The provinces differ from Paris in the nature of the social warfare, but not in its morality. Passions are directed to meaner objects; they are narrower, and more intense. The whole of a man’s faculties are concentrated upon one object; and he pursues it for years with relentless and undeviating ardour. To supplant a rival, to acquire a few more acres, to gratify jealousy of a superior, he will labour for a lifetime. The intensity of his hatred supplies his want of intellect; he is more cunning, if less far-sighted; and in the contest between the brilliant Parisian and the plodding provincial we generally have an illustration of the hare and the tortoise. The blind, persistent hatred gets the better in the long run of the more brilliant, but more transitory, passion. The lower nature here, too, gets the better of the higher; and Balzac characteristically delights in the tragedy produced by genius which falls before cunning, as virtue almost invariably yields to vice. It is only when the slow provincial obstinacy happens to be on the side of virtue that stupidity, doubled with virtue, as embodied for example in two or three French Caleb Balderstons, generally gets the worst of it. There are exceptions to this general rule. Even Balzac sometimes relents. A reprieve is granted at the last moment, and the martyr is unbound from the stake. But those catastrophes are not only exceptional, but rather annoying. We have been so prepared to look for a sacrifice that we are disappointed instead of relieved. If Balzac’s readers could be consulted during the last few pages of a novel, I feel sure that most thumbs would be turned upwards, and the lions allowed to have their will of the Christians. Perhaps our appetites have been depraved; but we are not in the cue for a happy conclusion.
I know not whether it was the cause or the consequence of this sentiment that Balzac was a thorough legitimist. He does not believe in the vitality of the old order, any more than he believes in the truth of Catholicism. But he regrets the extinction of the ancient faiths, which he admits to be unsuitable; and sees in their representatives the only picturesque and really estimable elements that still survived in French society. He heartily despises the modern mediævalists, who try to spread a thin varnish over a decaying order; the world is too far gone in wickedness for such a futile remedy. The old chivalrous sentiments of the genuine noblesse are giving way to the base chicanery of the bourgeois who supplant them: the peasantry are mean, avaricious, and full of bitter jealousy; but they are triumphantly rooting out the last vestiges of feudalism. Democracy and communism are the fine names put forward to justify the enmity of those who have not, against those who have. Their success means merely an approaching ‘descent of Niagara,’ and the growth of a more debasing and more materialist form of despotism. But it would be a mistake to assume that this view of the world implies that Balzac is in a state of lofty moral indignation. Nothing can be further from the case. The world is wicked; but it is fascinating. Society is very corrupt, it is true; but intensely and permanently amusing. Paris is a hell; but hell is the only place worth living in. The play of evil passions gives infinite subjects for dramatic interests. The financial warfare is more diabolical than the old literal warfare, but quite as entertaining. There is really as much romance connected with bills of exchange as with swords and lances, and rigging the market is nothing but the modern form of lying in ambush. Goneril and Regan are triumphant; but we may admire the grace of their manners and the dexterity with which they cloak their vices. Iago not only poisons Othello’s peace of mind, but, in the world of Balzac, he succeeds to Othello’s place, and is universally respected. The story receives an additional flavour. In a characteristic passage, Balzac regrets that Molière did not continue ‘Tartufe.’ It would then have appeared how bitterly Orgon regretted the loss of the hypocrite, who, it is said, made love to his wife, but who, at any rate, had an interest in making things pleasant. Your conventional catastrophe is a mistake in art, as it is a misrepresentation of facts. Tartufe has a good time of it in Balzac: instead of meeting with an appropriate punishment, he flourishes and thrives, and we look on with a smile not altogether devoid of complacency. Shall we not take the world as it is, and be amused at the ‘Comédie Humaine,’ rather than fruitlessly rage against it? It will be played out whether we like it or not, and we may as well adapt our tastes to our circumstances.
Ought we to be shocked at this extravagant cynicism; to quote it, as respectable English journalists used to do, as a proof of the awful corruption of French society, or to regard it as semi-humorous exaggeration? I can’t quite sympathise with people who take Balzac seriously. I cannot talk about the remorseless skill with which he tears off the mask from the fearful corruptions of modern society, and penetrates into the most hidden motives of the human heart; nor can I infer from his terrible pictures of feminine suffering that for every one of those pictures a woman’s heart had been tortured to death. This, or something like this, I have read; and I can only say that I don’t believe a word of it. Balzac, indeed, as compared with our respectable romancers, has the merit of admitting passions whose existence we scrupulously ignore; and the further merit that he takes a far wider range of sentiment, and does not hold by the theory that the life of a man or a woman closes at the conventional end of a third volume. But he is above all things a dreamer, and his dreams resemble nightmares. Powerfully as his actors are put upon the stage, they seem to me to be, after all, ‘such stuff as dreams are made of.’ A genuine observer of life does not find it so highly spiced, and draws more moderate conclusions. Balzac’s characters run into typical examples of particular passions rather than genuine human beings; they are generally monomaniacs. Balthazar Claes, who gives up his life to search for the philosopher’s stone, is closely related to them all; only we must substitute for the philosopher’s stone some pet passion, in which the whole nature is absorbed. They have the unnatural strain of mind which marks the approach to madness. It is not ordinary daylight which illuminates Balzac’s dreamland, but some fantastic combination of Parisian lamps, which tinges all the actors with an unearthly glare, and distorts their features into extravagant forms. The result has, as I have said, a strange fascination; but one is half-ashamed of yielding, because one feels that it is due to the use of rather unholy drugs. The vapours that rise from his magic caldron and shape themselves into human forms smell unpleasantly of sulphur, or perhaps of Parisian sewers.
The highest poetry, like the noblest morality, is the product of a thoroughly healthy mind. A diseased tendency in one respect is certain to make itself manifest in the other. Now Balzac, though he shows some powers which are unsurpassed or unequalled, possessed a mind which, to put it gently, was not exactly well regulated. He took a pleasure in dwelling upon horrors from which a healthy imagination shrinks, and rejoiced greatly in gloating over the mysteries of iniquity. I do not say that this makes his work immoral in the ordinary sense. Probably few people who are likely to read Balzac would be any the worse for the study. But, from a purely artistic point of view, he is injured by his morbid tendencies. The highest triumph of style is to say what everybody has been thinking in such a way as to make it new; the greatest triumph of art is to make us see the poetical side of the commonplace life around us. Balzac’s ambition was, doubtless, aimed in that direction. He wished to show that life in Paris or at Tours was as interesting to the man of real insight as any more ideal region. In a certain sense, he has accomplished his purpose. He has discovered food for a dark and powerful imagination in the most commonplace details of daily life. But he falls short in so far as he is unable to represent things as they are, and has a taste for impossible horrors. There are tragedies enough all round us for him who has eyes to see. Balzac is not content with the materials at hand, or rather he has a love for the more exceptional and hideous manifestations. Therefore the ‘Comédie Humaine,’ instead of being an accurate picture of human life, and appealing to the sympathies of all human beings, is a collection of monstrosities, whose vices are unnatural, and whose virtues are rather like their vices. One feels that there is something narrow and artificial about his work. It is i
ntensely powerful, but it is not the highest kind of power. He makes the utmost of the gossip of a club smoking-room, or the scandal of a drawing-room, or perhaps of a country public-house; but he represents a special phase of manners, and that not a particularly pleasant one, rather than the more fundamental and permanent sentiments of mankind. When shall we see a writer who can be powerful without being spasmodic, and pierce through the surface of society without seeking for interest in its foulest abysses?
BALZAC by William Ernest Henley
An extract from ‘Views and Reviews’
Under which King?
To Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac’s novels had been dug out of a suffering woman’s heart: but Goethe spoke not always wisely, and in this exacting world there be some that not only have found fault with Balzac’s method and results but have dared to declare his theory of society the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was less observer than creator: his views were false, his vision was distorted, and though he had ‘incomparable power’ he had not power enough to make them accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they find Balzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; he made room for the work of Flaubert, Feydeau, the younger Dumas, Augier and Zola and the brothers Goncourt; and to him Charles Baudelaire is as some fat strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs. Sainte-Beuve refused to accept him, but his ‘Pigault-Lebrun des duchesses’ is only malicious: he resented the man’s exuberant and inordinate personality, and made haste to apply to it some drops p. 140of that sugared vitriol of which he had the secret. Taine is a fitter critic of the Comédie humaine than Sainte-Beuve; and Taine has come to other conclusions. Acute, coarse, methodical, exhaustive, he has recognised the greatness of one still more exhaustive, methodical, coarse, and acute than himself. English critics fall foul of Balzac’s women; but Taine falls foul of English critics, and with the authority of a Parisian by profession declares that the Parisiennes of the Comédie are everything they ought to be — the true daughters of their ‘bon gros libertin de père.’ And while Taine, exulting in his Marneffe and his Coralie, does solemnly and brilliantly show that he is right and everybody else is wrong, a later writer — English of course — can find no better parallel of Balzac than Browning, and knows nothing in art so like the Pauline of la Peau de Chagrin as the Sistine Madonna. It is curious, this clash of opinions; and it is plain that one or other party must be wrong. Which is it? ‘Qui trompe-t-on ici?’ Is Taine a better judge than Mr. Leslie Stephen or Mr. Henry James? Or are Messrs. James and Stephen better qualified to speak with authority than Taine? It may be that none but a Frenchman can thoroughly and intimately apprehend in its inmost a thing so essentially French as the Comédie; it is a fact that Frenchmen of all sorts and sizes have accepted the Comédie in its totality; and that is reason good p. 141enough for any commonplace Englishman who is lacking in the vanity of originality to accept it also.
The Fact.
Balzac’s ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. His Hulot was to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the love of woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, in whom is incarnated the instinct and the science of sexual corruption, is Hulot’s Cleopatra, and only dies because ‘elle va faire le bon Dieu’ — as who should say ‘to mash the Old Man’; Frenhœffer, Philippe Bridau, Vautrin, Marsay, Rastignac, Grandet, Balthazar Claës, Béatrix, Sarrazine, Lousteau, Esther, Lucien Chardon — the list is, I believe, some thousands strong! Also the argument is proved in advance: there is the Comédie itself — ’the new edition fifty volumes long.’ Bad or good, foul or fair, impossible or actual, a monstrous debauch of mind or a triumph of realisation, there is the Comédie. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the last stones of it; and it exists — if a little the worse for wear: the bulk is enormous — if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten p. 142and crumbling. Truly, he had ‘incomparable power.’ He was the least capable and the most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinate effects. He may be impossible; but there is French literature and French society to show that he passed that way, and had ‘incomparable power.’ The phrase is Mr. Henry James’s, and it is hard to talk of Balzac and refrain from it.
BALZAC AS A DRAMATIST by Epiphanius Wilson
Honore de Balzac is known to the world in general as a novel-writer, a producer of romances, in which begin the reign of realism in French fiction. His Comedie Humaine is a description of French society, as it existed from the time of the Revolution to that of the Restoration. In this series of stories we find the author engaged in analyzing the manners, motives and external life of the French man and woman in all grades of society. When we open these volumes, we enter a gallery of striking and varied pictures, which glow with all the color, chiaroscuro and life-like detail of a Dutch panel. The power of Balzac is unique as a descriptive writer; his knowledge of the female heart is more profound, and covers a far wider range than anything exhibited by a provincial author, such as Richardson. But he has also the marvelous faculty of suggesting spiritual facts in the life and consciousness of his characters, by the picturesque touches with which he brings before us their external surroundings — the towns, streets and houses in which they dwell; the furniture, ornaments and arrangement of their rooms, and the clothes they wear. He depends upon these details for throwing into relief such a portrait as that of Pons or Madame Hulot. He himself was individualized by his knobbed cane abroad, and his Benedictine habit and statuette of Napoleon at home; but every single one of his creations seems to have in some shape or other a cane, a robe or a decorative attribute, which distinguishes each individual, as if by a badge, from every other member of the company in the Comedy of Life.
The art of characterization exhibited by the author fascinates us; we gaze and examine as if we were face to face with real personages, whose passions are laid bare, whose life is traced, whose countenance is portrayed with miraculousness, distinctness and verisimilitude. All the phenomena of life in the camp, the court, the boudoir, the low faubourg, or the country chateau are ranged in order, and catalogued. This is done with relentless audacity, often with a touch of grotesque exaggeration, but always with almost wearying minuteness. Sometimes this great writer finds that a description of actuality fails to give the true spiritual key to a situation, and he overflows into allegory, or Swendenborgian mysticism, just as Bastien-Lepage resorts to a coating of actual gilt, in depicting that radiant light in his Jeanne d’Arc which flat pigment could not adequately represent.
But this very effort of Balzac to attain realistic characterization has resulted in producing what the ordinary reader will look upon as a defect in his stories. When we compared above the stories of this writer to a painting, we had been as near the truth, if we had likened them to a reflection or photograph of a scene. For in a painting, the artist at his own will arranges the light and shade and groups, and combines according to his own fancy the figures and objects which he finds in nature. He represents not what is, but what might be, an actual scene. He aims at a specific effect. To this effect everything is sacrificed, for his work is a synthesis, not a mere analysis. Balzac does not aim at an effect, above and independent of his analysis. His sole effort is to emphasize the facts which his analysis brings to light, and when he has succeeded in this, the sole end he aims at is attained. Thus action is less important in his estimation than impression. His stories are therefore often quite unsymmetrical, even anecdotic, in con
struction; some of them are mere episodes, in which the action is irrelevant, and sometimes he boldly ends an elaborate romance without any dramatic denouement at all. We believe that Honore de Balzac was the first of European writers to inaugurate the novel without denouement, and to give the world examples of the literary torso whose beauty and charm consist not in its completeness, but in the vigor and life-like animation of the lines, features, and contours of a detached trunk.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1447