Balzac's influence during his lifetime was, with but few exceptions, exercised outside his own, novelist's profession. The sphere in which it made itself chiefly felt was that of the cultured reading public, and the public was, first and foremost, a foreign one. History repeated itself. To Honore d'Urfe, the author of the Astree, in the sixteenth century, while living in Piedmont, a letter came announcing that twenty-nine princesses and nineteen lords of Germany had adopted the names and characters of his heroes and heroines in the Astree, and had founded an academy of true lovers. Almost the same thing occurred to the nineteenth-century Honore de Balzac. For a while, certain people in Venetian society assumed the titles and roles of his chief personages, playing the parts, in some instances, out to their utmost conclusion.
Sainte-Beuve, who, in 1850, drew attention to this curious historical analogy, went on to mention that, in Hungary, Poland, and Russia, Balzac's novels created a fashion. The strange, rich furniture that was assembled and arranged, according to the novelist's fancy, out of the artistic productions of many countries and epochs, became an after-reality. Numerous wealthy persons prided themselves on possessing what the author had merely imagined. The interior of their houses was adorned a la Balzac.
One evening at Vienna, says his sister, he entered a concert-room, where, as soon as his presence was perceived and bruited about, all the audience rose in his honour; and, at the end of the entertainment, a student seized his hand and kissed it, exclaiming: "I bless the hand that wrote Seraphita." Balzac himself relates that, once travelling in Russia, he and his friends, as night was coming on, went and asked for hospitality at a castle. On their entrance, the lady of the house and some other members of the fair sex vied with each other in eagerness to serve the guests. One of the younger ladies hurried to the kitchen for refreshment. In the meantime, the novelist's identity was revealed to the chatelaine. A lively conversation was immediately engaged in, and, when the impromptu Abigail returned with the refreshment, the first words she heard were: "Well, Monsieur Balzac, so you think—" Full of surprise and joy she started, dropped the tray she had in her hands, and everything was broken. "Glory I have known and seen," adds the narrator; "wasn't that glory?"
It was more. It was power wielded for good or evil, like that of every other great man, be he statesman, or priest, or artist. The conviction of possessing this power caused Balzac to complain with sincere indignation of those who charged him with being an immoral writer. "The reproach of immorality," he said in his preface to the second edition of Pere Goriot, "which has ever been launched at the courageous author, is the last that remains to be made, when nothing else can be urged against a poet. If you are true in your portrayal, if, by dint of working night and day you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the world, the epithet immoral is cast in your face. Socrates was immoral, Jesus Christ was immoral. Both were persecuted in the name of the societies they overthrew or reformed. When the world wishes to destroy any one, it taxes him with immorality."
This argument is beside the question. It does not settle whether the apologist's influence upon the men and women of his generation and beyond—an influence which, in his lifetime, was incontestable, and may be deemed potent still, to judge by the extent to which his books are read—was and is good or bad. Balzac's personality is here only indirectly involved. His individual character might have been better or worse without the conclusion to be drawn being affected. Good men's influence is not always good, nor bad men's influence always bad. Intention may be inoperative, and effect may be involuntary.
Balzac claimed the right to speak of all conduct, to represent all conduct in his fiction; and we shall see, farther on, that he imposed his claim upon those who followed him in literature. But, if he anticipated reality—and this is acknowledged—if he led society to imitate his fiction, if his exceptional representations tended, with him and after him, to become general or more frequent in one or another class of society, he must be considered morally responsible for the result. It has already been remarked, in the preceding chapter, that there are two ways of reproducing reality in literature and art, one of them favouring, not through didacticism but through emotion, the creation in the mind of a state of healthy feeling, thought, and effort; the other, that sort of fascination with which the serpent attracts its victims. It is certain that Balzac did not adequately take this into account, certain also that in parts of his Comedy, the secret, unconscious sympathy of the author with some of his sicklier heroes and heroines could not and did not have that dynamic moral action which he vainly desired.
Of the chief French novelists or litterateurs who were his contemporaries, critics are inclined to esteem his influence most evident on George Sand and Victor Hugo. Brunetiere, indeed, begins with Sainte-Beuve. But the similarities discoverable between the author of Volupte and the author of the Comedie Humaine were present in Sainte-Beuve's work at a period when Balzac was only just issuing from obscurity, and appear, moreover, to be due to temperament. In the case of George Sand, the inference is based partly on the praise she meted out to Balzac in her reminiscences. Brunetiere specifies the Marquis de Villemer as the one proved example of imitation. But this novel was written in 1861, eleven years after Balzac's death; and, in so far as it differs from Mauprat and the earlier books, whether La Petite Fadette or Consuelo, can be shown to be the result of a natural and independent evolution.
As regards Victor Hugo, on the contrary, there is plenty of prima facie evidence that he largely utilized Balzac's material and method; and there is evidence also that Balzac utilized, though in a less degree, the subjects developed by Hugo. The reciprocal borrowing is easy to explain, both men, in spite of their fundamental peculiarities, having much in them that was common—imagination difficult to control, fondness for exaggeration, language prone to be verbose and turgid, research of devices to astonish the reader. Hugo's Miserables is a monument of his fiction that owes much to Balzacian architecture. The realism of the latter author is converted without difficulty into the former's romanticism, or, rather, the alloy of romanticism is so considerable in Balzac's work that there is little conversion to make. Ferragus and Vautrin are prototypes of Valjean, just as Valjean's Cosette exploited by Madame Thenardier is an adaptation of Ferragus' daughter or Doctor Minoret's Ursula. The prison manners and slang of the Miserables inevitably recall those of Vautrin's Last Incarnation, while, on the other hand, Hugo's salon ultra reappears in the Cabinet of Antiques. And the analogies present themselves continually. One might almost say that the whole of the Comedie Humaine suggested things to its future panegyrist, who wrote his greatest novel in the years consecutive to Balzac's death. Of course, Hugo's borrowings, being those of a man of genius, were not made use of servilely. Like Shakespeare and Moliere, the author of the Miserables metamorphosed and enhanced what he took.
Balzac's major influence on literature began as soon as he was dead. And the men he reacted on soonest were the dramatists; not through his own plays, which figured so small in his achievement, or, if through them at all, then only as they applied the same principles as his novels. The stage, being ever en vedette, is best situated to interpret the signs of the times, and is likewise more open to the solicitations of novelty, more ready to try new methods. A noticeable defect of the French drama, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the pronounced artificiality of its characters and plots. Whatever the kind of play exhibited, the same stereotyped noble fathers, ingenuous maidens, coquettes, and Lotharios strutted on the boards. Whatever else changed, these did not. Only their costumes differed. Moreover, the adventures in which the dramatis personae displayed themselves contained always the same sort of tricks for bringing about the denouement. Even the language had its own style, outside which nothing was appropriate. All this was classicism in its most degenerate form, an art from which original inspiration was banished to the profit of a much inferior species of skill. Be it granted that the drama, more than any other kind of literature, is liable to the encroachment and dominance of such artificiality on account of its foreshortening in perspective. Be it granted, also, that sometimes a new movement will intensify an old habit. The Romanticists, though reformers in other respects, did little or nothing to render the stage more real. Their lyricism, in front of the footlights, needed buskins and frippery, or, at any rate, fostered them, as the pieces of Hugo and de Vigny proved.