His conception of the novel.
And yet the novel, as he conceived it, gave him the best of opportunities for putting his results before the world. If we allow ourselves to set all our attention on politics and finance and social theory, we lose in life all but the smell of blue-books, and the grey colour of Stock Exchange returns. If Balzac had written science, and not stories, we should have only had the ideas of his novels without that passionate presentment of concrete things that gives those ideas their vitality. Indeed, the novels are far greater than the ideas, just as the poetic, seeing man in Balzac was greater than the scientist. Weariless in distinguishing man from man, type from type, specimen from specimen, by the slightest indication of the clay, he was able in novels, as he could never have done in works of science, to give the colour of each man's life expressed in his actions, in his talk, in his choice of clothes, in the furniture of his room. The action of all novels, like that of all plays, is performed in the brain of the reader or spectator. The novelist's and dramatist's characters are like pieces on a chessboard, symbols of possibilities not obviously expressed. In older fiction these possibilities were left so vague that the reader could adopt any part he chose, without in the least interfering with the story, independent as that was of personal character. Never before Balzac made them had the chessmen assumed so much of human detail. In his books they are no longer pegs of wood, depending for their meanings on the reader's generosity, for their adventures on the ingenuity of the author. They make their moves in their own rights. The hero of a Balzac novel is not the reader, in borrowed clothes, undergoing a series of quite arbitrary experiences. He cannot be made to do what the author requires, but fills his own suits, and has a private life. Balzac knows and makes his reader feel that his characters have not leapt ready-made into the world to eat and drink through a couple of hundred pages and vanish whence they came. They have left their mark on things, and things have left their mark on them. They have lived in pages where he has not seen them, and Balzac never drags them to take a part in existences to which they do not belong. I can remember no case where Balzac uses a stock scene, a room, or a garden, or a valley that would do for anything. There was only one room, one valley, one garden, where the characters could have said those words, lost that money, or kissed those kisses, and Balzac's stupendous energy is equal not only to pouring life into his people, but also to forcing the particular scene upon his canvas with such vivid strokes that every cobble seems to have a heart, and every flower in a pot to sway its blossoms with the sun. Even in the short stories, where he often follows gods that are not his own, writing of madness like a Hoffmann, and of intrigue like a Boccaccio, his peculiar genius is apparent in the environments. How carefully, in La Messe de l'Athée, he works out the conditions of life that made the story possible for its actors. And, in the longer novels, there is scarcely a sentence unweighted with evidence that is of real import to him who would truly understand the characters and happenings of the book. How much does not the story of Eugénie Grandet owe to that description of the little money-getting, vine-growing town of Saumur, with its cobbled streets, its old houses, its greedy faces watching the weather from the house doors, the only proper setting for the narrow power of Goodman Grandet, and the leaden monotony of his daughter's life?
Balzac's world and that of Realism.
Balzac's fierce determination that his lies should be true in their details has often been remarked in claiming him as the first of the French realists. And, indeed, others of his characteristics, his interest in life as it is, the scientific bias that found its parody in Zola, his fearlessness in choice of subject, his entire freedom from classical ideals, are certainly attributes of realism. Realism is ready, like Balzac, to deal with stock exchanges and bakeries and all the side shops of civilisation; realism finds Greek Greek and not an Elixir of Life; realism tries to see life as it is. But realism (an impossible ideal) needs for its approximate attainment a man of ordinary energy; and this Balzac was not. Balzac used Thor's hammer, not one from the carpenter's shop. He lived like ten men and so do his characters. A crossing-sweeper in a story by Balzac would wear out his broom in half an hour, but the broom of a crossing-sweeper of de Maupassant or Flaubert would be certain of an average life. Balzac's world is not the world of realism, because it goes too fast, like a clock without a pendulum, running at full speed. His world is more alive than ours, and so are his men. They are demons, men carried to the nth power. Fire runs in their veins instead of blood, and we watch them with something like terror, as if we were peeping into hell. They are superhuman like Balzac himself, and have become a kind of lesser divinities. None but he would have dared 'to frame their fearful symmetry.' None but they could so well have illustrated existence as Balzac saw it.
A new motive in fiction.
And life, as this Rabelaisian Frenchman saw it, in the chaotic years of the nineteenth century, was a terrible thing except to the blind and the numbed, and to those who, like himself, possessed 'unconquerable souls.' He found two primary motives in existence. Passion and the production of children was one. He said that this was the only one. But his life and his work made it clear that there was another, and that this other was money. Money, the need of it, the spending of it, fantastic but always acute plans for getting hold of it, like that suggested in Facino Cane, filled his own life, and were not banished even from his love-letters. His own obsession by debts and business forced on him as a novelist a new way of looking at life, and, through him, gave another outlook to story-telling. In the older novels, Fielding's for example, rich were rich, and poor were poor, and only to be changed from one to the other by some calamity or fairy godmother of a coincidence. People were static; unless they turned out to be Somebody's illegitimate son or rightful heir, their clothes were not of a finer cut as they grew older, and if they ate off wooden platters in the first chapter, they supped no more daintily in the last. In romantic tales and fairy stories, a hero might cut his way to fortune through dragons or piratical Turks; in the rogue novels he might swindle a dinner, and after long switchbacking between twopence and nothing, happen by accident upon a competence; he never, before Balzac took him in hand, went grimly at life, closing his heart, concentrating his energies, compelling even love to help him in his steady climb from poverty to opulence. He left that to the villain, and the story-teller took care that the villain eventually got his deserts. The older novelists were vastly interested in the progress of a love-affair; Balzac looks kindly at that, but his real interest is in the progress of a financial superman. The wealth and poverty of Balzac's characters is the quality that makes or breaks them. The mainspring of their actions is the desire of getting on in life. What is the tragedy of Eugénie Grandet, but money? What is the tragedy of Père Goriot, but money? Eliminate wealth and poverty from either of them and they cease to exist. If old Goriot had been rich and indulgent to his daughters he would have been an estimable father; but he is poor; his daughters must be luxurious, and so he is Père Goriot. The story is that of Lear and his kingdom, translated into hundred franc notes and lacking the Cordelia. Love, Wisdom, Gentleness are inconsequent dreamers in a house of Mammon. They talk in window corners and behind curtains, ashamed of their disinterestedness. They are like the old gods banished from the temples, whispering in secret places in the woods, and going abroad quietly in the twilight, while in the glare of noon the clanking brazen giant strides heavily across the world.
'And underneath his feet, all scattered lay
Dead skulls and bones of men, whose life had gone astray.'