It is not surprising, therefore, that when we come to study the dramas of Balzac we find that the very qualities that give effectiveness to a stage representation are wanting in them. For the qualities which make a realistic tale impressive render a play intolerable. Thus Balzac’s stage pieces are interesting, exciting and vivid in many passages, but they cannot stand the searching glare of the footlights. Balzac, in the first place, looked upon the drama as a department of literature inferior to that of romance, and somewhat cavalierly condescended to the stage without reckoning on either its possibilities or its limitations. He did not take to play-writing because he had exhausted his vein of fiction, but because he was in need of money. This was during the last years of his life. In this period he wrote the five plays which are included in the authorized edition of his works.
Balzac’s first play was Vautrin, and Vautrin appears as the name of the most astonishing and most original character which Balzac has created and introduced in the five or six greatest novels of the Comedy. So transcendent, super-human and satanic is Vautrin, Herrera, or Jacques Collin, as he is indifferently called, that a French critic has interpreted this personage as a mere allegorical embodiment of the seductions of Parisian life, as they exist side by side with the potency and resourcefulness of crime in the French metropolis.
Vautrin is described in the Comedie Humaine as the tempter and benefactor of Lucien de Rubempre, whom he loves with an intense devotion, and would exploit as a power and influence in the social, literary and political world. The deep-dyed criminal seems to live a life of pleasure, fashion and social rank in the person of this protege. The abnormal, and in some degree quixotic, nature of this attachment is a purely Balzacian conception, and the contradictions involved in this character, with all the intellectual and physical endowments which pertain to it, are sometimes such as to bring the sublime in perilous proximity to the ridiculous. How such a fantastic creation can be so treated as to do less violence to the laws of artistic harmony and reserve may be seen in Hugo’s Valjean, which was undoubtedly suggested by Balzac’s Vautrin. In the play of Vautrin, the main character, instead of appearing sublime, becomes absurd, and the action is utterly destitute of that plausibility and coherence which should make the most improbable incidents of a play hang together with logical sequence.
Balzac in the Resources of Quinola merely reproduces David Sechard, though he places him in the reign of Philip the Second of Spain. He went far out of his way to make Fontanares the first inventor of the steamboat; the improbability of such a supposition quite forfeits the interest of the spectators and, in attempting to effect a love denouement, he disgusts us by uniting the noble discoverer with the vile Faustine. Even the element of humor is wanting in his portrayal of Quinola — who is a combination of the slave in a Latin comedy and the fool, or Touchstone of Shakespeare. This play is, however, ingenious, powerful and interesting in many passages.
Pamela Giraud is fantastic and painful in its plot. Balzac’s ideal woman, the Pauline of the Peau de Chagrin, is here placed in a situation revolting even to a Parisian audience; but the selfish worldliness of the rich and noble is contrasted with the pure disinterestedness of a poor working girl in all of Balzac’s strongest, most searching style. The denouement is well brought about and satisfactory, but scarcely atones for the outrageous nature of the principal situation.
Balzac was especially a novelist of his own period, and the life of his romances is the life he saw going on around him. The principal character in The Stepmother is a Napoleonist general typical of many who must have lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. The ruling passion of General de Grandchamp is hatred for those who deserted the cause or forsook the standard of the First Consul. This antipathy is exaggerated by Balzac into murderous hatred, and is the indirect cause of death to the General’s daughter, Pauline, and her lover, the son of a soldier of the First Empire, who, by deserting Napoleon, had fallen under the Comte de Grandchamp’s ban. The situation is, however, complicated by the guilty passion which Gertrude, the stepmother of Pauline and wife of the General’s old age, feels for the lover of Pauline. The main interest of the drama lies in the struggle between these two women, every detail of which is elaborated with true Balzacian gusto and insight. We expect to see virtue triumphant, and Pauline united to the excellent Ferdinand. When they both die of poison, and Gertrude becomes repentant, we feel that the denouement is not satisfactory. The jealousy of the woman and the hatred of the man have not blended properly.
But there can be no doubt at all that if Balzac had lived, he might have turned out a successful playwright. When he began his career as a dramatic writer he was like a musician taking up an unfamiliar instrument, an organist who was trying the violin, or a painter working in an unknown medium. His last written play was his best. Fortunately, the plot did not deal with any of those desperate love passions which Balzac in his novels has analyzed and described with such relentless and even brutal frankness. It is filled throughout with a genial humanity, as bright and as expressive as that which fills the atmosphere of She Stoops to Conquer or A School for Scandal. The characters are neither demons, like Cousin Betty, nor reckless debauchees, like Gertrude in The Stepmother. The whole motif is comic. Moliere himself might have lent a touch of his refined and fragrant wit to the composition; and the situation is one which the author could realize from experience, but had only learned to regard from a humorous standpoint in the ripeness of his premature old age. Balzac makes money rule in his stories, as the most potent factor of social life. He describes poverty as the supreme evil, and wealth as the object of universal aspiration. In line with this attitude comes Mercadet with his trials and schemes. Scenes of ridiculous surprises succeed each other till by the return of the absconder with a large fortune, the greedy, usurious creditors are at last paid in full, and poetic justice is satisfied by the marriage of Julie to the poor man of her choice.
THE NOVEL by D. H. Lawrence
SOMEBODY says the novel is doomed. Somebody else says it is the green bay tree getting greener. Everybody says something, so why shouldn’t I! Mr. Santayana sees the modern novel expiring because it is getting so thin; which means, Mr. Santayana is bored.
I am rather bored myself. It becomes harder and harder to read the whole of any modern novel. One reads a bit, and knows the rest; or else one doesn’t want to know any more.
This is sad. But again, I don’t think it’s the novel’s fault. Rather the novelists’.
You can put anything you like in a novel. So why do people always go on putting the same thing? Why is the vol au vent always chicken! Chicken vol au vents may be the rage. But who sickens first shouts first for something else.
The novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo’s telescope or somebody else’s wireless. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
In a novel, everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is art at all. There may be didactic bits, but they aren’t the novel. And the author may have a didactic “purpose’’ up his sleeve. Indeed most great novelists have, as Tolstoi had his Christian- socialism, and Hardy his pessimism, and Flaubert his intellectual desperation. But even a didactic purpose so wicked as Tolstoi’s or Flaubert’s cannot put to death the novel.
You can tell me, Flaubert had a “philosophy”, not a “purpose”. But what is a novelist’s philosophy but a purpose on a rather higher level? And since every novelist who amounts to anything has a philosophy — even Balzac — any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
Vronsky sinned, did he? But also the sinning was a consummation devoutly to be wished. The novel makes that obvious: in spite of old Leo Tolstoi. And the would-be-pious Prince in Insurrection is a muff, with his piety that nobody wants or believes in.
There you have the greatness of the novel itself. It won’t let you tell didact
ic lies, and put them over. Nobody in the world is anything but delighted when Vronsky gets Anna Karenina. Then what about the sin? — Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky’s and Anna’s fear of society. The monster was social, not phallic at all. They couldn’t live in the pride of their sincere passion, and spit in Mother Grundy’s eye. And that, that cowardice, was the real “sin”. The novel makes it obvious, and knocks all old Leo’s teeth out. “As an officer I am still useful. But as a man, I am a ruin,” says Vronsky — or words to that effect. Well what a skunk, collapsing as a man and a male, and remaining merely as a social instrument; an “officer”, God love us! — merely because people at the opera turn backs on him! As if people’s backs weren’t preferable to their faces, anyhow!
And old Leo tries to make out, it was all because of the phallic sin. Old liar! Because where would any of Leo’s books be, without the phallic splendour? And then to blame the column of blood, which really gave him all his life riches! The Judas! Cringe to a mangy, bloodless Society, and try to dress up that dirty old Mother Grundy in a new bonnet and face-powder of Christian-Socialism. Brothers indeed! Sons of a castrated Father!
The novel itself gives Vronsky a kick in the behind, and knocks old Leo’s teeth out, and leaves us to learn.
It is such a bore that nearly all great novelists have a didactic purpose, otherwise a philosophy, directly opposite to their passional inspiration. In their passional inspiration, they are all phallic worshippers. From Balzac to Hardy, it is so. Nay, from Apuleius to E. M. Forster. Yet all of them, when it comes to their philosophy, or what they think-they- are, they are all crucified Jesuses. What a bore! And what a burden for the novel to carry!
But the novel has carried it. Several thousands of thousands of lamentable crucifixions of self-heroes and self-heroines. Even the silly duplicity of Resurrection, and the wickeder duplicity of Salammbo, with that flayed phallic Matho, tortured upon the Cross of a gilt Princess.
You can’t fool the novel. Even with man crucified upon a woman: his “dear cross”. The novel will show you how dear she was: dear at any price. And it will leave you with a bad taste of disgust against these heroes who turn their women into a “dear cross”, and ask for their own crucifixion.
You can fool pretty nearly every other medium. You can make a poem pietistic, and still it will be a poem. You can write Hamlet in drama: if you wrote him in a novel, he’d be half comic, or a trifle suspicious: a suspicious character, like Dostoevsky’ s Idiot. Somehow, you sweep the ground a bit too clear in the poem or the drama, and you let the human Word fly a bit too freely. Now in a novel there’s always a tom-cat, a black tom-cat that pounces on the white dove of the Word, if the dove doesn’t watch it; and there is a banana-skin to trip on; and you know there is a water-closet on the premises. All these things help to keep the balance.
If, in Plato’s Dialogues, somebody had suddenly stood on his head and given smooth Plato a kick in the wind, and set the whole school in an uproar, then Plato would have been put into a much truer relation to the universe. Or if, in the midst of the Timaeus, Plato had only paused to say: “And now, my dear Cleon — (or whoever it was) — I have a bellyache, and must retreat to the privy: this too is part of the Eternal Idea of man”, then we never need have fallen so low as Freud.
And if, when Jesus told the rich man to take all he had and give it to the poor, the rich man had replied: “All right, old sport! You are poor, aren’t you>?Come on, I’ll give you a fortune. Come on! “ Then a great deal of snivelling and mistakenness would have been spared us all, and we might never have produced a Marx and a Lenin. If only Jesus had accepted the fortune!
Yes, it’s a pity of pities that Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t write straight novels. They did write nove.’s; but a bit crooked. The Evangels are wonderful novels, by authors “ with a purpose. “Pity there’ s so much Sermon-on-the-Mounting.
“Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John Went to bed with their breeches on!” —
as every child knows. Ah, if only they’d taken them off!
Greater novels, to my mind, are the books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Kings, by authors whose purpose was so big, it didn’t quarrel with their passionate inspiration. The purpose and the inspiration were almost one. Why, in the name of everything bad, the two ever should have got separated, is a mystery! But in the modern novel they are hopelessly divorced. When there is any inspiration there, to be divorced from.
This, then, is what is the matter with the modern novel. The modern novelist is possessed, hag-ridden, by such a stale old “purpose”, or idea-of-himself, that his inspiration succumbs. Of course he denies having any didactic purpose at all: because a purpose is supposed to be like catarrh, something to be ashamed of. But he’s got it. They’ve all got it: the same snivelling purpose.
They’re all little Jesuses in their own eyes, and their “purpose” is to prove it. Oh Lord! — Lord Jim! Sylvestre Bonnard! If Winter Comes! Main Street! Ulysses! Pan! They are all pathetic or sympathetic or antipathetic little Jesuses accomplis or manquis. And there is a heroine who is always “pure”, usually, nowadays, on the muck-heap! Like the Green Hatted Woman. She is all the time at the feet of Jesus, though her behaviour there may be misleading. Heaven knows what the Saviour really makes of it: whether she’ s a Green Hat or a Constant Nymph (eighteen months of constancy, and her heart failed), or any of the rest of ‘em. They are all, heroes and heroines, novelists and she-novelists, little Jesuses or Jesusesses. They may be wallowing in the mire: but then didn’t Jesus harrow Hell! A la bonne heure!
Oh, they are all novelists with an idea of themselves! Which is a “purpose’’, with a vengeance! For what a weary, false, sickening idea it is nowadays! The novel gives them a way. They can’ t fool the novel.
Now really, it’s time we left off insulting the novel any further. If your purpose is to prove your own Jesus qualifications, and the thin stream of your inspiration is “sin”, then dry up, for the interest is dead. Life as it is! What’s the good of pretending that the lives of a set of tuppenny Green Hats and Constant Nymphs is Life-as-it-is, when the novel itself proves that all it amounts to is life as it is isn’t life, but a sort of everlasting and intricate and boring habit: of Jesus peccant and Jesusa peccante.
These wearisome sickening little personal novels! After all, they aren’t novels at all. In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all. Just as God is the pivotal interest in the books of the Old Testament. But just a trifle too intimate, too frere et cochon, there. In the great novel, the felt but unknown flame stands behind all the characters, and in their words and gestures there is a flicker of the presence. If you are too personal, too human, the flicker fades out, leaving you with something awfully lifelike, and as lifeless as most people are.
We have to choose between the quick and the dead. The quick is God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead. In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn’t even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead.
What makes the difference? Quien sabe! But difference there is. And I know it.
And the sum and source of all quickness, we will call God. And the sum and total of all deadness we may call human.
And if one tries to find out, wherein the quickness of the quick lies, it is in a certain weird relationship between that which is quick and — I don’t know; perhaps all the rest of things. It seems to consist in an odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness. That silly iron stove somehow belongs.
Whereas this thin-shanked table doesn’t belong. It is a mere disconnected lump, like a cut-off finger.
And now we see the great, great merits of the novel. It can’t exist without being “quick”. The ordinary unquick novel, even if it be a best seller, disappears into absolute nothingness, the dead burying their dead with surprising speed. For even the dead like to be tickled. But the next minute, they’ve forgotten both the tickling and the tickler.
Secondly, thenovel contains nodidactiveabsolute. All that is quick, and all that is said and done by the quick, is, in some way godly. So that Vronsky’s taking Anna Karenina we must count godly, since it is quick. And that Prince in Resurrection, following the convict girl, we must count dead. The convict train is quick and alive. But that would-be-expiatory Prince is as dead as lumber.
The novel itself lays down these laws for us, and we spend our time evading them. The man in the novel must be “quick”. And this means one thing, among a host of unknown meaning: it means he must ha-we a quick relatedness to all the other things in the novel: snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper. He must be in quick relation to all these things. What he says and does must be relative to them all.
And this is why Pierre, for example, in War and Peace, is more dull and less quick than Prince Andre. Pierre is quite nicely related to ideas, tooth-paste, God, people, foods, trains, silk-hats, sorrow, diphtheria, stars. But his relation to snow and sunshine, cats, lightning and the phallus, fuchsias and toilet- paper, is sluggish and mussy. He’s not quick enough.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1448