Part 16 (1/2)
That which Balzac has best rendered in it is the struggle for life on the social plane; and that which forms its most legitimate claim to be deemed in some measure a whole is the general reference to this in all the so-called parts. Before the Revolution, the action of the law was narrower, being chiefly limited to members of one cla.s.s. With the fall of ancient privilege the sphere of compet.i.tion was opened to the entire nation; and, instead of n.o.bles contending with n.o.bles, churchmen with churchmen, tradesmen with tradesmen, there was an interpenetration of combatants over all the field of battle, or rather, the several smaller fields of battle became one large one.
Balzac's fiction reproduces the later phase in minute detail, and, mostly, with a treatment suited to the subject.
Brunetiere, whose chapter on the _Comedy_ is written more gropingly than the rest of his study of the novelist, makes use of an ingenious comparison with intent to persuade that the stories had from the very first a predestined organic union, with ramifications which the author saw but obscurely and which were joined together more closely--as also more consciously--during the lapse of years. ”Thus,” he says, ”brothers and sisters, in the time of their infancy or childhood, have nothing in common except a certain family resemblance--and this not always. But, as they advance in age, the features that individualized them become attenuated, they return to the type of their progenitors, and one perceives that they are children of the same father and mother. Balzac's novels,” he concludes, ”have a connection of this kind. In his head, they were, so to speak, contemporary.”
The simile is not a happy one. It does not help to reconcile us to an artificial approximation of books that are heterogeneous, unequal in value, and, frequently, composed under influences far removed from the after-thought that was given to them by a putative father. Balzac was not well inspired in relating his novels to each other logically. Such natural relations.h.i.+p as they possess is that of issuing from the same brain, though acting under varying conditions and in different states of development; and it is true that, if the story of this brain is known, and its experiences understood, a certain cla.s.sification might be made--perhaps more than one--of its creations, on account of common traits, resemblances of subject or treatment, which could serve to link them together loosely. But, between this arrangement and the artificial hierarchy of the _Comedy_, it is impossible to find a bridge to pa.s.s over.
One of the real links betwixt the novels is the reappearance of the same people in many of them, which thing is not in itself displeasing.
It has the advantage of allowing the author to display his men and women in changed circ.u.mstances, to cast side-lights upon them, and to reveal them more completely. However, here and there, we pay for the privilege in meeting with bores whose further acquaintance we would fain have been spared. And then, also, we are likely enough to come across a hero or heroine as a child, after learning all about his or her maturer life; to accompany people to the grave and see them buried, and yet, in a later book, to be introduced to them as alive as ever they were. This is disconcerting. Usually, Balzac remembers his characters well enough to be consistent in other respects when he makes them speak and act, or lets us into his confidence about them.
Still, he is guilty of a few lapses of memory. In _The Woman of Thirty Years Old_, Madame d'Aiglemont has two children in the early chapters; subsequently, one is drowned, and, instead of one remaining, we learn there are three--a new reading of Wordsworth's _We are seven_. Again, in the _Lost Illusions_, Esther Gobseck has blond hair in one description of her, and black in another. We are reduced to supposing she had dyed it. Mistakes of the kind have been made by others writers of fiction who have worked quickly. In the _Comedy_, the number of _dramatis personae_ is exceedingly large. Balzac laughingly remarked one day that they needed a biographical dictionary to render their ident.i.ty clear; and he added that perhaps somebody would be tempted to do the work at a later date. He guessed rightly. In 1893, Messrs.
Cerfbeer and Cristophe undertook the task and carried it through in a book that they call the _Repertory of the Comedie Humaine_.[*] All the fict.i.tious personages or petty folk that live in the novelist's pages are duly docketed, and their births, marriages, deaths, and stage appearances recorded in this _Who's Who_, a big volume of five hundred and sixty-three pages, const.i.tuting a veritable curiosity of literature.
[*] This work has been made available at Project Gutenberg by Team Balzac. It is in two volumes.--Preparer's Note.
Much has been said in the preceding chapters of the large use Balzac made of his own life, his adventures, his experiences, in composing the integral portions of his _Comedy_, so that its contents, for any one who can interpret, becomes a valuable autobiography. And the lesser as well as the greater novels supply facts. In the _Forsaken Woman_, Madame de Beauseant, who has been jilted by the Marquis of Ajuda-Pinto, permits herself to be wooed by Gaston de Nueil, a man far younger than herself. After ten years, he, in turn, quits her to marry the person his mother has chosen for him; but, unable to bear the combined burden of his remorse and yearning regret, he commits suicide. This tale, like the _Lily in the Valley_, is a adaptation of Balzac's liaison with Madame de Berny. It was written in the very year he severed the material ties that bound them. The only distinction between his case and that of Gaston de Nueil was that he had no desire to kill himself, and was content to be no more than a friend, since he was the freer to flirt with Madame de Castries. And when the latter lady kept him on tenter-hooks, tormenting him, tempting him, but never yielding to him, he revenged himself by writing the _d.u.c.h.ess de Langeais_, attributing to the foolish old general his own hopes, fears, and disappointments at the hands of the coquettish, capricious d.u.c.h.ess. ”I alone,” he said in a letter, ”know the horrible that is in this narrative.” And, if, in _Albert Savarus_, we have a confession of his political ambitions and campaigns, we get in _Cesar Birotteau_ and the _Petty Bourgeois_ his financial projects, which never brought him anything; in _A Man of Business_--as well as elsewhere--his continual money embarra.s.sments. How deeply he felt them, he often lets us gather from his fiction. ”I have been to a capitalist,” he wrote in one of his epistles to Madame Hanska, ”a capitalist to whom are due indemnities agreed on between us for works promised and not executed; and I offered him a certain number of copies of the _Studies of Manners and Morals_. I proposed five thousand francs with deferred payment, instead of three thousand francs cash. He refused everything, even my signature and a bill, telling me my fortune was in my talent and that I might die any time. This scene is one of the most infamous I have known. Some day I will reproduce it.”
And he did, with many things else that happened to him in his dealings with his fellows. There is biography too, as well as autobiography in the _Comedy_--this notwithstanding his disclaimers. Exact portraiture he avoided for obvious reasons, but intentional portraiture he indulged in largely; and life and character were sufficiently near the truth for shrewd contemporaries to recognize the originals. To add one or two examples to the number already given. Claire Brunne (Madame Marbouty) seems to have suggested his _Muse of the County_, a Berrichon blue-stocking; Madame d'Agoult and Liszt became Madame de Rochfide and the musician Conti in _Beatrix_; a cousin of Madame Hanska, Thaddeus Wylezinski, who wors.h.i.+pped her discreetly, is depicted under the traits of Thaddeus Paz, a Polish exile in the _False Mistress_, who a.s.sumes a feigned name to conceal his love; Lamartine furnished the conception of the poet Ca.n.a.lis in _Modeste Mignon_, the resemblance being at first so striking that the novelist afterwards toned it away a little; and Monnier, the caricaturist, certainly supplied the essential elements in Bixiou, who is so well drawn in _Cousin Bette_ and the _Firm of Nucingen_. The Baron Nucingen himself has some of the features of the James de Rothschild whom Balzac knew; and Rastignac embodied the author's impression of Thiers in the statesman's earlier years. One might go further and couple Delacroix the painter's name with that of Joseph Bridau in _A Bachelor's Household_, Frederick Lemaitre, the actor's, with Medal's in _Cousin Pons_, Emile de Girardin's with du Tillet's in _Cesar Birotteau_. At last, however, owing to the mingling of one personality with another, identification is increasingly difficult, unless the novelist comes to our a.s.sistance, as in the story _Cousin Bette_, where he confesses Lisbeth the old maid, to be made up out of three persons, Madame Valmore, Madame Hanska's aunt, and his own mother.
Summing up Balzac's entire literary production, which in Monsieur de Lovenjoul's catalogue occupies no fewer than fourteen pages, we find that it comprises, besides the ninety-six different works of the _Comedie Humaine_ properly so called, ten volumes of his early novels; six complete dramatic pieces--one, the _School for Husbands and Wives_ recently published;[*] thirty _Contes Drolatiques_; and three hundred and fourteen articles and opuscles, some of them fairly long, since the _Reminiscences of a Pariah_ has a hundred and eighty-four pages octavo, the _Theory of Walking_ fifty, the _Code of Honest People_ a hundred and twelve, the _Impartial History of the Jesuits_ eighty; these exclusive of the _Revue Parisienne_ with its two hundred and twenty pages, which, as we have seen, was written entirely by himself.
When we remember that the whole of this, with the exception of the early novels and six of the opuscles, was produced in twenty years, we can better appreciate the man's industry, which, as Monsieur Le Breton calculates, yielded an average of some two thousand pages, or four to five volumes a year.
[*] Played for the first time March 13, 1910, at the Odeon Theatre.
In the miscellanies one meets with much that is curious, amusing, and instructive, quite worthy to figure in the _Comedy_--witty dialogues, light stories containing deductions _a la_ Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allan Poe, plenty of satire, sometimes acidulated as in his _Troubles and Trials of an English Cat_, and theories about everything, indicative of extensive reading, large a.s.similation and quick reasoning. The miscellanies really stand to the novels in the relation of a sort of prolegomenon. They serve for its better understanding, and are agreeable even for independent study.
CHAPTER XV
VALUE OF THE WORK
The aim of an author whose writings are intended to please must be ethical as well as aesthetic, if he respects himself and his readers.
He wishes the pleasure he can give to do good, not harm. The good he feels capable of producing may be limited to the physical or may extend beyond to the moral; but it will be found in his work in so far as the latter is truly artistic.
Balzac's prefaces and correspondence are so many proofs that he rejected the pretensions of literature or any other art to absolute independence. The doctrine of art for art's sake alone would have had no meaning to him. However much his striving to confer on his novels organic unity, and however much the writing against time deteriorated his practice, they did not prevent him from recognizing the ethical claim. What he realized less was the necessity of submitting treatment to the same government of law.
Even if we grant that the plan of the _Comedie Humaine_ existed in the novelist's mind from the commencement, obscurely at first, more clearly afterwards, the plan itself was not artistic in the sense that an image in the architect's mind is artistic when he designs on paper the edifice he purposes to construct, or in the painter's mind when he chooses the subject and details of his picture, or in the sculptor's mind when he arranges his group of statuary, or in the musician's mind when he conjures up his opera or oratorio. Balzac's plan was one of numbers or logic merely. The block of his _Comedy_ was composed on the dictionary principle of leaving nothing out which could be put in; and his genius, great as it was, wrestled achingly and in vain with a task from which selection was practically banished and which was a piling of Pelion on Ossa.
For this reason it is that, regarded as an aggregate, the _Comedie Humaine_ can be admired only as one may admire a forceful ma.s.s of things, when it is looked at from afar, through an atmosphere that softens outlines, hides or transforms detail, adds irreality. In such an ambience certain novels that by themselves would shock, gain a sort of appropriateness, and others that are trivial or dull serve as foils. But, at the same time, we know that the effect is partly illusion.
In a writer's entire production the constant factor is usually his style, while subject and treatment vary. Balzac, however, is an exception in this respect as in most others. He attains terse vigour in not a few of his books, but in not a few also he disfigures page after page with loose, sprawling ruggedness, not to say pretentious obscurity. His opinion of himself as a stylist was high, higher no doubt than that he held of George Sand, to whom he accorded eminence mainly on this ground. Of the French language he said that he had enriched it by his alms. Finding it poor but proud, he had made it a millionaire. And the a.s.sertion was put forward with the same seriousness that he displayed when declaring that there were three men only of his time who really knew their mother-tongue--Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and himself. That his conversancy with French extended from Froissart downwards, through Rabelais' succulent jargon as well as Moliere's racy idiom, is patent in nearly all he wrote; and that he was capable of using this vocabulary aptly is sufficiently shown in the best and simplest of his works. But it is not so clear that he added anything to the original stock. Such words as he coined under the impetus of his exuberance are mostly found in his letters and have not been taken into favour.
A demur must likewise be entered against his style's possessing the qualities that const.i.tute a charm apart from the matter expressed. Too many tendencies wrought in him uncurbed for his ideas to clothe themselves constantly in a suitable and harmonious dress. Generally when his personality intruded itself in the narrative, it was quite impossible for him to speak unless affectedly, with a mixture of odd figures of speech and similes that hurtled in phrases of heavy construction. Taine has collected a few of these. In the _Cure of Tours_ we read:--
”No creature of the feminine gender was more capable than Mademoiselle Sophie Gamard of formulating the elegiac nature of an old maid.”
Elsewhere, he speaks of the ”fluid projections of looks that serve to touch the suave skin of a woman;” of the ”atmosphere of Paris in which seethes a simoon that swells the heart;” of the ”coefficient reason of events;” of ”pecuniary mnemonics;” of ”sentences flung out through the capillary tubes of the great female confabulation;” of ”devouring ideas distilled through a bald forehead;” of a ”lover's enwrapping his mistress in the wadding of his attentions;” of ”abortions in which the sp.a.w.n of genius c.u.mbers an arid strand;” of the ”philosophic moors of incredulity;” of a ”town troubled in its public and private intestines.”
In one of the chapters of _Seraphita_, he says: ”Wilfred arrived at Seraphita's house to relate his life, to paint the grandeur of his soul by the greatness of his faults; but, when he found himself in the zone embraced by those eyes whose azure scintillations met with no horizon in front, and offered none behind, he became calm again and submissive as the lion who, bounding on his prey in an African plain, receives, on the wing of the winds, a message of love, and stops. An abyss opened into which fell the words of his delirium!”
And the same Wilfred ”trusted to his perspicacity to discover the parcels of truth rolled by the old servant in the torrent of his divagations.”
During the years of Balzac's greatest literary activity, which were also those of his bitterest polemics, his opponents made much capital out of the caprices of his pen. In the lawsuit against the _Revue de Paris_, Monsieur Chaix d'Est-Ange, the defendant's counsel, provoked roars of laughter by quoting pa.s.sages from the _Lily in the Valley_; and Jules Janin, in his criticism of _A Provincial Great Man in Paris_, grew equally merry over the verbal conceits abounding in the portraits of persons. And yet the very volumes that furnish the largest number of ill-begotten sentences contain many pa.s.sages of sustained dignity, sober strength, and proportioned beauty.