THE MANY-SIDED BALZAC
Honoré Balzac, or de Balzac, as he loved to call himself—though really there was no “noble” blood in his veins—was baptized under the name of Balssa. He was born on May 20, 1799, at Tours. His mother, Laure Sallambier, was a Parisian; his father, a provincial from Languedoc. After completing his studies in Paris, Honoré began the study of law at the age of seventeen, but after eighteen months’ apprenticeship to an attorney and a second year and a half’s service to a notary, his literary ambition began to turn him away from the law. Already at the age of twenty he had conceived the idea of a drama on Cromwell, but after fifteen months’ labor, he read it to a company of friends who received it coldly. In 1822, he made his first essay at the novel, under the title,The Inheritress de Birague. From this time on he labored incessantly in producing the gigantic works which have immortalized his name.
Debt was always threatening to overwhelm Balzac, for in the days of his largest income his free life and passion for luxuries kept him constantly in danger of going down in the flood. Once, in 1825, when his first novels produced butlittle return, he felt compelled to leave his vocation of letters to become bookseller, printer, and type-founder. But after three years of disaster, resulting in one hundred thousand francs of debt, he once more took up his pen, this time to succeed most splendidly—though it required ten years of strenuous, almost frenzied, production to clear him of his obligations.
The story of his loves is closely knit with his literary career, as are also the records of his minglings with the men of his day, but no such brief monograph as this can even refer adequately to the details of his personal life. Inspiration, observation, and labor were its dominant notes throughout. Two thousand distinct characters move as in life through his forty-seven volumes of more than sixteen thousand aggregate pages, all produced in twenty-five years of actual pen-craft. What a monument for the titan who in 1850 passed away in his prime!
There are two marked tendencies of extreme displayed by the short-story: The first, and the more modern, is a fondness for over-compression; that is, the practice of skeletonizing the story, of giving little more than a bare, swift outline of the action, and only so much accessory material as may be needed to round out a body decentlyclothed upon with flesh. The story is everything, the setting almost nothing. It scarcely need be said that this tendency comes perilously near to robbing the short-story of the literary qualities which it should rightly display. A few of Maupassant’s compact and abrupt shorter fictions may serve to illustrate this characteristic—not to mention unhappy examples all too prevalent to-day.
The second tendency is quite in the other extreme. I speak of it now because most of Balzac’s shorter stories are of this type,—which gives much space to detail, the development of setting, and the building up of a well-rounded and fully-garbed body to carry the soul of the story. If the scenario-story is likely to swing to an extreme of compression, the leisurely type is prone to over-leisureliness, as is often seen in the shorter work of Mr. James, and the later little fictions by Mr. Howells, wherein, and so far properly too, the story is not made to be everything, but wherein—not so wisely—circumstances and air are accorded even more than due value. The effect is to draw the narrative away from the unity and compression characteristic of the short-story type, and range it with those other fictional forms which, while cognate to, are really something different from the short-story.
Balzac’s short-stories—so to call them—were written from three to five years before Poe wrote “Berenice” (1835), which was his first short-story to anticipate and meet fully the requirements of the type as formulated by the author himself, in his criticism of Hawthorne’s “Tales,” in 1842. But Balzac drew more and more away from the impressionistic, unified, condensed short-story, for it was evidently not his ideal form, and took up the detailed psychological novel of manners. Even in the story given herewith in translation, we find a wealth of detail and an extent of time covered in the action which are not part and parcel of the true short-story, technically considered. But, lest these comments seem to cite these qualities in derogation of Balzac’s art be it noted that Balzac’s little fictions, with all their fullness, are greater than many technically perfect short-stories in their miraculous compression. Certainly it is only this dual element of fullness and consequent diffused final effect which prevented him from anticipating Poe as the firstconsciousartist of the short-story—yet with this one reservation I reserve much, for compression and unity of final impression are the very twin arteries of this fictional form. Balzac’s short-stories approached technical perfection just as closely as did the short-stories ofthose two American forerunners of Poe—Irving and Hawthorne.
It is illuminating to observe that Balzac’s full-method of short-story art was not the reflex of the successful novelist who was sure of his public and for that reason dared the expansive treatment. The truth is that of his successful novels onlyThe Chouanshad been written in 1829 before he began, in 1830, that brilliant series of shorter stories which place him among the masters.
The fictive art of Balzac is more clearly displayed in his short-stories than in his novels. By far the greater number of his novels are filled with a vast amount of contributory detail not always germane to the plot. As stories, they often mark time. The author’s great motive was to make faithful transcripts from life, to present realities, to penetrate into the deeps of the human soul and disclose its inner life, to delineate the high and the low places of the whole social system of his era. On this giant-journey he was often allured from the highway of his story by side-paths rich in interest, and the great realistic novelist did not any more hesitate to follow out these beckoning byways than did Victor Hugo in his equally great romances. The inevitable in each case was a far from unified type of fiction.
In Balzac’s short-stories, however, we discern but very little of this tendency, fully expanded though they are, and that is why I have ventured to assert their artistic superiority to his novels. True, the genius of this greatest of French novelists can be fully appreciated only by those who make a study of his longer works with their tremendous sweep of character presentment, minuteness of setting, and depth of psychological inquiry. But for approximate singleness of effect—a great factor in the consideration of fictional merit—we must turn to his short-stories.
This contrast in method is due not merely to Balzac’s fondness for making excursions in his novels, but it is largely attributable to the nature of thenouvelle, or expanded short-story form. Any short-story, being complete in itself and not one of a series, necessarily bears a much less close relation to any other of its kind than does any one of Balzac’s novels to his other novels. Each of these is an integrated part of a great life-record which he was engaged in completing—but which, unhappily, was never consummated.
The themes of all Balzac’s short-stories are consistent with the artistic requirements of thenouvelle; that is to say, they are transcriptions ofexceptional marginaliafrom common life, always dealing with the unusual, and occasionallywith the unique. Because of this quality, it seems evident that, as Brunetière has pointed out, Balzac elected to develop these incidents in short-story form rather than expand them into novels. Treated in the short-story, they stand for what they are—extraordinary happenings in common life (as distinguished from impossible “incidents” which are told in fantastic and ultra-romantic short-stories); in the novel, they would have been enlarged out of their true focus, and so have seemed to bear a more important, a more typical, relation to life as a whole than any such exceptional incidents ever do. Hence, again, Balzac has used in his short-stories less the realistic method of narration than the romantic. Pure realism as a method is suited to the novel, where life shows whole; but the short-story, which presents a section, a phase, an incident of life, and by which we do not hope to gain a picture of an age, of a whole social system, or even of an entire individual life, is almost compelled to adopt the methods of romanticism even when laying its fictional foundations, as Balzac did, deep in the ground of reality.
In attempting to get a view of his broad genius we must remember our author’s versatility, not alone of gift but of temper; and since a consideration of his novels is not pertinent to this paper, letus see if the many-sided Balzac is not clearly revealed in a varied half-dozen of his greatest short-stories.
Picture this powerful worker spending endless days and nights, months on end, roaming the streets of Paris, haunting purlieu and boulevard, absorbing with the thirsty passion of a universal analyst the knowledge of what man is. But he is more than a terrifically industrious observer, he is sincere, and he codifies his observations asThe Connoisseur of Life.
This first phase of our social psychologist—and as such he blazed new trails in French literature—is well illustrated in one of his greatest stories (it seems trite to aver that it must be read to be appreciated!) which is a romanticnouvelleof about ten thousand words, “The Unknown Masterpiece.” It is well to note in this connection that the typical psychological-study differs from the character-study in that the former concerns itself withworkingsof the inner life, while the latter notes theeffectof life on character, disposition, bearing, and conduct.
Nicolas Poussin, a poor and ambitious young artist, timidly visits François Porbus, another artist of ability, in his studio. There Master Frenhofer, an eccentric, wealthy old artist, is discoursing on his theories of art (set forth brilliantlyand at length in the story, and illustrating the marvellous sweep of Balzac’s knowledge). Frenhofer is obsessed by the conviction that the artists of the day do not make their subjects live, and illustrates by criticising the painting, “St. Mary the Egyptian,” which Porbus has about completed. “Your saint is not badly put together, but she is not alive. Because you have copied nature, you imagine that you are painters, and that you have discovered God’s secret! Bah! To be a great poet, it is not enough to know syntax, and to avoid errors in grammar.” “The mission of art is not to copy nature, but to express it” (an illuminating passage when applied to Balzac’s own work). At length the old man seizes the brushes, and with a few strokes imparts vivacity to the figure, and makes the “Saint” stand out from the canvas.
Old Master Frenhofer himself has been laboring for ten years to perfect his painting of a woman, but despairs of adding the final touches, and determines to travel in search of a perfect model. In his enthusiasm for art, and hoping to gain Frenhofer’s secret, as well as instruction from the old painter, Nicolas asks his beautiful mistress and model, Gillette, to pose for the old man. A protracted struggle ensues between her abhorrence of the idea and herwish to serve her lover. At last, however, she yields.
When Nicolas and Porbus are permitted to view Frenhofer’s completed canvas, they discover that in his long effort to perfect his work the old painter has entirely covered the original picture, and that not more than a shadowy human foot is to be seen; only the imaginative eye of the artist himself is able to see the figure!
The dénouement is a double one: As she feared would be the case, Gillette loses her love for Nicolas, who could sacrifice the sacredness of her beauty in order to advance his own career by capturing the secrets of a great master; and the old artist, after burning all his paintings, dies in despair upon discovering the truth, for he has lived all these years with his painting as the well-loved companion of his labors and his dreams.
A great story, illustrating Balzac as a connoisseur—a knower of life.
A second phase of Balzac’s genius is that ofThe Impressionistic Literary Artist. In his inner life some pictures were born, others were caught on the retina from his attentive journeyings afield. To produce in the reader precisely the impression which the originator feels, is impressionism, and this transfusion of spirit, tone, andfeeling, Balzac now and then accomplished, though not often.
One of the most striking of these impressionistic sketches, more atmospheric, more simply pictorial, than any of his others, is “A Passion in the Desert.”
A Provençal soldier of Napoleon tells the story over a bottle to a friend, and he retells it in a letter to a lady who had just seen a wonderful example of animal-training in a menagerie.
When General Desaix was in upper Egypt “a provincial soldier, having fallen into the hands of the Maugrabins, was taken by these Arabs into the deserts that lie beyond the cataracts of the Nile.” Freeing himself, he secures a carbine, a dagger, a horse, and some provisions, and makes away. But, eager to see camp once more, he rides his horse to death and finds himself alone in the desert.
At length he seeks shelter and sleep in a grotto, but awakens to find his asylum shared by a huge lioness. He considers well the possibilities while he waits for her to wake. When she opens her eyes her pretty, coquettish movements remind him of “a dainty woman.” The soldier expects immediate conflict and draws his dagger; but the lioness stares steadily at him for a moment, then walks slowly but confidently toward him.Forcing himself to smile into her face, he reaches out his hand caressingly, and she accepts these overtures with seeming pleasure, even purrs like a cat, but the sound is so loud that it is not unlike the dying notes of a church organ. Believing himself safe for the present, the man rises and leaves the grotto; she follows, rubbing against his legs and uttering a wild, peculiar cry, whereupon he again goes through the petting motions usual with domestic animals, at the same time weighing the chance of killing her with one blow of his weapon. On her side, the lioness scrutinizes him kindly, yet prudently—then she licks his shoes.
Visions of what may happen when his unwelcome companion is hungry bring a shudder to the soldier. He tries to come and go, as an experiment, but her eyes never leave him for the fraction of a minute. Near the spring he sees the remains of his horse partly consumed—and understands her forbearance thus far. He determines to try to tame her ladyship and to win her affection. In these endeavors the day wears on until she becomes responsive enough to his voice to turn to him when he calls “Mignonne.”
The Provençal is now relying on his nimble feet to take him out of danger so soon as the lioness is asleep, and when the right momentcomes he walks quickly in the direction of the Nile. But he has gone only a short distance when he hears her in pursuit, uttering the same wild cry. Even in this extremity the Frenchman reflects humorously, “It may be that this young lioness has never met a man before; it is flattering to possess her first love!”
He accompanies his hostess back to the grotto, and from this moment feels that the desert has become friendly, human; and he sleeps. When he awakes he sees nothing of Mignonne until, upon ascending the hill, he discovers her bounding along in his direction. Her chops are bloody; but she manifests her pleasure in his society by beginning to play like a large puppy.
Several days go by filled with warring sensations for the Frenchman. Solitude reveals her mysteries, and he feels their charm. He studies the effects of the moon on the limitless sand; the wonderful light of the Orient; the terrifying spectacle of a storm on the plain where sand rises in death-dealing clouds. In the cool nights he imagines music in the heavens above. He ponders on his past life.
The magnetic will of the Provençal seems to control brute nature, or else she has not felt the pangs of hunger, for her amiability is unbroken, and he trusts her completely. Whatever she maybe doing, she stops short at the word “Mignonne.” One day when he shows acute interest in a flying eagle, the lioness is evidently jealous, and the Provençal now declares that “she has a soul.”
Here the lady who received the Provençal’s letter about his adventure wants to know how it ended. He replies that “it ended as all great passions do, by a misunderstanding,” and goes on to explain that he must have unintentionally hurt the lioness’s feelings, as one day she turned and caught his thigh in her teeth. Fearing she meant to kill him, the soldier plunged his dagger into her throat, but his remorse was immediate; he felt that he had murdered a friend.
The brief outlines of two stories must suffice to illustrate a third and more characteristic phase of Balzac’s genius—his sternness asThe Recorder of Tragedy. Both are romantic themes treated with relentless realism of detail.
The first story bears the Spanish title,El Verdugo(“The Executioner”).
During the Napoleonic era, a certain Spanish town, Menda, is under French government. A suspicion that the Spanish Marquis de Légañès has made an attempt to raise the country in favor of Ferdinand VII has caused a battalion of French soldiers to be placed here, the garrisonof occupation being in command of one Victor Marchand. On the night of the feast-day of St. James, the English capture the town, but Clara, the daughter of the old Spanish nobleman, had warned the young French Commandant, Marchand, with whom she was in love, and he had escaped. The English suspect her father of having made Marchand’s escape possible, so the entire family of the Marquis is condemned to be hanged. The old noble offers to the English general all that he has if he will spare the life of his youngest son, and allow the rest to be beheaded instead of ignominiously hanged. Both requests are granted. The Marquis then goes to his youngest son, Juanito, and commands him that for this day he shall be the executioner. After heart-breaking protests, the lad is compelled to yield. As his sister Clara places her head on the block, the young French officer, Victor, now friendly with the English, runs to her and tells her that if she will marry him her life will be saved. Her only reply is to her brother, “Now, Juanito,” and her head falls at the feet of her lover. When the day is done, the youngest son, Juanito, is alone. To save the family honor, he has been the executioner of the day.
Only a little less tragic is “The Conscript,” which is part sketch, part short-story.
Madame de Dey, aged thirty-eight, is the widow of a lieutenant-general. She is possessed of a great soul and an attractive personality. During the Reign of Terror she takes refuge in the village of Carentan. Motives of policy influence her to open her house every evening to the principal citizens, Revolutionary authorities, and the like. Her only relative in the world is her son, aged twenty, whom she adores. The Mayor, and others in authority in the town, aspire to marry her, but her heart is bound up in her boy. Suddenly hersalonis closed without explanation. Two nights pass, and gossip finds all sorts of reasons—she is hiding a lover; or her son; or a priest. The third day in the morning an old merchant insists upon seeing her. She shows him a letter written by her son in prison, saying he hopes to escape within three days and will come to her house. This is the third day, and she is greatly agitated. The merchant tells her that people are suspicious, and that she must surely receive as usual that night. Then he goes out and spreads plausible tales of her recent extreme illness and marvelous cure. That night many come to see for themselves, and, notwithstanding her terrible anxiety, she keeps up until they all go—except the Public Prosecutor, who is one of her suitors. He tells her he knows she isexpecting her son Auguste, and that if he comes she must get him away early in the morning, as he, the Prosecutor, must come then with a “denunciation,” to search her house. While they talk, a young man arrives and is taken to the room prepared for Auguste. When she discovers him to be only a conscript sent there by the Mayor, her grief is great. After spending the night awake in her room, still listening for her boy’s arrival, she is found at daybreak dead—at the hour when, unknown to his mother, her son was shot at Morbihan.
No view of Balzac, the short-story writer, would be complete without considering him asThe Social Philosopher—by far his preponderating character also as a novelist.
There are not lacking undiscerning folk who judge Balzac’s short-stories by the tone of hisContes Drolatiques. It is far from true, however, that Balzac preferred to deal with the corrupt side of life. In reality, he was a great moralist, with robust convictions of right and wrong, and a nicely balanced moral judgment. Yet this contradictory spirit did wallow in filthy imaginations all too often, committed personal follies, pictured the courtesan and the pander, marital infidelity and sordidness in countless manifestations.But let it be remembered that he chose to depict a society which was not only the product of his age, but the outcome of a national life. No one could be more fearless in exposing vice, and while it may be questioned whether the world greatly profits morally by such vivid picturings, it cannot be doubted that Balzac’s social philosophy was not that of the literary pander. His soul had altitude, as one has said, as well as latitude.
Balzac was keenly sensitive to criticism of his moral influence, and himself answered the charge of being a creator of vicious feminine types:
“The author cannot end these remarks without publishing here the result of a conscientious examination which his critics have forced him to make in relation to the number of virtuous women and criminal women whom he has placed on the literary stage. As soon as his first terror left him time to reflect, his first care was to collect hiscorps d’armée, in order to see if the balance which ought to be found between those two elements of his written world was exact, relatively to the measure of vice and virtue which enters into the composition of our present morals. He found himself rich by thirty-odd virtuous women against twenty-two criminal women, whom he here takes the liberty of ranging in order of battle, in orderthat the immense results already obtained may not be disputed. To this he adds that he has not counted-in a number of virtuous women whom he has left in the shade—where so many of them are in real life.” (Here followed tabulated lists of his prominent women characters, as arranged by himself).
In considering the big plot of the social study,La Grande Brétêche—not perfectly translated “The Great House”—we are interestingly reminded of the similarmotifsin Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” and Mrs. Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer”—just as our author’s “A Seashore Drama” recalls the more artistic story of fatherly execution, “Mateo Falcone,” by Mèrimèe.
InLa Grande Brétêchea company of friends are spending an evening together and one is asked to tell a story—a conventional opening enough.
He describes a house which has been deserted, the large and once beautiful gardens overgrown with weeds. Neglect and decay are everywhere. The story of the house is this—told with much Balzacian preliminary circumstance:
Monsieur de Merret one night came home quite late, and as he was about to enter his wife’s apartments he heard a closet door, opening into her room, close very quietly. He thought it washis wife’s maid, but just then the maid entered the room from another door. The husband sent the maid away and asked his wife who had gone into the closet. She answered him that no one was there.
He said, “I believe you. I will not open it. But see, here is your crucifix—swear before God that there is no one in there. I will believe you—I will never open that door.”
Madame de Merret took up the crucifix and said, “I swear it.”
Monsieur de Merret sent away the servants—all but one trusted one. He then sent for a mason, and had the closet securely walled in. At dawn the work was completed, the mason had gone, and Monsieur, on some pretext, left the house. As soon as he was gone, Madame de Merret called her maid, and together they began to tear down the wall—hoping to replace the bricks before Monsieur returned. They had just begun the work when Monsieur entered the room. For twenty days he remained in his wife’s apartment, and when a noise was heard in the closet and she wished to intercede for the dying man, her husband would answer:
“You swore on the cross that there was no one there.”
No need even for a Balzac to read a moral!
A fifth side of Balzac’s genius is sweeter to contemplate—that ofThe Idealistic Philosopher. Take time to readThe Personal Opinions of Honoré de Balzac, edited by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, you who would know how the man interpreted himself, and you will find idealism lifting its lily crest from the field of ooze.
Doubtless “A Legend of Jesus Christ in Flanders” is Balzac’s most ethically idealistic story—a true symbolical tale of Hawthorne’s legendary type.
Night was falling. The ferry-boat that carried passengers from the island of Cadzand to Ostend was ready to depart. Just then a man appeared who wished to enter the boat. It was already full. There was no place in the stern for the stranger, for the “aristocrats” of Flanders were seated there—a baroness, a cavalier, a young lady, a bishop, a rich merchant, and a doctor. So he made his way to the bow, where the more humble folk were seated. They at once made room for him.
As soon as the boat had moved out on the water, the skipper called to his rowers to pull with all their might, for they were in the face of a storm. All the while the tempest was growing more terrifying, and all the while the men and women in the boat questioned in their hearts who mightthe stranger be. On his face shone a light and a quiet peace they could not understand.
Finally, the boat was capsized. Then the stranger said to them, “Those who have faith shall be saved; let them follow me.” With a firm step he walked upon the waves, and those who followed him came safe to shore.
When they were all seated near the fire in a fisherman’s hut, they looked round for the man who had brought them safely out of the sea. But he was not there, having gone down to the water to rescue the skipper, who had been washed ashore. He carried him to the door of the hut, and when the door of the humble refuge was opened, the Saviour disappeared—for it was He.
And so on this spot the convent of Mercy was built, as a shelter for storm-beleaguered sailors, and it was said by humble folk that for many years the foot-prints of Jesus Christ could be seen there in the sands of Flanders.
There is little charm in Balzac’s work, much coarseness, much detail of vileness, much to cause the sensitive to shudder; but there is much, too, that causes the soul to judge itself honestly, and many a beauty-crowned peak rising nobly from the valley darkness.
In the story which here follows in full, in translation,appear all of Balzac’s characteristic traits. Happily, its theme leads us above the sordid and the filthy, up to the heights which he knew and sometimes extolled.
“An Episode Under the Terror,” which Ferdinand Brunetière has pronounced to be “in its artistic brevity one of Balzac’s most tragic and finished narratives,” was written in 1830 as an introduction to the fictitious Memoirs of Sanson, who is the Stranger referred to in the story.