchmen now confess that Balzac's characters
are very often not _des êtres réels_, no Englishman need be ashamed of
having always thought so.
The fact is that this giant in novel-writing did actually succeed in
doing what some of his brethren in _Hyperion_ would have liked to do--in
setting up a new world for himself and getting out of the existing
universe. His characters are never _in_human; they never fail to be
human; they are of the same flesh and blood, the same soul and spirit,
as ourselves. But they have, as it were, colonised the fresh planet--the
Balzacium Sidus--and taken new colour and form from its
idiosyncrasies.[167]
[Sidenote: Its effect on successors.]
It is for this reason that one hesitates to endorse the opinions quoted
above as to the filiation of all or most subsequent French fiction upon
Balzac. Of course he had a great influence on it; such a genius, in such
circumstances, could not but have. The "interior" business was largely
followed and elaborated; it might be argued--though the contention would
have to be strictly limited and freely provisoed--that Naturalism in
general--as the "Rougon-Macquart" scheme certainly was in
particular--was a sort of bastard of the _Comédie_. Other points of
relationship might be urged. But all this would leave the most
characteristic Balzacities untouched. In the most obvious and
superficial quality--pessimistic psychology--the other novelist dealt
with in this chapter--Beyle--is far more of a real origin than Balzac
is. If one takes the most brilliant of his successors outside the
Naturalist school--Flaubert and Feuillet--very little that is really
Balzacian will be found in either. At least _Madame Bovary_ and _M. de
Camors_--which, I suppose, most people would choose to represent the
greatest genius and the most flexible talent of the Second Empire in
novel-writing--seem to me to show hardly anything that is like Balzac.
The Goncourts have something of degraded Balzacianism on its lower side
in them, and Zola approaches, at least in his "apocalyptic" period,
something like a similar though less offensive degradation of the
higher. But I can hardly conceive anything less like Balzac's work than
Maupassant's.
[Sidenote: And its own character.]
For the fact is that the real Balzac lies--to and for me--almost
entirely in that _aura_ of other-worldliness of which I have spoken. It
is in the revelation of this other world, so like ours and yet not the
same; in the exploration of its continents; in the frequentation of its
inhabitants; that the pleasure which he has to give consists. How he
came himself to discover it is as undiscoverable as how his in some sort
analogue Dickens, after pottering not unpleasantly with Bozeries,
"thought of Mr. Pickwick," and so of the rest of _his_ human (and
extra-human) comedy. But the facts, in both cases fortunately, remain.
And it may be possible to indicate at least some qualities and
characteristics of the fashion in which he dealt with this world when he
_had_ discovered it. In _Les Chouans_ he had found out not so much it,
as the way to it; in the books between that and _La Peau de Chagrin_ he
was over the border, and with _La Peau_ itself he had "crossed
Jordan,"--it was all conquest and extension--as far as permitted--of
territory afterwards.
[Sidenote: The "occult" element.]
There can, I should suppose, be very little doubt that the fancy for the
occult, which played a great part, as far as bulk goes, in the
_Juvenilia_, but produced nothing of value there, began to bear fruit at
this time. The Supernatural (as was remarked of woman to the indignation
of Mr. Snodgrass) is a "rum creetur." It is very difficult to deal with;
to the last degree unsatisfactory when of bad quality and badly handled;
but possessing almost infinite capabilities of exhibiting excellence,
and conveying enjoyment. Of course, during the generation before
Balzac's birth and also that between his birth and 1830, the Terror
Novel--from the _Castle of Otranto_ to Maturin--had circled through
Europe, and "Illuminism" of various kinds had taken particular hold of
France just before the Revolution. But Balzac's "Occult," like Balzac's
everything, was not the same as anybody else's. Whether you take it in
_La Peau de Chagrin_ itself, or in _Séraphita_, or anywhere, it
consists, again, rather in atmosphere than in "figures." A weaker genius
would have attached to the skin of that terrible wild ass--gloomier, but
more formidable than even the beast in Job[168]--some attendant evil
spirit, genie, or "person" of some sort. A bit of shagreen externally,
shrinking--with age--perhaps? with weather?--what not?--a life shrinking
in mysterious sympathy--that is what was wanted and what you have,
without ekings, or explanations, or other trumpery.
[Sidenote: Its action and reaction.]
Nor is it only in the ostensibly "occult" or (as he was pleased to call
them) "philosophic" studies and and stories that you get this
atmosphere. It spreads practically everywhere--the very bankruptcies and
the sordid details of town and country life are overshadowed and in a
certain sense _dis_-realised by it. Indeed that verb which, like most
new words, has been condemned by some precisians, but which was much
wanted, applies to no prose writer quite so universally as to Balzac. He
is a _dis_-realiser, not by style as some are, but in thought--at the
very same time that he gives such impressions of realism. Sometimes, but
not often, he comes quite close to real mundane reality, sometimes, as
in the most "philosophical" of the so-called philosophical works, he
hardly attempts a show of it. But as a rule when he is at his very best,
as in _La Peau de Chagrin_, in _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, in _Le
Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, he attains a kind of point of unity between
disrealising and realising--he disrealises the common and renders the
uncommon real in a fashion actually carrying out what he can never have
known--the great Coleridgian definition or description of poetry. In
fact, if prose-poetry were not a contradiction in terms, Balzac would
be, except in style,[169] the greatest prose-poet of them all.
[Sidenote: Peculiarity of the conversation.]
On[170] one remarkable characteristic of the _Comédie_ very little has
usually been said. It has been neglected wholly by most critics, though
it is of the very first importance. And that is the astonishingly small
use, _in proportion_, which Balzac makes of that great weapon of the
novelist, dialogue, and the almost smaller effect which it accordingly
has in producing his results (whatever they are) on his readers. With
some novelists dialogue is almost all-powerful. Dumas, for instance (as
is pointed out elsewhere), does almost everything by it. In his best
books especially you may run the eye over dozens, scores, almost
hundreds of pages without finding a single one printed "solid." The
author seldom makes any reflections at all; and his descriptions, with,
of course, some famous exceptions, are little more than longish stage
directions. Nor is this by any means merely due to early practice in the
drama itself; for something like it is to be found in writers who have
had no such practice. In Balzac, after making every allowance for the
fact that he often prints his actual conversations without typographical
separation of the speeches, the case is just the other way. Moreover,
and this is still more noteworthy, it is not by what his characters do
say that we remember them. The situation perhaps most of all; the
character itself very often; the story sometimes (but of that more
presently)--these are the things for and by which we remember Balzac and
the vast army of his creations; while sometimes it is not even for any
of these things, but for "interiors," "business," and the like. When one
thinks of single points in him, it is scarcely ever of such things as
the "He has got his discharge, by----!" of Dickens; as the "Adsum" of
Thackeray; as the "Trop lourd!" of Porthos' last agony; as the longer
but hardly less quintessenced malediction of Habakkuk Mucklewrath on
Claverhouse. It is of Eugénie Grandet shrinking in automatic repulsion
from the little bench as she reads her cousin's letter; of Henri de
Marsay's cigar (his enjoyment of it, that is to say, for his words are
quite commonplace) as he leaves "la Fille aux Yeux d'Or"; of the lover
allowing himself to be built up in "La Grande Bretèche." Observe that
there is not the slightest necessity to apportion the excellence implied
in these different kinds of reminiscence; as a matter of fact, each way
of fastening the interest and the appreciation of the reader is
indifferently good.[171] But the distinction remains.
[Sidenote: And of the "story" interest.]
There is another point on which, though no good critic can miss it, some
critics seem to dislike dwelling; and this is that, though Balzac's
separate situations, as has just been said, are arresting in the highest
degree, it is often distinctly difficult to read him "for the story."
Even M. Brunetière lets slip an admission that "interest" of the
ordinary kind is not exactly Balzac's forte; while another admirer of
his grants freely that his _affabulation_ is weak. Once more, we need
not and must not make too much of this; but it is important that it
should not be forgotten, and the extreme Balzacian is sometimes apt to
forget it. That it comes sometimes from Balzac's mania for rehandling
and reshaping--that he has actually, like the hero of what is to some
his most unforgettable short story, daubed the masterpiece into a
blur--is certain. But it probably comes more often, and is much more
interesting as coming, from want of co-ordination between the observing
and the imagining faculties which are (as Hugo meant) the yoked coursers
of Balzac's car.
The fact is that _exceptis excipiendis_, of which _Eugénie Grandet_ is
the chief solid example, it is not by the ordinary means, or in the
ordinary ways, that Balzac makes any considerable part of his appeal. He
is very much more _der Einzige_ in novel-writing than Jean Paul was in
novel-writing or anything else; for a good deal of Richter's uniqueness
depended[172] upon eccentricities of style, etc., from which Balzac is
entirely free. And the same may be said, with the proper mutations, of
George Meredith. No one ever made less use--despite his "details" and
"interiors"--of what may be called intellectual or artistic costume and
properties than the author of the _Comédie Humaine_. The most
egotistical of men in certain ways, he never thrusts his _ego_ upon you.
The most personal in his letters, he is almost as impersonal in most of
his writings (_Louis Lambert_, etc., being avowedly exceptional) as
Shakespeare. Now, though the personal interest may be not illegitimate
and sometimes great, the impersonal is certainly greater. Thanks to
industrious prying, not always deserving the adjective impertinent, we
know a great deal about Balzac; and it is by no means difficult to apply
some of the knowledge to aid the study of his creation. But in reading
the creation itself you never need this knowledge; it never forces
itself on you. The hundreds, and almost thousands, of persons who form
the company of the _Comédie_--their frequently recurring parts adjusted
with extraordinary, though by no means obtrusive or offensive,
consistency to the enormous world of detail and scenery and general
"surroundings" in which their parts are played--are never interfered
with by the pointing-stick or the prompter. They are _there_; they can't
help being there, and you have to make the best or the worst of them as
you can. Considering the general complexion of this universe, its
inevitableness and apparent [Greek: autarkeia] may seem, in some moods
and to some persons, a little oppressive; it is always, perhaps, as has
been admitted, productive rather of admiration than of pleasure. Faults
of various kinds may be found with it. But it is almost always
wonderful; it is often great, and it is sometimes of the greatest.[173]
FOOTNOTES:
[124] Of course there are exceptions, _Le Rouge et le Noir_ and _La Peau
de Chagrin_ being perhaps the chief among long novels; while some of
Balzac's short stories possess the quality in almost the highest degree.
[125] He tried several pseudonyms, but settled on this. Unfortunately,
he sometimes (not always) made it "_De_ Stendhal," without anything
before the "De," and more unfortunately still, in the days of his
Napoleonic employment he, if he had not called himself, had allowed
himself to be called "M. _de_ Beyle"--an assumption which though
dropped, was not forgotten in the days of his later anti-aristocratism.
[126] Beyle himself recognized the necessity of the reader's
collaboration.
[127] This does not apply to poets as much as to prose writers: a fact
for which reasons could perhaps be given. And it certainly does not
apply to Balzac.
[128] He was now forty-four, and had published not a few volumes, mostly
small, of other kinds--travel description (which he did uncommonly
well), and miscellaneous writing, and criticism, including the famous
_Racine et Shakespeare_, an _avant-coureur_ of Romanticism which
contained, besides matter on its title-subjects, some sound estimate of
Scott as a writer and some very unsound abuse about him as a man. This
last drew from Byron, who had met Beyle earlier at Milan, a letter of
expostulation and vindication which did that noble poet infinite credit,
but of which Beyle, by no means to _his_ credit, took notice. He was
only too like Hazlitt in more ways than one: though few books with
practically the same title can be more different than _De l'Amour_ and
_Liber Amoris_.
[129] As for instance, those from Dekker and Massiger; Camoens and
Ercilla are allowed their native tongues "neat."
[130] The actual "Chartreuse" of Parma only makes its appearance on the
very last page of the book, when the hero, resigning his arch bishopric,
retires to it.
[131] He is the younger son of a rich and noble family, but his father
disowns and his older brother denounces him quite early. It is
characteristic of Beyle that we hear very little of the father and are
practically never even introduced to the brother.
[132] These four words somehow make me think of Samuel Newcome's comment
on the unfortunate dinner where "Farintosh" did not appear: "Scarcely
anything was drank."
[133] See note above.
[134] Both would have declined to meddle with her, I think, but for
different reasons.
[135] Beyle, who had himself no good looks, is particularly lavish of
them to his heroes.
[136] Perhaps one of the rare biographical details which, as has been
explained, may "force the _consigne_" here, is that Beyle in his youth,
and almost up to middle age, was acquainted with an old lady who had the
very unenviable reputation of having actually "sat for" Madame de
Merteuil.
[137] This bad bloodedness, or [Greek: kakoêtheia], of Beyle's heroes is
really curious. It would have qualified them later to be Temperance
fanatics or Trade Union demagogues. The special difference of all three
is an intense dislike of somebody else "having something."
[138] In that merry and wise book _Clarissa Furiosa_.
[139] She keeps the anniversary of his execution, and imitates
Marguerite in procuring and treasuring, at the end of the story,
Julien's severed head. (It may be well to note that Dumas had not yet
written _La Reine Margot_.)
[140] In proper duel, of course; not as he shot his mistress.
[141] Its great defect is the utter absence of any poetical element.
But, as Mérimée (than whom there could hardly be, in this case, a critic
more competent or more friendly) said, poetry was, to Beyle, _lettre
close_.
[142] It seems curiously enough, that Beyle did mean to make the book
_gai_. It is a a very odd kind of gaiety!
[143] This attraction of the _forçat_ is one of the most curious
features in all French Romanticism. It was perhaps partly one of the
general results of the Revolutionary insanity earlier, partly a symptom
or sequel of Byronism. But the way it raged not only among folks like
Eugène Sue, but among men and women of great talent and sometimes
genius--George Sand, Balzac, Dumas, Victor Hugo--the last and greatest
carrying it on for nearly two generations--is a real curiousity of
literature. (The later and different crime-novel of Gaboriau & Co. will
be dealt with in its place.)
[144] _V. sup._ vol. i. p. 39.
[145] A pseudonymous person has "reconstituted" the story under the
title of _Lucien Leeuwen_ (the hero's name). But some not inconsiderable
experience of reconstitutions of this kind determined me to waste no
further portion of my waning life on any one of them.
[146] It may be desirable to glance at Beyle's avowed or obvious
"intentions" in most if not all his novels--in the _Chartreuse_ to
differentiate Italian from French character, in _Le Rouge et le Noir_ to
embody the Macchiavellian-Napoleonic principle which has been of late so
tediously phrased (after the Germans) as "will to" something and the
like. These intentions may interest some: for me, I must confess, they
definitely get in the way of the interest. For essays, "good": for
novels, "no."
[147] Vide _Guy Mannering_ as to the "macers."
[148] _Les Chouans._
[149] Forty vols. London: 1895-8.
[150] _Quarterly Review_ for January 1907.
[151] I believe I may say, without fatuity, that the general
Introduction and the _Quarterly_ article, above referred to, contain
most things that anybody but a special student will need.
[152] It is, however, important to remember that almost the whole of the
first of these three decades was taken up with the tentatives, while the
concluding _lustrum_ was comparatively infertile. The _Comédie_ was, in
the main, the crop of fifteen years only.
[153] It ought always to be, but has not always been, put as a round sum
to his credit in this part of the account that he heartily recognised
the value of Scott as a novelist. A hasty thinker might be surprised at
this; not so the wiser mind.
[154] This remarkable person deserves at least a note here "for one
thing that he did"--the novel of _Fragoletta_ (1829), which many should
know _of_--though they may not know _it_--from Mr. Swinburne's poem, and
some perhaps from Balzac's own review. It is one of the followings of
_La Religieuse_, and is a disappointing book, not from being too immoral
nor from being not immoral enough, but because it does not "come off."
There is a certain promise, suggestion, "atmosphere," but the actual
characterisation is vague and obscure, and the story is told with no
grasp. This habit of "flashing in the pan" is said to have been
characteristic of all Latouche's work, which was fairly voluminous and
of many different kinds, from journalism to poetry; and it may have been
partly due to, partly the cause of, a cross-grained disposition. He had,
however, a high repute for spoken if not written criticism, had a great
influence as a trainer or mentor on George Sand, and perhaps not a
little on Balzac himself. During the later years of his fairly long life
he lived in retirement and produced nothing.
[155] One of the friends who have read my proofs takes a more
Alexandrian way with this objection and says "But there _are_." I do not
know that I disagree with him: but as he does not disagree with what
follows in itself, both answers shall stand.
[156] Cf. Maupassant's just protest against this, to which we shall
come.
[157] An actual reduction of Balzac's books to smaller but still
narrative scale is very seldom possible and would be still more rarely
satisfactory. The best substitute for it is the already glanced at
_Répertoire_ of MM. Christophe and Cerfbeer, a curious but very
satisfactory Biographical Dictionary of the Comedy's _personae_.
[158] "Sans génie je suis flambé," as he wrote early to his sister.
[159] This is about the best of the batch, and I agree with those who
think that it would not have disfigured the _Comédie_. Indeed the
exclusion of these _juvenilia_ from the _Édition Définitive_ was a
critical blunder. Even if Balzac did once wish it, the "dead hand" is
not to be too implicitly given way to, and he was so constantly changing
his views that he probably would have altered this also had he lived.
[160] A certain kind of commentator would probably argue from Mr.
Browning's well-known words "_fifty_ volumes long" that he _had_, and
another that he had _not_ read the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_.
[161] He would not have liked the name "patriot" because of its
corruption, but he was one.
[162] Not a few things, some of them very good, came between--the
pleasant _Maison du Chat-qui-Pelote_, several of the wonderful short
stories, and the beginning of the _Contes Drolatiques_. But none of them
had the "importance"--in the artistic sense of combined merit and
scale--of the _Peau_.
[163] I mean, of course, as far as books go. We have positive testimony
that there was a live Becky, and I would I had known her!
[164] Originally and perhaps preferably called _La Rabouilleuse_ from
the early occupation of its heroine, Flore Brazier, one of Balzac's most
notable figures.
[165] It is one of the strangest instances of the limitations of some of
the best critics that M. Brunetière declined even to speak of this great
book.
[166] The immense influence of Maturin in France, and especially on
Balzac, is an old story now, though it was not always so.
[167] It is possible that some readers may miss a more extended survey,
or at least sample, of these characters. But the plea made above as to
abstract of the stories is valid here. There is simply not room to do
justice to say, Lucien de Rubempré, who pervades a whole block of novels
and stories, or to others from Rastignac to Corentin.
[168] It has sometimes occurred to me that perhaps the skin _was_ that
of Job's onager.
[169] He does try a sort of pseudo-poetical style sometimes; but it is
seldom successful, and sometimes mere "fine-writing" of no very fine
kind. The close of _Peau de Chagrin_ and _Séraphita_ contain about the
best passages.
[170] The two next paragraphs are, by the kind permission of the Editor
and Publisher of the _Quarterly Review_, reprinted, with some slight
alterations, from the article above referred to.
[171] I have known this denied by persons of authority, who would exalt
the gift of conversation even above the pure narrative faculty. I should
admit the latter was commoner, but hardly that it was inferior.
[172] I believe I may speak without rashness thus, for a copy of the
sixteen-volume (was it not?) edition was a cherished possession of mine
for years, and I even translated a certain amount for my own
amusement--especially _Die unsichtbare Loge_.
[173] I have said nothing here on a point of considerable interest to
myself--the question whether Balzac can be said ever (or at least often)
to have drawn a gentleman or a lady. It would require too much
"justification" by analysis of particular characters. And this would
pass into a more general enquiry whether these two species exist in the
Balzacium Sidus itself. Which things open long vistas. (_V. inf._ on
Charles de Bernard.)