BALZAC

Throughthe ‘usual channels of information’—I mean, of course, the daily papers—many readers have become aware of the recent publication, in theRevue de Paris, of a series of Balzac’s letters. But few have understood their importance. Their interest for the student is great, for in a revelation of their author, that is impressive and almost final, they confirm to the full the view of Balzac which those of us have taken (I took it myself in my littleLifeof him in the ‘Great Writers’ Series) who have perceived that by his temperament and inclination, as well as by his power, he is divided widely from those more sordid and limited realists at whose head it was erewhile the fashion to place him. Romance, it has been claimed—often by friend and foe alike—Romance was Victor Hugo’s, Materialism was Balzac’s. And now Balzac is found—and one has a right to be surprised, not of course at the kind, but only at the degree of the manifestation—he isfound in mature years to be in his own conduct more simply and absolutely romantic than the most visionary or most warm-hearted schoolgirl. He works himself into a genuine and indescribably enthusiastic, but always respectful, attachment to a young married woman whom he has never seen, who inquires of him about his stories, who sends himThomas à Kempis(which he translates later into theMédecin de Campagne: ‘c’est l’Evangile en action’), who writes to him confidentially for a year or two before she meets him, who later receives him as her guest in Russian Poland, and whom he marries at last, in 1850, only several years after the death of her husband.

The facts that have been mentioned latest have been known since about the time of the publication of the now familiar couple of volumes of Balzac’sCorrespondence. It is the earlier and most interesting part of the story that is new. The report had previously been current that Balzac had for the first time been made aware of Madame de Hanska’s existence when he was staying at, or passing through, Neuchâtel, in September 1833. She announced, so it was said, her wish to be introduced to him on hearing that he was at the hotel; and this last autumn (such is the vanity of humaneffort upon matters after all not profoundly important), I established the fact, in concert with the present proprietor of the Hôtel Belle Vue at Neuchâtel, that the old but not yet disused Hôtel du Faucon must have been the hostelry in which this memorable meeting took place. The ‘Faucon,’ which had been built just in the middle of the little town but a few years before the date of Balzac’s visit, was then the inn at which a traveller of any importance was sure to descend—neither the ‘Belle Vue’ nor the ‘Lac’ existed at that period. Let us take courage, however—our trouble was not so useless as I had for a moment imagined it. The actual meeting-place of two friends, two ‘lovers’ (in Walt Whitman’s sense, at all events), is in the end at least as interesting as the meeting-place of two strangers, who were to warm towards each other only in future years. They met, then, we may fairly presume, at the Faucon at Neuchâtel, but met after a correspondence by turns polite and chivalrous, intimate and ardent.

It was no unusual thing for Balzac—the historian, above all things, of men’s ambitions and of women’s hearts—to receive, together with the compliments, the confessions of the fair. In our own age—an age perhaps more enamoured of physical prowess andpresence than of intellectual or spiritual achievement—I have not heard that the novelist or the successful writer of the short story is in constant receipt of the confidences and eulogiums of women. These, I am informed, when bestowed liberally on the stranger, are directed, nowadays, in chief to thejeune premierwith a rapid action and a well-made coat. But it was otherwise two generations ago; and Balzac, sometimes complaining of the embarrassment, sometimes, on the other hand, with not a little of honest pride in the circumstances that caused it, avows himself endowed with the functions of a confessor. In the two volumes of the well-knownCorrespondenceI have referred to before, and in such other writings as have hitherto been accessible, it is chiefly question of a certain anonymous ‘Louise,’ whom he never saw, to whom he said many pretty things on writing-paper, and to whom he was once minded to dedicate one of his stories. As a rule, I believe, he left unanswered the letters of the stranger—felt, perhaps, that it was enough that they should have been received, and, if they contained anything that was noteworthy, registered, very likely, in the book of his memory for possible employment in fiction. But now it is made clear abundantly, that in the case of Evelinade Hanska, not only was there correspondence, intimate if scarcely voluminous, before any personal meeting, but likewise that by means of it such a tie was created, such a mutual fascination formed, as could hardly with ease be broken. And yet, what if when they met in the flesh there had been—as after all there might have been—disillusionment! What if Evelina de Hanska had proved as distasteful to Monsieur de Balzac as Anne of Cleves to the experienced Henry!

He was in the best of all possible moods, however, to be impressed with Madame de Hanska, during the period of their earliest correspondence; for unquestionably he was wounded, unquestionably he was sore. Among the friendships—verging sometimes on love-affairs—which Balzac formed with women, two were at this moment in the crisis of their fate. Many years before the existence of Madame de Hanska became known to him, Balzac had been friend, trustful dependant, would-be lover, probably—it is difficult to express the relationship—of a certain Madame de Berny. She was a little older than he was, and she helped him in money troubles when he was young enough to be able to accept her assistance without shame, and she knew the world at a time when, if I may proffer thephrase, he joined the inextinguishable simplicity of the artist to the more prosaic simplicity of the inexperienced.

At Madame de Berny’s house in the Oise, Balzac had written his brief and restrained masterpiece,Le Curé de Tours. Her difficult virtue, and all her other qualities and characteristics, made, confessedly, much of the interest ofLe Lys dans la Vallée. That relationship of theirs—into which, as I consider, a morbid element, an exaggerated sentimentality, did at one time to some extent enter—was only wholly broken by Madame de Berny’s death. For two years at least she was the victim of a mortal illness. The illness began, and the depression caused by it in Balzac began, about 1833.

But during the year 1832, Balzac, whose feeling towards Madame de Berny—‘an angel at my side’—must with long years have somewhat changed its character—during the year 1832 Balzac had passed through an experience the end of which he speaks of, long afterwards, as ‘un des plus grands chagrins de ma vie.’ And that was his experience with the young Madame de Castries—the Duchesse de Castries she became, in due time, some years later—a light of Parisian Society, fully as fascinating in the quietude of Aix-les-Bains as amidst the distractionsof all thesalonsof the capital. It is not from the letters that Balzac wrote to her—not, at all events, from any that have been published—that we know or can surmise how irresistible for Balzac was her personal magnetism. It is rather from certain amongst the letters sent by him to his life-long friend, his sister’s school friend, Madame Zulma Carraud of Angoulême, that we are informed of the effect of Madame de Castries’ dealings with him. She was at one time a delight, then a disillusionment, and then (and, as it seems to me, ever afterwards) a painful yet attractive memory. The rupture—never a quarrel avowed to the outsider; never indeed a rupture that was quite complete, or that was in any way explicable save under the supposition that the lady of thebelle chevelure venitiennehad a blonde’s inconstancy and a Scottish caution—the rupture, such as it was, occurred in the autumn of 1832, when Balzac, who was to have gone over into Italy with the lady and her brother, parted from her at Geneva, and consoled himself (let me be permitted to hope) as best he could, by buying, at that famous dealer’s on the Quai des Bergues,1a little of the ‘Carl Théodore’ (Frankenthal) porcelain that his soulloved. The ‘collector,’ I am informed, is heartless—but he has his compensations.

1Since moved to the Corratorie.

The second of the just published letters addressed to Madame de Hanska contains sentences which are meaningless, if it is not to Madame de Castries that they refer. ‘Only Heaven and I can ever understand the frightful energy with which a heart must be endowed, if, being full of tears that are repressed, it must suffice still for the labours of writing.’ Again—and this time why should I translate?—the cry of a moment: ‘Toutes mes passions, toutes mes croyances, sont trompées.’ And he tells his correspondent that Madame Recamier at least never sat, as was supposed, for Feodora.2‘I met a Feodora once, but her I shall never paint; besides, thePeau de Chagrinwas written long before I met her.’3Yet again, ‘I made Feodora out of two women whom I knew, but not intimately. Observation was enough for me—with a few confidences to boot.’

2Feodora, the evil genius, one may say, of thePeau de Chagrin.

3If this was Madame de Castries, the intention did not always hold good, since more than touches of that charmer there are supposed to be in theDuchesse de Langeais.

What Balzac seems to have been struck with, from the first, in Evelina de Hanska, was her sincerity and oneness of purpose, the truth of her devotion to his work, and a certain similarity, an immediatesympathy, between his nature and hers. Much of his work, as he avows, has been done to strike the public—to provide the public with that without which it could scarcely accord him the attention he asked. But ‘certainly there are books in which I have loved to be myself; and you will know well which they are, for they are those in which my heart has spoken.’ When at length the two came together, at Neuchâtel in 1833—as in Vienna, and in Russian Poland itself, in later years—there was nothing, it seems, in either to diminish the interest or to break the spell. And the fascination continued. I have for my own part a little theory that the sympathy of the woman, her deep interest in his work, her participation in it (Séraphitaand some kindred labour, whatever be its defects, would never have existed but for that influence of this mystic Northerner), gave the attachment, as far as Balzac was concerned, something of the features of an attachment of consolation. His early adoration, as I hold, his boyish passion, was for Madame de Berny. And, in maturer years, his ideal, his very dream of beauty and of charm, was Madame de Castries—Madame de Castries set, so to put it, in the best of her backgrounds: Madame de Castries at Aix-les-Bains. Never, I think, in Balzac’s lifewas that experience, or the force of it, equalled. But in Evelina de Hanska, whether as friend or wife, he discovered and obtained a steady rest—a rest the more assured, it may be, because she entertained for him feelings of a deeper devotion than any that were extended by that admirable and almost lifelong comrade, his friend, his sister’s friend, the blameless and the wise Madame Zulma Carraud.

An idealist, anyhow, Balzac was at the beginning; an idealist he remained to the end. The ‘amitiés d’épiderme,’ as he excellently called them, attracted him but little. In my short book about him, in the ‘Great Writers’ Series, I tried to show that what he sought for and obtained was the intimacy of the heart. Gautier knew this. And one-sided indeed must be those people—whether the word of their choice is intended for blame or for praise—who, judging either by life or work, think that Balzac is properly described as ‘materialist’ or ‘realist,’ alone or chiefly. The Real, which is not always the hideous, he was strong enough to face; yet Romance was essential to him. It is time, now, that the sentimental andsoi-disantRomantic began to understand that in Balzac there were depths of feeling and of poetry to which they could never approach; and time also that those tiresome disciples of mere uglinessin literary theme and literary treatment, who account him their yet insufficient master, were informed, roundly, that whatever the lessons he may half-incidentally have taught them, nothing of Balzac’s greatness can ever fairly be claimed as supporting or justifying the narrow limitations of their sordid sect and creed.

(The Bookman, March 1894.)

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