When, therefore, the poetry of the Greeks was becoming entangled in the subtleties of versification, it received a fresh and vigorous impulsion from Theocritus, who, disregarding the set rules of his contemporaries, and returning to the direct observation of reality, expressed not only the ideal, as poetry should, but also Nature in her most humble and familiar details, and represented his Shepherdess as beautiful but unkempt, the odor of cattle about her, and with her hands hardened by contact with the horns of the steers. Pictures of the obvious and the true should represent, therefore, not only the beautiful but the repulsive, not only that which is unpleasant but that which is agreeable; and the Shepherdess of Theocritus, in her unkempt beauty, would be as untrue to nature had she not the odor of the cattle about her as are the patched and powdered bergères with which Watteau charmed the Pompadour.
Nature loves and abounds in contrasts, as witness the toad squatting beneath the rose bush; and while either may afford a separate study, yet the union of the two is necessary in a faithful picture of what actually exists.
When, therefore, Villon broke away from the stilted and flowery madrigals of the school of Charles d’Orléans, and sought anew for the simplicity of Nature, he was but continuing Theocritus and paving the way for Diderot and Rétif de la Bretonne. The current of opinion, however, was adverse to these writers, and it was not until the early part of the present century, when the Romantic school, with its vanguards led by Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand and with Victor Hugo for its subsequent chief, had succeeded after a terrible struggle in freeing themselves from the established rules and conventional phrasing of the classicists and had raised the standard of liberty in art, that many of the prejudices which the Academicians had engendered disappeared, and the ground, swept clean and clear, was prepared for the advent of a new teacher.
It was at this propitious moment that Balzac, already famous through his “Physiologie du Mariage,” presented his credentials in the “Peau de Chagrin,” and with an audacity unparalleled in literature represented his hero as troubled not only about the state of his mistress’ affections, but also as to whether he would have money enough to pay her fare in a cab.
The stupefaction and indignation of the purists at this unheard-of infraction of their formal style were indescribable, but the Romantic school upheld the innovation, and the new generation applauded the realistic portrayal of the penniless student who went to an evening entertainment on the points of his shoes, while dreading a splash of mud more than a shot from a pistol.
In this respect, therefore, the “Peau de Chagrin” marked the first return in the nineteenth century to the real and to the true; it gave a fresh impulse to an expiring literature, and constituted the corner-stone of the Realistic school, which has found such able exponents not only in the De Goncourts and Flaubert, but in Dickens, Thackeray, Tourgénieff, and a host of lesser lights.
But Balzac’s incontestable superiority over other writers consists in his descriptions of the habits and customs of every-day life, and in his perception and rendition of the delicate and innumerable shadings which accompany their thousand complications, in the scenes of private life which he depicted, in the little mysterious dramas which take place every day in every social sphere, and especially in his portraits. The exactitude of the transcription, the delicacy of the shading, and the profusion and realism of detail are such that it would almost seem as though reality itself had been transported and placed before the eyes of the reader.
The third and last number of the “Revue Parisienne” contains a criticism of Balzac’s on the “Chartreuse de Parme,” in which, in alluding to the author, he says, “Stendhal is one of the most remarkable writers of the day, but in his work form is neglected; he writes as a bird sings.”
Form, the absence of which he noticed in Stendhal, was to him a source of continued care and preoccupation, and he would often spend an hour in burnishing a single sentence. With all his facility of conception, execution was exceedingly laborious, and his admiration of Gautier’s ability to dash off without an erasure a warm-colored and impeccable article, while unbounded, was not unmixed with a certain conviction that the work would be improved by a thorough revision.
As has been seen, Balzac spent almost ten years in forming his hand and chastening his style, and the courage which he then manifested was equaled only by the patience with which he sought to improve the coloring of his afterwork. As a grammarian he is unsurpassed, and the faults which are noticeable in many of his works are for the most part purely clerical, and due to his mania for writing his books on proof-sheets instead of in manuscript. As an innovator he was of course attacked,—all innovators are,—and Sainte-Beuve, whose manner of writing Balzac had characterized as macaroni, continually ridiculed his style and form of expression. In this respect, however, it should be remembered that at the time of Balzac’s advent into literature the French language had been passed through a strainer so fine that no terms remained to express anything beyond the purely conventional; and Balzac, who was thoroughly impressed with Aristotle’s idea that the inexpressible does not exist, was almost obliged to create a language of his own; and in his endeavor to express himself with realistic clearness he seized upon every suggestive technicality which he encountered in science, in the green room, the alcoves of the hospital, or the by-ways of Paris, and built a vocabulary from all that was most expressive in the different strata of existence. It was he who invented “chic” and many other terms of an equally felicitous nature.