It is to be regretted that these two books, the first of which was published at the outset of the author’s career, and the second towards the close of his life, were not strengthened and augmented by the others with which he proposed to accompany them, and whose subjects and titles—namely, “Anatomie des Corps Enseignants,” “Pathologie de la Vie Sociale,” “Monographie de la Vertu,” “Dialogue Philosophique et Politique sur la Perfection du XIXe Siècle”—have alone descended to us; for this vein of literary treasure can never be profitably worked save by another Balzac or a modern Aristophanes.
It was in 1844 that Balzac said, “The first half of the present century will be found to have been greatly influenced by four men,—Napoleon, Cuvier, O’Connell, and myself. The first lived on the blood of Europe, the second espoused the globe, the third became the incarnation of an entire race, while I shall have carried a complete society in my brain.”
Though almost another half century has now elapsed since these words were uttered, it would seem that the influence which he was then conscious of exerting is even more vigorous than before. The characters which he painted formed, it is true, part of a Paris now dead and forgotten, but the types have survived, and the lessons which he deduced therefrom are as eminently instructive now as they were in the days when he wrote; and while, taking the world at large as the groundwork of his edifice, man was necessarily but the detail, he has, in his description thereof, painted him in every phase,—consequent and inconsequent, neither completely good nor completely vicious, logical at times, and sometimes great, but incessantly opposing his own interests to the laws of society in that gigantic struggle of customs and sentiments which is as inconsistent to-day as it was fifty years ago.
When the “fiat lux” was pronounced, and man completed, Balzac turned to his natural companion, and in his portraiture of woman not a single type is lacking. Herein he is unexcelled and unsurpassable. That which Euripides considered as the most terrible of all misfortunes, and De Maistre nothing but a beautiful animal, found its most graphic expression through him. As a faithful naturalist, he has, in descending the spiral of civilization, described and classified the femina simplex; but the ideal woman, sublime in her errors, magnificent in her devotion, and royal in her forgiveness, has found her geographer in him. His descriptions of Madame de Beauséant, the Duchesse de Langeais, Madame Firmiani, the Countess in “Colonel Chabert,” Madame Claës, Madame Jules, Madame de Montsauf, Béatrix, and Mademoiselle des Touches comprise woman almost in her entirety; they are landmarks in psychological study; and so true to nature are they that their appearance marked a new era in literature.
It is in these portraits that Balzac is most realistic; and while a few of the most admirable among them are sometimes erring, yet it will be admitted that womankind is not composed exclusively of angels; perfection is often dull, and a fault may be a virtue. By way of contrast, however, he has, in Eugénie Grandet, Madame Firmiani, Madame de la Chanterie, Marguerite Claës, Madame Jules, Agathe Rouget, Pierrette, Madame Hulot, and Ursule Mirouët, not only solved the difficult problem of rendering virtue interesting, but he has created in frames of impeccable beauty a series of irreproachable Madonnas.
His revelation of woman is completed in a special and parallel study of love. Love he considered the mainspring of humanity; without it, religion, history, romance, and art would be useless; and he has analyzed, dissected, and explained its every phase, hesitation, palpitation, and tenderness.
Beyond the scenic effects which he lent to passion, Balzac entered thoroughly into the specialties of trade and profession, and it seems almost incredible that one mind could have grappled with the details of the practice of law which are so admirably described in the “Contrat de Mariage,” in his portrait of Derville the lawyer, Peerquin the notary, and the proceedings in “César Birotteau,” while imagining such types as Vautrin, who dominated Paris from the depths of the galleys, or La Fille aux yeux d’or languishing in her octagonal boudoir.
As Bianchou he is alienist and physician; in Dr. Mirouët he is medium and mesmerist; he is a miser in Grandet and discounter in Gobseck; he is vicar at Tours and old maid at Issoudun. None better than he has described that class of fascinating scoundrels of which Rastignac is the type, nor painted more clearly the heralds of ennui and philosophers of satiety than he has done in De Marsay and Maxime de Trailles. In “Les Deux Poètes” he is printer and manufacturer of paper; in the “Cousin Pons” he presents the flower of an imagination intoxicated with the master paintings of great artists; while in the “Illusions Perdues” the journalist is dissected and the publisher decomposed.
In the veins of his characters there is not a drop of ink; they live, move, and have their being, and their eyelashes are as delicately finished as their epigrams.
Starting from the mud and vermin of Parisian by-ways, and ascending to the steps of the throne, Balzac garnered every possible type, no two of which are similar; each is original and all are profoundly human; and while the dregs of London are not further removed from the splendors of Teheran than is mother Nourrison from the Duc de Grandlieu, yet Balzac’s intuition divined the one as clearly as he described the other.