Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  But what he missed in the whole representation of the fair sex he made up for by what he invented, as indeed, too, in his representation of the sterner sex; and Jules Janin’s account of the matter is not far from the truth: —

  “He is at once the inventor, the architect, the upholsterer, the milliner, the professor of languages, the chambermaid, the perfumer, the barber, the music-teacher, and the usurer. He renders his society all that it is. He it is who lulls it to sleep on a bed expressly arranged for sleep and adultery; he, who bows all women beneath the same misfortune; he, who buys on credit the horses, jewels, and clothes of all these handsome sons without stomach, without money, without heart. He is the first who has found the livid veneer, the pale complexion of distinguished company which causes all his heroes to be recognized. He has arranged in his fertile brain all the adorable crimes, the masked treasons, the ingenious rapes mental and physical which are the ordinary warp of his plots. The jargon spoken by this peculiar world, and which he alone can interpret, is none the less a mother-tongue rediscovered by Monsieur de Balzac, which partly explains the ephemeral success of this novelist, who still reigns in London and Saint Petersburg as the most faithful reproduction of the manners and actions of our century.”

  Janin’s animus blinded him to the rest, and it is just the rest of the qualities which converted the ephemeral success into the permanent. Taine’s estimate is more discursive. He is further removed from polemics. He says: —

  “Monsieur de Balzac has of private life a very deep and fine sentiment which goes even to minuteness of detail and of superstition. He knows how to move you and make you palpitate from the first, simply in depicting a garden-walk, a dining-room, a piece of furniture. He divines the mysteries of provincial life; sometimes he makes them. Most often he does not recognize and therefore isolates the pudic and hidden side of life, together with the poetry it contains. He has a multitude of rapid remarks about old maids and old women, ugly girls, sickly women, sacrificed and devoted mistresses, old bachelors, misers. One wonders where, with his petulant imagination, he can have picked it all up. It is true that Monsieur de Balzac does not proceed with sureness, and that in his numerous productions, some of which appear to us almost admirable, at any rate touching and delicious or piquant and finely comic in observation, there is a dreadful pell-mell. What a throng of volumes, what a flight of tales, novels of all sorts, droll, philosophic, and theosophic. There is something to be enjoyed in each, no doubt, but what prolixity! In the elaboration of a subject, as in the detail of style, Monsieur de Balzac has a facile, unequal, risky pen. He starts off quickly, sets himself in a gallop, and then, all at once, he stumbles to the ground, rising only to fall again. Most of his openings are delightful; but his conclusions degenerate or become excessive. At a certain moment, he loses self-control. His observing coolness escapes; something in his brain explodes, and carries everything far, far away. Hazard and accident have a good share in Monsieur de Balzac’s best production. He has his own manner, but vacillating, fidgety, often seeking to regain self-possession.”

  How much one could wish that, instead of producing more, Balzac should have produced less. With a man of his native power and perseverance, what greater perfection there might have been! Certainly, no defect is more patent in the Comedie Humaine than the trail of hasty workmanship, the mark of being at so much a line. Strangely, the speed with which he wrote furnished him with a cause for boasting. More properly, it ought to have filled him with humiliation. Many litterateurs are compelled to drive and overdrive their pens. But, if they have the love of letters innate in them, it will go against the grain to send into the world their sentences without having had leisure to polish each and all. Examples have already been given of the short time spent over several books of the Comedy. There is no need to repeat these or to add to their names. Occasionally, the result was not bad, when, as with Cesar Birotteau, the subject had been long in the novelist’s head. This, however, was the exception. The fifty-five sheets once composed in a single week, and the six thousand lines once reeled off in ten days, were probably invented as well as set on paper within the periods stated. No doubt, much was altered in the galley proofs; but the alterations would be made with the same celerity, so that they risked being no improvement either in style or matter. Balzac, indeed, was aware of the imperfections arising from such a method; and he not infrequently strove to correct them in subsequent editions. The task might perhaps have been carried out fully, if the bulk of his new novels had not been continually growing faster than he could follow it with his revision.

  The commercial compromises that he consented to were still more injurious to the artistic finish of some of his later pieces of fiction. For instance, when the Employees was about to come out in a volume, after its publication as a serial the length was judged to be insufficient by the man of business. He wanted more for his money. What did Balzac do? He searched through his drawers, pitched upon a manuscript entitled Physiology of the Employee, and drilled it into the other story. Of these patchwork novels The Woman of Thirty Years Old is the worst. Originally, it was six distinct short tales which had appeared at divers dates. The first was entitled Early Mistakes; the second, Hidden Sufferings; the third, At Thirty Years Old; the fourth, God’s Finger; the fifth, Two Meetings; and the sixth and last, The Old Age of a Guilty Mother. In 1835, the author took it into his head to join them together under one title, The Same Story, although the names of the characters differed in each chapter, so that the chief heroine had no fewer than six appellations. Not till 1842 did he remedy this primary incoherence, yet without the removal of the aliases doing anything towards bestowing consistency on the several personages thus connected in Siamese-twin fashion. To-day, any one who endeavors to read the novel through will proceed from astonishment to bewilderment, and thence to amazement. Nowhere else does Balzac come nearer to that peculiar vanity which fancies that every licence is permissible to talent.

  In his chapter on the social importance of the Comedie Humaine, Brunetiere tries to persuade us that, before Balzac’s time, novelists in general gave a false presentation of the heroes by making love the unique preoccupation of life. And he seems to include dramatists in his accusation, declaring that love as a passion, the love which Shakespeare and Racine speak of, is a thing exceeding rare, and that humanity is more usually preoccupied with everything and anything besides love; love, he says, has never been the great affair of life except with a few idle people. Monsieur Brunetiere’s erudition was immense, and the nights as well as the days he spent in acquiring his formidable knowledge may in his case have prevented more than a passing thought being given to the solicitation of love. If the eminent critic had been as skilled in psychology as he was in literature, he would have been more disposed to recognize that, amidst all the toils and cares of life, love, in some phase, is after all the mainspring, and that, if it were eliminated from man’s nature, the most puissant factor of his activity would disappear. Love is part of the huge sub-conscious in man; and the novelist, in making the events of his fiction turn upon it, does no more than follow nature.

  However, it is not exact that all novelists and dramatists, or even the majority of them, before Balzac’s time made love the sole preoccupation of their heroes. What they did rather — in so far as their writing was true — was to give a visible relief to it which in real life is impossible, since it belongs to the invisible, inner experience. Nor is it exact that Balzac consistently assigns a secondary place in his novels to love. He does so in his best novels, but not in some that he thought his best — The Lily in the Valley and Seraphita for example. The relegation of love to the background in these novels which happen to be his masterpieces was caused by something mentioned in a preceding chapter, to wit, that Balzac never thoroughly felt or understood love as a great and noble passion. And love, with him, being so oddly mixed up with calculation, it was to be expected he should succeed best in books in which the dominant interest was some other passion — an exc
eptional one. If money plays, on the contrary, such an intrusive role in his novels, its introduction was less from voluntary, reasoned choice than from obsession. He deals with this subject sometimes splendidly, but, at other times, he wearies. Had money filled a smaller part of his work, the work would not have been lost.

  In fine, with its beauties and its ugliness, its perfections and its shortcomings, the Comedy is the illumination cast by a master-mind upon the goings-out and comings-in of his contemporaries, the creation of a more universal and representative history of social life than had been previously written. Having considerable ethical value, it is worth still more on account of the ways it opens towards the fiction of the future.

  CHAPTER XVI. THE INFLUENCE

  Balzac’s influence during his lifetime was, with but few exceptions, exercised outside his own, novelist’s profession. The sphere in which it made itself chiefly felt was that of the cultured reading public, and the public was, first and foremost, a foreign one. History repeated itself. To Honore d’Urfe, the author of the Astree, in the sixteenth century, while living in Piedmont, a letter came announcing that twenty-nine princesses and nineteen lords of Germany had adopted the names and characters of his heroes and heroines in the Astree, and had founded an academy of true lovers. Almost the same thing occurred to the nineteenth-century Honore de Balzac. For a while, certain people in Venetian society assumed the titles and roles of his chief personages, playing the parts, in some instances, out to their utmost conclusion.

  Sainte-Beuve, who, in 1850, drew attention to this curious historical analogy, went on to mention that, in Hungary, Poland, and Russia, Balzac’s novels created a fashion. The strange, rich furniture that was assembled and arranged, according to the novelist’s fancy, out of the artistic productions of many countries and epochs, became an after-reality. Numerous wealthy persons prided themselves on possessing what the author had merely imagined. The interior of their houses was adorned a la Balzac.

  One evening at Vienna, says his sister, he entered a concert-room, where, as soon as his presence was perceived and bruited about, all the audience rose in his honour; and, at the end of the entertainment, a student seized his hand and kissed it, exclaiming: “I bless the hand that wrote Seraphita.” Balzac himself relates that, once travelling in Russia, he and his friends, as night was coming on, went and asked for hospitality at a castle. On their entrance, the lady of the house and some other members of the fair sex vied with each other in eagerness to serve the guests. One of the younger ladies hurried to the kitchen for refreshment. In the meantime, the novelist’s identity was revealed to the chatelaine. A lively conversation was immediately engaged in, and, when the impromptu Abigail returned with the refreshment, the first words she heard were: “Well, Monsieur Balzac, so you think — ” Full of surprise and joy she started, dropped the tray she had in her hands, and everything was broken. “Glory I have known and seen,” adds the narrator; “wasn’t that glory?”

  It was more. It was power wielded for good or evil, like that of every other great man, be he statesman, or priest, or artist. The conviction of possessing this power caused Balzac to complain with sincere indignation of those who charged him with being an immoral writer. “The reproach of immorality,” he said in his preface to the second edition of Pere Goriot, “which has ever been launched at the courageous author, is the last that remains to be made, when nothing else can be urged against a poet. If you are true in your portrayal, if, by dint of working night and day you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the world, the epithet immoral is cast in your face. Socrates was immoral, Jesus Christ was immoral. Both were persecuted in the name of the societies they overthrew or reformed. When the world wishes to destroy any one, it taxes him with immorality.”

  This argument is beside the question. It does not settle whether the apologist’s influence upon the men and women of his generation and beyond — an influence which, in his lifetime, was incontestable, and may be deemed potent still, to judge by the extent to which his books are read — was and is good or bad. Balzac’s personality is here only indirectly involved. His individual character might have been better or worse without the conclusion to be drawn being affected. Good men’s influence is not always good, nor bad men’s influence always bad. Intention may be inoperative, and effect may be involuntary.

  Balzac claimed the right to speak of all conduct, to represent all conduct in his fiction; and we shall see, farther on, that he imposed his claim upon those who followed him in literature. But, if he anticipated reality — and this is acknowledged — if he led society to imitate his fiction, if his exceptional representations tended, with him and after him, to become general or more frequent in one or another class of society, he must be considered morally responsible for the result. It has already been remarked, in the preceding chapter, that there are two ways of reproducing reality in literature and art, one of them favouring, not through didacticism but through emotion, the creation in the mind of a state of healthy feeling, thought, and effort; the other, that sort of fascination with which the serpent attracts its victims. It is certain that Balzac did not adequately take this into account, certain also that in parts of his Comedy, the secret, unconscious sympathy of the author with some of his sicklier heroes and heroines could not and did not have that dynamic moral action which he vainly desired.

  Of the chief French novelists or litterateurs who were his contemporaries, critics are inclined to esteem his influence most evident on George Sand and Victor Hugo. Brunetiere, indeed, begins with Sainte-Beuve. But the similarities discoverable between the author of Volupte and the author of the Comedie Humaine were present in Sainte-Beuve’s work at a period when Balzac was only just issuing from obscurity, and appear, moreover, to be due to temperament. In the case of George Sand, the inference is based partly on the praise she meted out to Balzac in her reminiscences. Brunetiere specifies the Marquis de Villemer as the one proved example of imitation. But this novel was written in 1861, eleven years after Balzac’s death; and, in so far as it differs from Mauprat and the earlier books, whether La Petite Fadette or Consuelo, can be shown to be the result of a natural and independent evolution.

  As regards Victor Hugo, on the contrary, there is plenty of prima facie evidence that he largely utilized Balzac’s material and method; and there is evidence also that Balzac utilized, though in a less degree, the subjects developed by Hugo. The reciprocal borrowing is easy to explain, both men, in spite of their fundamental peculiarities, having much in them that was common — imagination difficult to control, fondness for exaggeration, language prone to be verbose and turgid, research of devices to astonish the reader. Hugo’s Miserables is a monument of his fiction that owes much to Balzacian architecture. The realism of the latter author is converted without difficulty into the former’s romanticism, or, rather, the alloy of romanticism is so considerable in Balzac’s work that there is little conversion to make. Ferragus and Vautrin are prototypes of Valjean, just as Valjean’s Cosette exploited by Madame Thenardier is an adaptation of Ferragus’ daughter or Doctor Minoret’s Ursula. The prison manners and slang of the Miserables inevitably recall those of Vautrin’s Last Incarnation, while, on the other hand, Hugo’s salon ultra reappears in the Cabinet of Antiques. And the analogies present themselves continually. One might almost say that the whole of the Comedie Humaine suggested things to its future panegyrist, who wrote his greatest novel in the years consecutive to Balzac’s death. Of course, Hugo’s borrowings, being those of a man of genius, were not made use of servilely. Like Shakespeare and Moliere, the author of the Miserables metamorphosed and enhanced what he took.