"But what of that! Dwarf as I am, I am yours. I am yours because I love you and esteem you. Truth dwells not among men; the kingdom of God is not of this world. But as much as man can steal from divinity of the ray of light which illumines the world, you, ye sons of Prometheus, ye lovers of naked truth and inflexible justice, have stolen. Forward, then! no matter what the shade of your banner, so long as your troops are marching in the direction of the republican future! Forward, in the name of Jesus, who has only one true apostle left on earth (Lamennais); in the name of Washington and of Franklin, who were unable to accomplish enough, and have left us their task to finish; in the name of Saint-Simon, whose sons—God be with them!—are attempting to solve the great and terrible social problem! Forward, so long as good is done, and those who believe prove that they do so! I am only a poor daughter of the regiment—take me with you!"
There are few such pure and heartfelt feminine outbursts of enthusiasm in literature. German literature presents something in the nature of a counterpart to it in Bettina's GoethesCorrespondence with a Child(published the same year), which is the outcome of an equally exuberant enthusiasm; but in Bettina's case we do not receive the same impression of sincerity, and the feeling expressed is in itself narrower—it is purely aesthetic, the cult of one great genius. Bettina is a clever woman; her style is brilliant, with polished, and here and there pointed facets; but even in the feminine weakness of George Sand's enthusiasm there is greatness.
It was some years before the feelings, the birth of which we have witnessed, display themselves in her works. To these later works we shall come presently. We must first consider for a moment the more tranquil, purely poetic tales of the second period of her literary career.
Regarding these from the artistic standpoint, the little tale entitledLa Marquiseis, in my estimation, undoubtedly the best; indeed, taking nothing but art into consideration, it is possibly her most perfect work. I fancy it must have been inspired by the memory of her kind-hearted, dignified grandmother. It fascinates by its combination of the spirit and customs of the eighteenth century with the timid, more spiritually enthusiastic amatory passion of the nineteenth. It is a simple story of a high-born lady of theancien régime, who has married as they married in those days, and has accepted a lover as they accepted lovers then, but whose lover bores her to death because he was not the choice of her heart, but simply the man whom the whole of good society conspired to force upon her. Young, inexperienced, beautiful, and innocent in so far that she does not know what love is, she falls in love with a poor, half-starving, dissipated actor, who on the stage appears to her an incarnation of manliness and poetry. She sees him, when he is not aware of her presence, off the stage, and is dismayed by the difference in his appearance. He has become aware of her interest in him, and now plays to her alone, and dreams of her alone. They hold their first and last rendezvous late one evening after the play. The Marquise, having been cupped in the morning, is fatigued. The actor has not had time to take off the costume of his part; the ideality of the stage still clings to him, and he is inspired, beautified, ennobled by his love, which raises him high above the ordinary conditions of his life. She is modest, he reverential; she is in love, enraptured by a poetical illusion; he loves her as she is, loves her longingly, passionately, but chivalrously; and, after a tempest of passionate words, they part, without any caress but the kiss she imprints on his brow as he kneels at her feet.
The old Marquise, who tells the story, is silent for a moment after concluding it, and then says: "Well, will you believe now in the virtue of the eighteenth century?" "Madame," replies the person addressed, "I have not the slightest desire to doubt it; nevertheless, if I were not so touched by your story, I might allow myself to observe that it was very wise of you to have yourself cupped that day." "You wretched men!" said the Marquise, "you are quite incapable of understanding the story of the heart."
George Sand has written nothing more graceful. The sly sarcasm in this conclusion, a quality which also distinguishes the equally charming and equally suggestive little tale,Teverino, but which is not frequently met with in her writings, is quite in the spirit of the eighteenth century; and the style has that conciseness which is, as a rule, an indispensable quality in a work destined to descend to future generations.La Marquisehas a rightful claim to a place in every anthology of French masterpieces.
Amongst the works which George Sand now proceeds to write is a whole series in which she represents her conception of woman's nature when it is uncorrupted. The women she draws are chaste and proud and energetic, susceptible to the passion of love, but remaining on the plane above it, or retaining their purity even when they yield to it. She inclines to attribute to woman a moral superiority over man. But the natures of her heroes, too, are essentially fine, though in the ruling classes tainted by the inherited tendency to tyrannise over woman and the lower classes. Rousseau's conviction of the original goodness of nature and of the depravity of society lies at the foundation of all these works. Women like Fiamma inSimon, Edmée inMauprat, Consuelo in the novel of the same name (of whom Madame Viardot was to a certain extent the original), are fine specimens of George Sand's typical young girl. Her rôle is to inspire, to heal, or to discipline the man. She knows not vacillation; resolution is the essence of her character; she is the priestess of patriotism, of liberty, of art, or of civilisation. Of the novels named,Consuelois the longest and most famous; it begins in masterly fashion, but, like many of Balzac's, not to speak of Dumas', longer works, degenerates into romantic fantasticalness. The artistic theories of the day led in the direction of exaggeration and extravagance. It was not Victor Hugo alone who was apt to relapse into the formless.
Side by side with the books which have the high-minded young girl as heroine, we find one or two in which the mature woman is the central figure—in which George Sand has given a more direct representation of her own character. Such areLe Secrétaire intime, a comparatively weak story, andLucrezia Floriani, one of the most remarkable productions of her pen. Of this latter book, it may with truth be said that it is not food for every one (Non hic piscis omnium). To most readers it will seem a forbidding or revolting literary paradox; for it aims at proving the modesty, nay, the chastity of an unmarried woman (an Italian actress and play-writer) who has four children by three fathers. But it is a book in which the authoress has successfully performed the difficult task she set herself, that of giving us an understanding of a woman's nature which is so rich and so healthy that it must always love, so noble that it cannot be degraded, so much that of the artist that it cannot rest content with a single feeling, and has the power to recover from repeated disappointments.
George Sand was successful because she simply presented her readers with the key to her own nature. Many who have heard of the authoress's irregular life, of her liaisons with Jules Sandeau, Alfred de Musset, Michel de Bourges, Chopin, Manceau, and half-a-dozen others, must have asked themselves how books that, with all their passion, are so pure and noble as hers, could be the outcome of such a disorderly and, according to accepted ideas, degraded life. And many have felt that the inherent curiosity of the artist nature (which she defined by saying that when the conversation turned upon cannibalism her first thought was: "I wonder what human flesh tastes like;") was not a sufficient explanation of her conduct. InLucrezia Florianishe has given us an exhaustive study of her own character at the age of thirty. I shall endeavour to make the character intelligible with the help of passages culled from different parts of the book.
"Lucrezia Floriani by nature was—who would have believed it?—as chaste as is the soul of a little child. It certainly seems strange to hear this of a woman who had loved so much and so many.... It is probable that the sensual part of her organisation was especially powerfully developed; although to men who did not please her she seemed frigid.... In the rare intervals when her heart had been tranquil, her brain had been at rest; and if she could have been prevented from ever seeing the other sex, she would have made an excellent nun, calm and vigorous. This is as much as to say that nothing could be purer than her thoughts when she was alone, and that when she loved, all that was not her lover was to her, as far as the senses were concerned, solitude, emptiness, nonentity." Lucrezia says of love: "I know that it is said to be a sensual impulse; but this is not true in the case of clever women. With them it follows a regular course; it takes possession of the brain first, knocking at the door of the imagination. Without the golden key to that door it cannot enter. When it has established its mastery there, it descends into the lower regions; it insinuates itself into all our faculties; and then we love the man who rules us, as god, brother, husband, everything that a woman can love." The authoress explains how it was possible for Lucrezia's soul to be continually possessed afresh by the erotic illusion, and in particular how her last, ardently passionate attachment for Prince Karol (Chopin) came into being. "To these rich, strong natures the last love seems always the first; and certain it is, that if affection is to be measured by enthusiasm, Lucrezia had never loved so much. The enthusiasm she had felt for other men had been of short duration. They had been incapable of maintaining it or renewing it. Love had survived disillusionment for a certain time; then came the stage of generosity, solicitude, compassion, devotion, of the motherly feeling, to put it in a word. It was a marvel that passions so foolishly conceived should have lasted so long; although the world, judging only by appearances, was astonished and scandalised to see her breaking the ties so soon and so completely. In all these attachments she had been hardly a week happy and blind—and was not the absolute devotion of one, sometimes two, years, which followed on a love that she recognised to have been foolish and ill-bestowed, a supreme effort of heroism, greater than the sacrifice of a whole life for a being felt to be worthy of it?"
We can understand how it was that weak men had an attraction for Lucrezia. Her independent character in combination with her motherly instincts drew her to the weak. The idea of being protected was intolerable to her; and on occasions when she had felt the desire to lean upon those who were stronger than herself, she had too often been repelled by their coldness. She was therefore inclined to believe that love and energy were to be found in combination only in hearts which had suffered as much as her own.
Finally, we see how her relation to her children—and Lucrezia, like George Sand, is the tenderest, most affectionate of mothers—influenced her erotic life. "She had wished to be a mother to her lovers without ceasing to be the mother of her children, and the conflict between the two feelings had always ended in the extinction of the less obstinate passion. The children triumphed, and the lovers, who, to speak metaphorically, had been taken from the Foundling Hospital of civilisation, were obliged, sooner or later, to return there."
Lucrezia speaks of her attitude to the verdict of the world on her character and life in terms which are directly applicable to George Sand. "I have never sought notoriety. I may have caused scandal, but never knowingly or willingly. I have never loved two men at the same time. I have never, even in thought, belonged to more than one during any given time, that is, as long as my passion lasted. When I no longer loved a man, I did not deceive him. I broke off with him entirely. I had vowed, it is true, in my enthusiasm, to love him always; and I made the vow in absolute good faith. Every time I loved, it was so ardently and perfectly that I believed it was for the first and last time in my life. You cannot call me a respectable woman. But I myself am certain that I am one; I even lay claim to be a virtuous woman, though I know that, according to your ideas and public opinion, this is blasphemy. I submit my life to the verdict of the world without rebelling, without disputing the justice of its general laws, but not acknowledging that it is right in my case."[6]
The contrast betweenLucrezia Florianiand the short series of simple, beautiful peasant stories which follow it after a short interval and bring us up to 1848, seems at first sight a very marked one. In reality, however, the gulf separatingLucreziafromLa Mare au Diable, François le Champi, andLa petite Fadetteis not so wide as it appears. What attracted George Sand to the peasants of Berry, to the rustic idylls of her native province, was the very same Rousseau-like enthusiasm for nature that had lent impetus and weight to her protests against the laws of society. Her secretary and intimate friend, Müller-Strübing, a German, is said to have drawn her attention to Auerbachs earliest village stories, and thereby to have instigated her to the production of the works which, thanks to their simplicity and calm purity, no less than to their wealth of feeling, have gained her the widest circle of readers. Auerbach was consecrated peasant-annalist by Spinoza, the apostle of natural piety, George Sand by Rousseau, the worshipper of nature. Her French peasants are very certainly not "real" in the same sense as Balzac's inLes Paysans; they are not merely represented with a sympathy which is as strong as his antipathy, but are made out to be amiable, tender-hearted, and sensitively delicate in their feelings; they are to real French peasants what the shepherds of Theocritus were to the real shepherds of Greece. Nevertheless, these tales have one merit which they owe entirely to their subject-matter and which George Sand's other novels lack—they possess the charm, always rare, but doubly rare in French literature, of naïveté. All that there was of the peasant girl, of the country child, in George Sand; everything in her which was akin to the plants that grow, to the breeze that blows, knowing not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth; all that which, unconscious and dumb, was so legible in her countenance and behaviour, but was so often nullified in her works by sentimentality and phrase-mongering, revealed itself here in its childlike simplicity.
La Mare au Diable, written in 1841, is the gem of these village tales. In it idealism in French fiction reaches its highest level. In it George Sand gave to the world what she declared to Balzac it was her desire to write—the pastoral of the eighteenth century.
[1]Compare the passages fromJacquesquoted inThe Romantic School in Germany, pp. 104, 105. Émile Zola latterly adopted a different tone.
[1]Compare the passages fromJacquesquoted inThe Romantic School in Germany, pp. 104, 105. Émile Zola latterly adopted a different tone.
[2]Emile Zola writes of the characters inJacques(Documents littéraires, 222): "I cannot describe the impression produced upon me by such characters; they confuse me, they astonish me, as people would who had made a wager to walk upon their hands. Their bitterness and everlasting complaints are quite incomprehensible to me. What is it they complain of? What is it they want? They take life from the wrong side; hence it is only natural that they should be unhappy. Life is fortunately a much more complaisant damsel than they make her out to be. One can always get on with her if one is good-natured enough to put up with the unpleasant hours," In caricaturing George Sand, Zola draws his own portrait, or rather his own caricature, for he is certainly not so narrow-mindedly matter-of-fact as this.
[2]Emile Zola writes of the characters inJacques(Documents littéraires, 222): "I cannot describe the impression produced upon me by such characters; they confuse me, they astonish me, as people would who had made a wager to walk upon their hands. Their bitterness and everlasting complaints are quite incomprehensible to me. What is it they complain of? What is it they want? They take life from the wrong side; hence it is only natural that they should be unhappy. Life is fortunately a much more complaisant damsel than they make her out to be. One can always get on with her if one is good-natured enough to put up with the unpleasant hours," In caricaturing George Sand, Zola draws his own portrait, or rather his own caricature, for he is certainly not so narrow-mindedly matter-of-fact as this.
[3]Even that determined antagonist of Romanticism and George Sand, Émile Zola, is obliged to write of George Sand: "The Romantic spirit animated her creations, but her style remained classic."Documents littéraires. 217.
[3]Even that determined antagonist of Romanticism and George Sand, Émile Zola, is obliged to write of George Sand: "The Romantic spirit animated her creations, but her style remained classic."Documents littéraires. 217.
[4]The writer of an article inLe Figaro(Supplément littéraire) for June 3, 1893, maintains that it is Jules Sandeau who is referred to in this passage; but he is mistaken. SeeCosmopolisof May 1896, p. 440.
[4]The writer of an article inLe Figaro(Supplément littéraire) for June 3, 1893, maintains that it is Jules Sandeau who is referred to in this passage; but he is mistaken. SeeCosmopolisof May 1896, p. 440.
[5]The Prince de Ligne is writing of the qualities of the true soldier, as De Musset writes of those of the true poet. He says: "Si vous ne rêvez pas militaire, si vous ne dévorez pas les livres et les plans de guerre, si vous ne baisez pas les pas des vieux soldats, si vous ne pleurez pas au récit de leurs combats, si vous ne mourez pas du désir d'en voir et de honte de n'en avoir pas vu, quoique ce ne soit pas votre faute, quittez vite un habit que vous déshonorez. Si l'exercice même d'une seule bataille ne vous transporte pas, si vous ne sentez pas la volonté de vous trouver partout, si vous êtes distrait, si vous ne tremblez pas que la pluie n'empêche votre régiment de manœuvrer; donnez-y votre place à un jeune homme tel que je le veux," &c., &c. The manner in which the prose style is reproduced in verse by De Musset shows his artistic genius even more plainly than the invention of a new style would have done. A hint from Émile Montégut put me on the track of this passage.
[5]The Prince de Ligne is writing of the qualities of the true soldier, as De Musset writes of those of the true poet. He says: "Si vous ne rêvez pas militaire, si vous ne dévorez pas les livres et les plans de guerre, si vous ne baisez pas les pas des vieux soldats, si vous ne pleurez pas au récit de leurs combats, si vous ne mourez pas du désir d'en voir et de honte de n'en avoir pas vu, quoique ce ne soit pas votre faute, quittez vite un habit que vous déshonorez. Si l'exercice même d'une seule bataille ne vous transporte pas, si vous ne sentez pas la volonté de vous trouver partout, si vous êtes distrait, si vous ne tremblez pas que la pluie n'empêche votre régiment de manœuvrer; donnez-y votre place à un jeune homme tel que je le veux," &c., &c. The manner in which the prose style is reproduced in verse by De Musset shows his artistic genius even more plainly than the invention of a new style would have done. A hint from Émile Montégut put me on the track of this passage.
[6]Lucrezia Floriani, 169, 67, 130, 127, 38.
[6]Lucrezia Floriani, 169, 67, 130, 127, 38.
Side by side with George Sand and her work we come upon the man whose art she herself characterised as the antipodes of her own. Whilst she, in this particular a genuine Romanticist, turned with repugnance from the social conditions of her day, more disposed to revile and escape from them than to examine and depict them, he, if he did not feel contented, at least felt quite at home in his surroundings, and almost from the beginning of his career regarded the society of his own day and the immediately preceding period as his artistic property, his inexhaustible mine. George Sand was a great character limner, but she was almost more essentially a great landscape painter; and she represented human beings as the landscape painter represents plants; what she showed was the part of humanity which seeks and bathes in the light. Balzac's point of view was the opposite: the part of the human plant which he understood and loved to paint was the root. What Victor Hugo, inLa Légende des Siècles, says of the satyr, is applicable to Balzac:
"Il peignit l'arbre vu du côté des racines,Le combat meurtrier des plantes assassines."
In the exuberantly fertile province of Touraine, "the garden of France," the native province of Rabelais, Honoré de Balzac was born on a spring day in 1799—a man of an exuberantly fertile, full-blooded, warm-blooded nature, with plenty of heart and plenty of brain. Clumsy and tender, coarse and sensitive, the presentient dreamer, the minute observer, this man of curiously complex character combined sentiment, genuine and somewhat ponderous, with a marvellous keenness of vision, combined the seriousness of the scientific investigator with the light humour of the storyteller, the discoverer's perseverance and absorption in his idea with the artist's impulse to present to the eyes of all, in unabashed nakedness, what he had observed, felt, discovered or invented. He was as if created to divine and betray the secrets of society and humanity.
BALZAC
BALZAC
Balzac was a powerfully built, broad-shouldered man of middle height, corpulent in later life; the feminine whiteness of his strong, thick neck was his pride; his hair was black and as coarse as horse-hair, and his eyes shone like two black diamonds; they were lion-tamer's eyes, eyes that saw through the wall of a house what was happening inside, that saw through human beings and read their hearts like an open book. His whole appearance indicated a Sisyphus of labour.
He came as a youth to Paris, poor and solitary, drawn thither by his irresistible author's vocation and by the hope of winning fame. His father, like most fathers, was extremely unwilling that his son, whom no one credited with being a genius, should give up the profession of law for literature, and therefore left him entirely to his own resources. So there he sat in his garret, unwaited on, shivering with cold, his plaid wrapped round his legs, the coffee-pot on the table on one side of him, the ink-bottle on the other, staring out now and again over the roofs of the great city whose spiritual conqueror and delineator fate had destined him to be. The view was neither extensive nor beautiful—moss-grown tiles, shining in the sun or washed by the rain, roof-gutters, chimneys, and chimney-smoke. His room was neither comfortable nor elegant; the cold wind whistled through the chinks of its window and door. To sweep the floor, to brush his clothes, and to purchase the barest necessaries with the utmost economy, were the daily morning tasks of the young poet who was planning a great tragedy, to be calledCromwell. His recreation was a walk in the neighbouring cemetery of Père Lachaise, which overlooks Paris. From this vantage-ground young Balzac (like his hero, Rastignac) measured the great metropolis with his eye, and made a defiant wager with it that he would compel it to recognise and honour his unknown name.
The tragedy was soon given up; Balzac's genius was too modern, too vigorous, to put up with the rules and abstract characters of French tragedy. And, besides, it was imperative that the young hermit, who had only obtained conditional leave of absence from home, should make himself independent as quickly as possible.
He took to hurried novel-writing. As yet he had not the experience of life requisite to give his productions any lasting value; but he had a vivid, inexhaustibly productive imagination, and had read enough to be able to write stories in a certain passable style, the style of most of the light literature of the day. In 1822 he published, under different pseudonyms, no fewer than five such novels; and during the following three years he wrote others which he himself, with all his self-esteem, could not regard as anything but pot-boilers. In 1822 he writes to his sister: "I did not send youBirague, because it is perfect trash. ... InJean Louisthere is some character-drawing, but the plot is wretched. The one merit of these books, dear, is that they bring me in a thousand francs; but I have received the sum in bills which have a long time to run—will it ever be paid?" Those who have toiled through one or more of these early works of Balzac's, will not consider his verdict too harsh. They are distinguished by a certain vivacity—what the French callverve—that is all the good that can be said of them. That they possessed the merit which their author himself described as their only one is doubtful, not only because Balzac in his later novels (seeUn grand Homme de Province à Paris) gives most unflattering descriptions of the publishers who pay with promissory notes, but also because in 1825 he suddenly, in despair, gave up authorship for the time being, in the hope of making a living as a bookseller and printer.
His brain, which was constantly conceiving plans of every description, had conceived that of bringing out one-volume editions of the classic authors. No such editions as yet existed, and he felt convinced that they would be a good business speculation. And he was right; but the profits of this, as of all Balzac's later speculations, were reaped by others; the projector invariably lost by them. In 1837, for example, when he was in Genoa, the idea occurred to him that the ancient Romans had probably not exhausted their silver mines in Sardinia. He spoke of his idea to a Genoese acquaintance, and determined to follow it up. Next year he spent valuable time in taking a fatiguing journey to the island, to examine the slag of the mines. The state of matters answered exactly to his expectations; but when he applied to the authorities at Turin for permission to work the mines, he found that his Genoese friend had been beforehand with him, had acquired the exclusive right to do so, and was already well on the way to become a rich man. Undoubtedly many of the practical speculations which suggested themselves to Balzac's busy brain were mere chimeræ; nevertheless, his genius reveals itself in them. Just as Goethe's was a nature so at one with nature that his poet's eye, falling accidentally on a palm, discovered the secret of the metamorphosis of plants (one and the same original form in every part of the plant), and that his casual examination of a split sheep's skull laid the foundation of philosophic anatomy, so Balzac's was to such a degree the nature of the inventor and discoverer, on the small as well as on the great scale, that he seemed, like the legendary characters possessed of second sight, to know instinctively where riches lay hidden, seemed, as it were, to carry a divining rod which bent of itself towards gold, the nameless, sexless hero of his works. He certainly was not successful in his attempts to secure the treasure; he was a magician, not a business man.
This first idea of his was as felicitous as it was daring; he was to be type-founder, printer, bookseller, and author in one; for he himself, full of enthusiasm for his grand projects, wrote the prefaces for his editions of the classics. But, after he had persuaded his parents to put the greater part of their capital into the undertaking, after he had set agoing a type-foundry and printing establishment, and printed good, illustrated, one-volume editions of Molière and La Fontaine, the French booksellers to a man combined against their would-be colleague, flatly refused to circulate his editions, and quietly awaited his commercial ruin, to take up his idea and profit by it themselves. At the end of three years Balzac was compelled to sell his books as waste-paper, and dispose of his printing machinery at a great loss. He himself underwent all the misfortunes of the poor inventive printer inÈve et David. He was left not only poor, but so overburdened with debt that he had to work all the rest of his life simply to pay his creditors, regain his independence, and restore his mother's fortune. And this debt, to demolish which he had no weapon but his pen, was not a passive enemy; it grew, and attacked him from new quarters; as for long his only means of meeting one engagement was to incur another. It was in the course of these transactions that he became acquainted with all the various types of Parisian money-lenders, of whom he has given such striking portraits in Gobseck and kindred characters; and the words: "My debts! my creditors!" are constantly in his thoughts and of constant recurrence in those letters to his intimate friends in which the warm heart of the heavily burdened man allows itself free expression. "Remorse," he writes in one of his novels, "is not so bad as debt, for it cannot clap us into prison." He actually had a short experience of life in a debtor's prison, and to avoid a repetition of it had often to hide, to change his place of residence, or have his letters sent to misleading addresses. The genuine poet, he lived with his debts as with an inexhaustible source of emotion; his imagination received, as it were, a daily spur to industry when the thought of his debts awoke him and he seemed, as soon as he opened his eyes, to see his promissory notes appearing out of every corner and jumping like grasshoppers all over the room.
He set to work with herculean energy, and worked, one may say without a pause, through all the years of his youth and manhood, until, at the age of fifty, he collapsed from over-exertion—fell as suddenly as the bull that has received its death-thrust on a Spanish arena. The reason of production being so little of a pleasure, so entirely a labour to him, is to be sought in the fact that, though his great and active imaginative power was unceasingly impelling him to write, it was not supported by any innate or early acquired stylistic skill. In mastery of form Balzac was not the equal of many of his contemporaries. He never succeeded in writing a pleasing poem (those which are to be found in his novels are the work of others—Madame de Girardin, Théophile Gautier, Charles de Bernard, Lasailly), and he and none other was the author of the much derided, halting line with which his Louis Lambert begins the epic of the Incas:
"O Inca! ô roi infortuné et malheureux!"
Novel after novel did he write under a pseudonym and repudiate before he attained to a style; his struggle to obtain the mastery of French prose was a desperate one; and it was one of his greatest griefs that the young Romanticists who followed in the steps of Victor Hugo long refused to acknowledge him as a real artist. The delicately sympathetic Gautier, ever ready to admire, was the only author to greet him with prompt recognition. But Balzac's astonishment was boundless when he saw young Gautier, without preparation or any great exertion, and without needing to make any corrections, fling off, at a desk in the printer's office, an article irreproachable in both style and matter. It was long before he could be persuaded that Gautier had not had hisfeuilletonready in his head. At last he grasped the fact that there is such a thing as innate faculty of style, a faculty which had been denied him. How he toiled to acquire it! How ardently he admired Gautier when he really comprehended the quality of his plastic talent! We come upon a curious proof of this so late as the year 1839, when Balzac, in describing the principal female characters in his novelBeatrix, employs almost word for word descriptions from articles written by Gautier two years previously on Jenny Colon and Mademoiselle Georges, the actresses.[1]We feel, in comparing the passages, how eagerness when we see how commonplace and feeble the additions from his own vocabulary are.
Balzac was bound to fail in his attempt to rival Gautier in the latter's special province, for this reason, that he sees and feels in a perfectly different way. Gautier the stylist is an artist of the first rank, but Gautier the author, in spite of his poetic qualities, is cold and at times arid. His talent may be defined as the talent of the plastic artist who has won a place for himself in literature. Balzac, on the other hand, is an inferior stylist, but an author of the highest rank. He cannot place his characters before us with a few telling words, because he does not himself see them in one single plastic situation. When, conjured up by his imagination, they present themselves to the eye of his mind, he sees them, not gradually, but at once, in different stages of their lives and in different costumes; he overlooks their whole career; he observes all the multitude of their peculiar movements and gestures, and hears the sound of their voices in utterances so characteristic that they bring the speaker bodily before us. It is not, as in the case of the stylist, a single picture, the result of a single, perhaps subtle, but somewhat dry association of ideas, which reveals the character to us; no, Balzac's character is composed of a hundred thousand associations of ideas which unconsciously blend and form a unit, complicatedly rich as nature itself, as that real human unit, which consists of a strange mixture of innumerable physical and spiritual elements. It would require a whole book to give a sufficient number of examples of Balzac's incomparable power of bringing personalities vividly before us by means of their manner of expressing themselves, or even simply by some peculiarity in their dress, their household arrangements, and the like.[2]His difficulty lay in the proper disposal of the wealth of material which his memory and his inspirations thrust upon him. At one time he would compress too many ideas, the association between which was intelligible to himself alone, into a few words (as when he says of an innocent, unoffending lady that "her ears were the ears of the slave and the mother"); at another, he would write down, one after the other, all the observations and fancies which his prolific brain suggested every time he invented a fictitious personage, and lose himself in a diffuse, descriptive, argumentative flow of words, which conveyed no distinct impression to the reader—the reason being that the electric communication between the organs of poetic vision and poetic eloquence in the author's brain was faulty, and at times altogether broken off. Tenfold labour had to supply the bitterly felt deficiency.
When we remember that, in those days of collaboration, Balzac never had a collaborator, never even a copyist, we can understand what patience and what stupendous exertion were required to produce, in the course of twenty years, the novels, tales, and plays, more than a hundred in number, which proceeded from his pen.
Whilst Hugo writes as the artists of the Renaissance painted, surrounded by a company of youthful admirers and pupils, Balzac sits alone in his study. He allows himself little sleep. He goes to bed between seven and eight, gets up again at midnight and works in his white, Dominican monk's, habit, with a gold chain round his waist, until daybreak, when, feeling the want of exercise, he rushes off himself to the printer's to deliver his manuscript and correct proofs. His is no ordinary proof-correcting. He demands eight or ten impressions of each sheet. This is partly because he is not certain of having found the final, correct expressions, but also because it is his habit to complete the general outline of his story first, and fill in the details by degrees. Half, sometimes more than half, the payment he receives, goes into the pocket of the printer; but not even extreme need will induce him to allow his work to appear before it seems to him as perfect as he can make it. He is the despair of the type-setter, but his proof-reading is also his own most painful task. The first impression is set with wide spaces between the paragraphs, and gigantic margins; and both of these are by degrees filled to overflowing. When he has done with it, the page, with its dots and dashes, strokes and stars, looks like a picture of a firework. Then the heavily built, untidily dressed man with the crushed felt hat and the sparkling eyes, hurries home along the crowded street, every here and there respectfully made way for by some one who knows or guesses him to be a genius. More hours of work follow. Before dinner he seeks recreation in a call on a lady, or a raid on the old curiosity shops in search of a rare piece of furniture or an old painting. Not till evening comes again does this indefatigable worker think of rest.
"Sometimes," writes Gautier, "he would come to my house in the morning, groaning, exhausted, dizzy with the fresh air, like a Vulcan escaped from his forge, and fling himself down on the sofa. His long night's work had made him ravenously hungry, and he would pound sardines and butter into a kind of paste which reminded him of a dish he had been accustomed to at home, and which he ate spread upon bread. This was his favourite food. As soon as he had eaten he would fall asleep, begging me, before he closed his eyes, to wake him in an hour. Paying no attention to this request, I took care that no noise in the house should disturb this well-earned slumber. When he awoke at last and saw the evening twilight spreading its grey shadows over the sky, he would jump up and overwhelm me with abuse, call me traitor, robber, murderer. I had been the means of his losing 10,000 francs, for he would have earned as much as that with the novel which he would have planned if he had been awake, even leaving possible second and third editions out of the question; I was causing the most terrible catastrophes and most inconceivable complications; I had made him miss appointments with financiers, publishers, duchesses; he would not be in a position to meet his engagements; this fatal sleep would cost him millions.... I was consoled by seeing the fresh Touraine colour returning to his cheeks."
When, taking Charles de Lovenjoul's bibliographical work as a guide, we follow Balzac's labours week by week; when we see from his own letters how, never allowing himself to be distracted by those Parisian gaieties in which he nevertheless often took part, nor to be scared by the literary cannonades of his frequently envious critics, he steadily, stone by stone, raised the pyramid of his life's work, determined to make it as broad and as high as possible, we are inspired by a feeling of respect for the man and his courage. The good-natured, stout, noisy Balzac was no Titan; indeed, in that generation of heaven-storming Titans and Titanesses he appears a peculiarly earth-bound creature. But he is of the race of the Cyclopes; he was a mighty master-builder who worked with a giant's strength; and the uncouth, brick-laying, carpentering Cyclops raised his building as high as the two great lyric geniuses of the day, Victor Hugo and George Sand, mounted on their wings.
He had never any doubt of his own ability. A self-confidence which corresponded to his talent, and which sometimes displayed itself in naïve boastfulness, but never in petty vanity, carried him bravely through all the trials and struggles of the first years; and in the moments of depression which occurred in his, as they do in every artist's life, he was, as we understand from his letters, comforted and strengthened by faithful, secret love. A woman whose name he never mentioned to his friends, whom he only alludes to with reverence as "an angel," "a moral sun," and who to him was "more than a mother, more than a friend, more than one human being can be to another," supported him with her self-sacrificing devotion, with word and deed, in the many troubles which beset his youth. We know that he was acquainted with her in 1822, and for twelve years (she died in 1837) she managed from time to time "to steal away from duty, family, society, all the hampering ties of Parisian life," and spend two hours with him.[3]Balzac, always ardent in his praise, naturally employs the strongest expressions where he loves; what is really worthy of notice is the delicacy of feeling displayed by this man, who is so invariably decried for his cynical sensuality—the admiration and gratitude in which his love takes shape.
[1]Compare the following sentences:—GAUTIER.Les cheveux ...scintillentet se contournent aux faux jours en manière defiligranes d'or bruni....BALZAC.Cette chevelure, au lieu d'avoir une couleur indécise,scintillaitau jour comme desfiligranes d'or bruni....GAUTIER.Le nez, fin etmince, d'uncontour assez aquilineet presqueroyal....BALZAC.Ce nez d'un contouraquilin, mince, avec je ne sais quoi deroyal....GAUTIER.Elle ressemble à s'y méprendre à une ...Isis des bas-reliefs éginétiques....BALZAC.Ce visage, plus rond qu'oval, ressemble à celui de quelque belleIsis des bas-reliefs éginétiques.GAUTIER.Une singularité remarquable du col de Mademoiselle Georges, c'est qu'au lieu de s'arrondir intérieurement du côté de la nuque, ilforme un contour renfléet soutenu,qui lie les épaules au fond de sa tête sans aucune sinuosité, diagnostic de tempéramentathlétique, développéau plus haut point chez l'hercule Farnése.L'attache des brasa quelque chose de formidable.... Mais ils sont très-blancs, très-purs,terminés par un poignet dune délicatesseenfantine et desmains mignonnes frappées de fossettes.BALZAC.Au lieu de se creuser à lanuque, le col de Camilleforme un contour renflé qui lie les épaules à la tête sans sinuosité, le caractère le plus évident de la force. Ce col présente par moments des plis d'une magnificenceathlétique. L'attache des bras, d'un superbe contour, semble appartenir à une femme colossale. Les bras sont vigoureusement modelés,terminés par un poignet d'une délicatesseanglaise etdes mains mignonnes et pleines de fossettes.
[1]Compare the following sentences:—
GAUTIER.Les cheveux ...scintillentet se contournent aux faux jours en manière defiligranes d'or bruni....
BALZAC.Cette chevelure, au lieu d'avoir une couleur indécise,scintillaitau jour comme desfiligranes d'or bruni....
GAUTIER.Le nez, fin etmince, d'uncontour assez aquilineet presqueroyal....
BALZAC.Ce nez d'un contouraquilin, mince, avec je ne sais quoi deroyal....
GAUTIER.Elle ressemble à s'y méprendre à une ...Isis des bas-reliefs éginétiques....
BALZAC.Ce visage, plus rond qu'oval, ressemble à celui de quelque belleIsis des bas-reliefs éginétiques.
GAUTIER.Une singularité remarquable du col de Mademoiselle Georges, c'est qu'au lieu de s'arrondir intérieurement du côté de la nuque, ilforme un contour renfléet soutenu,qui lie les épaules au fond de sa tête sans aucune sinuosité, diagnostic de tempéramentathlétique, développéau plus haut point chez l'hercule Farnése.L'attache des brasa quelque chose de formidable.... Mais ils sont très-blancs, très-purs,terminés par un poignet dune délicatesseenfantine et desmains mignonnes frappées de fossettes.
BALZAC.Au lieu de se creuser à lanuque, le col de Camilleforme un contour renflé qui lie les épaules à la tête sans sinuosité, le caractère le plus évident de la force. Ce col présente par moments des plis d'une magnificenceathlétique. L'attache des bras, d'un superbe contour, semble appartenir à une femme colossale. Les bras sont vigoureusement modelés,terminés par un poignet d'une délicatesseanglaise etdes mains mignonnes et pleines de fossettes.
[2]Merely to show exactly what I mean, I give a single example. The courtesan Josépha asks the old, worn-out roué, Baron Hulot, one of Napoleon's generals, if it is true that he has caused the death of his brother and his uncle, brought misery and disgrace upon his family, and defrauded the government, all to gratify his mistress's whims."Le baron inclina tristement la tête.—Eh bien! j'aime cela! s'écria Josépha, qui se leva pleine d'enthousiasme. C'est unbrûlage générale! c'est Sardanapale! c'est grand! c'est complet! On est une canaille, mais on a du cœur. Eh bien! moi j'aime mieux un mange-tout passionné comme toi pour les femmes que ces froids banquiers sans âme qu'on dit vertueux et qui ruinent des milliers de familles avec leurs rails.... Ça n'est pas comme toi, mon vieux; tu es un homme à passions; on te ferait vendre ta patrie! Aussi, vois-tu, je suis prête à tout faire pour toi! Tu es mon père, tu m'as lancée! c'est sacré. Que te faut-il? Veux-tu cent mille francs? On s'exterminera le tempérament pour te les gagner."Do not these words give life to the woman who speaks and the man she addresses?
[2]Merely to show exactly what I mean, I give a single example. The courtesan Josépha asks the old, worn-out roué, Baron Hulot, one of Napoleon's generals, if it is true that he has caused the death of his brother and his uncle, brought misery and disgrace upon his family, and defrauded the government, all to gratify his mistress's whims.
"Le baron inclina tristement la tête.—Eh bien! j'aime cela! s'écria Josépha, qui se leva pleine d'enthousiasme. C'est unbrûlage générale! c'est Sardanapale! c'est grand! c'est complet! On est une canaille, mais on a du cœur. Eh bien! moi j'aime mieux un mange-tout passionné comme toi pour les femmes que ces froids banquiers sans âme qu'on dit vertueux et qui ruinent des milliers de familles avec leurs rails.... Ça n'est pas comme toi, mon vieux; tu es un homme à passions; on te ferait vendre ta patrie! Aussi, vois-tu, je suis prête à tout faire pour toi! Tu es mon père, tu m'as lancée! c'est sacré. Que te faut-il? Veux-tu cent mille francs? On s'exterminera le tempérament pour te les gagner."
Do not these words give life to the woman who speaks and the man she addresses?
[3](The lady's name was Madame de Bemy. Letters to Louise, Nos. I. and XXII., the letter to his mother, dated Jan. I, 1836, and that of October 1836 to Madame Hanska, taken in combination, show this plainly.
[3](The lady's name was Madame de Bemy. Letters to Louise, Nos. I. and XXII., the letter to his mother, dated Jan. I, 1836, and that of October 1836 to Madame Hanska, taken in combination, show this plainly.
Balzac's earliest literary model was, as already mentioned, Sir Walter Scott, an author of whom he can never have reminded any one, and with whom, when his genius reaches its maturity, he has hardly anything in common. The writer of theComédie Humainewas a man of far too modern a spirit to be able to remain faithful to historic fiction. He felt no home-sickness for any past century; he had amassed a vast wealth of observation, and involuntarily chose themes in which he could turn this to the best account. He was dimly conscious that the writer of historical novels, unless he be content simply to thrust the characters which he has before him as models into antiquated costumes, must take his modern, personal, psychological observations, and, as it were, force them back into a more primitive age—a difficult task, the attempt at which seldom resulted in more than a thinly disguised reproduction of the manners and customs of the writer's contemporaries, or at any rate of their ideas. It was not in Balzac's nature to collect information laboriously from old chronicles; he studied the living men and women of his own day.
La Physiologie du Mariage, the first of his works to arouse attention, supplemented Brillat-Savarin's harmlessPhysiologie du Goûtwith a half-jocose, half-scientific, wholly coarse analysis of that institution of society which French literature from time immemorial has treated as a butt for witticisms, an object of ironical homage, and a matter for unsparing investigation. Balzac regards it in the light of a tragi-comic social necessity, defends it, and assists it with good advice in its struggle with those destructive elements, masculine and feminine caprices and passions. Marriage has a special attraction for Balzac as being the battle-ground of two egoisms; he rushes with the ruthlessness of a wild boar through its boundless domain of attractions and repulsions, snuffing and poking his nose into everything. In France marriage has always been a tolerably external, public matter; it need not surprise us that Balzac has little reverence for its mysteries. He writes of them with Molière's outspokenness, but less healthily—more pessimistically and more grossly. The book is full of clever, coarse conceits and laughable anecdotes, and is often extremely amusing from the contrast between the frivolous, licentious matter and the professorial or father-confessor style in which it is expounded by the youthful lecturer on the science of marriage. It is, nevertheless, an immature production of a writer who has been early robbed of all beautiful illusions; and it must certainly be a repulsive book to most readers of the female sex, though we are told that a considerable proportion of its contents was communicated to the author by two women, neither of them young—Madame Hamelin and Madame Sophie Gay.La Physiologie du Mariagereveals none of Balzac's nobility of thought and delicacy of feeling—nothing but his gift of ruthless, searching analysis.
It would seem as if the opening of his authorial vein in this book had freed him for a long time from bad blood. His conception of life is henceforward a more elevated one, or rather, it divides itself into two conceptions, a serious and a sportive. The serious and the sensually cynic philosophy of human life, which inLa Physiologie du Mariageblent into one repulsive whole, now separate, displaying themselves in the form of tragedy and satyric comedy. In 1831 he both writes his first philosophic novel,La Peau de Chagrin(which laid the foundation of his fame as an author) and begins, withLa belle Impéria, the long series of theContes drôlatiques, a collection of tales in the freest Renaissance style, reminiscent of Queen Marguerite and Brantôme in matter and of Rabelais in language. Told in the language of our own day, they would be both disgusting and dull; but the grand, simple, old-fashioned prose style, which lends more nobility to the subject than even the severest metrical forms, metamorphoses these deifications of the flesh into genuine works of art, burlesque as the tales told by one of those worldly-minded, handy, jovial monks who swarm in the legendary lore of every country.
In one of the masterly prologues to this collection of tales the author tells how, having lost his patrimony in his youth, and being reduced to the direst poverty, he cried to heaven, like the woodcutter in the fable who had lost his axe, in hopes that the gods might take pity on him and give him another axe. What Mercury threw down to him was an ink-horn, on which were engraved the three letters AVE. He stood turning the heavenly gift round and round in his hands until he caught sight of the letters backwards, EVA. What was Eva? What but all women in one? A heavenly voice had called to him: "Think of woman; she will heal thy woes and fill thy pockets; she is thy fortune, thy property. Ave, I salute thee! Eva, O woman!" Which, being interpreted, meant that what he was now to attempt was to win a smile from the unprejudiced reader by mad and merry love stories. And he succeeded. In none of his other writings did his style attain such brilliance and vigour; Rubens's colouring is not bolder nor richer, and Rubens hardly equals this herculean wantonness with his fauns and drunken bacchantes. But it is difficult to find ten successive lines that are fit for quotation or reading aloud.
La Peau de Chagrinis Balzac's first literary tussle with the reality of his age; it is a spirited, many-sided work, rich in germs and shoots; and with its fine, simple symbols it anticipates that almost comprehensive picture of modern society which its author was to give to the world in his complete works. The externalities of modern life, such as the theatre and the fashionable lady's boudoir; the dissatisfied and hopeless poverty of the talented young author thrown into relief by the orgies of wealthy journalists and women of the demi-monde; the contrast, in the two principal female characters, between the worldly and the loving heart—all this is shown us in a strange, fantastic light. The book consists of a few connected gaudy spectacular scenes; there is more reflection and symbolic art than plastic talent in it. The youthful hero, who is on the point of committing suicide in despair over his hopeless poverty, receives from an aged dealer in curiosities a piece of wild ass's skin, on which neither steel nor fire produces the smallest effect, and which secures to its possessor the fulfilment of his every wish, but which shrinks a line or two with the gratification of each; simultaneously with the final disappearance of the ass's skin the life of its owner comes to an end. The persuasive powers of a marvellous imagination have succeeded in imparting credibility to the supernatural part of this profound allegory. Balzac has given the fantastic element in it a form which permits of its blending with the modern realistic elements, Aladdin's lamp, when it was rubbed, instantly worked a direct miracle; even in Oehlenschläger'sAladdinit supersedes the law of cause and effect. Not so the ass's skin; it does nothing directly; it only ensures the fortunate issue of events, steadily shrinking the while. It seems to be made of the fabric of which our lives are composed. The gradual annihilation of the human being is brought about, we are told, by two instinctive actions, which exhaust its sources of life. "Deux verbes expriment toutes les formes que prennent ces deux causes de mort: vouloir et pouvoir.Vouloirnous brûle etpouvoirnous détruit." That is to say, we die at last because we go on killing ourselves every day.
The ass's skin is, like ourselves, at last annihilated by "vouloir et pouvoir." With real profundity Balzac shows in this powerful representation of the chief impulse of the younger generation of his day—to drink the cup of life greedily to the very dregs—what emptiness there is in satiety, how certain it is that death lies cowering in the satisfaction of desire. Youthful, fertile, suggestive, and vaguely melancholy, like all books produced by genius before the acquirement of personal experience,La Peau de Chagrinmade its mark abroad as well as in France. Goethe read it during the last year of his life. Riemer (who attributes the authorship of the book to Victor Hugo) reports Goethe to have said on October 11, 1831: "I have been reading more ofLa Peau de Chagrin. It is an excellent work in the newest style, distinguished by the vigour and cleverness of its back-and-forward movement between the impossible and the painful, and by the logical manner in which the marvellous is employed in producing the most extraordinary chains of thought and events, of which, taken in detail, much that is favourable might be said." In a letter of the 17th November of the same year he writes of the same work: "This book, the production of an intellect of very high order, points to a deep-seated, incurable corruption in the French nation, which will spread steadily unless the provinces, which can neither read nor write, restore it to health again, as far as that is possible." (Goethe-Jahrbuch, 1880, pp. 287, 289.)
The novel contains not a little autobiography. Balzac knew from his own experience the feelings of the impecunious youth, who, descending from his garret, picks his way in his solitary pair of white silk stockings and dancing-shoes across the muddy street, in deadly fear of being splashed by a passing carriage, and consequently deprived of the sight of his beloved. But what interests us more, is the sum of inward experience which is contained in the book, and which amounts to this: Society detests misfortune and suffering, avoids them like infectious diseases, never hesitates in choosing between a misfortune and a crime. Let a misfortune be never so sublime, society will manage to belittle it, to make it ridiculous by some witty sally; it has no sympathy to spare for the fallen gladiator. To Balzac, in short, even now in his youth, society appears devoid of every higher religious or moral feeling; it shrinks from the old, the sick, and the poor; it does homage to luck, to strength, and, above all, to wealth; it tolerates no misfortune out of which it cannot by some means or other coin money.
Before Balzac's day the novel had occupied itself almost exclusively with one theme—love; but the god of Balzac's contemporaries was money; therefore in his books money, or rather the lack of money, the desire of money, is the pivot on which society turns. The idea was audacious and novel. To enter in a work of fiction, a romance, into accurate details regarding the incomes and expenditure of the principal characters, in short, to treat money as of prime importance, was a perfectly new departure; and many denounced it as prosaic, nay, coarse; for it is always considered coarse to say what every one thinks, and what consequently all have tacitly agreed to conceal or to prevaricate about—and especially coarse to proclaim it in an art which is often regarded as the art of beautiful lying.
But Balzac was young yet; his poet's soul, though winter fell early in it, had its spring; he, too, felt constrained to make love and woman the central interest of a whole series of novels; and he treated the old theme with an originality which made it seem quite new. The stories in which he most successfully varied it form a distinct group among his works.
It was not beauty, at least not plastic beauty, which Balzac worshipped in woman. And one thing that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries was, that beauty did not impress him most when seen through the medium of art. A great proportion of the Romantic literature of France, as well as of Germany and Scandinavia, was art literature. Such an art-loving author as, for instance, Gautier (who soon became the head of a whole school), was actually prevented by his love of art from appreciating reality. He himself has told how disappointed he was the first time he went to paint a female figure from the life in Rioult's studio, and this in spite of the unquestioned beauty of the model and the classical grace of her outlines. "I have always," he confesses, "preferred the statue to the woman, marble to flesh." Significant words! Picture Gautier and Balzac together in the museum of antiquities in the Louvre, in that holy of holies, where the Venus of Milo shines in solitary majesty. The plastic poet hears, resounding from the marble, the loveliest of all the hymns of Greek art to the perfection of the human form. Gazing at Venus, he forgets his surroundings. Not so Balzac! His attention is promptly diverted from the goddess by the first Parisian lady who stops in front of her, wearing, in the fashion of the day, a long shawl in which there is not a fold from neck to heel, a coquettish hat, and tightly fitting gloves. He takes in at a glance all the little artifices of the fashionable toilette, the secrets of which are no secrets to him.[1]
Here, then, we have the first characteristic feature in Balzac's work. No artistic tradition stands between him and the woman of the period. He studied no statue, worshipped no goddess, did no homage to ideal beauty; he saw and understood woman exactly as she was then, with her gowns, shawls, gloves, and hats, her caprices, virtues, temptations, and faults, her nerves and passions, with all their traces of unnaturalness, morbidness, and ennui. He loves her as she is. And he is not satisfied with studying her in the street, in the boudoir, or even in the bedchamber; he is not satisfied with analysing her soul; he inquires into the physiological causes of the psychological phenomena, into the sufferings and the diseases of women. He does more than merely indicate all that the weak and suffering sex silently endures.
The second characteristic feature is, that it is not the young girl, nor even the young married woman, whom Balzac represents as the object of love; his chief female type, which has taken its name from the title of one of his stories, isla femme de trente ans. He discovered and proclaimed the simple truth that in such a climate as that of the north of France, a woman is not at her best, either physically or spiritually, at the age of eighteen. He described the woman who has left her first youth behind her, who feels more profoundly, thinks more maturely, has already suffered disappointments, but is still capable of intense, unalloyed feeling. Life has already set its mark upon her—here a line of suffering, and there a wrinkle—but she is still in full possession of all the attractions of her sex. She is melancholy; she has tasted happiness and has tasted suffering, is misunderstood or lonely; she has often been deceived, but is still waiting, capable of inspiring the strong, ardent passions which draw their nourishment from compassion. And, curiously enough, she is not seen and described from the point of view of the man of her own age, but from that of a younger man, with little experience of life. The vernal emotion, the ardent desire, the naïve enthusiasm, the unconscious idealisation of youthful passion, surround this no longer perfectly youthful figure with a glorifying halo, embellish, rejuvenate, deify the woman whose real attractions are her refinement, her feminine seriousness, and the grace born of genuine passion. The delineation is never idealistic in the sense that George Sand's delineations are; for nothing is suppressed of what women, when they talk or write of their own sex, are accustomed to ignore—of what even George Sand passes over in silence when she is describing women for whom she desires to awaken sympathy and admiration. To George Sand woman is above all a soul; to Balzac she is a natural phenomenon, and therefore not flawless, either physically or spiritually. His idealisation is either purely external (the transfiguring power of certain lights, of the erotic situation, &c), or else it consists in passion for a certain limited time invalidating everything else, everything previous, and ennobling with its glow. Maternal love, wifely love, the bashful tenderness of the young girl, are painted by Balzac during this period with as masterly a touch as the unbridled erotic passion of the courtesan.[2]
He shows us the Frenchwoman of four different historical periods.
First, the Frenchwoman of the days of the Revolution. In that little masterpiece,Le Réquisitionnaire, one of his few perfectly proportioned stories, he represents, with the Reign of Terror as a background, a mother's love for her son. The little out-of-the-way town and Madame de Dey's curious house are drawn with a few strokes. Apprehension of the possible fate of a son who has been condemned to death; the expectation of his arrival in the disguise of a soldier who is to be quartered on her; the terrible anxiety, increasing from hour to hour till late at night; the apparently mysterious arrival of the young soldier who, unseen by the mistress of the house, is at once conducted to the bedchamber comfortably prepared for him; the mother's torturing restlessness and almost uncontrollable joy when she hears his steps in the room above, but feels obliged, in order not to betray his arrival, to continue her conversation in the drawing-room; her hurried entrance into his room, and the frightful discovery that the person who has arrived is not her son, but a real recruit—all this, compressed into a few pages, is described with extraordinary power and truth to nature.
Next Balzac paints the women of the Napoleonic period, upon a background of military pomp and splendour, in all the glow and warmth of their admiration for the successful warriors. His picture bears the impress of the restless, pleasure-seeking haste with which life was lived at a time when it was possible for the young woman "to become fiancée, wife, mother, and widow between a first and a fifth bulletin from the Grande Armée," and when the near prospect of widowhood or honours or an immortal name, made the women more reckless and the officers more seductive. A period and a distinct female type are represented in the description of the review in the Tuileries Gardens, and of the evening party at the time of the battle of Wagram (inLa Femme de trente AnsandLa Paix du Ménage).
But it is not until the plots of his stories are laid in the days of the restored Legitimist monarchy that Balzac finds his true province, and produces his most acutely observed, skilfully drawn female types and his most wonderful psychological analyses. Eminently fitted as he was, with his unshrinking eye and his hard hand, to paint the dullness and the dishonesty of the reign of the Citizen King, he was poet enough to look back regretfully from the prosaic days of the plutocracy to the refined elegance and freer, gayer tone of the days of the Legitimist Monarchy. That had still been an aristocratic period; and Balzac, who, without any proper claim to the title, regarded himself as an aristocrat, had no small respect for the aristocracy; the high-born, well-bred, beautiful woman was in his eyes the flower of humanity. He was of the generation that worshipped Napoleon; Napoleon's name appears on every tenth page of his novels, and (like Victor Hugo) he dreamed of rivalling, in his own domain of literature, the Emperor's world-wide dominion; in his study stood a statuette of Napoleon, and on the scabbard of the sword he had written: "What he has conquered with the sword I will conquer with the pen." But, granted all this, he nevertheless, with his dreams, his weaknesses, his vanities and his refinements, belonged to the Legitimist Monarchy, for which, moreover, the fact that his youth had been spent under it gave him a warmer feeling. In the days of gilded state-coaches and old French ceremonial, under the shelter of ecclesiasticism and frivolity, it had been possible for liberal ideas and humane morals to thrive in the higher classes of society; they disappeared when money ascended the throne. The social life of Paris lost that refined charm for which it had been so famous. It is not surprising, then, that Balzac painted the fair sinners of the Faubourg St. Germain with a lenient hand and flattering colours. One of the most eminent women of the day, the charming Delphine de Girardin, whose salon was a fashionable resort, was a true friend to Balzac as well as to Hugo and Gautier; but as far as his works are concerned, he undoubtedly learned more from the two duchesses who personified to him the greatness of Imperial France and the gay refinement of theancien régime, and with whom he became intimate almost at the beginning of his literary career. These were Madame Junot, the Duchess of Abrantés, whom he assisted in her literary pursuits, and the Duchesse de Castries, who began their acquaintance by writing anonymously to him of her interest in his works, and to whom a probably unrequited passion on his side and violent jealousy on hers long bound him. She appears in hisHistoire des Treizeunder the name of the Duchesse de Langeais.
At the beginning of the Thirties, Balzac has, of course, not yet begun to write of society under the Constitutional Monarchy, its women and their passions. This happens later. And when it does happen, what we observe is, that he as a rule envisages this new material much more gloomily and austerely. The feeling of spring has vanished. Woman and love still form the centre of interest in many of the books. But affection has become passion and passion has become depravity. We read little of unselfish feeling and innocent sympathies, much of self-interested calculation, on the part of women as well as of men, nay, especially on the part of women; even in love, and still more when it is only a substitute for love which is described. In many of these novels the courtesan thrusts the fine lady into the background, and occasionally the former is represented as more disinterested than the latter. Abysses of selfishness and vice open before the reader's eyes.