Part 12 (2/2)
Dirt, confusion, shabby expedients, living to live,--these are what make poverty terrible and odious, and in these Balzac would seem to have been steeped to the very lips.
These French writers possess the art of plunging at once _in medias res_, and Balzac places you, in the twinkling of an eye, in one of the lowest boarding-houses of Paris. At first all is dirt, hubbub, and unsavory odors; but from the vapors of the caldron evolves a web of many-colored life, of terrible pathos, and original humor, not unenlivened by pale golden threads of beauty, which had better never been.
All the characters are excellently drawn: the harpy mistress of the house; Mlle. Michonnet the spy, and her imbecile lover; Mme. Coutuner, with her purblind strivings after virtue, and her real, though meagre respectability; Vautrim, the disguised galley-slave, with his cynical philosophy and Bonaparte character; and the young students of medicine, cheering the dense fog with the scintillations of their wit, and the joyousness and petulance with which their age meets the most adverse circ.u.mstances, at least in France!
The connection between this abject poverty and the highest luxury of Parisian life is made naturally by Eugene, connected to his misfortune with a n.o.ble family, of which his own is a poor and young branch, studying a profession and sighing to live like a duke, and _Le Pere Goriot_, who has stripped himself of all his wealth for his daughters, who are more naturally unnatural than those of Lear. The transitions are made with as much swiftness as a curtain is drawn upon the stage, yet with no feeling of abruptness, so skilfully are the incidents woven into one another.
And be it recorded to the credit of Balzac, that, much as he appears to have suffered from the want of wealth, the vices which pollute it are represented with as terrible force as those of poverty.
The book affords play for similar powers, and brings a similar range of motives into action with Scott's ”Fortunes of Nigel.” If less rich than that work, it is more original, and has a force of pencil all its own.
Insight and a master's hand are admirable throughout; but the product of genius is _Le Pere Goriot_. And, wonderful to relate, this character is as much enn.o.bled, made as poetical by abandonment to a single instinct, as others by the force of will. Prometheus, chained on his rock, and giving his heart to the birds of prey for aims so majestic, is scarcely a more affecting, a more reverent object, than the rich confectioner whose intellect has never been awakened at all, except in the way of buying and selling, and who gives up his acuteness even there, and commits such unspeakable follies through paternal love; a _blind_ love too, nowise superior to that of the pelican!
a.n.a.lyze it as you will, see the difference between this and the instinct of the artist or the philanthropist, and it produces on your mind the same impression of a present divinity. And scarce any tears could be more sacred than those which choke the breath at the death-bed of this man, who forgot that he was a man, to be wholly a father, this poor, mad, stupid, father Goriot. I know nothing in fiction to surpa.s.s the terrible, unpretending pathos of this scene, nor the power with which the mistaken benediction given to the two medical students whom he takes for his daughters, is redeemed from burlesque.
The scepticism as to _virtue_ in this book is fearful, but the love for innocence and beautiful instincts casts a softening tint over the gloom.
We never saw any thing sweeter or more natural than the letters of the mother and sisters of Eugene, when they so delightfully sent him the money of which he had been wicked enough to plunder them. These traits of domestic life are given with much grace and delicacy of sentiment.
How few writers can paint _abandon_, without running into exaggeration!
and here the task was one of peculiar difficulty. It seemed as if the writer were conscious enough of his power to propose to himself the most difficult task he could undertake.
A respectable reviewer in ”Les Deux Mondes” would wish us to think that there is no life in Paris like what Balzac paints; but we can never believe that: evidently it is ”too true,” though we doubt not there is more redemption than he sees.
But this book was too much for our nerves, and would be, probably, for those of most people accustomed to breathe a healthier atmosphere.
Balzac has been a very fruitful writer, and, as he is fond of jugglers'
tricks of every description, and holds nothing earnest or sacred, he is vain of the wonderful celerity with which some of his works, and those quite as good as any, have been written. They seem to have been conceived, composed, and written down with that degree of speed with which it is possible to lay pen to paper. Indeed, we think he cannot be surpa.s.sed in the ready and sustained command of his resources. His almost unequalled quickness and fidelity of eye, both as to the disposition of external objects, and the symptoms of human pa.s.sion, combined with a strong memory, have filled his mind with materials, and we doubt not that if his thoughts could be put into writing with the swiftness of thought, he would give us one of his novels every week in the year.
Here end our praises of Balzac; what he is, as a man, in daily life, we know not. He must originally have had a heart, or he could not read so well the hearts of others; perhaps there are still private ties that touch him. But as a writer, never was the modern Mephistopheles, ”the spirit that denieth,” more worthily represented than by Balzac.
He combines the spirit of the man of science with that of the amateur collector. He delights to a.n.a.lyze, to cla.s.sify; there is no anomaly too monstrous, no specimen too revolting, to insure his ardent but pa.s.sionless scrutiny. But then he has taste and judgment to know what is fair, rare, and exquisite. He takes up such an object carefully, and puts it in a good light. But he has no hatred for what is loathsome, no contempt for what is base, no love for what is lovely, no faith in what is n.o.ble. To him there is no virtue and no vice; men and women are more or less finely organized; n.o.ble and tender conduct is more agreeable than the reverse, because it argues better health; that is all.
Nor is this from an intellectual calmness, nor from an unusual power of a.n.a.lyzing motives, and penetrating delusions merely; neither is it mere indifference. There is a touch of the demon, also, in Balzac, the cold but gayly familiar demon; and the smile of the amateur yields easily to a sneer, as he delights to show you on what foul juices the fair flower was fed. He is a thorough and willing materialist. The trance of religion is congestion of the brain; the joy of the poet the thrilling of the blood in the rapture of sense; and every good not only rises from, but hastens back into, the jaws of death and nothingness; a rainbow arch above a pestilential chaos!
Thus Balzac, with all his force and fulness of talent, never rises one moment into the region of genius. For genius is, in its nature, positive and creative, and cannot exist where there is no heart to believe in realities. Neither can he have a permanent influence on a nature which is not thoroughly corrupt. He might for a while stagger an ingenuous mind which had not yet thought for itself. But this could not last. His unbelief makes his thought too shallow. He has not that power which a mind, only in part sophisticated, may retain, where the heart still beats warmly, though it sometimes beats amiss. Write, paint, argue, as you will, where there is a sound spot in any human being, he cannot be made to believe that this present bodily frame is more than a temporary condition of his being, though one to which he may have become shamefully enslaved by fault of inheritance, education, or his own carelessness.
Taken in his own way, we know no modern tragedies more powerful than Balzac's ”Eugenie Grandet,” ”Sweet Pea,” ”Search after the Absolute,”
”Father Goriot.” See there goodness, aspiration, the loveliest instincts, stifled, strangled by fate, in the form of our own brute nature. The fate of the ancient Prometheus was happiness to that of these, who must pay, for ever having believed there was divine fire in heaven, by agonies of despair, and conscious degradation, unknown to those who began by believing man to be the most richly endowed of brutes--no more!
Balzac is admirable in his description of look, tone, gesture. He has a keen sense of whatever is peculiar to the individual. Nothing in modern romance surpa.s.ses the death-scene of Father Goriot, the Parisian Lear, in the almost immortal life with which the parental instincts are displayed. And with equal precision and delicacy of shading he will paint the slightest by-play in the manners of some young girl.
”Seraphitus” is merely a specimen of his great powers of intellectual transposition. Amid his delight at the botanical riches of the new and elevated region in which he is travelling, we catch, if only by echo, the hem and chuckle of the French materialist.
No more of him!--We leave him to his suicidal work.
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