Chapter 7

[1]Cf. Th. Gautier,Portraits contemporains, p. 108.

[2]SeeLe Message, La Grenadière, La Femme abandonnée, La grande Brétèche, Madame Firmiani, Une Fille d'Eve, andLa Femme de trente Ans, which last work is a collection of stories not originally written in connection with each other.

Of the books published by Balzac in 1833 and 1834, two are especially deserving of notice—the delicately wrought, classic tale,Eugénie Grandet, and the powerful, fatefulPère Goriot. In the first-mentioned work Balzac competes with Molière (l'Avare) in the second with no less a writer than Shakespeare (King Lear).

Eugénie Grandetdoes not represent the full measure of Balzac's talent, though he long went by the name of its author as a kind of title of honour. The book interested because of its careful and accurate descriptions of provincial life with its virtues and vices; it could be recommended for family reading, because the heroine was a chaste and noble-minded young girl; but its chief distinction lay in the wonderful manner in which Balzac's genius makes of covetousness and avarice, qualities of which hitherto only the comical side had been displayed, imposing vices. He shows how the instinct of amassing money, which it is the custom to regard as a laughable weakness, by degrees stifles every human feeling, and, raising its terrible Medusa head, tyrannises over the miser's surroundings; and he at the same time makes the miser himself a more human figure. To Balzac he is not the stereotyped comedy bourgeois, but a power-loving monomaniac, a petrified enthusiast, a poet, who at the sight of his gold revels in satisfied desire, but also in wild dreams. The miser is simply a man who is more thoroughly impressed than other men with the truth that money represents all human powers and pleasures. In the representation of such a character, Balzac displays his peculiar gift, which is that of producing a powerful effect with small means, with what others have overlooked or despised. From the symbolic standpoint the horizon ofEugénie Grandetis not narrow; but it was narrow in comparison with Balzac's characteristic and usual one.

InPère Goriotit widens. Here it is not an out-of-the-way provincial nook, but the great city of Paris which is studied, and which is unrolled, like a panorama, before our eyes. And there is no generalising and symbolising, as inLa Peau de Chagrin; each class of society and each character in each class is provided with its own characteristic features. I have spoken ofKing Lear; but the story of the two cold-hearted daughters and their father, full of deep meaning and feeling as it is, is only in an external sense the theme of the book. The real theme is the comparatively uncorrupted provincial youth's introduction to the world of Paris, his gradual discovery of the real nature of that world, his horror at the discovery, his refusal to do what others do, his temptations, and his gradual, yet rapidly completed, education for the life that is being lived around him. Nothing more profound than this study of the development of Rastignac's character has been produced by Balzac, or indeed by any modern novelist. He shows with marvellous art how on every side, except where men's words are dictated by hypocrisy or extreme naïveté, the young man meets with the same conception of society and receives the same advice. His relative and protectress, the charming and distinguished Madame de Beauséant, says to him: "The more coldly you calculate, the higher you will rise. Think of men and women simply as post-horses to be left behind you, broken-winded, at each stage of your journey.... If you have any real feeling, hide it; never let it be suspected, or you are lost.... If you can manage to make women think you clever, men will soon believe that you are, unless you destroy their illusion too rudely.... You will find out what society is—a company of dupes and rogues. Be neither the one nor the other." And the escaped galley-slave Vautrin says to him: "One must either force a way for one's self into the heart of that crowd as a cannon-ball does, or sneak in like the plague. Honesty is of no use. Men bend and submit to the power of genius; they hate it, they try to calumniate it, because it takes without sharing; but they yield if it persists; they adore it on their bended knees if they have not succeeded in burying it in the mud.... I defy you to take two steps in Paris without stumbling on infernal machinations. Hence the honest man is the common enemy. But who do you suppose is the honest man? In Paris he is the man who keeps silence and refuses to share."

Rastignac is the typical young Frenchman of that period. He is talented, but not in any uncommon degree, and has no idealism beyond that which is begotten by the inexperience of youth. Profoundly impressed by all that he sees and experiences, he begins to aspire with steadily diminishing conscientiousness, steadily growing desire, after fortune's favours. How indignantly he repudiates the idea when Vautrin first puts the old hypothetical question to him—whether, if a mere act of will could do it, he would kill an unknown mandarin in China to obtain the millions he desires! Yet how short a time elapses before "the mandarin" is lying in his death-throes! Rastignac says to himself at first, as all men do in their youth, that to resolve to become great or wealthy at any cost is the same as to resolve to lie, cheat, and cringe to and flatter those who have lied, cheated, cringed, and flattered. Presently he dismisses the thought, determining not to think at all, but to follow the instincts of his heart. There comes a time when he is still too young to make definite calculations, but old enough to be haunted by vague ideas and hazy visions, which, if they could be chemically condensed, would leave no very pure deposit. His liaison with the fashionable lady, Delphine de Nucingen, Goriot's daughter, completes his education. And whilst he has been acquiring a full and perfect understanding of that sum of small and great meannesses which constitutes fashionable life, he has been influenced by Vautrin's satirical cynicism. "One or two more such political reflections, and you will see the world as it is. If he will but act an occasional little virtuous scene, the man of superior powers may satisfy all his fancies and receive loud applause from the fools in the pit.... I give you leave to despise me to-day, being certain that ere long you will love me. You will find in me those yawning abysses, those great concentrated feelings, which the foolish call vices; but you will never find me either cowardly or ungrateful."

Rastignac's eyes are opened; he sees all the shams by which he is surrounded, sees that morals and laws are simply screens behind which impudent vice acts unrestrainedly. Everywhere, everywhere, sham respectability, sham friendship, sham love, sham kindness, sham sacredness, sham marriages! With masterly skill Balzac has seized and immortalised that moment in the young man's life when, as I have already put it, his heart swells and becomes strangely heavy, and he feels, when he looks about him, as if a fountain of scorn were surging in his breast. "His reflections whilst he was dressing were of the saddest and most depressing. Society appeared to him like an ocean of mud, in which the man who dipped his foot at once sank up to the neck. 'In society men commit only mean crimes,' he said to himself; 'Vautrin is greater.'" In the end, after he has taken all the measurements of this hell, he settles down comfortably in it, and prepares to scale the heights of society, to rise to the elevated official position which we find him occupying when we meet him again in later novels.

Almost all Balzac's characteristic qualities stood him in good stead in the evolution of this broadly planned work. His almost animal liveliness, his inexhaustible flow of cutting epithet, lent themselves naturally to the reproduction of the conversation of the mixed, shabby, wanton, impudently clever company who sat at the table of the Pension Vauquer. There are hardly any noble characters in the book, and the author has consequently no opportunity of indulging in tasteless pathos; but the reader has countless opportunities of rejoicing in the unerring eye and the precision with which Balzac dissects the soul of a criminal, a coquette, a millionaire, an envious old maid. The neglected, disowned old father, from whom the book takes its title, is by no means an entirely successful character. Père Goriot is a victim, and Balzac always waxes sentimental over victims. With extremely bad taste he calls the old man "the Christ of paternal love"; and to the paternal love he imparts such a sensually hysterical character that he almost disgusts us with it.[1]Nevertheless the fact that the whole plot centres round this forsaken old man, upon whose heart his own daughters trample, gives to the composition a satisfactory unity and solidity. The whole Juvenal-like satire of society is concentrated, is compressed, as it were, into an epigram, in the passage which describes how Delphine does not visit her dying father because it is imperative, if she desires to mount a step higher on the social ladder, that she should avail herself of the long-coveted invitation to Madame Beauséant's ball—a ball to which "the whole of Paris" is crowding merely to spy with cruel curiosity for traces in the hostess's face of the pain caused her by the engagement of her lover, the news of which had only reached her that morning.

We follow Delphine as she drives, with Rastignac by her side, in her own carriage to the ball. The young man, who is well aware that she would drive over her father's corpse to show herself at this ball, but who is neither able to give her up nor brave enough to incur her displeasure by reproaching her, cannot refrain from saying a few words about the old man's pitiable condition. The tears come into her eyes. "I shall look ugly if I cry," she thinks; and they dry at once. "To-morrow morning I shall go to my father," she says, "and nurse him, and never leave his pillow." And she means what she says. She is not a radically bad woman, but she is a living picture of the discords of society; she belongs to the lower classes by birth, to the upper by marriage; she is rich, but the humiliating conditions of her marriage deprive her of the control of her fortune; she is pleasure-loving, empty-minded, and ambitious. Balzac's creative power was not equal to the production of a simple, pure, Shakespearean Cordelia; his region is not the region of the noble; but he has created a Regan and a Goneril who are more human and true to life than the great Englishman's.

[1]"Mon Dieu! pleurer, elle a pleuré?"—"La tête sur mon gilet," dit Eugène.—"Oh! donnez-le-moi, ce gilet," dit le père Goriot.

One day in 1836 Balzac appeared in his sister's room in the wildest of spirits. Imitating the gestures of a drum-major with his thick cane (on the cornelian handle of which was engraved in Turkish a sultan's motto: "I am the destroyer of obstacles"), he shouted to her during the pauses of an accompaniment of martial music made with his tongue: "Congratulate me, little one, for I am on the point of becoming a genius." He had conceived the idea of combining all his novels, those already published and those yet to be written, into one great work—La Comédie Humaine.

The plan was stupendous and perfectly original; nothing of the kind existed in any known literature; it was a product of the same genius for systématisation which at the beginning of his career had inspired him with the idea of writing a series of historical romances embracing a succession of centuries. But this was a far more interesting and fertile idea. For, if the work were successful, it would possess the same force of illusion as if it dealt with historic facts, and it would, moreover, not merely be a little fragment of life symbolically and artistically enlarged into an image of the whole, but might justly lay claim to be, in the scientific sense of the word, a whole. In theDivina CommediaDante had, as it were, focussed all the philosophy and experience of life of the Middle Ages; his ambitious rival purposed giving to the world by means of two to three thousand characters, which each represented hundreds of others, a complete psychology of all the different classes of French society, and thus, indirectly, of his age.

It is undeniable that the result was something unique.

Balzac's country has, like the real country, its ministers, its judges, its generals, its financiers, manufacturers, merchants, and peasants. It has its priests, its town and country doctors, its men of fashion, its painters, sculptors, and designers, its poets, prose authors, and journalists, its old and its newly created aristocracy, its vain and unfaithful, and its lovable, victimised wives, its authoresses of genius and its provincial blue-stockings, its old maids, its actresses, and its host of courtesans. And the illusion is astonishing and complete.

The personages reappear in one after another of the numerous novels; we make acquaintance with them in all the different stages of their lives; they are constantly being alluded to by other characters when they do not appear themselves; the descriptions of their appearance, dress, homes, habits, and daily life are as minute and exact as if they had been given by a dressmaker, a doctor, a tradesman, or a lawyer, and at the same time so vivid that we feel as if we must certainly find the person described either in the street and house indicated as his home, or else paying a call upon the distinguished lady whose salon is the rendezvous of all the people of fashion in the novels. It seems almost impossible that these beings, one and all, should be mere figments of the brain; we involuntarily think of the France of that day as peopled by them.

And it is the whole of France. For Balzac described in their turn towns and districts in every part of the country.[1]Far from despising the provinces, he took a pride in displaying his intimate knowledge of all the peculiarities of their stagnant life, of their virtues, all culminating in resignation, and their vices, the offspring of narrow-mindedness. But Paris in a very special manner lives in his pages. And Balzac's Paris is not the old city ofNotre-Dame de Paris, the picturesque, medieval capital with its marked social contrasts, its animated street life, and its superstitious ecclesiasticism; still less is it Victor Hugo's ideal Paris, that impossible New Jerusalem of intellect and enlightenment; it is the real modern city with its joy, its sorrow, and its shame—the entrancing wonder of our own age, which throws the seven of antiquity into the shade—the gigantic polypus with the hundred thousand tentacles which drag everything, near and far, into its clutches—the great cancer eating into France. The Paris of the author's own day lives in his books, with its narrow streets, of which he gives Rembrandt-like etchings, with its rattle and shrieks, its street cries in the early morning and its mighty evening chorus of voices—a sea of sound which he reproduces for us with an orchestral effect, reminding us of the men initiated into the mysteries of old, who seemed to have eaten drums and drunk cymbals.[2]Balzac knows about everything in Paris—the architecture of the houses, the furniture of the rooms, the pedigrees of the fortunes, the successive owners of the valuable objects of art, the ladies' toilettes, the dandies tailors' bills, the lawsuits which divide families, the state of health, means of subsistence, needs, and desires of all the different classes of the population. He had absorbed the town through every pore. Contemporary novelists sought refuge from the mist-veiled sun of Paris and the commonplace modern Parisian, in Spain, or Africa, or the East; but to Balzac no sun was fairer than that which shone on Paris. Those about him endeavoured to conjure forth the shades of a distant or departed beauty: but to him ugliness was no more repulsive than the nettle is to the botanist, the snake to the zoologist, or disease to the doctor. He would never, in Faust's place, have called Helen from the grave; he would have been much more likely to send for his friend Vidocq, the Prefect of Police and quondam criminal, and get him to tell tales of what he had gone through and seen and heard.

By dint of observation he amasses an enormous collection of separate traits, and the cataloguing of these traits frequently makes the introductory part of his novel tiresome and confusing; at the end of an interminable description of a house, a figure, a face, a nose, the reader sees nothing, is simply bored. But then comes a moment when the author's glowing imagination melts and fuses together all these commonplace elements presented to it by his faithful memory, as Benvenuto Cellini melted down plates and spoons and from them cast his Perseus. Goethe says (in his diary of February 26, 1780): "The collecting and putting together of details does not help me to understand. But after I have long occupied myself in dragging together sticks and straws, and have attempted to warm myself in vain, although there is fire at the heart of the heap and smoke everywhere, suddenly the flame springs up and the whole is in a blaze." In Balzac's novels the descriptive parts are often smothered in smoke, but the flame never fails to burst forth.

For Balzac was not merely an observer; he was a seer. If he happened to meet a workman and his wife going home from the theatre between eleven and twelve at night, he as likely as not followed them the whole way to their little house beyond the outer boulevards. He heard them talk (the mother dragging their child after her by the hand) first of the play, then of their own affairs. They talked of the money that was to be paid them next day, spending it in imagination in twenty different ways, quarrelling during the process and revealing their characters in the squabble. And Balzac listened so intently to their complaints of the length of the winter, the dearness of potatoes, the rise in the price of turf, that he at last lived their life, and, as we are told in hisFacino Cane, "felt their rags upon his back and walked with his feet in their soleless shoes." Their dreams, their necessities, entered into his soul, and he went about in a kind of waking dream. Whilst this mental intoxication lasted he gave up all his usual habits and became something different from himself, became the age. He did not only write his stories, he lived them; his fictitious characters were so vividly present to him that he spoke of them to his acquaintances as if they actually existed. When he undertook a journey to a place he wished to describe, he would say: "I am going to Alençon, where Mademoiselle Carmon lives; to Grenoble, where Dr. Bénassis lives." He used to give his sister the news of his imaginary world. "Do you know who it is Félix de Vandenesse is marrying? A Mademoiselle de Grandville. It is a good match, in spite of all Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille has cost the family." One day when Jules Sandeau was speaking of his sister, who was ill, Balzac, who had been listening absently for some time, suddenly said: "This is all very well, my friend; but now to return torealities—let us talk of Eugénie Grandet." It was necessary that the illusion in his own case should be as strong as this, if he was to communicate it to others with approximate strength. His imagination had the commanding power which allows no doubt to arise. It exercised this quality in practical matters too. Amongst the hundreds of projects which occurred to him as possible means of freeing himself from debt, was that of covering the bare fields surrounding the little country-house of Les Jardies (which he had bought that he might have a security to give his mother) with enormous forcing-houses, which, because of the entire absence of shelter from the sun's rays, would require very little artificial heat. In these forcing-houses a hundred thousand pine-apples were to be grown, which, sold at five francs each, instead of at the ordinary price of twenty, would yield the fortunate grower a yearly income of 400,000 francs "without his requiring to produce a scrap of manuscript." With such convincing eloquence did the originator of this plan demonstrate the absolute certainty of its success, that his friends actually looked out for a shop on one of the boulevards for the retail of the pine-apples, and consulted him as to the form and colour of the signboard. At another time he was firmly persuaded, I know not upon what grounds, that he had discovered the place in the outskirts of Paris where Toussaint Louverture had buried his treasure; and so successful was he in communicating his belief to his friends Sandeau and Gautier, neither of them particularly simple-minded persons, that these two gentlemen armed themselves with spades and stole like criminals out of Paris at five o'clock in the morning to dig at the spot indicated—naturally to find nothing. The expression, "thepowerof imagination," is peculiarly applicable in Balzac's case.

And this imagination which prevailed over others was his own tyrant. It gave him no peace. Not satisfied with the conception of plans, with the sweet, but barren joy of artistic dreams, it compelled him to be continually carrying out his plans, to keep himself in that habit of producing, without which inspiration so soon vanishes.

When, writing inLa Cousine Betteof the gifted sculptor, Wenceslas Steinbockes idleness, he quotes these words of "a great writer": "I sit down to my work with despair and rise from it with sorrow," he is obviously in a half-modest way quoting himself. And he adds: "If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtius flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent." The method of production which he describes is his own; but it is not the only, not even the highest method. More tranquil, less modern spirits have kept their heads clear and their eyes undimmed above the seething crater of their work; and by doing so have preserved a sound critical sense which has prevented them from ever becoming as tediously entangled in their material as the author ofLe Curé de VillageandLe Medicin de Campagne. But, on the other hand, a certain dull glow, a thrilling, enthralling something which has become a necessity to modern nerves, is too often lacking in their works.

In the long preface to theComédie HumaineBalzac sets forth his intentions and his aim. He begins by expressing his contempt for the usual method of writing history. "In reading those dry and most unattractive registers of events which go by the name of history, we observe," he writes, "that the historians of all countries and ages have forgotten to give us the history of morals." This deficiency he intends, as far as it lies in his power, to supply. He purposes producing a record of the passions, virtues, and vices of society by condensing kindred characters into types—thus, with patience and perseverance, writing the book which Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, and Persia "have unfortunately neglected to bequeath to us." We see what a low opinion Balzac has of history. His extremely slight acquaintance with it made it easier for him to be contemptuous. Nor was he himself really the historian of his age; he was, to use his own striking and correct expression, its naturalist. He followed the lead of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who demonstrated the unity of structure of all the different species. Among scientists he felt himself a scientist, a professor of sociology. "Society produces from man, according to environment, as many different men as there are species in zoology. The difference between soldier, labourer, official, lawyer, idler, scientist, statesman, merchant, sailor, poet, priest, is, though more difficult to grasp, quite as great as the difference between wolf, lion, horse, raven, shark, seal, and cow." The analogy is not complete, partly because, as Balzac himself immediately admits, the wife and husband of society do not always correspond to each other as do the male and female of the zoologist, partly because it is in the power of the social individual to pass from one class or calling to another, whereas in nature transition from one species to another is impossible during the lifetime of an individual.

What Balzac really means, and what is perfectly true, is that the standpoint from which he views society corresponds exactly, as a rule, to the standpoint from which the scientist investigates nature. He never moralises and condemns; he never, in this unlike most of his fellows, allows himself to be led by disgust or enthusiasm to describe otherwise than truthfully; to him, as to the naturalist, nothing is too small, nothing too great to be examined and explained. Seen through the microscope, the spider is larger and more complicatedly organised than the hugest elephant; regarded from the scientific standpoint, the majestic lion is only a pair of jaws upon four legs. The kind of food determines the shape of tooth, jaw, shoulder-blade, muscle, and claw, and explains the majesty. And in exactly the same manner, that which under certain circumstances seems a foul, despicable crime, reveals itself, regarded from another standpoint, to be a miniature edition of one of the grand, brilliant vices of which history tells—and this is Balzac's standpoint.

Even in as early a work asEugénie Grandetwe come upon expressions which prove it. The time is approaching when Eugénie will be forced to confess to the miser who is her father that she no longer possesses her ducats, that she has actually given them away. "Three days later," writes Balzac, "a terrible drama was to be enacted—a bourgeois tragedy without poison, dagger, or bloodshed, yet more cruel than any of those which happened in the famous family of the Atrides." This is as much as to say: My middle-class novel is more tragic than your classic tragedy. InPère Goriot, when the mistress of the famous boarding-house is loudly and despairingly bewailing the departure of her boarders, Balzac remarks: "The lamentations which Lord Byron has put into the mouth of Tasso are beautiful, but they lack the profound truth of Madame Vauquer's." Which means: The pettiness and vulgarity which I describe, is, vigorously apprehended, more interesting than all your noble generalities. InCésar BirotteauBalzac not only makes jesting reference in his titles to Montesquieu's famous book on the Roman Empire, but, with the audacity of genius, compares his elaborate, lengthy description of a clever Parisian perfumer's successes and misfortunes with the story of the Trojan wars and the changeful fortunes of Napoleon. "Troy and Napoleon are only heroic epics. May this tale be an epic of middle-class life, of destinies to which no poet has turned his attention, so destitute of all greatness do they appear. Its subject is not a single man, but a whole host of sufferings." Which is as much as to say: In literature nothing is in itself little or great; in a poor hairdresser's struggle for existence I can read a heroic poem; I show how the events of a humble private life, if we connect them with their causes and trace these back to their source, are as important, as interesting and engrossing as the great revolutions in the lives of nations. And when, in that masterpiece,Un Ménage de Garçon, the cunning, handsome bravo, Max Gilet, is killed in a duel, the author observes: "Thus died one of those men who are capable of great things when their environment is favourable; a man whom nature had treated like a spoiled child, for she had given him the courage, the coolness, and the political sagacity of a Cæsar Borgia." So effective is the last of these reflections, that the reader feels as if he had not understood Max's character until now, when he sees it in the light of this name.

And virtue is in Balzac's eyes just as much of a result as vice. Although he is at times weakly sentimental and bombastic in his descriptions of dutifulness and benevolence, to which he moreover imparts a strong Roman Catholic colouring, he never fails to direct attention to the sources of the virtues he describes, which are to be found, now in a natural frigidity of the senses, now in pride, now in unconscious calculation, now in inherited nobility of sentiment, now in feminine remorse, masculine simple-mindedness, or the pious hope of reward in a future life.

Un Ménage de Garçon, Cousine Bette, andLes Illusions perduesare works which ought to be read by any one who is desirous of appreciating the growth of their author's literary powers during the last stage of his career.

The first, which is one of Balzac's least known and read novels, is an admirable psychological analysis of the life of a small country-town and of a family with branches there and in Paris. The chief character is a decayed officer of Napoleon's Guards, originally a strong, energetic character, now the personification of brutal, passionate egoism. He is themiles gloriosusof antiquity, except that in place of being cowardly he is vicious. The second novel mentioned,La Cousine Bette, a well-known and much read one, gives an incomparable realistic representation of the ruinous power of the erotic passion. Even Shakespeare (inAntony and Cleopatra) does not treat the theme in a more masterly and convincing manner.Les Illusions perduesis devoted to demonstrating the degrading results of the abuse of the press.

The title of this last novel is characteristic of Balzac. It might, in a manner, be the title of his complete works. But no other single book of his gives such a good general idea of his attitude to modern civilisation. The pernicious side of the influence of the newspaper press is treated as the dark side of public life generally.

Like most great authors who have not lived to be old, Balzac had little reason to rejoice over the criticism meted out to him by the press. He was not understood. Even the best critics, men of the type of Sainte-Beuve, were too unlike him and too near to him in time to understand his greatness. He lived a solitary life; contrary to Parisian custom he took no steps to get his books praised; and, as usually happens, such success as he earned procured him as much envy as fame. InLes Illusions perdueshe gave a picture of the press which the insulted journalists never forgave him. The most eminent of them was Jules Janin. His portrait was, not exactly ill-naturedly, but far from flatteringly painted in the novel under the name of Etienne Lousteau. This made and still makes his criticism of the book very amusing. It appeared in theRevue de Paris, a periodical to which Balzac had been a regular contributor until he brought and gained a lawsuit against it, after which it naturally treated him as an outlaw. It is a malicious, trivial, witty piece of writing, which has not survived the book it was intended to ruin.

A young, poor provincial poet, beautiful as a god, but of weak character and mediocre talent, is brought to Paris by the Muse of the Department, an elegant, aristocratic bluestocking. They are in love with each other, and it has been the lady's intention to allow him to play the part of her accepted lover in the capital; but when she is received with open arms by the fashionable world, she suddenly sees herself and her knight in a new light. Coldness and neglect on her part ensue; Lucien is thrown into the shade by a more than middle-aged man of the world. And now we are called on to observe the stages of another of the many processes by which provincials are educated into Parisians. Lucien hopes to make his way as an author; he has written a novel in Sir Walter Scott's style and a volume of poems; he is received into a little circle of poor, proud young authors, artists, and scientific men, chosen spirits, to whom the future of France belongs. But the months of poverty, self-denial, laborious study, and ideal hope are too long for him; he pines for immediate pleasure and fame, for revenge upon all who humiliated him when he was the ignorant country prophet. The so-called "minor press" offers him the chance of completely satisfying his desire; his head is turned, and he plunges, without cause to advocate or principle to uphold, into daily journalism.

Lousteau takes him to the shop of a rich Palais-Royal bookseller and newspaper proprietor. "Each time the bookseller opened his lips he grew in Lucien's eyes; the young man seemed to see politics and literature converging towards this shop as their true centre. To find an eminent poet prostituting his muse to a journalist ... was a terrible lesson to the great man from the country.... Money! in that word lies the solution of every problem. He is lonely, unknown, has only a doubtful friendship to look to for happiness. He blames his true and sorrowing friends of the literary brotherhood for having painted the world to him in false colours and having hindered him from rushing, pen in hand, into the great mêlée." From the bookshop Lousteau and Lucien make their way to the theatre. Lousteau, as a journalist, is welcome everywhere. The manager tells them how a conspiracy against the play has been defeated by means of a free use of the purses of his two prettiest actresses' wealthy admirers. "During these last two hours Lucien had heard of nothing but money. Everything had resolved itself into money. At the theatre and in the bookshop, with publisher and with editor, there had been no question of art or real merit. He felt as if the huge stamping-machine of the mint were imprinting its mark with dull, heavy blows on his head and heart." His literary conscience evaporates, and he becomes the literary and dramatic critic of an impudent, stupid newspaper. Loved and supported by an actress, he sinks ever deeper in the life led by the man who has sold his pen. He goes over from the Liberals to the Conservatives. The depth of his degradation is most strongly borne in upon us in the scene where, having been compelled by his editor to write a malicious attack on an admirable book written by the best and noblest of his own friends (Balzac's ideal author), he is found knocking at this friend's door, on the evening before the article appears, to beg his forgiveness. Outward is soon added to inward misery. His mistress dies, and he is in such straits that he has to write obscene songs sitting by her death-bed, to raise the money for her funeral expenses. He ends by accepting from her maid a louis which the woman has just earned in a shameful manner, and with it paying his journey home to his native village. And all this bears the stamp of truth—horrible truth. In this one book Balzac renounces the impartiality of the scientific observer. Everywhere else he preserves his equanimity; here he chastises with scorpions.

[1]Issoudun inUn Ménage de Garçon, Douai inLe Recherche de l'Absolu, Alençon inLa vieille Fille, Besançon inAlbert Savarus, Saumur inEugénie Grandet, Angoulême inLes deux Poètes, Tours inLe Curé de Tours, Limoges inLe Curé de Village, Sancerre inLa Muse du Département. &c.

[2]See the introduction to the indecent story,La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, in which the hurry, the crowdedness, the whole spirit of Parisian life, is represented with an incomparable skill in the art of word-painting.

In his history of France Michelet dates a new epoch in the intellectual life of that country from the period when coffee came into general use as a beverage. This is pushing an idea to the extreme; but there would be no exaggeration in asserting that in Voltaire's style we can trace an inspiration of coffee, just as we can trace an inspiration of wine in the style of earlier authors. Balzac's method of working obliged him to refresh himself during his long, fatiguing nights of labour with an injurious quantity of coffee. It has been aptly said: "He lived on 50,000 cups of coffee and died of 50,000 cups of coffee."

One is conscious in his works of his ceaseless toil and of his nervous excitement, but it is probable that if he had worked more calmly he would not have communicated the same life to them. While we are reading his pages we feel the confused tumult of the great capital, its furious competition, its fever of work and pleasure, the sleepless whirr of the great loom. All these hearths and lamps and furnaces have lent some of their fire to his books. He was in his native element when he had work before him and behind him and round him—when, like a sailor in mid-ocean who sees nothing but sea, he saw nothing but work as far as his sight could reach.

During the last seventeen years of his life his labours were interrupted and enlivened by intellectual intercourse with a lady who lived at a great distance from Paris, to whom he wrote almost every day. We have an account of this friendship, only slightly disguised, inAlbert Savarus.

In February 1832 a young Polish Countess, Madame Evelina Hanska, then aged twenty-six or twenty-eight, wrote an anonymous letter to Balzac, in which she thanked him for his writings and tried to persuade him to look on things from a more spiritual point of view. This led to a correspondence between them. Madame Hanska, a gifted, highly educated woman, belonged by birth to the famous Rzewuski family; the eminent Polish author, Henri Rzewuski, was her brother. Her husband was a rich old man, an invalid, with a peculiar temper. They lived a very lonely life on their estate in Little Russia, and literature and Balzac were her only interests.

Balzac and she had first met at Neuchatel in Switzerland early in 1833, but on this occasion they were only for a few minutes alone together; in December of the same year, however, they spent six weeks together at Geneva, and, before they parted, agreed that they would marry whenever Countess Hanska became a widow. Henceforward they met almost every year, in Switzerland or Austria; and they carried on a constant correspondence. There is not the slightest doubt that Balzac was devotedly attached to Countess Hanska, although his devotion to her did not prevent his having numerous liaisons with other women. She was his guiding star, and he felt impelled to communicate all his thoughts and all the events of his life to her.

She undoubtedly loved him in return, with a love which was partly real passion, partly satisfied vanity; but Balzac's letters to her show that she never ceased tormenting him with her passionate jealousy. He had begun to cool when a meeting in Vienna in 1835, arranged by Countess Hanska, fanned the sinking fire of his passion into a blaze again. After this a number of years passed without their seeing each other. In 1841 Madame Hanska in her turn manifested a certain coldness, born of suspicion; and after Count Hanska's death, which happened in November of that year, she does not seem to have shown much inclination to marry Balzac. But the agreement remained in force, and Balzac's one wish was to marry the woman he loved. She held back. They did not meet till 1843 (in St. Petersburg). In 1845 they met in Paris, in 1847 at her home at Vierzchovnia; and there Balzac spent part of 1848 and the whole of 1849. But it was not till 1850, when his health was already undermined, that Madame Hanska consented to marry him. A fatal affection of the heart, the consequence of years of over-exertion, had declared itself before the wedding took place at Berditsjev in March 1850. Three months from that date Balzac was dead. He had furnished a beautiful house in Paris for himself. His friends were reminded of the Turkish proverb: "When the house is ready, Death enters."

Short as was the married life of the couple, it was long enough for Balzac to discover how mistaken had been his estimate of the woman he had worshipped and treated as a higher being for years. She seems to have been in reality a very heartless creature, with an ill-regulated mind; and her youthful passion for the great author had entirely evaporated. In Victor Hugo's book,Choses Vues, he tells how in June 1850, hearing disquieting reports of Balzac's condition, he went to inquire after him. The door was opened by a maid-servant, who said: "Monsieur is dying. Madame has gone to her own room." Hugo went up to Balzac's bedroom, and found an old woman, a nurse, and a man-servant standing by the bed. The old woman was Balzac's mother. His wife was not with him in his last moments.

It is difficult to define her influence upon him as a writer; but it was inconsiderable. To it we owe the fanciful Swedenborgian romance,Séraphita, and the delicately finished, clever story,Modeste Mignon.

Death came when Balzac's intellectual powers were in their zenith. He never wrote better than in the last year of his life. Hence his fame, too, was at its height. It had grown slowly. The first score of his novels gained him no widespread reputation among the general public; but they attracted the attention of the men of talent of the younger generation, who gathered round him and watched the progress of his literary career with the deepest interest. To those of them who wished to succeed in literature he recommended three things—diligence, a solitary life, and (this half in jest) the vow of chastity. He sanctioned correspondence with the object of their affections, because "letter-writing forms one's style." The young men were astonished to receive such advice from a man whose books were invariably greeted by the press with angry shrieks of offended morality; they had yet to learn that the charge of immorality is the invariable insult hurled by literary impotence at everything in literature that is vigorous and virile. In spite of all the attacks upon it, his name was held in ever more honourable repute, and at the time of his death his contemporaries had almost grasped the fact that in Balzac they possessed one of the really great authors who imbue a whole school of art with their spirit. Not only had he laid the foundation of the modern style of novel-writing, but—true son of a century during which science has penetrated ever farther into the domain of art—he had introduced a method of observation which could be followed by others. His name in itself was a great name, but the name of the founder of a school is Legion.

The fact that he did not obtain full recognition in his lifetime is explained by two deficiencies in his works.

His style was uncertain. It was at times vulgarly trivial, at times bombastic. And deficiency in the matter of style is a serious deficiency; because what distinguishes art from that which is not art, is just that determined exclusion of what is almost, but not quite right, to which we give the name of style. It is, moreover, a particularly objectionable deficiency in the eyes of Frenchmen, with their keen rhetorical sense. But after Balzac's death his works began to be much read abroad as well as in France, and foreigners made very light of this shortcoming of his. The man who understands a language well enough to read it, but has not sufficient knowledge to appreciate all its refinements, easily forgives sins of style when they are compensated for by rare and attractive qualities. And this was the position of the great novel-reading European public. Educated Italians, Austrians, Poles, Russians, &c., read Balzac with unalloyed pleasure, paying small heed to the inequality of his style. The fault will, however, undoubtedly affect the duration of his work. Nothing formless or only half-formed endures. The greatComédie Humaine(like the 10,000 stadia long painting which Aristotle maintained would not be a work of art at all) will not be regarded by posterity in the light of a single work, and the length of time during which its separate fragments retain their place in the literature of the world will be exactly proportioned to the degree of artistic perfection possessed by each. After the lapse of a few centuries they are not likely to be read simply because of the material they provide for the student of the history of civilisation.

To deficiency in the matter of form Balzac adds a much greater deficiency in the matter of abstract ideas. It was impossible that the man who was great only as a writer of fiction should receive full recognition in his lifetime. Men had become accustomed to see in the author the spiritual guide, and Balzac was certainly not that. His great powers as an analyst of the human soul were obscured by his total want of understanding of the emancipatory religious and social ideas of his age, ideas which so early aroused George Sand's enthusiasm, and had such a powerful influence on Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and others. His political and religious doctrines, which were a species of homage to absolutism and Catholic orthodoxy, were obnoxious to many. At first men smiled when the sensuous writer with the reformatory ideas quoted the dogmatists of the white banner, Joseph de Maistre and Bonald; but by degrees they comprehended the confusion that reigned in his mind.

The sensuousness of his temperament and the unbridled strength of his imagination inclined Balzac to mysticism in both science and religion. Animal magnetism, which from about 1820 onwards plays such a prominent part in literature, was a power in the influence of which over men's minds he had a strong belief. InLa Peau de Chagrin, Séraphita, andLouis Lambert, will is defined as a force resembling steam, as "a fluid which according to its density can alter everything, even natural laws." In spite of the modernity of his intellect Balzac was enough of the Romanticist to believe in clairvoyance, and to have a leaning generally to the occult sciences. Nevertheless, in spite of the bias given to his mind by his age, the age of Romanticism, he belonged, as Victor Hugo said at his grave, "whether he knew it and desired it or not, to the mighty race of revolutionary authors."

His nature and education prepared him to understand life in all its fulness, and, by virtue of this understanding, to enjoy it; but, early initiated into the corruption of society, his horrified, order-loving mind sought for a bit and bridle for erring humanity, and could find it in nothing but the restored Church. Hence the painful contradiction between sensual and aesthetic tendencies which we so often find in Balzac's writings, especially when he is treating of the relations between the sexes. It is this contradiction which gives an unpleasant, impure tone toLe Lys dans la Vallée_(which Balzac himself considered his masterpiece) andLes Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariés. And it also explains how his philosophic principles and his ecclesiastical leanings so often contradict each other. In the preface to the complete edition of his works he first asserts that man is originally neither good nor bad, and that society invariably makes him better, thus unconsciously declaring himself directly opposed to the Church's fundamental doctrine of the corruption of man by sin; a few lines farther on he extols Catholicism as the "only perfect system for the suppression of the corrupt tendencies of humanity," and demands that the education of the nation shall be entrusted to the clergy. His conviction of the existence of those "corrupt tendencies" led him almost always to regard and represent the lower classes, servants and peasants, as the enemies of the propertied class (see his comic pathos on the subject of servants inCousine Betteand his peasants inLes Paysans); and he enjoyed making sallies against the populace and democracy, the Liberals, the two Chambers, and parliamentary government, from the vantage ground of clericalism and absolutism.

With all his great and brilliant qualities there was something wanting in Balzac, the something which goes by the name of culture. He lacked its calm, or, to be more exact, his restless, perpetually producing imaginative mind never enjoyed the calm which is a condition of culture.

But he possessed what is more important in an author—profoundly penetrating, truth-loving genius. Those who seek merely the beautiful, describe only the stem and flower of the human plant; Balzac drew it with its roots; to him it was of most moment to trace all the ramifications and workings of that underground life of the plant which conditions its visible life. The flaws in his artistic and intellectual culture will not prevent posterity from recognising his genius.

From the standpoint of our own day we see side by side with Balzac another French author whom it would never have occurred to any one in their day to couple with him, and whose literary existence was as quiet and unremarked as Balzac's was noisy and obtrusive. Curiously enough, Balzac was the only one of Henri Beyle's contemporaries who accorded him full, unqualified recognition. In the eyes of the younger generation of the France of to-day, Beyle and Balzac complement each other as unmistakably as do Lamartine and Victor Hugo. It may seem in so far inappropriate to couple the names of the two authors, that the one wrote close on a hundred novels, the other only two of any length; but the quality of Beyle's two is so remarkable that they entitle their author to rank with the father of the modern novel; and certain of his other works (he wrote, reckoning everything—novels, tales, critical and theoretical essays, biographies, and descriptions of travel—a score of volumes) have exercised as great a literary influence as have his novels.

Beyle's relation to Balzac is that of the reflective to the observant mind, of the thinker in art to the seer. We see into the hearts of Balzac's characters, into the "dark red mill of passion," which is the motive force of their actions; Beyle's characters receive their impulse from the head, "the open light-and-sound chamber";[1]the reason being that Beyle was a logician and Balzac a man of an effusively rich animal nature. Beyle stands to Victor Hugo in much the same position as Leonardo da Vinci to Michael Angelo. Hugo's plastic imagination creates a supernaturally colossal and muscular humanity, fixed in an eternal attitude of struggle and suffering; Beyle's mysterious, complicated, refined intellect produces a small series of male and female portraits which exercise an almost magic fascination on us with their far-away, enigmatic expressions and their sweet, seductive, wicked smiles. Of course, Michael Angelo towers as high above Victor Hugo as Leonardo does above Beyle; but just as there is a resemblance in Hugo's style to the style of Michael Angelo's Moses, so there is a kinship between Beyle's Duchess of Sanseverina and Leonardo's Mona Lisa; and, in spite of the immense superiority of the great Italians, the resemblance in the relative positions of the two artists and the two authors is striking. Beyle is the metaphysician among the French authors of his day, as Leonardo was the metaphysician among the great painters of the Renaissance.

We have already encountered Beyle as one of the leaders in the advanced-guard attacks upon the conventional French tragedy style and the patriotism of the Classicists, which ignored ail foreign literature simply as being foreign. In those engagements he was one of the first to break the enemy's ranks; no one dealt more crushing blows to the Imperialist men of letters than this writer, who in a manner was himself distinctly a Frenchman of the Empire. Indeed, the very circumstance that he was the only one of the great authors of 1830 who had really known the Empire, gives him a prominently peculiar position in the Romantic group. This man alone among them all had been present at the battle of Marengo and the entry into Milan, the battle of Jena and the entry into Berlin, had seen the burning of Moscow and shared in the horrors of the retreat through Russia. He alone among them all had spoken to Napoleon and had known Byron. He was only a year younger than Nodier; but Nodier as forerunner was not much more than a herald whose trumpet-blast announced and awakened, whereas Beyle as forerunner was a doughty trooper with lance and pennon, one of those Uhlans who capture a town single-handed. In Nodier's intellectual life the French Revolution was the great event which dominated everything—he never wearied of describing its heroes and its victims, its prison scenes, its conspiracies, secret societies, &c; in Beyle's, Napoleon's career and fall were the facts of vital importance.

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