The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Balzac’s youthful “literary hogwash” written before 1829 was unsigned. The first novel published under his name, and the earliest work to be incorporated in La Comédie humaine was Les Chouans (1829), about royalist guerrillas in western France in 1799. He was already irritating publishers by endless proof corrections, which ran up printing costs. “What the devil has got into you,” his publisher Latouche exclaimed. “Forget about the black mark under your mistress’s left tit, it’s only a beauty spot.” Les Chouans was praised by reviewers but did not sell. His next book, La Physiologie du marriage, published later that year, a surefire attention-getter, set him on the road to fame, or at least notoriety. In it “a young bachelor” revealed the knowledge of women he had acquired in thirty years of unmarried life. Insisting that “marriage is not born of Nature,” Balzac realistically separated romantic love from the biological drive to reproduce. Marriage, he explained, was an ongoing civil (or domestic) war in which, as in other wars, superior force and guile made the winner. The book was especially popular with women, whose grievances it exposed.

  At thirty-four years of age he had already published two dozen novels and numerous tales under his own name, and had sketched his large scheme. “Salute me,” he exclaimed to his sister, Laure, and her husband when he visited them in 1833, “I am on the way to becoming a genius!” By 1838, he predicted, “the three sections of this vast work will be, if not entirely complete, at least super-imposed so that the reader will be able to judge it as a whole.” In a letter to Eve Hanska in 1834 he outlined his ambitious project.

  The Études de moeurs will be a complete picture of society from which nothing has been omitted, no situation in life, no physiognomy or character of man or woman, no way of living, no calling, no social level, no part of France, nor any aspect of childhood, old age, middle age, politics, justice or war.… In the Études philosophiques I shall show the why of sentiments, the what of life; what is the structure, what are the conditions outside which neither society nor man can exist; after having surveyed it in order to describe it, I shall survey it in order to judge it. Also, in the Études de moeurs there will be individuals treated as types, and in the Études philosophiques there will be types depicted as individuals. Thus I shall have brought all aspects to life, the type by individualizing it, the individual by typifying him. If twenty-four volumes are needed for the Études de moeurs, only fifteen will be needed for the Études philosophiques and only nine for the Études analytiques. Thus Man, Society and Mankind will be described, judged and analyzed without repetitions in a work which will be like a western Thousand and One Nights.

  (Translated by Norman Denny)

  From anyone else, such a program would have seemed pretentious. But Balzac would justify his publisher Latouche’s description of him as “that volcano of novels who can turn out one in six weeks.”

  It was essential to this grandiose concept that the whole work never be completed. Their coherence would come from documentary truth. Following the prescription of Balzac’s country doctor, “We proceed from ourselves to men, never from men to ourselves.” With his “prodigious taste for detail,” he would capture the personal nature of experience. “The author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works improperly called romans [novels, or romances].” This sometimes overwrought detail, along with the dominant, usually unappealing, passions of his characters, repels many American readers nowadays.

  To give historical coherence to his whole comedy, Balzac pioneered the multinovel saga. Keeping characters alive from novel to novel, he allowed them to age, develop, or disintegrate. Although Old Goriot died, his ambitious daughter, Mme. de Nucingen, and her husband lived on in many novels. He referred readers to earlier novels—“See Le Père Goriot”—in which the same character had appeared. After a dormant period, characters would reemerge to remind us they are still alive. Over the twenty-five years of his writing they created their own problems as they aged.

  Few, even among Balzac admirers, have read the bulk of his ninety-odd novels. But his passion for accurate history and his grand scheme make any of them a window into his Comédie humaine. Despite the complexity of his plan Balzac insisted, “I love simple subjects.” In the English-speaking world his most popular novels would include Eugénie Grandet, “A Scene from Provincial Life” (1833), the tale of an enterprising small-town miser, the mayor of Saumur, and the struggle between two families for the hand and fortune of his heiress. We follow his profitable speculations in securities appreciated by the Restoration, and witness his daughter’s unhappy widowhood. “The pale cold glitter of gold was destined to take the place of all warmth and colour in her innocent and blameless life, and lead a woman who was all feeling to look on any show of affection with mistrust.… Such is the story of this woman, who is in the world but not of the world, who, made to be a magnificent wife and mother, has no husband, children, or family.” The theme of Le Père Goriot, “A Scene from Private Life” (1835), set in Paris, Balzac summarized in his notebook. “A worthy man—middle-class boarding-house—600 francs income—stripped himself to the bone for his two daughters, who each have 50,000 a year—dies like a dog.” As we follow the frustration of Old Goriot we meet his two daughters, the cynical ex-convict Vautrin who aims to corrupt the young Rastignac from the provinces, the warm-hearted medical student Bianchon, and other boarders. All these figures reappear in later segments of La Comédie humaine.

  La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin; 1831), one of the Philosophical Studies, opens our window on Balzac’s mysticism, the improbable complement to his passion for the concrete. This other Balzac is the enthusiast for mesmerism, cosmic unity, and the “life force.” In this odd novel he elaborated a simple item in his notebook, “The discovery of a skin representing life. An oriental fable.” The young Raphael, about to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine, wanders into an antique shop. There the mysterious dealer offers him the magic skin of a wild ass. The Sanskrit inscription on the skin promises its owner, “Express a desire and thy desire shall be fulfilled. But let thy wishes be measured against thy life. Here it lies. Every wish will diminish me and diminish thy days.” The dealer who sells him the skin has lived to be a hundred because he has never expressed a desire. Raphael accepts the bargain and we follow his wishes to the fatal end. He has taken the counsel of Rastignac: “Dissipation, my dear fellow, is a way of life. When a man spends his time squandering his fortune, he’s very often on to a good thing: he is investing his capital in friends, pleasures, protectors and acquaintances.”

  In The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau (1837), one of his “Scenes from Parisian Life,” the charlatan hero prospers by selling a “cephalic oil” supposed to make hair grow. Haunted by the specter of bankruptcy (as Balzac himself had been), he is “killed by the idea of financial probity as by a pistol-shot.” And one of his most copious and vivid novels, Lost Illusions (1837, 1839, 1843), depicts the vices, foibles, and charms of the Paris beau monde through the struggles of an aspiring young poet from the provinces. He has no money but becomes the protégé of an influential patroness. He discovers that in the literary world, too, only money counts. Abandoned by his patroness, he turns to journalism, trying to make his way in the corrupt scandalmongering press, but when he finally returns to his home in the provinces he finds it no less corrupt than Paris.

  Balzac’s Human Comedy for the reading public was never quite separate from the world he was re-creating. Just before he lost consciousness in August 1850, Balzac is reported to have recalled the skillful doctor whom he had created in Le Père Goriot, and he said, “Only Bianchon can save me.”

  40

  In Love with the Public

  EVEN if Dickens had not been a great event in English literature, he would be a great event in English history. For, as G. K. Chesterton reminds us, “the man led a mob. He did what no English Statesman, perhaps, has really done; he called out the people.” Dickens’s career was a grand literary love affair wi
th the English public, not just the reading public but the whole listening public.

  A great love affair needs two willing partners, as there surely were here. Charles Dickens and the people of early Victorian England were made for each other. This happy coincidence explains much of the appeal and also the limits of Dickens’s work. Seldom has an author been so cherished by his readers or an audience so beloved by an author. Dickens himself boasted of “that particular relation (personally affectionate like no other man’s) which subsists between me and the public.” Perhaps this was because he was “a brilliant listener,” and “allowed no man to be a bore.”

  Dickens’s childhood prepared him to speak about the common life. If Balzac’s family worried over their claim to add a “de” to their name, and disciplined him at the Oratorian Brothers’ best school, Dickens suffered the working-class discipline of a boot-blacking factory, the shame of a father in debtor’s prison, and the hunger of a six-shilling weekly wage. While Balzac shared the mercenary ambitions of middle-class France and the intrigues of Paris salons, Dickens was trying to stay alive and to make a living. They produced two versions of the human comedy as different as the France and England of their time. Balzac’s France was turbulent, with memories of the guillotine and recurrent surging Paris mobs, with a new “constitution” every fifteen years, with upstart and defunct titles, ephemeral monarchies, royalist and democratic ideologies, and resounding street slogans. Balzac’s beau ideal was Napoleon and in his own fashion Balzac had determined to conquer the world. Money and the salon were his refuge from war and politics. Without a family or children, Balzac had a dozen mistresses.

  Dickens’s England was another story. The slender young queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the year when Dickens first achieved fame with “Pickwick Triumphant.” It was an age of empire, an age of complacency and reform. The Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 would disintegrate the rotten boroughs, and respond to the agitation of Workingmen’s Associations, Chartists, and others. The contradictions of the era were expressed in the Crimean War. On the other side of Europe, in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” at Balaklava and Inkerman, gallant British troops recklessly disregarded casualties. But the scandalous disregard of the health of the troops sparked the saintly heroism of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910).

  It was an age of public brutality and unctuous religiosity, of private insensitivity and sentimentality, an age of cruel prisons, unbending factory discipline, and illiterate workers. Yet all these ills, it was believed, could be cured by better orphanages, humane prisons, Factory Acts, improved Poor Laws, repealed Combination Laws—generally by heeding the voice of the people spoken through a widening suffrage. The ills of this society, unlike Balzac’s, would be cured not by revolution but by muscular Christianity and strong-willed morality.

  The trials of Dickens’s childhood would put his own optimism to the test, and would figure disproportionately in his works. In Balzac’s human comedy children are only pawns in the game of inheritance, but in Dickens’s they play leading roles. The childhood fortunes and misfortunes of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Tiny Tim engage us as much as those of any of his adult heroes. Little Nell of The Old Curiosity Shop never ceased to be the author’s favorite, and Dickens wept whenever he gave public readings of her death. Unique among the great novels, his human comedy is enlivened by young men and women who were not yet rocked by adult passions.

  Born in Portsmouth in 1812 to John Dickens, a paymaster in the Navy, Charles Dickens, at the age of five, moved with his family to London. John Dickens, the son of a domestic servant, had married the pretty daughter, one of ten children, of another Navy paymaster. Before they moved to London, John Dickens’s father-in-law had embezzled £5,000 of Navy funds, was convicted, and fled the country, which destroyed John Dickens’s hopes for financial help. A devoted family man, he did not gamble and drank only moderately. But he was generous, and loved to entertain, always hoping (like Mr. Micawber) that something would turn up. John Dickens could never live within his income, and throughout his life Charles Dickens had the burden of trying to keep his father out of debtor’s prison.

  When Charles was only twelve, his father, “as kindhearted and generous a man as ever lived,” was committed to Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. There Dickens recalled:

  My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room … and cried very much. And he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before now; with two bricks inside the rusted grate, to prevent its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with him, who came in by and by; and as the dinner was a joint-stock repast, I was sent up to “Captain Porter” in the room overhead, with Mr. Dickens’ compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend me a knife and fork?

  Mrs. Dickens had imprudently rented a large house to be a school where she might repair the family fortunes, but no pupils ever came. Meanwhile, to save money, they took Charles out of school. “What would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere!”

  When a friend, manager of a boot-blacking factory in the Strand, offered Charles a job at six shillings a week, “in an evil hour for me” the family leaped at it. “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age.… My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.” The searing experience of the job he recalled in Dickensian detail.

  My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking: first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty downstairs on similar wages.

  The manager did the only thing he could to increase Charles’s humiliation, by requiring the boys to work before an open window to attract customers along the Strand.

  A curious twist of Victorian humanitarianism allowed the families of Marshalsea prisoners to live with them and come and go to the prison. Charles’s mother lived in the prison, while Charles and his sister Fanny spent Sundays there. When John Dickens was released, Mrs. Dickens would have been happy to keep Charles making his six shillings a week at the blacking warehouse. But John Dickens disagreed, and sent Charles as a day pupil to the respectable Wellington House Academy. It was ruled by a sadistic headmaster who seemed to enjoy hitting the palms of offenders’ hands with “a bloated mahogany ruler,” or “viciously drawing a pair of pantaloons tight with one of his large hands and caning the wearer with the other.” Dickens did passably, and even won a Latin prize though he had never taken Latin. But when his struggling parents, already evicted from their house for failure to pay their rent, were burdened with another baby, they could no longer pay the fees, and Charles, just fifteen, was taken out of school. Hired as office boy in a firm of solicitors, he saw his salary soon rise from ten shillings to fifteen shillings a week. He found the work repetitious—registering wills, serving processes, filing documents—but he amused himself by observing the pompous idiosyncrasies of lawyers and clients.

  Meanwhile, John Dickens, who had been charitably retired from the Navy with a small pension, at the age of forty-one had learned shorthand and joined the Parliamentary reporting staff of the British Press. Charles himself while at school had sent that paper some “penny-a-line” notices of local items. Following his father’s example, he now determined to become a journalist. This meant mastering shorthand, and even i
n this tiresome exercise he found drama. “The changes that were wrung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effect of a curve in the wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep.” Although not yet seventeen he obtained a job as court reporter in the Consistory Court of the Bishop of London, where he acquired a treasury of jargon, obfuscation, and legal muddles for any number of novels. At eighteen he secured a reader’s ticket at the British Museum and he read fervently in his spare hours. With his remarkable shorthand skill, he went on, by the age of twenty, to report on Parliament for his uncle Barrow’s new paper. His sight of the travesties of the law had already made him a reformer when he witnessed the Parliamentary battle over the Reform Bill of 1832. He widened his view of London life as a reporter for the Liberal Morning Chronicle and helped them win some news beats against The Times.

  Meanwhile the slight Maria Beadnell, who came of a minor banking family above his station, infatuated him by her harp playing, her coy ringlets, and teasing ways. But her family had already promised her to a more appropriate young man, whom she married, and Dickens was left with a frustration from which he would never really recover. Three years later he met a quite different figure, Catherine Hogarth, the full-bosomed daughter of a successful journalist. The Hogarths saw promise in the young Charles, applauded the match, and he married Kate in 1836. She bore him ten children (nine of whom survived), and with his growing fame, their convivial family life became quite public. But she was moody, inept at conversation, and over the years the sociable Charles found her far from an ideal companion for his celebrity.