French poets and novelists

Contents

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HONORE DE BALZAC 84\<r

BALZAC'S LETTERS 151 «x

I

HONOKE DE BALZAC was born at Tours in 1799 ; he died at Paris in 1850. Most first-rate men at fiftyone have still a good deal of work in them, and there is no reason to believe that, enormous as had been the demands he made upon it, Balzac's productive force was fully spent. His prefaces are filled with confident promises to publish novels that never appeared. Never theless it is impossible altogether to regret that Balzac died with work still in him. He had written enough ; he had written too much. His novels, in spite of their extraordinary closeness of tissue, all betray the want of leisure in the author. It is true that shortly before his death he had encountered a change of fortune ; he had married a rich woman and he was in a position to drive his pen no faster than his fancy prompted. It is interesting to wonder whether Balzac at leisure — Balzac with that great money-question which was at once the supreme inspiration and the sesthetic alloy of his life, placed on a relatively ideal basis — would have done anything essentially finer than " Les Parents Pauvres " or "Le Pere Goriot." We can hardly help doubting it. M. Taine, looking as usual for formulas and labels, says that the most complete description of Balzac is that he was a man of business — a man of business in debt. The formula here is on the whole satisfactory ; it expresses not only what he was by circumstances, but what he was by inclination. We cannot say how much Balzac liked being in debt, but we are very sure he liked, for itself, the process of manufacture and sale, and that even when all his debts had been paid he would have continued to keep his shop.

Before he was thirty years old he had published,, under a variety of pseudonyms, some twenty long novels, veritable Grub Street productions, written in sordid Paris attics, in poverty, in perfect obscurity. Several of these " oeuvres de jeunesse " have lately been republished, but the best of them are unreadable. No writer ever served a harder apprenticeship to his art, or lingered more hopelessly at the base of the ladder of fame. This early incompetence seems at first an anomaly, but it is only partially an anomaly. That so vigorous a genius should have learned his trade so largely by experiment and so little by divination ; that in order to discover what he could do he should have had to make specific trial of each of the things he could not do — this is something which needs ex planation. The explanation is found, it seems to us, simply in the folly of his attempting, at that age, to produce such novels as he aspired to produce. It was not that he could not use his wings; it was simply that his wings had not grown. The wings of great poets generally sprout very early ; the wings of great artists in prose, great explorers of the sources of prose, begin to spread themselves only after the man is tolerably formed. Good observers, we believe, will confess to a general mistrust of novels written before thirty. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, were hardly in their twenties before they struck their fully resonant notes. "Walter Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, Madame Sand, waited till they were at least turned thirty, and then without prelude, or with brief prelude, produced a novel that was a masterpiece. If it was well for them to wait, it would have been infinitely better for Balzac. Balzac was to be preeminently a social novelist ; his strength was to lie in representing the innumerable actual facts

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of the French civilization of his day — things only to be learned by patient experience. Balzac's inspiration, his stock, his fonds, was outside of him, in the complex French world of the nineteenth century. If, instead of committing to paper impossible imaginary tales, he could have stood for a while in some other relation to the society about him than that of a scribbler, it would have been a very great gain. The great general defect of his manner, as we shall see, is the absence of fresh air, of the trace of disinterested observation ; he had from his earliest years, to carry out our metaphor, an eye to the shop. In every great artist who possesses taste there is a little — a very little — of the amateur; but in Balzac there is absolutely nothing of the amateur, and nothing is less to be depended upon than Balzac's taste. But he was forced to write ; his family wished to make a lawyer of him, and he preferred to be a romancer. He mastered enough law to be able to incorporate the mysteries of legal procedure in the " Comedie Humaine," and then embarked upon the most prolific, literary career, perhaps, that the world has seen. His family cut down his supplies and tried to starve him out ; but he held firm, and in 1830 made his first step into success. Meanwhile he had engaged in several commercial ventures, each one of which failed, leaving him a ponderous legacy of debt. To the end of his life he was haunted with undischarged obli gations and was constantly trying new speculations and investments. It is true, we believe, that he amused himself with representing this pecuniary incubus as far more mysteriously and heroically huge than it was. His incessant labour brought him a remuneration which at this day and in this country would be considered contemptible. M. Gozlan affirms that his annual income, in his successful years, rarely exceeded 12,000 francs. This appears incredible until we find the editor of the " Revue de Paris " crying out against his demand of 3,000 francs for the MS. of " Eugenie Grandet." There is something pitiful in the contrast between this meagre personal budget and his lifelong visions of wealth and of the ways of amassing wealth, his jovial, sensual, colossal enjoyment of luxury, and the great monetary architecture as it were of the " Comedie Humaine." Money is the most general element of Balzac's novels ; other things come and go, but money is always there. His great ambition and his great pretension as a social chronicler was to be complete, and he was more complete in this direction than in any other. He rarely introduces a person without telling us in detail how his property is invested, and the fluctuations of his rentes impartially divide the writer's attention with the emotions of his heart.

Balzac never mentions an object without telling us what it cost, and on every occasion he mentions an enormous number of objects. His women, too, talk about money quite as much as his men, and not only his ignoble and mercenary women (of whom there are so many) but his charming women, his heroines, his great ladies. Madame de Mortsauf is intended as a perfect example of feminine elevation, and yet Madame de Mortsauf has the whole of her husband's agricultural economy at her fingers' ends ; she strikes us at moments as an attorney in petticoats. Each particular episode of the " Comedie Humaine " has its own hero and heroine, but the great general protagonist is the twenty-franc piece.

One thing at any rate Balzac achieved during these early years of effort and obscurity ; he had laid the foundations of that intimate knowledge of Paris which was to serve as the basis — the vast mosaic pavement — of the " Comedie Humaine." Paris became his world, his universe ; his passion for the great city deserves to rank in literature beside Dr. Johnson's affection for London. Wherever in his novels Paris is not directly presented she is even more vividly implied ; the great negative to this brilliant positive, that vie de province of which he produced such elaborate pic tures, is always observed from the standpoint of the

Boulevard. If Balzac had represented any other country than France, if his imagination had ever left a footprint in England or Germany, it is a matter of course for those who know him that his fathomless Parisian cockneyism would have had on these occasions a still sharper emphasis. But there is nothing to prove that he in the least "realized," as we say, the existence of England and Germany. That he had of course a complete theory of the British constitution and the German intellect makes little difference ; for Balzac's theories were often in direct proportion to his ignorance. He never perceived with any especial directness that the civilized world was made up of something else than Paris and the provinces ; and as he is said to have been able to persuade himself, by repeating it a few times, that he had done various things which he had not done — made a present of a white horse, for instance, to his publisher — so he would have had only to say often enough to himself that England was a mythic country to believe imperturbably that there was in fact, three hundred miles away, no magnificent far-spreading London to invalidate his constant assump tion that Paris is the pivot of human history. Never was a great genius more essentially local. Shakespeare, Scott, Goethe, savour of their native soil ; but they have a glance that has only to fix itself a moment to call

HONORS DE BALZAC. S3

up easily other horizons. Balzac's power of creation gains perhaps in intensity what it loses in reach ; it is certain at any rate that his conception of the stage on which the " Com^die Humaine " is perpetually being acted is surrounded by a Chinese wall. Never was an imagination more in sympathy with the French theory of centralization.

When his letters are* published it will be interesting to learn from them, in so far as we may, how his life was spent during these first ten years of his manhood. He began very eai-ly to write about countesses and duchesses ; and even after he had become famous, the manner in which he usually portrays the denizens of the Faubourg St. Germain obliges us to believe that the place they occupy in his books is larger than any that they occupied in his experience. Did he go into society ? did he observe manners from a standpoint that commanded the field? It was not till he became famous that he began to use the aristocratic prefix ; in his earlier years he was plain M. Balzac. I believe it is more than suspected that the pedigree represented by this de was as fabulous (and quite as ingenious) as any that he invented for his heroes. Balzac was profoundly and essentially roturier ; we shall see that the intrinsic evidence of his plebeian origin is abundant. He may very well, like his own Eugene de B&stignac, have lived at a Maison Vauquer ; but did he, like Rastignac, call upon a Madame de Beauseant and see her receive him as a kinsman ? We said just now that we had to look for Balzac almost altogether in his books; and yet his books are singularly void of personal revela tions. They tell us a vast deal about his mind, but they suggest to us very little about his life. It is hard to imagine a writer less autobiographic. This is certainly a proof of the immense sweep of his genius — of the incomparable vividness of his imagination. The things he invented were as real to him as the things he knew, and his actual experience is overlaid with a thousand thicknesses, as it were, of imaginary experi ence. The person is irrecoverably lost in the artist. There is sufficient evidence, however, that the person led a rather hungry and predatory life during these early years, and that he was more familiar with what went on in the streets than with what occurred in the salons. Whatever he encountered, however, he observed. In one of his tales he describes a young man who follows people in the street to overhear what they say. This at least is autobiographic, and the young man is Honore de Balzac, " devoured by his genius and by the consiousness of his genius," as M. Taine says — with all the unwritten " Com6die Ilumaine " within him. " In listening to these people I could espouse their life.

I felt their rags upon my back ; I walked with my feet in their tattered shoes ; their desires, their wants — everything passed into my soul, and my soul passed into theirs ; it was the dream of a waking man." This glimpse of Balzac laying up data is especially interest ing because it is singularly rare. It must be that for years he spent many an hour in silent, instinctive con templation, for his novels imply a period of preparatory research, of social botanizing, geologizing, palseontologizing, just as Humboldt's "Cosmos" implies a large amount of travel. It happens that most of the anec dotes about Balzac pertain to his productive period, and present him to us in his white friar's dress, getting out of bed at midnight to work, in a darkened room, three weeks at a sitting. The open-air Balzac, as we may call it, has been little commemorated. White Dominican robes, darkened rooms, deep potations of coffee, form the staple of M. Gozlan's reminiscences. Every man works as he can and as he must ; and if, in order to write the " Parents Pauvres," Balzac had had to dress himself in a bearskin, we trust he would not have hesitated. But it is nevertheless true that be tween the lines of the " Com^die Humaine " the reader too often catches a glimpse of the Dominican robe and the darkened room, and longs for an open window and a costume somewhat less capricious. A realistic novelist, he remembers, is not an astrologer or an alchemist.

In 1830 Balzac published the "Peau de Chagrin"— the first work of the series on which his reputation rests. After this, for twenty years, he produced with out cessation. The quantity of his work, when we consider the quality, seems truly amazing. There are writers in the same line who have published an abso lutely greater number of volumes. Alexandre Dumas, Madame Sand, Anthony Trollope, have all been immensely prolific; but they all weave a loose web, as it were, and Balzac weaves a dense one. The tissue of his tales is always extraordinarily firm and hard ; it many not at every point be cloth of gold, but it has always a metallic rigidity. It has been worked over a dozen times, and the work can never be said to belong to light literature. You have only to turn the pages of a volume of Balzac to see that, whatever may be the purity of the current, it at least never runs thin. There is none of that wholesale dialogue, chopped into fragments, which Alexandre Dumas manufactures by the yard, and which bears the same relation to real narrative architecture as a chain of stepping-stones tossed across a stream does to a granite bridge. Balzac is always definite ; you can say Yes or No to him as you go on ; the story bristles with references that must be verified, and if sometimes it taxes the attention more than is thought becoming in a novel, we must admit that, being as hard reading in the way of enter tainment as Hallam or Guizot, it may also have been very hard writing. This it is that makes Balzac's fertility so amazing — the fact that, whether we relish its results or not, we at least perceive that the process is not superficial. His great time was from 1830 to 1840 ; it was during these ten years that he published his most perfect works. ". Eugenie Grandet," " La Eecherche de 1'Absolu," "Le Pere Goriot," "Un Menage de Garcon," " Le Cabinet des Antiques," belong to the earlier period. " Beatrix," " Modeste Mignon," " Une Tenebreuse Affaire," " Les Illusions Perdues," the " Memoires de deux Jeunes Mariees," " La Muse du Departement," "Le Depute d'Arcis," belong to the latter. Balzac is never simple, and in a sense which it will be interesting to attempt to explain, he is always corrupt ; but " La Recherche de Absolu " and " Le Pere Goriot " — we will not mention " Eugenie Grandet,' ; which was so praised for its innocence that the author found himself detesting it — have a certain relative simplicity and purity; whereas in the "Jeunes Mariees," " Beatrix," and " Modeste Mignon," we are up to our necks in sophistication. If, however, the works of the first half of Balzac's eminent period are, generally

H speaking, superior to those of the second half, it must be added that there are two or three incongruous transpositions. " Le Lys dans la Yall6e," published in 1835, is bad enough to be coupled with "Beatrix"; and " Les Parents Pauvres " and " Les Paysans," finished shortly before the author's death, are in many respects his most powerful achievements. Most of Balzac's shorter tales are antecedent to 1840, and his readers know how many masterpieces the list contains. "Le Colonel Chabert " and " L'Interdiction " are found in it, as well as " La Femme Abandonee," " La Grenadine " and " Le Message," and the admirable little stories grouped together (in the common duode cimo edition) with "Les Marana," The duration of Balzac's works will certainly not be in proportion to their length. " Le Cure" de Tours," for all its brevity, will be read when " Le Deput<$ d'Arcis " lies unopened ; and more than one literary adventurer will turn, outwearied, from " La Peau de Chagrin " and find conso lation in " Un Debut dans la Vie."

"We know not how early Balzac formed the plan of the " Comddie Humaine " ; but the general preface, in which he explains the unity of his work and sets forth that each of his tales is a block in a single immense edifice and that this edifice aims to be a complete portrait of the civilization of his time — this remarkable manifesto dates from 1842. (If we call it remarkable, it is not that we under stand it ; though so much as we have just expressed may easily be gathered from it. From the moment that Balzac attempts to philosophize, readers in the least sensible of the difference between words and things must part company with him.) He complains* very properly, that the official historians have given us no information about manners that is worth speak ing of ; that this omission is unpardonable ; and that future ages will care much more for the testimony of the novel, properly executed, than for that of the writers who " set in order facts which are about the same in all nations, look up the spirit of laws which have fallen into disuse, elaborate theories which lead nations astray, or, like certain metaphysicians, endeavour to explain what is." In spired by this conviction, Balzac proposed to himself to illustrate by a tale or a group of tales every phase of French life and manners during the first half of the nineteenth century. To be colossally and exhaustively complete — complete not only in the generals but in the particulars — to touch upon every salient point, to illuminate every typical feature, to reproduce every sentiment, every idea, every person, every place, every object, that has played a

H 2 part, however minute, however obscure, in the life of the French people — nothing less than this was his programme. The undertaking was enormous, but it will not seem at first that Balzac underestimated the needful equipment. He was conscious of the necessary talent and he deemed it possible to acquire the necessary knowledge. This knowledge was almost encyclopaedic, and yet, after the vividness of his imagination, Blazac's strongest side is his grasp of actual facts. Behind our contemporary civilization is an immense and complicated machinery — the machinery of government, of police, of the arts, the professions, the trades. Among these things Balzac moved easily and joyously ; they form the rough skeleton of his great edifice. There is not a little pedantry in his pretension to universal and infallible accuracy ; but his accuracy, so far as we can mea sure it, is extraordinary, and in dealing with Balzac we must, in every direction, make our account with pedantry. He made his cadres, as the French say; he laid out his field in a number of broad divisions ; he subdivided these, and then he filled up his moulds, pressing the contents down and packing it tight. You may read the categories on the back of the cover of the little common edition. There are the " Scenes de la Vie Privt'e" — "de la Vie de Province" — "de la Vie Parisienne " — " de la ,Yie Politique " — " de la Yie Militaire " — " de la Vie de Campagne " ; and in a complementaiy way there are the " Etudes Philosophiques " — (this portentous category contains the picturesque "Recherche de 1'Absolu") — and the " Etudes Analytiques.

" Then, in the way of sub divisions, there are " Les Celibataires," " Les Parisiens en Province," " Les Rivalites," " Les Illusions Perdues," the " Splendeurs et Mis^res des Courtisanes," the " Parents Pauvres," the " Envers de 1'Histoire Contemporaine." This goodly nomenclature had a retroactive effect; the idea of the " Comedie Humaine," having developed itself when the author was midway in his career, a number of its component parts are what we may call accomplices after the fact. They are pieces that dovetail into the vast mosaic as they best can. But even if the occasional disparities were more striking they would signify little, for what is most interesting in Balzac is not the achievement but the attempt. The attempt was, as he himself has happily expressed it, to " faire concurrence k 1'etat civil " — to start an opposition, as we should say in America, to the civil registers. He created a com plete social system — an hierarchy of ranks and pro fessions which should correspond with that of which the officers of the census have cognizance. Everything is there, as we find it in his pages — the king (in " Le Depute d'Arcis " Louis XVIII. is introduced and makes witticisms quite inedits) the administration, the church, the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the men of letters, the actors, the children (a little girl is the heroine of " Pierrette," and an urchin the hero of "Un Debut dans la Vie ") the shopkeepers of every degree, the criminals, the thousand irregular and unclassified members of society. All this in Balzac's hands becomes an organic whole ; it moves together ; it has a pervasive life ; the blood circulates through it ; its parts are connected by sinuous arteries. We have seen in English literature, in two cases, a limited attempt to create a permanent stock, a standing fund, of characters. Thackeray has led a few of his admirable figures from one novel to another, and Mr. Trollope has deepened illusion for us by his re peated evocations of Bishop Proudie and Archdeacon Grantley. But these things are faint shadows of Balzac's extravagant thoroughness — his fantastic cohesiveness. A French brain alone could have persisted in making a system of all this. Balzac's " Comedie Humaine " is on the imaginative line very much what Comte's " Positive Philosophy" is on the scientific.

These great enterprises are equally characteristic of the French passion for completeness, for symmetry, for making a system as neat as an epigram — of its intolerance of the indefinite, the unformulated. The French mind likes better to squeeze things into a formula that mutilates them, if need be, than to leave them in the frigid vague. The farther limit of its power of arrangement (so beautiful as it generally is) is the limit of the knowable. Consequently we often see in the visions and systems of Frenchmen what may be called a conventional infinite. The civiliza tion of the nineteenth century is of course not infinite, but to us of English speech, as we survey it, it appears so multitudinous, so complex, so far- spreading, so suggestive, so portentous — it has such misty edges and far reverberations — that the imagination, oppressed and overwhelmed, shrinks from any attempt to grasp it as a whole. The French imagination, in the person of Balzac, easily dominates it, as he would say, and, without admitting that the problem is any the less vast, regards it as practically soluble. He would be an incautious spirit who should propose here upon to decide whether the French imagination or the English is the more potent. The one sees a vast number of obstacles and the other a vast number of remedies — the one beholds a great many shadows and the other a great many lights. If the human comedy, as Balzac pours it, condensed and solidified, out of his mould, is a very reduced copy of its original, we may nevertheless admit that the mould is of enormous dimensions. "Very good," the Eng lish imagination says ; " call it large, but don't call it universal." The impartial critic may assent ; but he privately remembers that it was in the con venient faculty of persuading himself that he could do everything that Balzac found the inspiration to do so much.

In addition to possessing an immense knowledge of his field, he was conscious that he needed a philosophy — a system of opinions. On this side too he equipped himself ; so far as quantity goes no man was ever better provided with opinions. Balzac has an opinion on everything in heaven and on earth, and a complete, consistent theory of the universe, which was always ready for service. " The signs of a superior mind," says M. Taine, in speaking of him, "are vues d' ensemble — general views"; and judged by its wealth in this direction Balzac's should be the greatest mind the world has seen. We can think of no other mind that has stood ready to deliver itself on quite so many subjects. We doubt whether, on the whole, Aristotle had so many vues d'ensemble as Balzac. In Plato, in Bacon, in Shakespeare, in Goethe, in Hegel, there are shameful intermissions and lapses, ugly blank spots, ungraceful liabilities to be taken by surprise. But Balzac, as the showman of the human comedy, had measured his responsi bilities unerringly and concluded that he must not only know what everything is, but what everything should be. He is thus par excellence the philosophic novelist ; his pages bristle with axioms, moral, political, ethical, sesthetical ; his narrative groans beneath the weight of metaphysical and scientific digression. The value of his philosophy and his science is a question to be properly treated apart ; we mean simply to indicate that, formally, in this direc tion he is as complete as in the others.

In the front rank, of course, stand his political and religious opinions. These are anchoi'ed to "the two eternal truths — the monarchy and the Catholic Church." Balzac is, in other words, an elaborate conservative — a Tory of the deepest dye. How well, as a picturesque romancer, he knew what he was about in adopting this profession of faith will be plain to the most superficial reader. His philosophy, his morality, his religious opinions have a certain picturesque correspondence with his political views. Speaking generally, it may be said that he had little belief in virtue and still less admiration for it. He is so large and various that you find all kinds of contradictory things in him ; he has that sign of the few supreme geniuses that, if you look long enough he offers you a specimen of every possible mode of feeling. He has represented virtue, innocence and purity in the most vivid forms. Cesar Birotteau, Eugenie Grandet, Mile. Cormon, Mme. Graslin, Mme. Claes, Mme. de Mortsauf, Popinot, Genestas, the Cousin Pons, Schmucke, Chesnel, Joseph Bridau, Mme. Hulot — these and many others are not only admirably good people, but they are admirably suc cessful figures. They live and move, they produce an illusion, for all their goodness, quite as much as their baser companions — Mme. Vauquer, Mme. Marneffe, Yautrin, Philippe Bridau, Mme. de Rochefide. Balzac had evidently an immense kindliness, a salubrious good nature which enabled him to feel the charm of all artless and helpless manifestations of life. That robustness of temperament and those high animal spirits which carried him. into such fantastic explorations of man's carnal nature as the "Physiologie du Mariage " and the " Contes Drolatiques" — that lusty natural humour which was not humour in our English sense, but a relish, senti mentally more dry but intellectually more keen, of

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all grotesqueness and quaintness and uncleanness, and which, when it felt itself flagging, had still the vigour to keep itself up a while as what the French call the " humoristic " — to emulate Eabelais, to torture words, to string together names, to be pedantically jovial and archaically hilarious — all this helped Balzac to appreciate the simple and the primitive with an intensity subordinate only to his enjoyment of cor ruption and sophistication. "We do wrong indeed to say subordinate ; Balzac was here as strong and as frank as he was anywhere. We are almost inclined to say that his profoundly simple people are his best — that in proportion to the labour expended upon them they are most lifelike. Such a figure as " big Nanon," the great, strapping, devoted maid- servant in "Eugenie Grandet," may stand as an example. (Balzac is full, by the way, of good servants ; from Silvie and Christophe in " Le Pere Goriot " to Chesnel the notary, whose absolutely canine fidelity deprives him even of the independence of a domestic, in " Le Cabinet des Antiques.") What he represents best is extremely simple virtue, and vice simple or complex, as you please. In superior virtue, intellectual virtue, he fails; when his superior people begin to reason they are lost — they become prigs and hypocrites, or worse. Madame de Mortsauf, who is intended to be