HONORE DE BALZAC
_"Sans genie, je suis flambe! "If I have not genius, it is all up with me!" there is nothing wonderful in this. Everybody
knows what genius is wanted to make a name in literature, and most
people think they have it." He had
the choice, by his nature, his aims, his capacities, of being a genius
or nothing. He had no little gifts, and he was even destitute of some of
the separate and indivisible great ones. For a short time he was left pretty much to himself, and recovered
rapidly. All these trials he seems to have passed, if
not brilliantly, yet sufficiently. And then came the inevitable crisis, which was of an unusually severe
nature. It does not appear that Honore had revolted during his
probation--indeed he is said, and we can easily believe it from his
books, to have acquired a very solid knowledge of law, especially in
bankruptcy matters, of which he was himself to have a very close shave
in future. We know, in detail, very little of him during the period. They
were very numerous, though the reprints spoken of above never extended
to more than ten. Now I have, and a most curious study they are. Indeed I am not sorry,
as Mr. Wedmore thinks one would be. They are curiously, interestingly,
almost enthrallingly bad. This was the "game
of speculation." But he had hardly any capital; he was naturally quite
ignorant of his trade, and as naturally the established publishers and
booksellers boycotted him as an intruder. He had more than twenty years to live, but he never cured himself of
this hankering after _une bonne speculation_. Every now and then Balzac transferred bodily, or with
slight alterations, passages from these experiments to his finished
canvases. Here
is a _Traite de la Vie Elegante_, inestimable for certain critical
purposes. The explanation may
or may not be found in the fact that we have abundant critical work of
his, and that it is nearly all bad. de Belloy and de Grammont. Only, in human respect and other,
we phrase it: "Oh, dear M. de Balzac! As for the
Anglophobia, the Englishman who thinks the less of him for that must
have very poor and unhappy brains. It may or may not be that
marriage, in the hackneyed phrase, is a net or other receptacle where
all the outsiders would be in, and all the insiders out. Unluckily no man can "throw back" in this
way, except now and then as a mere pastime. He was
not one of those men who can do work by fits and starts in the intervals
of business or of amusement; nor was he one who, like Scott, could work
very rapidly. He could
not bear disturbance; he wrote best at night, and he could not work at
all after heavy meals. Nobody in the longest of nights could manage
that, except by dictating it to shorthand clerks. Some doubts have, I believe, been thrown on the most minute account of
his ways of composition which we have, that of the publisher Werdet. One of
his earliest utterances, "_Il faut piocher ferme_," was his motto to
the very last, varied only by a certain amount of traveling. But part of this was Madame Hanska's own purchasing, and
there were offsets of indebtedness against it almost to the last. It was in England, moreover, that by far
his greatest follower appeared, and appeared very shortly. But
the relations of pupil and master in at least some degree are not, I
think, deniable. But, as a rule,
he was thinking too much of his own work and his own principles of
working to enter very thoroughly into the work of others. It does not appear that Balzac was exactly unhappy during this huge
probation, which was broken by one short visit to Paris. In person Balzac was a typical Frenchman, as indeed he was in most ways. His
character, not as a writer but as a man, must occupy us a little longer. The fact is that if he had handled this last matter rather more lightly
his answer would have been a sufficient one, and that in any case the
charge is not worth answering. It does not lie against the whole of his
work; and if it lay as conclusively as it does against Swift's, it would
not necessarily matter. He will not, indeed, be
a Shakespeare, or a Dante, or even a Scott; but we may be very well
satisfied with him as a Fielding, a Thackeray, or a Balzac. But
it is also some time since I came to the conclusion that he was so, and
my conversion is not to be attributed to any editorial retainer. With him as with some others,
but not as with the larger number, the sense of _greatness_ increases
the longer and the more fully he is studied. There are two things, then, which it is more especially desirable to
keep constantly before one in reading Balzac--two things which, taken
together, constitute his almost unique value, and two things which not
a few critics have failed to take together in him, being under the
impression that the one excludes the other, and that to admit the other
is tantamount to a denial of the one. The effect of this singular combination of qualities, apparently the
most opposite, may be partly anticipated, but not quite. It results
occasionally in a certain shortcoming as regards _verite vraie_,
absolute artistic truth to nature. The province of Balzac may not be--I do no think
it is--identical, much less co-extensive, with that of nature. Every now and then the artist uses his
observing faculty more, and his magnifying and distorting lens less;
every now and then he reverses the proportion. This specially Balzacian quality is, I think, unique. By this I do not of course mean that
Balzac did not write in verse: we have a few verses of his, and they are
pretty bad, but that is neither here nor there. It might be possible to coast about it, to hint at it,
by adumbrations and in consequences. He bewilders us a very little by it, and he
gives us the impression that he has slightly bewildered himself. For in this labyrinth and whirl of things, in this heat and hurry
of observation and imagination, the special intoxication of Balzac
consists. Every great artist has his own means of producing this
intoxication, and it differs in result like the stimulus of beauty or of
wine. In part, no doubt, and in great part, the work of Balzac is dream-stuff
rather than life-stuff, and it is all the better for that. But the coherence of his visions, their bulk, their
solidity, the way in which they return to us and we return to them, make
them such dream-stuff as there is all too little of in this world. He stands alone;
even with Dickens, who is his nearest analogue, he shows far more
points of difference than of likeness. GEORGE SAINTSBURY. Gaudissart II. Poor Relations:--I. Poor Relations:--II. This is
not so difficult as the public might imagine. But this
chimera, like many another, has become a reality; has its behests, its
tyranny, which must be obeyed. Unity of structure, under other names, had
occupied the greatest minds during the two previous centuries. There is but one
Animal. "The Animal" is elementary, and takes its external form, or, to be
accurate, the differences in its form, from the environment in which
it is obliged to develop. I, for my part, convinced of this scheme of nature long before the
discussion to which it has given rise, perceived that in this respect
society resembled nature. Thus social species have always
existed, and will always exist, just as there are zoological species. When Buffon describes the lion, he
dismisses the lioness with a few phrases; but in society a wife is not
always the female of the male. Then, among animals the drama is limited; there
is scarcely any confusion; they turn and rend each other--that is all. Men, too, rend each other; but their greater or less intelligence makes
the struggle far more complicated. Again, Buffon found that life was
extremely simple among animals. How, at the same time, please
the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry and
philosophy under striking imagery? This work, so far, was nothing. In spite of the wide scope of the preliminaries, which might
of themselves constitute a book, the work, to be complete, would need a
conclusion. Thus depicted, society ought to bear in itself the reason of
its working. Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Bossuet, Leibnitz, Kant, Montesquieu, _are_ the science which statesmen
apply. Christianity, above all, Catholicism, being--as I have pointed out in
the Country Doctor (_le Medecin de Campagne_)--a complete system for
the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the most powerful
element of social order. In this
respect social life is like the life of man. Christianity
created modern nationalities, and it will preserve them. Hence, no
doubt, the necessity for the monarchical principle. I
cannot, therefore, enter on religious discussions, nor on the political
discussions of the day. Besides, I
regard the family and not the individual as the true social unit. In
this respect, at the risk of being thought retrograde, I side with
Bossuet and Bonald instead of going with modern innovators. An engineer points out that a bridge is about to fall, that it
is dangerous for any one to cross it; but he crosses it himself when it
is the only road to the town. No Chamber has ever been the equal of the _Corps
Legislatif_, comparing them man for man. The elective system of the
Empire was, then, indisputably the best. They will quarrel with the novelist for
wanting to be an historian, and will call him to account for writing
politics. These tactics, familiar
in party warfare, are a disgrace to those who use them. And they lived all the days of their
life. I have done better than the historian, for I am free. And on this point there have been divided schools. or Charles I. The lives of Catherine
II. It is not a law to history, as it is to
romance, to make for a beautiful ideal. History is, or ought to be, what
it was; while romance ought to be "the better world," as was said by
Mme. Necker, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the last century. Still, with this noble falsity, romance would be nothing if it were not
true in detail. Hence, for the Protestant writer
there is but one Woman, while the Catholic writer finds a new woman in
each new situation. Without passion, religion, history, romance, art, would all be
useless. The misfortunes of the
two Birotteaus, the priest and the perfumer, to me are those of mankind. Lovelace has a
thousand forms, for social corruption takes the hues of the medium
in which it lives. In this respect, perhaps
literature must yield to painting. This crowd of
actors, of characters, this multitude of lives, needed a setting--if
I may be pardoned the expression, a gallery. These six classes correspond, indeed, to
familiar conceptions. Each has its own sense and meaning, and answers to
an epoch in the life of man. And not man alone, but the principal events of life, fall into classes
by types. There are situations which occur in every life, typical
phases, and this is one of the details I most sought after. Finally, the
Scenes of Country Life are, in a way, the evening of this long day, if
I may so call the social drama. First the Pathology of Social Life, then an Anatomy of Educational
Bodies, and a Monograph on Virtue. That, when it is complete, the public must pronounce.