A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 / To the Close of the 19th Century

by George Saintsbury

CHAPTER IV

BEYLE AND BALZAC

There may possibly be some readers who might prefer that the two novelists whose names head this chapter should be treated each in a chapter to himself. But after trying several plans (for I can assure such readers that the arrangement of this History has been the reverse of haphazard) I have thought it best to yoke them. That they have more in common with each other, not merely than either has with Hugo or Dumas, or even George Sand, but than either of these three has with the others, few will deny. And as a practising novelist Beyle has hardly substance enough to stand by himself, though as an influence—for a time and that no short one and still existing—scarcely any writer in our whole list has been more efficacious. It is not my purpose, nor, I think, my duty, to say much about their relations to each other; indeed Beyle delayed his novel-work so long, and Balzac codified his own so carefully and so early, that the examination of the question would need to be meticulous, and might even be a little futile in a general history, though it is an interesting subject for a monograph. It is enough to say that, generally, both belong to the analytical rather than to the synthetical branch of novel-writing, and may almost be said between them to have introduced the analytical romance; that they compose their palettes of sombre and neutral rather than of brilliant colours; that actual "story interest" is not what they, as a rule,[124] aim at. Finally—though this may be a proposition likely to be disputed with some heat in one case if not in both—their conception of humanity has a certain "other-worldliness" about it, though it is as far as possible from being what is usually understood by the adjective "unworldly" and though the forms thereof in the two only partially coincide.

Beyle—his peculiarity.

Of the books of Henri Beyle, otherwise Stendhal,[125] to say that they are not like anything else will only seem banal to those who bring the banality with them. To annoy these further by opposing pedantry to banality, one might say that the aseity is quintessential. There never—to be a man of great power, almost genius, a commanding influence, and something like the founder of a characteristic school of literature—was such a habitans in sicco as Beyle; indeed his substance and his atmosphere are not so much dry as desiccated. The dryness is not like that which was attributed in the last volume to Hamilton, which is the dryness of wine: it is almost the dryness of ashes. By bringing some humour of your own[126] you may confection a sort of grim comedy out of parts of his work, but that is all. At the same time, he has an astonishing command of such reality, and even vitality, as will (one cannot say survive but) remain over the process of desiccation.

That Beyle was not such a passionless person as he gave himself out to be in his published works was of course always suspected, and more than suspected, by readers with any knowledge of human nature. It was finally proved by the autobiographic Vie de Henri Brulard, and the other remains which were at last given to the world, nearly half a century after the author's death, by M. Casimir Stryienski. But the great part which he played in producing a new kind of novel is properly concerned with the earlier and larger division of the work, though the posthumous stuff reinforces this.

Armance.

Some one, I believe, has said—many people may have said—that you never get a much truer notion, though you may afterwards get a clearer and fuller, of a writer than from his earliest work.[127] Armance, Beyle's first published novel,[128] though by no means the one which has received most attention, is certainly illuminating. Or rather, perhaps one should say that it poses the puzzle which Beyle himself put briefly in the words quoted by his editor and biographer: "Qu'ai-j'été? que suis-je? En vérité je serais bien embarrassé de le dire." To tell equal truth, it is but a dull book in itself, surcharged with a vague political spite, containing no personage whom we are permitted to like (it would be quite possible to like Armance de Zohiloff if we were only told less about her and allowed to see and hear more of her), and possessing, for a hero, one of the most obnoxious and foolish prigs that I can remember in any novel. Octave de Malivert unites varieties of detestableness in a way which might be interesting if (to speak with only apparent flippancy) it were made so. He is commonplace in his adoration of his mother and his neglect (though his historian calls it "respect") of his father; he is constantly a prig, as when he is shocked at people for paying more attention to him when they hear that his parents are going to be indemnified to a large extent for the thefts of their property at the Revolution; he is such a sneak and such a snob that he is always eavesdropping to hear what people say about him; such a bounder that he disturbs his neighbours by talking loud at the play; such a brute that he deliberately kills a rather harmless coxcomb of a marquis who rebukes him for making this tapage; and such a still greater brute (for in the duel he had himself been wounded) that he throws out of the window an unfortunate lackey who gets in his way at a party where Octave has, as usual, lost his temper. Finally, he is a combination of prig, sneak, cad, brute, and fool when (having picked up and read a forged letter which is not addressed to him, though it has been put by enemies in his way) he believes, without any enquiry, that his unlucky cousin Armance, to whom he is at last engaged, is deceiving him, but marries her all the same, lives with her (she loves him frantically) for a few days, and then, pretending to go to the succour of the Greeks, poisons himself on board ship—rather more, as far as one can make out, in order to annoy her than for any other reason. That there are the elements, and something more than the elements, of a powerful story in this is of course evident; there nearly always are such elements in Beyle, and that is why he has his place here. But, as has been said, the story is almost as dull as it is disagreeable. Unluckily, too, it is, like most of his other books, pervaded by an unpleasant suggestion that the disagreeableness is intimately connected with the author's own nature. As with Julien Sorel (v. inf.) so with Octave de Malivert, one feels that, though Beyle would never have behaved exactly like his book-child, that book-child has a great deal too much of the uncanny and semi-diabolical doubles of some occult stories in it—is, in fact, an incarnation of the bad Beyle, the seamy side of Beyle, the creature that Beyle might have been but for the grace of that God in whom he did not believe. Which things, however one may have schooled oneself not to let book and author interfere with each other, are not comfortable.

It ought, however, to be said that Armance is an early and remarkable Romantic experiment in several ways, not least in the foreign mottoes, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, which are prefixed to the chapters. Unluckily some of them[129] are obviously retranslated from French versions unverified by the originals, and once there is a most curious blunder. Pope's description of Belinda's neck and cross, not quite in the original words but otherwise exact, is attributed to—Schiller!

La Chartreuse de Parme.

I have read, I believe, as much criticism as most men, possibly, indeed, a little more than most, and I ought long ago to have been beyond the reach of shocking, startling, or any other movement of surprise at any critical utterance whatsoever. But I own that an access of fou rire once came upon me when I was told in a printed page that La Chartreuse de Parme was a "very lively and very amusing book." A book of great and peculiar power it most undoubtedly is, a book standing out in the formidable genealogy of "psychological" novels as (salva reverentia) certain names stand out from the others in the greater list that opens the first chapter of St. Matthew. But "lively"? and "amusing"? Wondrous hot indeed is this snow, and more lustrous than any ebony are the clerestories towards the south-north of this structure.

The Waterloo episode.

The subject and general colour.

To begin with, there rests on the whole book that oppression of récit which has been not unfrequently dwelt upon in the last volume, and sometimes this. Of the 440 pages, tightly printed, of the usual reprint, I should say that two-thirds at least are solid, or merely broken by one or two paragraphs, which are seldom conversational. This, it may be said, is a purely mechanical objection. But it is not so. Although the action is laid in the time contemporary with the writer and writing, from the fall of Napoleon onwards, and in the country (Italy) that he knew best, the whole cast and scheme are historical, the method is that of a lecturer at a panorama, who describes and points while the panorama itself passes a long way off behind a screen of clear but thick glass. In two or perhaps three mostly minute parts or scenes this description may seem unjust. One, the first, the longest, and the best, is perhaps also the best-known of all Beyle's work: it is the sketch of the débâcle after Waterloo. (It is not wonderful that Beyle should know something about retreats, for, though he was not at Waterloo, he had come through the Moscow trial.) This is a really marvellous thing and intensely interesting, though, as is almost always the case with the author, strangely unexciting. The interest is purely intellectual, and is actually increased by comparison with Hugo's imaginative account of the battle itself; but you do not care the snap of a finger whether the hero, Fabrice, gets off or not. Another patch later, where this same Fabrice is attacked by, and after a rough-and-tumble struggle kills, his saltimbanque rival in the affections of a low-class actress, and then has a series of escapes from the Austrian police on the banks of the Po, has a little more of the exciting about it. So perhaps for some—I am not sure that it has for me—may have the final, or provisionally final, escape from the Farnese Tower. And there is, even outside of these passages, a good deal of scattered incident.

But these interesting plums, such as even they are, are stuck in an enormous pudding of presentation of the intrigues and vicissitudes of a petty Italian court,[130] in which, and in the persons who take part in them, I at least find it difficult to take the very slightest interest. Fabrice del Dongo himself,[131] with whom every woman falls in love, and who candidly confesses that he does not know whether he has ever been really in love with any woman—though there is one possible exception precedent, his aunt, the Duchess of Sanseverina, and one subsequent, Clélia Conti, who saves him from prison, as above—is depicted with extraordinary science of human nature. But it is a science which, once more, excludes passion, humour, gusto—all the fluids of real or fictitious life. Fabrice is like (only "much more also") the simulacra of humanity that were popular in music-halls a few years ago. He walks, talks, fights, eats, drinks, thinks even, and makes love if he does not feel it, exactly like a human being. Except the "fluids" just mentioned, it is impossible to mention anything human that he lacks. But he lacks these, and by not having them lacks everything that moves the reader.

And so it is more or less with all of them: with the Duchess and Clélia least perhaps, but even with them to some extent; with the Duchess's first cicisbeo and then husband, Count Mosca, prime minister of the Duke of Parma; with his master, the feebly cruel and feebly tyrannical Ranuce-Ernest IV.; with the opposition intriguers at court; with the Archbishop, to whom Fabrice is made, by the influence of Count and Duchess, coadjutor and actual successor; with Clélia's father and her very much belated husband—with all of them in short. You cannot say they are "out"; on the contrary they do and say exactly what in the circumstances they would do and say. Their creator's remarks about them are sometimes of a marvellous subtlety, expressed in a laconism which seems to regard Marivaudage or Meredithese with an aristocratic disdain. But at other times this laconic letter literally killeth. Perhaps two examples of the two effects should be given:

(Fabrice has found favour in the eyes and arms of the actress Marietta)

The love of this pretty Marietta gave Fabrice all the charms of the sweetest friendship. And this made him think of the happiness of the same kind which he might have found with the Duchess herself.

If this is not "piercing to the accepted hells beneath" with a diamond-pointed plunger, I know not what is.

But much later, quite towards the end of the book, the author has to tell how Fabrice again and Clélia "forgot all but love" in one of their stolen meetings to arrange his escape.

(He has, by the way, told a lie to make her think he is poisoned)

She was so beautiful—half-dressed and in a state of extreme passion as she was—that Fabrice could not resist an almost involuntary movement. No resistance was opposed.[132]

Now I am not (see Addenda and Corrigenda of the last volume) avid of expatiations of the Laclosian kind. But this is really a little too much of the "Spanish-fleet-taken-and-burnt-as-per-margin" order.

L'Abbesse de Castro, etc.

Much the same characteristics, but necessarily on a small scale, appear in the short stories usually found under the title of the first and longest of them, L'Abbesse de Castro. Two of these, Mina de Wangel and Le Philtre, are historiettes of the passion which is absent from La Chartreuse de Parme; but each is tainted with the macabre touch which Beyle affected or which (for that word is hardly fair) was natural to him. In one a German girl of high rank and great wealth falls in love with a married man, separates him from his wife by a gross deception, lives with him for a time; and when he leaves her on finding out the fraud, blows her brains out. In the other a Spanish lady, seduced and maltreated by a creole circus-rider of the worst character, declares to a more honourable lover her incurable passion for the scoundrel and takes the veil. The rest are stories of the Italian Renaissance, grimy and gory as usual. Vittoria Accoramboni herself figures, but there is no evidence that Beyle (although he had some knowledge of English literature[133]) knew at the time our glorious "White Devil," and his story dwells little on her faults and much on the punishment of her murderers. L'Abbesse de Castro itself, La Duchesse de Palliano, San Francesco à Ripa, Vanina Vanini are all of the same type and all full of the gloomier items seen by the Dreamer of Fair Women—

Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes,
Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,

and blood everywhere. And these unmerry tales are always recounted ab extra; in fact, many of them are real or pretended abstracts from chronicles of the very kind which furnished Browning with the matter of The Ring and the Book. It is, however, more apt and more curious to compare them with the scenes of Gerard's experiences with the princess in The Cloister and the Hearth, as instances of different handling of the same matter by two novelists of talent almost, if not quite, reaching genius.

Le Rouge et le Noir.

This singular aloofness, this separation of subject and spectator by a vast and impenetrable though translucent wall, as in a museum or a morgue, is characteristic of all Beyle's books more or less. In fact, he somewhere confesses—the confession having, as always in persons of anything like his stamp, the nature of a boast—that he cannot write otherwise than in récit, that the broken conversational or dramatic method is impossible to him. But an almost startling change—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say reinforcement—of this method appears in what seems to me by far the most remarkable and epoch-making of his books, Le Rouge et le Noir. That there is a strong autobiographic element in this, though vigorously and almost violently "transposed," must have been evident to any critical reader long ago. It became not merely evident but evidenced by the fresh matter published thirty years since.

Beyle's masterpiece, and why.

The book is a long one; it drags in parts; and, long as it is, there is stuff in it for a much longer—indeed preferably for two or three. It is not only a roman passionnel, as Beyle understood passion, not only a collection of Parisian and Provincial scenes, but a romance of secret diplomacy, and one of Seminarist life, with constant side-excursions of Voltairianism, in religion, of the revolutionary element in politics which Voltaire did not ostensibly favour, however much he may have been responsible for it, of private cynicism, and above all and most consistently of all, of that psychological realism, which is perhaps a more different thing from psychological reality than our clever ones for two generations have been willing to admit, or, perhaps, able to perceive.

That—to adopt a division which foolish folk have sneered at directly and indirectly, but which is valuable and almost necessary in the case of second-class literature—it is rather an unpleasant than a pleasant book, must be pretty well apparent from what has been already said of its author and itself. That it is a powerful one follows almost in the same way. But what has to be said, for the first, if not also the last, time in reference to Beyle's fiction, is that it is interesting.

Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole.

The interest depends almost entirely—I really do not think it would be rash to say entirely—upon the hero and one of the heroines. The other personages are dramatically and psychologically competent, but Beyle has—perhaps save in one or two cases intentionally—made them something of comparses or "supers." There may be two opinions about the other heroine, Madame de Rênal, Julien Sorel's first and last love, his victim in two senses and directly the cause of his death, though he was not directly the cause of hers. She seems to me merely what the French call a femmelette, feebly amorous, feebly fond of her children, feebly estranged from and unfaithful to her husband, feebly though fatally jealous of and a traitress to her lover—feebly everything. Shakespeare or Miss Austen[134] could have made such a character interesting, Beyle could not. Nor do the other "seconds"—Julien's brutal peasant father and brothers, the notables of Verrières, the husband, M. de Rênal (himself a gentillâtre, as well as a man of business, a bully, and a blockhead), and the hero's just failure of a father-in-law, the Marquis de la Mole—seem to me to come up to the mark. But, after all, they furnish forth the action, and are necessary in their various ways to set forth the character of that hero and his second love, almost in the mediaeval sense his wife and his widow, Mathilde de la Mole, heiress, great lady, fille folle de son corps, and, in a kind of way, Queen Whims.

Julien Sorel, allowance being made for his date, is one of the most remarkable heroes of fiction. He is physically handsome, in fact beautiful,[135] intellectually very clever, and possessed, in especial, of a marvellous memory; also, though not well educated early, capable of learning anything in a very short time—but presented in these favourable lights without any exaggeration. A distinguished Lord Justice was said by his admirers, at the beginning of his manhood, to have obtained more marks in examinations than any youthful person in the United Kingdom: and Julien, with equal opportunities, would probably have done the same in France. Morally, in no limited sense of the word, he does not possess a single good quality, and does possess most bad ones, with the possible exceptions of gluttony and avarice. That, being in each case a family tutor or employé under trust, he seduces the wife of his first employer and the daughter of the second, cannot, in the peculiar circumstances, be said to count. This is, as it were, the starting-point, the necessary handicap, in the competition of this kind of novel. It is as he is, and in reference to what he does, after this is put aside, that he has to be considered. He is not a stage villain, though he has the peculiar, and in the circumstances important, if highly-to-be-deprecated habit of carrying pocket-pistols. He is not a Byronic hero with a terrible but misty past. He is not like Valmont of the Liaisons Dangereuses,[136] a professional and passionless lady-killer. He is not a swindler nor (though he sometimes comes near to this also) a conspirator like Count Fosco of The Woman in White. One might make a long list of such negatives if it were worth while. He is only an utterly selfish, arrogant, envious, and generally bad-blooded[137] young man, whom circumstances partly, and his own misdeeds helping them, first corrupt and then destroy. You never sympathise with him for one moment, except in a peculiar fashion to be noted presently; but at the same time he neither quite bores you nor quite disgusts you. Homo est, and it is Beyle's having made him so that makes Beyle a sort of genius and much more than a sort of novelist.

But I am not certain that Mathilde is not even a greater creation, though again it is, except quite towards the end, equally impossible to like her. Femina est, though sometimes furens, oftener still furiosa (in a still wider sense than that in which Mr. Norris has[138] ingeniously "feminated" Orlando Furioso), and, in part of her conduct already alluded to, as destitute of any morality as Julien himself. Although there could hardly be (and no doubt had better not be) many like her, she is real and true, and there are not a few redeeming features in her artistically and even personally. She is, as has been said, both rich and noble, the famous lover of the third Valois Marguerite being an (I suppose collateral) ancestor of hers.[139] Her father is not merely a patrician but a Minister at the close of the French Restoration; she may marry any one she likes; and has, in fact, a train of admirers whom she alternately cajoles and snubs. Julien is taken into the household as half private secretary, half librarian; is especially favoured by her father, and treated by her brother (one of Beyle's few thoroughly good fellows) almost on equal terms. But his bad blood and his want of breeding make him stiff and mysterious, and Mathilde takes a perverse fancy to him, the growth of which is skilfully drawn. Although she is nothing so little as a Lélia or an Indiana or a Valentine (vide next chapter), she is idiosyncratically romantic, and at last it is a case of ladders up to the window, "the irreparable," and various wild performances on her part and her lover's. But this is all comparatively banal. Beyle's touch of genius only reappears later. An extraordinary but (when one comes to think of it) not in the least unnatural series of "ups and downs" follows. Julien's bad blood and vulgar nature make him presume on the advantage he has obtained; Mathilde's morgue and hot-headedness make her feel degraded by what she has given. She neglects him and he becomes quite frantic about her; he takes sudden dudgeon and she becomes frantically desirous of him. This spiritual or emotional man-and-woman-in-the-weather-house business continues; but at last, with ambages and minor peripeteias impossible to abstract, it so comes about that the great and proud Marquis de La Mole, startlingly but not quite improbably, chooses to recognise this traitor and seducer as a possible by-blow of nobility, gets him a commission, endows him handsomely, and all but gives his consent to a marriage.

Then the final revolution comes. With again extraordinary but, as it is told, again not inconceivable audacity, Julien refers for character to his first mistress in both senses, Madame de Rênal, and she "gives him away." The marquis breaks off the treaties, and Julien, leaving his quarters, journeys down to Verrières and shoots Madame de Rênal (with the pocket-pistols) in church. She does not die, and is not even very seriously wounded; but he is tried, is (according, it would seem, to a state of French law, which contrasts most remarkably with one's recent knowledge of it) condemned, and after a time is executed for a murder which has not been committed. Mathilde (who is to bear him a child and always considers herself his wife) and Madame de Rênal both visit him in prison, the former making immense efforts to save him. But Julien, consistently with his character all through, is now rather bored by Mathilde and exceedingly fond of Madame de Rênal, who dies shortly after him. What becomes of Mathilde we are not told, except that she devotes herself to her paulo-post-future infant. The mere summary may seem rather preposterous; the book is in a way so. But it is also, in no ordinary sense, once more real and true. It has sometimes been regarded as a childish, but I believe it to be a true, criterion of novels that the reader should feel as if he would like to have had personal dealings with the personages. I should very much like to have shot[140] Julien Sorel, though it would have been rather an honour for him. And I should very much like to have made Mathilde fall in love with me. As for Madame de Rênal, she was only good for suckling fools and telling tales out of school. But I do not find fault with Beyle for drawing her, and she, too, is very human.

In fact the book, pleasant or unpleasant, if we reflect on what the French novel was at the time, deserves a very high place. Compare it with others, and nowhere, except in Balzac, will you find anything like it for firm analysis of character, while I confess that it seems to me to be more strictly human of this world, and at the same time more original,[141] than a good deal of the Comédie.

The resuscitated work—Lamiel.

The question, "Would a novelist in altered circumstances have given us more or better novels?" is sometimes treated as ultra vires or nihil ad rem on the critic's part. I myself have been accused rather of limiting than of extending the province of the literary critic; yet I think this question is, sometimes at least, in place. If so, it can seldom be more in place than with Beyle, first because of the unusually mperfect character of his actual published work; and secondly, because of the still more unusual abundance of half-done work, or of fragments of self-criticism, which what has been called the "Beyle resurrection" of the close of the last century has furnished. Indeed the unfinished and scarcely more than half-drafted novel of Lamiel almost by itself suggests the question and supplies the answer. That answer—except from favourers of the grime-novel which, oddly enough, whether by coincidence or common causation became so popular at about the time of this "resurrection"—can hardly be favourable. Lamiel is a very grubby little book. The eponymous heroine is adopted as a child by a parish beadle and his wife, who do not at all maltreat her, except by bringing her up in ways of extreme propriety, which she detests, taking delight in the histories of Mandrin, Cartouche and Co. At early maidenhood she is pitched upon as lectrice, and in a way favourite, by the great lady of the neighbourhood, the Duchess of Miossens; and in this position first attracts the attention of a peculiarly diabolical little dwarf doctor, who, bar the comic[142] element, reminds one rather of Quilp. His designs are, however, baulked in a most Beylian manner; for Lamiel (who, by a pleasing chance, was at first called "Amiel"—a delightfully other Amiel!) coolly bestows some money upon a peasant to "teach her what love is," and literally asks the Gebirian question about the ocean, "Is this all?" after receiving the lesson. Further, in the more and more unfinished parts of the book, she levants for a time with the young duke, quits him, becomes a professional hetaera in Paris, but never takes any fancy to the business of her avocation till she meets an all-conquering criminal, Valbayre.[143] The scenario tells us that, Valbayre having been caught by justice, she sets fire to the Palace thereof, and her own bones are discovered in the ashes.

This, though Beyle at least meant to season the misanthropy with irony (he might be compared with Meredith for some slightly cryptic views of "the Comic Spirit"), is rather poor stuff, and certainly shows no improvement or likelihood of improvement on the earlier productions. It is even somewhat lamentable, not so much for the presence of grime as because of the absence of any other attraction. Le Rouge et le Noir is not exactly rose-pink, but it derives hardly any, if any, interest from its smirches of mud and blood and blackness. In Lamiel there is little else. Moreover, that unchallengeable "possibility of humanity" which redeems not merely Le Rouge et le Noir but the less exciting books, is wanting here. Sansfin, the doctor, is a mere monstrosity in mind as well as in body, and, except perhaps when she ejaculates (as more briefly reported above), "Comment! ce fameux amour, ce n'est que ça?" Lamiel herself is not made interesting.

The Nouvelles Inédites.

The Vie de Henri Brulard, of high importance for a History of Novelists, is in strictness outside the subject of a historian of the Novel, though it might be adduced to strengthen the remarks made on Rousseau's Confessions.[144] And the rest of the "resurrected" matter is also more autobiographical, or at best illustrative of Beyle's restless and "masterless" habit of pulling his work to pieces—of "never being able to be ready" (as a deservedly unpopular language has it)—than contributory to positive novel-achievement. But the first and by far the most substantive of the Nouvelles Inédites, which his amiable but not very strong-minded literary executor, Colomb, published soon after his death, needs a little notice.

Le Chasseur Vert.

Le Chasseur Vert[145] (which had three other titles, three successive prefaces, and in its finished, or rather unfinished, form is the salvage of five folio volumes of MS., the rest being at best sketched and at worst illegible) contains, in what we have of it, the account of the tribulations of a young sub-lieutenant of Lancers (with a great deal of money, a cynical but rather agreeable banker-papa, an adoring mother, and the record of an expulsion from the Polytechnique for supposed Republicanism) suddenly pitchforked into garrison, soon after the Revolution of July, at Nancy. Here, in the early years of the July monarchy, the whole of decent society is Legitimist; a very small but not easily suppressible minority Republican; while officialdom, civil and military, forms a peculiar juste milieu, supporting itself by espionage and by what Their Majesties of the present moment, the Trade Unions, call "victimisation," but in a constant state of alarm for its position, and "looking over its shoulder" with a sort of threefold squint, at the white flag, the eagles—and the guillotine. Nothing really happens, but it takes 240 pages to bring us to an actual meeting between Lieutenant Lucien Leeuwen and his previously at distance adored widow, the Marquise de Chasteller.

The book is not a very good novel, even as a fragment, and probably nothing would ever have made it so as a whole. But there is good novel-stuff in it, and it is important to a student of the novel and almost indispensable to a student of this novelist. Of the cynical papa—who, when his son comes to him in a "high-falutin" mood, requests him to go to his (the papa's) opera-box, to replace his sire with some agreeable girl-officials of that same institution, and to spend at least 200 francs on a supper for them at the Rocher—one would gladly see more. Of the barrack (or rather not-barrack) society at Nancy, the sight given, though not agreeable, is interesting, and to any one who knew something of our old army, especially before the abolition of purchase, very curious. There is no mess-room and apparently no common life at all, except on duty and at the "pension" hotel-meals, to which,—rather, it would seem, at the arbitrary will of the colonel than by "regulation,"—you have to subscribe, though you may, and indeed must, live in lodgings exactly like a particulier. Of the social-political life of the place we see rather too much, for Beyle, not content with making the politics which he does not like make themselves ridiculous—or perhaps not being able to do so—himself tells us frequently that they are ridiculous, which is not equally effective. So also, instead of putting severe or "spiritual" speeches in Lucien's mouth, he tells us that they were spiritual or severe, an assurance which, of course, we receive with due politeness, but which does not give us as much personal delectation as might be supplied by the other method. No doubt this and other things are almost direct results of that preference for récit over semi-dramatic evolution of the story by deed and word, which has been noticed. But they are damaging results all the same: and, after making the fairest allowance for its incomplete condition, the thing may be said to support, even more than Lamiel does, the conclusion already based upon the self-published stories (and most of all upon that best of them, Le Rouge et le Noir) that Beyle could never have given us a thoroughly hit-off novel.

Beyle's place in the story.

Still, there is always something unfair in making use of "Remains," and for my part I do not think that, unless they are of extraordinary merit, they should ever be published. "Death should clear all scores" in this way as in others. Yet no really critical person will think the worse of Beyle's published work because of these anecdota, though they may, as actually before us, be taken as throwing some light on what is not so good in the publicata. There can be no doubt that Beyle occupies a very important position in the history of the novel, and not of the French novel only, as the first, or almost the first, analyst of the ugly for fictitious purposes, and as showing singular power in his analysis. Unfortunately his synthetic gifts were not equally great. He had strange difficulty in making his stories march; he only now and then got them to run; and though the real life of his characters has been acknowledged, it is after all a sort of "Life-in-Death," a new manifestation of the evil power of that mysterious entity whom Coleridge, if he did not discover, first named and produced in quasi-flesh, though he left us without any indication of more than one tiny and accidental part of her dread kingdom.

He has thus the position of père de famille, whether (to repeat the old joke) of a famille déplorable in the moral, not the sentimental, sense, must, I suppose, be left matter of opinion. The plentiful crop of monographs about him since M. Stryienski's Pompeian explorations and publications is in a manner—if only in a manner—justified by the numerous followers—not always or perhaps often conscious followers, and so even more important—in his footsteps. Nobody can say that the picaresque novelists, whether in their original country or when the fashion had spread, were given to berquinades or fairy-tales. Nobody can say that the tale-writers who preceded and followed them were apostles of virtue or painters of Golden-Age scenes. But, with some exceptions (chiefly Italian) among the latter, they did not, unless their aim were definitely tragical—an epithet which one could show, on irrefragable Aristotelian principles, to be rarely if ever applicable to Beyle and his school—they did not, as the common phrase goes, "take a gloomy view" only. There were cakes and ale; and the cakes did not always give internal pains, nor the ale a bad headache. As even Hazlitt (who has been selected, not without reason, as in many ways like Beyle) said of himself on his death-bed, rather to some folks' surprise though not to mine, most of the characters "had a happy life," though the happiness might be chequered: and some of them were "good." It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in Beyle's books happiness does not exist, and virtue has hardly a place. There are some characters who may be said to be neutral or "on the line"; they may be not definitely unhappy or definitely bad. But this is about as far as he ever goes in that direction. And accordingly he and his followers have the fault of one-sidedness; they may (he did) see life steadily, but they do not see it whole. There is no need to preach a sermon on the text: in this book there is full need to record the fact.[146]

---

Balzac—conditions of the present dealing.

In dealing with Beyle's greater companion here there are certain things—not exactly difficulties, but circumstances conditioning the treatment—which should be stated. That it is well to know something about your subject has been an accepted doctrine with all save very young persons, idle paradoxers, and (according to Sir Walter Scott) the Scottish Court of Session in former days.[147] That it is also well not to know too much about it has sometimes been maintained, without any idleness in either sense of the word; the excess being thought likely to cause weariness, "staleness," and absence of interest. If this were necessarily so, it might be better for the writer once more to leave this part of the chapter (since at least the heading of it could not possibly be omitted in the history) a blank or a constellation of asterisks in Sternian fashion. For it has fallen to his lot to translate one whole novel of Balzac's,[148] to edit a translation of the entire Comédie,[149] superintending some of the volumes in narrow detail, and studying each in short, but (intentionally at least) thorough Introductions, with a very elaborate preface-study of the whole; to read all Balzac's rather voluminous miscellanea from the early novel-attempts to posthumous things, including letters; and, finally, to discuss the subject once more, with the aid or burden of many previous commentaries, in a long Review article.[150] Nevertheless, he does not feel that any disgust forbids while a clear duty calls: and he hopes to show that it is not always necessary to weary of quails as in the Biblical, partridges as in the old fabliau, and pigeons in the Dumas fils (v. inf.) version of the Parable of Satiety.

Limitations of Subject.

In no case, however, not even in that of Victor Hugo, is the easement given by the general plan of the book, in regard to biographical and other not strictly literary details, more welcome. We shall say nothing on the point whether the author of the Comédie Humaine should be called M. de Balzac or M. Balzac or M. Balssa; nothing about his family, his friends, his enemies, his strangely long-deferred, and, when it came, as strangely ill-fated marriage; little, though something necessarily, about his tastes, his commercial and other enterprises, and so forth; and not very much—something here also becoming obligatory—on his manner of producing the immense and wonderful work which he has left us. Those who are curious about such things will find ample satisfaction in the labours of M. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, of MM. Christophe and Cerfbeer, and of others.[151] Here he is, for us, Honoré de Balzac, author of the Juvenilia (saved from, as it is understood, a larger bulk still) in ten volumes; of the mighty "Comedy" itself, and, more incidentally, of the considerable epistolary and miscellaneous production referred to above. The manner in which this enormous output was put out has perhaps too much to do with its actual character to be passed over in total silence. It represents thirty years' working time almost entirely spent upon it,[152] the alternatives being the above-mentioned commercial speculations (which were almost invariably unfortunate, and involved him, during the whole of his career, in complicated indebtedness) and a good deal of travel, very frequently connected with these speculations. Of the society which formed so large a part of the life of the time and of which he wrote so often, Balzac saw little. He worked at enormous stretches, and he rewrote his work, in MS., in proof and in temporarily final print, with insatiable and indefatigable industry. To no writer could the commonplace extravagance about burning the candle at both ends be applied so truly as to Balzac. Only, his candle was shaped like a wheel with no felloes, and he burnt it at the end of every spoke and at the nave as well. How he managed to last, even to fifty, is one of the major curiosities of literary biography.

And of Balzac himself.

Of the three divisions of this vast but far from chaotic production, the miscellaneous, of course, concerns us least. It shows Balzac as a failure of a dramatist, a critic of very varying competence,[153] not a particularly effective writer merely as such, not possessed of much logical power, but having pretty wide interests and abundantly provided with what we may call the odd tools of the novelist's workshop. As a correspondent his writing has absolutely none of what may be called the "departmental" interest of great letter-writers—of Madame de Sévigné or Lady Mary, of Horace Walpole or Cowper; its attraction is not epistolary but wholly autobiographic. And it is only fair to say that, despite Balzac's immense and intense self-centredness, it leaves one on the whole with a much better opinion of him as a man than might be derived from his books or from the anecdotes about him. To adapt one of the best known of these, there was, in fact, nothing real to him but Honoré de Balzac, Honoré de Balzac's works and schemes, and, in rare cases (of which Madame Hanska was the chief), Honoré de Balzac's loves. These constituted his subject, his universe of thought and feeling, of action and passion. But at the same time he stands apart from all the other great egotists. He differs from those of whom Byron is the chief in that he does not introduce himself prominently in his fictitious creations. He does not, like those who may take their representative in Goethe, regard everything merely as it relates to his personality. His chief peculiarity, his unique literary character, and, it may be added at once, his greatness and his weakness, all consist in the fact that he evolves a new world out of himself. Now and then he may have taken an actual human model—George Sand, Madame d'Agoult, Madame de Castries, Liszt, Latouche,[154] Rémusat—as many others as anybody likes. But always these had not merely to receive the Balzacian image and superscription, but to be transmuted into creatures of a Balzacium Sidus. And it is the humanity of this planet or system, much more than of our world, whereof his Comédie is the Comedy—a Comédie Balzacienne.

Balzac's "general ideas."

But, it has been said, and the saying has been attributed to no less a critic than M. Faguet, there are no "general ideas" in Balzac.[155] One can only reply, "Heavens! Why should there be?" The celebrated unreason of "going to a gin-palace for a leg of mutton" (already quoted, and perhaps to be quoted again) is sound and sensible as compared with asking general ideas from a novelist. They are not quite absolutely forbidden to him, though he will have to be very careful lest they get in his way. But they are most emphatically not his business, except as very rare and very doubtful means to a quite different end, means absolutely insufficient by themselves and exceedingly difficult to combine with the other means which—more or fewer of them—are not only sufficient but necessary. The "slice of human life," not necessarily, but preferably ordinary, presenting probable and interesting characters, connected by sufficient plot, diversified and adorned by descriptive and other devices, and abundantly furnished with the conversation of men and women of this world, the whole forming such a whole as will amuse, thrill, affect, and in other ways, to use the all-important word once more, interest the reader,—that is what is wanted. And this definition is as rigid at least as the Aristotelian definition of tragedy and perhaps more exhaustive, as concerns the novel, including, with the necessary modifications, the romance—and the romance, including, with the necessary modifications, the novel. In it "general ideas," unless a very special and not at all usual meaning is attached to the term, can have no right of place. They may be brought in, as almost anything may be brought in if the writer is Samson enough to bring it. But they cannot be demanded of him as facts, images, emotions, style, and a very large number of other things can or may be, not, of course, all at once, but in larger or smaller selection. General ideas may and perhaps should be demanded from the philosopher, the historian, the political student. From the poet and the novelist they cannot be. And that they should be so demanded is one of the chief instances of what seems to the present writer to be the greatest mistake of French novel, as of other, criticism—its persistent relapse upon the rule-system and its refusal to judge by the result.[156]

It is all the more unreasonable to demand general ideas from Balzac himself, because he is so liberal of general imagery, and what is more, general prosopopœia. Be the Balzacian world real, as some would have it to be, or be it removed from our mundane reality by the subtle "other-planetary" influence which is apparent to others, its complexity, its fullness, its variety, its busy and by no means unsystematic life and motion, cannot be denied. Why on earth cannot people be content with asking Platonism from Plato and Balzacity from Balzac? At any rate, it is Balzacity which will be the subject of the following pages, and if anybody wants anything else let him go elsewhere.

Abstinence from abstract.

There is hardly likely to be much grumbling at the absence of such detailed abstract or survey of individual books as has been given in cases of what may seem to be much less importance. To begin with, such a survey as is possible[157] exists already from these hands in the Introductions to the translated edition above referred to, and to paraphrase or refashion it here would probably occupy a hundred pages, if not more. Nor would the plan, elsewhere adopted, of analysing afresh one, or two, or more examples, as representative, be satisfactory. Although Balzac is in a sense one of the most intensely individual of all novelists, his individuality, as in a very few others of the greatest cases, cannot be elicited from particular works. Just as Hamlet will give you no idea of the probable treatment of As You Like It, so Eugénie Grandet contains no key to La Cousine Bette. Even the groups into which he himself rather empirically, if not quite arbitrarily, separated the Comédie, though they lend themselves a little more to specification, do not yield very much to the classifier. The Comédie, once more, is a world—a world open to the reader, "all before him." Chronological order may tell him a little about Balzac, but it will not tell him very much about Balzac's work that he cannot gain from the individual books, except in the very earliest stages. There is no doubt that the Œuvres de Jeunesse, if not very delightful to the reader (I have myself read them not without pleasure), are very instructive; the instruction increases, while the pleasure is actually multiplied, when you come to Les Chouans and the Peau de Chagrin. But it is, after a fashion, only beyond these that the true Balzac begins, and the beginning is, to a large extent, a reaction from previous work in consequence of a discovery that the genius, without which he had acknowledged that it was all up with him,[158] did not lie that way, and that he had no hope of finding it there. Not that there is no genius in the two books mentioned; on the contrary, it is there first to be found, and in La Peau is of the first order. But their ways are not the ways in which he was to find it—and himself—more specially.

The Œuvres de Jeunesse.

As to Argow le Pirate[159] and Jane la Pâle (I have never ceased lamenting that he did not keep the earlier title, Wann-Chlore) and the rest, they have interest of various kinds. Some of it has been glanced at already—you cannot fully appreciate Balzac without them. But there is another kind of interest, perhaps not of very general appeal, but not to be neglected by the historian. They are almost the only accessible body, except Pigault-Lebrun's latest and Paul de Kock's earliest, of the popular fiction before 1830, of the stuff of which, as previously mentioned, Ducray-Duminil, the lesser Ducange, and many others are representatives, but representatives difficult to get at. This class of fiction, which arose in all parts of Europe during the last years of the eighteenth century and the earlier of the nineteenth, has very similar characteristics, though the examples differ very slightly in different countries. What are known with us as the Terror Novel, the Minerva Press, the Silver Fork school, etc. etc., all have their part in it, and even higher influences, such as Scott's, are not wanting. Han d'Islande and Bug-Jargal themselves belong to some extent to the class, and I am far from certain that the former is at all better than some of these juvenilia of Balzac's. But as a whole they are of course little more than curiosities.

Whether these curiosities are more widely known than they were some five-and-twenty, or thirty, years ago, when Mr. Louis Stevenson was the only friend of mine who had read them, and when even special writers on Balzac sometimes unblushingly confessed that they had not, I cannot say. Although printed in the little fifty-five-volume[160] edition which for so many years represented Balzac, they were excluded, as noted above, from the statelier "Définitive," and so may have once more "gone into abscondence." I do not want to read them again, but I no more repent the time once spent on them than I did earlier. In fact I really do not think any one ought to talk about Balzac who has not at least gained some knowledge of them, for many of their defects remained with him when he got rid of the others. These defects are numerous enough and serious enough. The books are nothing if not uncritical, generally extravagant, and sometimes (especially in Jean Louis) appallingly dull. Scarf-pins, made of poisoned fish-bones (Argow le Pirate), extinction of virgins under copper bells (Le Centénaire), attempts at fairy-tales (La Dernière Fée) jostle each other. The weaker historical kind figures largely in L'Excommunié (one of the least bad), L'Israëlite, L'Héritière de Birague, Dom Gigadas. There is a Vicaire des Ardennes (remarkably different from him of Wakefield), which is a kind of introduction to Argow le Pirate, and which, again, is not the worst. When I formerly wrote about these curious productions, after reading them, I had not read Pigault-Lebrun, and therefore did not perceive, what I now see to be an undoubted fact, that Balzac was, sometimes at least, trying to follow in Pigault's popular footsteps. But he had not that writer's varied knowledge of actual life or his power of telling a story, and though he for the most part avoided Pigault's grossièreté, the chaotic plots, the slovenly writing, and other defects of his model abode with him.

Les Chouans.

There are not many more surprising things, especially in pari materia, to be found in literary history than the sun-burst of Les Chouans after this darkness-that-can-be-felt of the early melodramas. Not that Les Chouans is by any means a perfect novel, or even a great one. Its narrative drags, in some cases, almost intolerably; the grasp of character, though visible, is inchoate; the plot is rather a polyptych of separate scenes than a connected action; you see at once that the author has changed his model to Sir Walter and think how much better Sir Walter would have done the thing. But there is a strange air of "coming alive" in some of the scenes, though they are too much separated, as in the case of the finale and of the execution of the rather hardly used traitor earlier. These possess a character of thrill which may be looked for in vain through all the ten volumes of the Œuvres de Jeunesse. Montauran is a hero in more than one sense, and Mlle. de Verneuil is still more a heroine. Had Balzac worked her out as he worked out others, who did not deserve it so well, later, she might have been one of the great characters in fiction. Even as it is, the "jour sans lendemain," which in one sense unites, and in another parts, her and her lover for ever, is one of the most really passionate things that the French novel, in its revival, had yet seen. Besides this, there is a sort of extrinsic appeal in the book, giving that curious atmosphere referred to already, and recalling the old prints of the earth yawning in patches and animals rearing themselves from it at the Creation. The names and personages of Hulot and Corentin were to be well known later to readers of the "fifty volumes," and even the ruffianly patriot[161] Marche-à-Terre had his future.

La Peau de Chagrin.

The second[162] blast of the horn with which Balzac challenged admission to the Inner Sanctuaries or strongholds of the novel, La Peau de Chagrin, had that character of difference which one notices not seldom in the first worthy works of great men of letters—the absence of the mould and the rut. Les Chouans was a Waverley novel Gallicised and Balzacified; La Peau de Chagrin is a cross between the supernatural romance and the novel of psychology. It is one of the greatest of Balzac's books. The idea of the skin—a new "wishing" talisman, which shrinks with every exercise of the power it gives, and so threatens extinction at once of wishing and living—is of course not wholly novel, though refreshed in detail. But then nothing is wholly novel, and if anything could be it would probably be worthless. The endless changes of the eternal substance make the law, the curse, and the blessing of life. In the working out of his theme it may possibly be objected that Balzac has not interested the reader quite enough in his personages—that he seems in a way to be thinking more of the play than of the actors or the audience. His "orgie" is certainly not much of a success; few orgies in print are, except when they are burlesqued. But, on the other hand, the curiosity-shop is splendid. Yet it is not on the details of the book, important as these have been allowed to be throughout Balzac, that attention should be mainly concentrated. The point of it is the way in which the necessary atmosphere of bad dream is kept up throughout, yet with an appropriate contrast of comparatively ordinary life. A competent critic who read Les Chouans, knowing nothing about its author or his work, should have said, "Here is more than a promising craftsman"; reading La Peau de Chagrin in the same conditions he should have said, "Here is a great, though by no means a faultless, artist." One who read both ought to have had no doubt as to the coming of something and somebody extraordinary.

The short stories.

Thenceforward Balzac, though hardly ever faultless except in short stories, was almost always great, and showed what may be called a diffused greatness, to which there are few parallels in the history of the novel. Some of the tales are simply wonderful. I cannot think of any one else, even Mérimée, who could have done La Grande Bretèche—the story of a lover who, rather than betray his mistress, allows himself to suffer, without a word, the fate of a nun who has broken her vows—as Balzac has done it. La Recherche de l'Absolu is one, and Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu is another, of the greatest known masterpieces in the world of their kind. La Fille aux Yeux d'Or and Une Passion dans le Désert have not the least need of their "indexable" qualities to validate them. In the most opposite styles Jésus Christ en Flandre and La Messe de l'Athée have their warmest admirers. In fact it is scarcely too much to say that, in the whole list of nearer two than one score—as they were published in the old collection from Le Bal de Sceaux to Maître Cornélius—scarcely any are bad or insignificant, few mediocre, and not a few equal, or hardly inferior, to those specially pointed out just now. As so often happens, the short story estopped Balzac from some of his usual delinquencies—over-detail, lingering treatment, etc.,—and encouraged his virtues—intensity, grandeur, and idiosyncratic tone.

The Contes Drolatiques.

Of his one considerable collection of such stories—the Contes Drolatiques—it is not possible to speak quite so favourably as a whole; yet the reduction of favour need not be much. Of its greatest thing, La Succube, there have hardly been two opinions among competent and unprejudiced judges. "Pity and terror" are there well justified of their manipulator. The sham Old French, if not absolutely "according to Cocker" (or such substitute for Cocker as may be made and provided by scholarly authority), is very much more effective than most such things. Not a few of the stories are good and amusing in themselves, though of course the votaries of prunes and prism should keep clear of them. The book has perhaps only one serious fault, that of the inevitable and no doubt invited suggestion of, and comparison with, Rabelais. In some points this will hold not so badly, for Balzac had narrative power of the first order when he gave it scope; the deficiencies of mere style which sometimes affect his modern French do not appear so much in this pastiche, and he could make broad jokes well enough. But—and this "but" is rather a terrible one—the saving and crowning grace of Pantagruelist humour is not in him, except now and then in its grimmer and less catholic variety or manifestation. And this absence haunts one in these Contes Drolatiques, though it is to some extent compensated by the presence of a "sentiment" rare elsewhere in Balzac.

Notes on select larger books: Eugénie Grandet.

Turning to the longer books, the old double difficulty of selection and omission comes on one in full force. There are, I suppose, few Balzacians who have not special favourites, but probably Eugénie Grandet, Le Père Goriot, and the two divisions of Les Parents Pauvres would unite most suffrages. If I myself—who am not exactly a Balzacian, though few can admire him more, and not very many, I think, have had occasion for knowing his work better—put Eugénie Grandet at the head of all the "scenes" of ordinary life, it is most certainly not because of its inoffensiveness. It is perhaps partly because, in spite of that inoffensiveness, it fixes on one a grasp superior to anything of Beyle's and equal to anything of Flaubert's or Maupassant's. But the real cause of admiration is the nature of the grasp itself. Here, and perhaps here only—certainly here in transcendence—Balzac grapples with, and vanquishes, the bare, stern, unadorned, unbaited, ironic facts of life. It is not an intensely interesting book; it is certainly not a delightful one; you do not want to read it very often. Still, when you have read it you have come to one of the ultimate things: the flammantia mœnia of the world of fiction forbid any one to go further at this particular point. And when this has been said of a novel, all has been said of the quality of the novelist's genius, though not of its quantity or variety.

Le Père Goriot and Les Parents Pauvres.

The other three books selected have greater "interest" and, in the case of the Parents Pauvres at least, much greater variety; but they do not seem to me to possess equal consummateness. Le Père Goriot is in its own way as pathetic as Eugénie Grandet, and Balzac has saved its pathos from being as irritating as that of the all but idiotic grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop. But the situation still has a share of that fatal helpless ineffectiveness which Mr. Arnold so justly denounced. Of the remaining pair, La Cousine Bette is, I suppose, again the favourite; but I am not a backer. I have in other places expressed my opinion that if Valérie Marneffe is part-model[163] of Becky Sharp, which is not, I believe, absolutely certain, the copy far—indeed infinitely—exceeds the original, and not least in the facts that Becky is attractive while Valérie is not, and that there is any amount of possibility in her. I should not wonder if, some day, a novelist took it into his head to show Becky as she would have been if she had had those thousands a year for which, with their accompanying chances of respectability, she so pathetically sighed. Now Valérie is, and always must have been, a catin, and nothing else. Lisbeth, again, though I admit her possibility, is not, to me, made quite probable. Hulot, very possible and probable indeed, does not interest or amuse me, and the angelic Adeline is good but dull. In fact the book, by its very power, throws into disastrous eminence that absence of delightfulness which is Balzac's great want, uncompensated by the presence of the magnificence which is his great resource. La Peau de Chagrin and some of the smaller things have this relief; La Cousine Bette has not. And therefore I think that, on the whole, Le Cousin Pons is the better of the two, though it may seem to some weaker, further "below proof." Everything in it is possible and probable, and though the comedy is rather rueful, it is comedy. It is a play; its companion is rather too much of a sermon.

Others—the general "scenic" division.

The "Scènes de la Vie Privée" (to pass to a rapid general survey of the "Acts" of the Comedy) provide an especially large number of short stories, almost the only ones of length being Modeste Mignon and Béatrix, a strongly contrasted couple. Modeste Mignon is perhaps one of the best of Balzac's second best. Béatrix, a book of more power, appeals chiefly to those who may be interested in the fact (which apparently is the fact) that the book contains, almost more than any other, figures taken from real people, such as George Sand—the "Camille" of the novel—and some of those about her. The "Scènes de la Vie de Province" are richer in "magnums." Eugénie Grandet is here, with a sort of companion, cheerfuller generally, in Ursule Mirouet. The shorter stories are grouped under the titles of Les Parisiens en Province (with the first appearance of Gaudissart) and Les Rivalités. Le Lys dans la Vallée (which one is sometimes anxiously begged to distinguish from "the lily of the valley," otherwise muguet) holds, for some, an almost entirely unique place in Balzac's work, or one shared only in part by Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées. I have never, I think, cared much for either. But there is more strength in two pairs of volumes which contain some of the author's masterpieces—Les Célibataires with Pierrette, Le Curé de Tours, and the powerful, if not particularly pleasant, Un Ménage de Garçon;[164] and Illusions Perdues, running up well with Un Grand Homme de Province à Paris and the semi-idyllic Ève et David.

But I suppose the "Scenes of Parisian Life" seem to be the citadel to most people. Here are three of the four books specially selected above, Le Père Goriot and both the constituents of Les Parents Pauvres. Here are the Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes, which some rank among the very first; not a few short stories in the volumes taking their titles from La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin and La Maison Nucingen; with César Birotteau (Balzac on Bankruptcy, as it has been profanely called) and the celebrated Histoire des Treize.

This last, I confess frankly, has always bored me, even though the volume contains La Fille aux Yeux d'Or. The idea of a secret society in Society itself was not new; it was much more worthy of Sue or Soulié than of Balzac, and it does not seem to me to have been interestingly worked out. But perhaps this is due to my perverse and elsewhere confessed objection to crime and conspiracy novels generally.

Neither have I ever cared much for the group of "Scenes de la Vie Politique," ranging from Une Ténébreuse Affaire to Le Député d'Arcis, the last being not entirely Balzac's own. The single volume, "Scènes de la Vie Militaire," consisting merely of Les Chouans and Une Passion dans le Désert, is much better, and the "Scènes de la Vie de Campagne" reach a high level with Le Médecin de Campagne, Le Curé de Village, and the late, grim, but very noteworthy Les Paysans.

None, however, of these sometimes rather arbitrary groups of Balzac's contains such thoroughly satisfactory matter as that which he chose to call "Études Philosophiques." It includes only one full-volume novel, but that is the Peau de Chagrin itself.[165] And here are most of the short stories singled out at first, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Jésus Christ en Flandre, Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu, with Melmoth Réconcilié[166] in the same batch. The two volumes entitled L'Enfant Maudit and Les Marana contain all but a dozen remarkable tales. Here, too, is the curious treatise Sur Cathérine de Médicis, with another, to some people among the most interesting of all, the autobiographic Louis Lambert, and also the mystical, and in parts very beautiful, Séraphita.

The "Études Analytiques," which complete the original Comédie with the two notorious volumes of Physiologie du Marriage and Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale, are not novels or tales, and so do not concern us. They are not the only instance in literature showing that the sarcasm

The God you took from a printed book

extends to other things besides divinity. The old conventional satires on marriage are merely rehashed with some extra garlic. Balzac had no personal experience of the subject till just before his death, and his singular claustral habits of life could not give him much opportunity for observation.

"Balzacity": its constitution.

Experience, indeed, and observation (to speak with only apparent paradox), though they played an important, yet played only a subordinate part at any time in the great Balzacian achievement. Victor Hugo, in what was in effect a funeral oration, described that achievement as "un livre qui est l'Observation et qui est l'Imagination." But no one familiar with the Victorian rhetoric will mistake the clou, the dominating and decisive word of that sentence. It is the conjunction. Hugo meant to draw attention to the astonishing union of Imagination with Observation—two things which, except in the highest poetry, are apt to be rather strangers to each other—and by putting Imagination last he meant also doubtless that this was the dominating—the masculine—element in the marriage. In the immense volume of discussion of Balzac which the long lifetime succeeding his death has seen, and which thickened and multiplied towards the close of the last century and a little later—owing to the conclusion of the Édition Définitive with its additions and illustrative matter—this point has perhaps been too frequently lost sight of. The great critics who were his contemporaries and immediate survivors were rather too near. The greatest of the later batch, M. Brunetière, was a little too eager to use Balzac as a stick to beat the Romantics with for one thing, and to make him out a pioneer of all succeeding French fiction for another. But, quite early, Philarète Chasles hit the white by calling him a voyant (a word slightly varying in signification from our "seer"), and recently a critic of less repute than Brunetière, but a good one—M. Le Breton—though perhaps sometimes not quite fair to Balzac, recognises his Romanticism, his frénésie, and so the Imagination of which the lunatic and the lover are—and of which the devotee of Romance in verse and prose should be—compact.

Nevertheless it would be of course highly improper, and in fact absurd, to deny the "observation"—at least in detail of all kinds. Although—as we have seen and may see again when we come to Naturalism and look back—M. Brunetière was quite wrong in thinking that Balzac introduced "interiors" to French, and still more wrong in thinking that he introduced them to European, novel-writing, they undoubtedly make a great show in his work—are, indeed, one of its chief characteristics. He actually overdoes them sometimes; the "dragging" of Les Chouans is at least partly due to this, and he never got complete mastery of his tendency that way. But undoubtedly this tendency was also a source of power.

Yet, while this observation of things is not to be denied, Balzac's observation of persons is a matter much more debatable. To listen to some of the more uncritical—especially among the older and now almost traditional—estimates of him, an unwary reader who did not correct these, judging for himself, might think that Balzac was as much of an "observational" realist in character as Fielding, as Scott when it served his turn, as Miss Austen, or as Thackeray. Longer study and further perspective seem recently to have put more people in the position which only a few held some years ago. The astonishing force, completeness, relative reality of his creations is more and more admitted, but it is seen (M. Le Breton, for instance, admits it in almost the very words) that the reality is often not positive. In fact the Comédie may remind some of the old nautical laudation of a ship which cannot only sail close to the wind, but even a point or two on the other side of it. If even Frenchmen now confess that Balzac's characters are very often not des êtres réels, no Englishman need be ashamed of having always thought so.

The fact is that this giant in novel-writing did actually succeed in doing what some of his brethren in Hyperion would have liked to do—in setting up a new world for himself and getting out of the existing universe. His characters are never inhuman; they never fail to be human; they are of the same flesh and blood, the same soul and spirit, as ourselves. But they have, as it were, colonised the fresh planet—the Balzacium Sidus—and taken new colour and form from its idiosyncrasies.[167]

Its effect on successors.

It is for this reason that one hesitates to endorse the opinions quoted above as to the filiation of all or most subsequent French fiction upon Balzac. Of course he had a great influence on it; such a genius, in such circumstances, could not but have. The "interior" business was largely followed and elaborated; it might be argued—though the contention would have to be strictly limited and freely provisoed—that Naturalism in general—as the "Rougon-Macquart" scheme certainly was in particular—was a sort of bastard of the Comédie. Other points of relationship might be urged. But all this would leave the most characteristic Balzacities untouched. In the most obvious and superficial quality—pessimistic psychology—the other novelist dealt with in this chapter—Beyle—is far more of a real origin than Balzac is. If one takes the most brilliant of his successors outside the Naturalist school—Flaubert and Feuillet—very little that is really Balzacian will be found in either. At least Madame Bovary and M. de Camors—which, I suppose, most people would choose to represent the greatest genius and the most flexible talent of the Second Empire in novel-writing—seem to me to show hardly anything that is like Balzac. The Goncourts have something of degraded Balzacianism on its lower side in them, and Zola approaches, at least in his "apocalyptic" period, something like a similar though less offensive degradation of the higher. But I can hardly conceive anything less like Balzac's work than Maupassant's.

And its own character.

For the fact is that the real Balzac lies—to and for me—almost entirely in that aura of other-worldliness of which I have spoken. It is in the revelation of this other world, so like ours and yet not the same; in the exploration of its continents; in the frequentation of its inhabitants; that the pleasure which he has to give consists. How he came himself to discover it is as undiscoverable as how his in some sort analogue Dickens, after pottering not unpleasantly with Bozeries, "thought of Mr. Pickwick," and so of the rest of his human (and extra-human) comedy. But the facts, in both cases fortunately, remain. And it may be possible to indicate at least some qualities and characteristics of the fashion in which he dealt with this world when he had discovered it. In Les Chouans he had found out not so much it, as the way to it; in the books between that and La Peau de Chagrin he was over the border, and with La Peau itself he had "crossed Jordan,"—it was all conquest and extension—as far as permitted—of territory afterwards.

The "occult" element.

There can, I should suppose, be very little doubt that the fancy for the occult, which played a great part, as far as bulk goes, in the Juvenilia, but produced nothing of value there, began to bear fruit at this time. The Supernatural (as was remarked of woman to the indignation of Mr. Snodgrass) is a "rum creetur." It is very difficult to deal with; to the last degree unsatisfactory when of bad quality and badly handled; but possessing almost infinite capabilities of exhibiting excellence, and conveying enjoyment. Of course, during the generation before Balzac's birth and also that between his birth and 1830, the Terror Novel—from the Castle of Otranto to Maturin—had circled through Europe, and "Illuminism" of various kinds had taken particular hold of France just before the Revolution. But Balzac's "Occult," like Balzac's everything, was not the same as anybody else's. Whether you take it in La Peau de Chagrin itself, or in Séraphita, or anywhere, it consists, again, rather in atmosphere than in "figures." A weaker genius would have attached to the skin of that terrible wild ass—gloomier, but more formidable than even the beast in Job[168]—some attendant evil spirit, genie, or "person" of some sort. A bit of shagreen externally, shrinking—with age—perhaps? with weather?—what not?—a life shrinking in mysterious sympathy—that is what was wanted and what you have, without ekings, or explanations, or other trumpery.

Its action and reaction.

Nor is it only in the ostensibly "occult" or (as he was pleased to call them) "philosophic" studies and and stories that you get this atmosphere. It spreads practically everywhere—the very bankruptcies and the sordid details of town and country life are overshadowed and in a certain sense dis-realised by it. Indeed that verb which, like most new words, has been condemned by some precisians, but which was much wanted, applies to no prose writer quite so universally as to Balzac. He is a dis-realiser, not by style as some are, but in thought—at the very same time that he gives such impressions of realism. Sometimes, but not often, he comes quite close to real mundane reality, sometimes, as in the most "philosophical" of the so-called philosophical works, he hardly attempts a show of it. But as a rule when he is at his very best, as in La Peau de Chagrin, in La Recherche de l'Absolu, in Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu, he attains a kind of point of unity between disrealising and realising—he disrealises the common and renders the uncommon real in a fashion actually carrying out what he can never have known—the great Coleridgian definition or description of poetry. In fact, if prose-poetry were not a contradiction in terms, Balzac would be, except in style,[169] the greatest prose-poet of them all.

Peculiarity of the conversation.

On[170] one remarkable characteristic of the Comédie very little has usually been said. It has been neglected wholly by most critics, though it is of the very first importance. And that is the astonishingly small use, in proportion, which Balzac makes of that great weapon of the novelist, dialogue, and the almost smaller effect which it accordingly has in producing his results (whatever they are) on his readers. With some novelists dialogue is almost all-powerful. Dumas, for instance (as is pointed out elsewhere), does almost everything by it. In his best books especially you may run the eye over dozens, scores, almost hundreds of pages without finding a single one printed "solid." The author seldom makes any reflections at all; and his descriptions, with, of course, some famous exceptions, are little more than longish stage directions. Nor is this by any means merely due to early practice in the drama itself; for something like it is to be found in writers who have had no such practice. In Balzac, after making every allowance for the fact that he often prints his actual conversations without typographical separation of the speeches, the case is just the other way. Moreover, and this is still more noteworthy, it is not by what his characters do say that we remember them. The situation perhaps most of all; the character itself very often; the story sometimes (but of that more presently)—these are the things for and by which we remember Balzac and the vast army of his creations; while sometimes it is not even for any of these things, but for "interiors," "business," and the like. When one thinks of single points in him, it is scarcely ever of such things as the "He has got his discharge, by——!" of Dickens; as the "Adsum" of Thackeray; as the "Trop lourd!" of Porthos' last agony; as the longer but hardly less quintessenced malediction of Habakkuk Mucklewrath on Claverhouse. It is of Eugénie Grandet shrinking in automatic repulsion from the little bench as she reads her cousin's letter; of Henri de Marsay's cigar (his enjoyment of it, that is to say, for his words are quite commonplace) as he leaves "la Fille aux Yeux d'Or"; of the lover allowing himself to be built up in "La Grande Bretèche." Observe that there is not the slightest necessity to apportion the excellence implied in these different kinds of reminiscence; as a matter of fact, each way of fastening the interest and the appreciation of the reader is indifferently good.[171] But the distinction remains.

And of the "story" interest.

There is another point on which, though no good critic can miss it, some critics seem to dislike dwelling; and this is that, though Balzac's separate situations, as has just been said, are arresting in the highest degree, it is often distinctly difficult to read him "for the story." Even M. Brunetière lets slip an admission that "interest" of the ordinary kind is not exactly Balzac's forte; while another admirer of his grants freely that his affabulation is weak. Once more, we need not and must not make too much of this; but it is important that it should not be forgotten, and the extreme Balzacian is sometimes apt to forget it. That it comes sometimes from Balzac's mania for rehandling and reshaping—that he has actually, like the hero of what is to some his most unforgettable short story, daubed the masterpiece into a blur—is certain. But it probably comes more often, and is much more interesting as coming, from want of co-ordination between the observing and the imagining faculties which are (as Hugo meant) the yoked coursers of Balzac's car.

The fact is that exceptis excipiendis, of which Eugénie Grandet is the chief solid example, it is not by the ordinary means, or in the ordinary ways, that Balzac makes any considerable part of his appeal. He is very much more der Einzige in novel-writing than Jean Paul was in novel-writing or anything else; for a good deal of Richter's uniqueness depended[172] upon eccentricities of style, etc., from which Balzac is entirely free. And the same may be said, with the proper mutations, of George Meredith. No one ever made less use—despite his "details" and "interiors"—of what may be called intellectual or artistic costume and properties than the author of the Comédie Humaine. The most egotistical of men in certain ways, he never thrusts his ego upon you. The most personal in his letters, he is almost as impersonal in most of his writings (Louis Lambert, etc., being avowedly exceptional) as Shakespeare. Now, though the personal interest may be not illegitimate and sometimes great, the impersonal is certainly greater. Thanks to industrious prying, not always deserving the adjective impertinent, we know a great deal about Balzac; and it is by no means difficult to apply some of the knowledge to aid the study of his creation. But in reading the creation itself you never need this knowledge; it never forces itself on you. The hundreds, and almost thousands, of persons who form the company of the Comédie—their frequently recurring parts adjusted with extraordinary, though by no means obtrusive or offensive, consistency to the enormous world of detail and scenery and general "surroundings" in which their parts are played—are never interfered with by the pointing-stick or the prompter. They are there; they can't help being there, and you have to make the best or the worst of them as you can. Considering the general complexion of this universe, its inevitableness and apparent αυταρκεια may seem, in some moods and to some persons, a little oppressive; it is always, perhaps, as has been admitted, productive rather of admiration than of pleasure. Faults of various kinds may be found with it. But it is almost always wonderful; it is often great, and it is sometimes of the greatest.[173]

FOOTNOTES:

[124] Of course there are exceptions, Le Rouge et le Noir and La Peau de Chagrin being perhaps the chief among long novels; while some of Balzac's short stories possess the quality in almost the highest degree.

[125] He tried several pseudonyms, but settled on this. Unfortunately, he sometimes (not always) made it "De Stendhal," without anything before the "De," and more unfortunately still, in the days of his Napoleonic employment he, if he had not called himself, had allowed himself to be called "M. de Beyle"—an assumption which though dropped, was not forgotten in the days of his later anti-aristocratism.

[126] Beyle himself recognized the necessity of the reader's collaboration.

[127] This does not apply to poets as much as to prose writers: a fact for which reasons could perhaps be given. And it certainly does not apply to Balzac.

[128] He was now forty-four, and had published not a few volumes, mostly small, of other kinds—travel description (which he did uncommonly well), and miscellaneous writing, and criticism, including the famous Racine et Shakespeare, an avant-coureur of Romanticism which contained, besides matter on its title-subjects, some sound estimate of Scott as a writer and some very unsound abuse about him as a man. This last drew from Byron, who had met Beyle earlier at Milan, a letter of expostulation and vindication which did that noble poet infinite credit, but of which Beyle, by no means to his credit, took notice. He was only too like Hazlitt in more ways than one: though few books with practically the same title can be more different than De l'Amour and Liber Amoris.

[129] As for instance, those from Dekker and Massiger; Camoens and Ercilla are allowed their native tongues "neat."

[130] The actual "Chartreuse" of Parma only makes its appearance on the very last page of the book, when the hero, resigning his arch bishopric, retires to it.

[131] He is the younger son of a rich and noble family, but his father disowns and his older brother denounces him quite early. It is characteristic of Beyle that we hear very little of the father and are practically never even introduced to the brother.

[132] These four words somehow make me think of Samuel Newcome's comment on the unfortunate dinner where "Farintosh" did not appear: "Scarcely anything was drank."

[133] See note above.

[134] Both would have declined to meddle with her, I think, but for different reasons.

[135] Beyle, who had himself no good looks, is particularly lavish of them to his heroes.

[136] Perhaps one of the rare biographical details which, as has been explained, may "force the consigne" here, is that Beyle in his youth, and almost up to middle age, was acquainted with an old lady who had the very unenviable reputation of having actually "sat for" Madame de Merteuil.

[137] This bad bloodedness, or κακοηθεια, of Beyle's heroes is really curious. It would have qualified them later to be Temperance fanatics or Trade Union demagogues. The special difference of all three is an intense dislike of somebody else "having something."

[138] In that merry and wise book Clarissa Furiosa.

[139] She keeps the anniversary of his execution, and imitates Marguerite in procuring and treasuring, at the end of the story, Julien's severed head. (It may be well to note that Dumas had not yet written La Reine Margot.)

[140] In proper duel, of course; not as he shot his mistress.

[141] Its great defect is the utter absence of any poetical element. But, as Mérimée (than whom there could hardly be, in this case, a critic more competent or more friendly) said, poetry was, to Beyle, lettre close.

[142] It seems curiously enough, that Beyle did mean to make the book gai. It is a a very odd kind of gaiety!

[143] This attraction of the forçat is one of the most curious features in all French Romanticism. It was perhaps partly one of the general results of the Revolutionary insanity earlier, partly a symptom or sequel of Byronism. But the way it raged not only among folks like Eugène Sue, but among men and women of great talent and sometimes genius—George Sand, Balzac, Dumas, Victor Hugo—the last and greatest carrying it on for nearly two generations—is a real curiousity of literature. (The later and different crime-novel of Gaboriau & Co. will be dealt with in its place.)

[144] V. sup. vol. i. p. 39.

[145] A pseudonymous person has "reconstituted" the story under the title of Lucien Leeuwen (the hero's name). But some not inconsiderable experience of reconstitutions of this kind determined me to waste no further portion of my waning life on any one of them.

[146] It may be desirable to glance at Beyle's avowed or obvious "intentions" in most if not all his novels—in the Chartreuse to differentiate Italian from French character, in Le Rouge et le Noir to embody the Macchiavellian-Napoleonic principle which has been of late so tediously phrased (after the Germans) as "will to" something and the like. These intentions may interest some: for me, I must confess, they definitely get in the way of the interest. For essays, "good": for novels, "no."

[147] Vide Guy Mannering as to the "macers."

[148] Les Chouans.

[149] Forty vols. London: 1895-8.

[150] Quarterly Review for January 1907.

[151] I believe I may say, without fatuity, that the general Introduction and the Quarterly article, above referred to, contain most things that anybody but a special student will need.

[152] It is, however, important to remember that almost the whole of the first of these three decades was taken up with the tentatives, while the concluding lustrum was comparatively infertile. The Comédie was, in the main, the crop of fifteen years only.

[153] It ought always to be, but has not always been, put as a round sum to his credit in this part of the account that he heartily recognised the value of Scott as a novelist. A hasty thinker might be surprised at this; not so the wiser mind.

[154] This remarkable person deserves at least a note here "for one thing that he did"—the novel of Fragoletta (1829), which many should know of—though they may not know it—from Mr. Swinburne's poem, and some perhaps from Balzac's own review. It is one of the followings of La Religieuse, and is a disappointing book, not from being too immoral nor from being not immoral enough, but because it does not "come off." There is a certain promise, suggestion, "atmosphere," but the actual characterisation is vague and obscure, and the story is told with no grasp. This habit of "flashing in the pan" is said to have been characteristic of all Latouche's work, which was fairly voluminous and of many different kinds, from journalism to poetry; and it may have been partly due to, partly the cause of, a cross-grained disposition. He had, however, a high repute for spoken if not written criticism, had a great influence as a trainer or mentor on George Sand, and perhaps not a little on Balzac himself. During the later years of his fairly long life he lived in retirement and produced nothing.

[155] One of the friends who have read my proofs takes a more Alexandrian way with this objection and says "But there are." I do not know that I disagree with him: but as he does not disagree with what follows in itself, both answers shall stand.

[156] Cf. Maupassant's just protest against this, to which we shall come.

[157] An actual reduction of Balzac's books to smaller but still narrative scale is very seldom possible and would be still more rarely satisfactory. The best substitute for it is the already glanced at Répertoire of MM. Christophe and Cerfbeer, a curious but very satisfactory Biographical Dictionary of the Comedy's personae.

[158] "Sans génie je suis flambé," as he wrote early to his sister.

[159] This is about the best of the batch, and I agree with those who think that it would not have disfigured the Comédie. Indeed the exclusion of these juvenilia from the Édition Définitive was a critical blunder. Even if Balzac did once wish it, the "dead hand" is not to be too implicitly given way to, and he was so constantly changing his views that he probably would have altered this also had he lived.

[160] A certain kind of commentator would probably argue from Mr. Browning's well-known words "fifty volumes long" that he had, and another that he had not read the Œuvres de Jeunesse.

[161] He would not have liked the name "patriot" because of its corruption, but he was one.

[162] Not a few things, some of them very good, came between—the pleasant Maison du Chat-qui-Pelote, several of the wonderful short stories, and the beginning of the Contes Drolatiques. But none of them had the "importance"—in the artistic sense of combined merit and scale—of the Peau.

[163] I mean, of course, as far as books go. We have positive testimony that there was a live Becky, and I would I had known her!

[164] Originally and perhaps preferably called La Rabouilleuse from the early occupation of its heroine, Flore Brazier, one of Balzac's most notable figures.

[165] It is one of the strangest instances of the limitations of some of the best critics that M. Brunetière declined even to speak of this great book.

[166] The immense influence of Maturin in France, and especially on Balzac, is an old story now, though it was not always so.

[167] It is possible that some readers may miss a more extended survey, or at least sample, of these characters. But the plea made above as to abstract of the stories is valid here. There is simply not room to do justice to say, Lucien de Rubempré, who pervades a whole block of novels and stories, or to others from Rastignac to Corentin.

[168] It has sometimes occurred to me that perhaps the skin was that of Job's onager.

[169] He does try a sort of pseudo-poetical style sometimes; but it is seldom successful, and sometimes mere "fine-writing" of no very fine kind. The close of Peau de Chagrin and Séraphita contain about the best passages.

[170] The two next paragraphs are, by the kind permission of the Editor and Publisher of the Quarterly Review, reprinted, with some slight alterations, from the article above referred to.

[171] I have known this denied by persons of authority, who would exalt the gift of conversation even above the pure narrative faculty. I should admit the latter was commoner, but hardly that it was inferior.

[172] I believe I may speak without rashness thus, for a copy of the sixteen-volume (was it not?) edition was a cherished possession of mine for years, and I even translated a certain amount for my own amusement—especially Die unsichtbare Loge.

[173] I have said nothing here on a point of considerable interest to myself—the question whether Balzac can be said ever (or at least often) to have drawn a gentleman or a lady. It would require too much "justification" by analysis of particular characters. And this would pass into a more general enquiry whether these two species exist in the Balzacium Sidus itself. Which things open long vistas. (V. inf. on Charles de Bernard.)

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