There was a logic, a completeness, in the groundwork of the scheme, that would have sterilised the imagination of a man with less exuberant vitality. Compare for a moment the Comédie Humaine with the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott meant to Balzac what Maria Edgeworth had meant to himself. He had seen in her an attempt to paint Irish country and character, and had decided to do the same for Scotland. Balzac after those ten years of bad mediæval stories, those ten years of labour for the Rachel of his own soul, saw in him an attempt to paint Scottish country and character, and decided to do the same for France. But, whereas Scott had been brought up on the Reliques of English Poetry, and in the country of purple heather, grey rock, and leaping stream, Balzac was nourished on philosophy and science, and spent his youth in a Paris lodging. Scott saw men rather than kinds of man. Bailie Nicol Jarvie is more Nicol Jarvie than Bailie. Balzac comes at life in a much more scientific spirit. 'Does not Society make of man,' he asks, as Chaucer has unconsciously asked before him, 'as many different men as there are varieties in zoology? The differences between a soldier, a labourer, an administrator, an idler, a savant, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a pauper, a priest, are, though more difficult to seize, as considerable as those that distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the sea-calf, the goat, etc.' Balzac made up his mind to collect specimens of the social species, not pressed and dried, like the old 'Characters' of the seventeenth century, but exhibited alive and in their natural surroundings. He was to make a world with the colour of contemporary France, an 'august lie, true in its details,' a world complete in itself, a world in which all the characters were to show the impress of that state of life to which it should please Balzac to call them. That was the idea that turned the Waverley Novels into the Comédie Humaine, that the idea whose exposition by a less full-blooded professor would have been so readily precise, so readily dull in its precision.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physical energy and the task of writing.
Now there are few harder tasks for a man of overflowing physical energy than this, of covering innumerable sheets of paper with wriggling unnatural lines traced with the end of a pen. It is likely to become a torment; the feet cross and uncross, the fingers itch, the inkpot flies across the room, and the energy defeats itself. There is the legend of Scott's hand, covering sheet after sheet so swiftly and with such regularity that it was painful to watch it; but Scott's was not the bomb-like brute energy of Balzac. Balzac, to give life to his scientific ideas, needed a more fiery vitality than Scott's, who began and ended with merely human notions. The actual writing of his books was proportionately more difficult for him. There was no mere eccentricity in his habit of getting the sketches for his books set up in type, and enlarging them from proofs in the middle of large sheets of paper, covering the vast margins with the additions that were to make the books themselves. It was a wise attempt to give himself the same physical outlet as that enjoyed by the painter or sculptor, to give himself something to pull about, something actual, something that could be attacked, anything rather than the terrible silkworm spinning of a single endless fibre. His energy would have been wasted in a hundred ways unless, so far as was possible, he had fitted his work to himself and himself to his work. Giant of concentration as he was, he added cubits to his stature by taking thought. He made his writing hours different from every one else's, wore a white frock something like a monk's habit, and found in the drinking of enormous quantities of coffee a stimulant as much theatrical as medicinal. These things meant much to him, and his use of them was an action similar to that of Poe's schoolboy, who, when guessing odd or even the marbles in his playmate's hand, would imitate the expression of his adversary's face and see what thoughts arose in his mind. The paraphernalia of work were likely to induce the proper spirit. When all his fellow Parisians were in bed, Balzac, gathering the voluminous white folds about his sturdy person, and glancing at the coffee stewing on the fire, sat down to his writing-table with the conviction of an alderman sitting down to a city dinner. There could never be a doubt in his mind as to the purpose for which he was there.
Balzac's prose.
This navvy-work of production had its influence on the character of his writing. But it was never in Balzac's nature to have understood Gautier's craftsman's delight in the polishing and chasing of diminutive things. Balzac, the working machine, was simply enormous energy so coaxed and trained as to produce an enormous output. The raw material of his rich humanity passed through violent processes. It had but small chance of any very delicate finish. Balzac thought in books and in cycles of books, never in pages, paragraphs, or sentences. Although he was much preoccupied with 'style,' envying the men whose writing would be charming to the ear even if it meant nothing to the mind, the best of his own prose is unbeautiful, rugged, fiercely energetic, peculiarly his own, and therefore not to be grumbled at. He would have liked to write finely, just as he would have liked la vie splendide. But his mind, delivering pickaxe blows, or furiously wrestling with great masses of material, could not clothe itself in stately periods. Always, out of any splendour that he made for it, shows a brown, brawny arm, and the splendour becomes an impertinence. He had ideas on art, as he had ideas on science, but his was too large a humanity to allow itself to be subordinate to either. He was too full-blooded a man to be withered by a theory. He was too eager to say what he had in his mouth to be patient in the modulation of his voice. He was almost too much of a man to be an artist. To think of that man fashioning small, perfect poems, who avowed that he wrote his Contes Drôlatiques because he happened to notice the fall in the French birth rate, is to think of a Colossus tinkering at the mechanism of a watch.
His proximity to life.
Then, too, he had been too close to life to think of art for art's sake. During the years that followed his setting up author in a garret, he had watched the existence of those who are so near starvation that they seem to make a living by sweeping the doorstep of Death. And, at the same time that, walking out in the evenings, and following a workman and his wife on their way home, he had been able to feel their rags upon his back, and to walk with their broken shoes upon his feet, he had also had his glimpses of la vie splendide, the more vivid, no doubt, for their contrast with the sober realities he knew. To this man, however great a writer he might become, life would always mean more than books. It always did. He could cut short other people's lamentations by saying, 'Well, but let us talk of real things; let us talk of Eugénie Grandet,' but Eugénie Grandet, the miser's daughter, interested him much more than the mere novel of that name. His people never existed for the sake of his books, but always his books for the sake of his people. He makes a story one-legged or humpbacked without scruple, so long as by doing so he can make his reader see a man and his circumstances exactly as they appeared to himself. He was not like a pure artist, an instrument on which life played, producing beautiful things. His concern with life was always positive. His world was not a world of dream and patterned imagery, but, according to his mood, was an elaborate piece of mechanism and he an impassioned mechanician, or a zoological garden and he an impassioned zoologist. It is almost matter for wonder that such a man should choose to express himself in narrative.