The Fact.
Balzac’s ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. His Hulot was to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the love of woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, in whom is incarnated the instinct and the science of sexual corruption, is Hulot’s Cleopatra, and only dies because ‘elle va faire le bon Dieu’—as who should say ‘to mash the Old Man’; Frenhœffer, Philippe Bridau, Vautrin, Marsay, Rastignac, Grandet, Balthazar Claës, Béatrix, Sarrazine, Lousteau, Esther, Lucien Chardon—the list is, I believe, some thousands strong! Also the argument is proved in advance: there is the Comédie itself—‘the new edition fifty volumes long.’ Bad or good, foul or fair, impossible or actual, a monstrous debauch of mind or a triumph of realisation, there is the Comédie. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the last stones of it; and it exists—if a little the worse for wear: the bulk is enormous—if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten
and crumbling. Truly, he had ‘incomparable power.’ He was the least capable and the most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinate effects. He may be impossible; but there is French literature and French society to show that he passed that way, and had ‘incomparable power.’ The phrase is Mr. Henry James’s, and it is hard to talk of Balzac and refrain from it.