That he could have succeeded in other careers, the medical one, for example, the painter's or sculptor's perhaps, or the mechanical inventor's, seems likely; but his impulsiveness, his exuberance, and his poor financial ability would have been hindrances in directions where success depends largely on exact calculation, method, and detail. In political life, his brilliance would assuredly have sufficed to procure him prominence in opposition. As a minister he would have inevitably fallen a victim to the inconsistencies of his own attitude—inconsistencies due to the fact that his judgments were intuitional and instinctive, with prejudices reacting on them, too numerous and too strong to allow him to weigh things fairly and deliberately. Moreover, his mind was too much engrossed by the sole picturesqueness of phenomena to delve deep enough beneath them for their essential relations. This is why it happens that his arguments are often worse than his convictions, the latter being inherited, in general, and at least having the residuary wisdom of tradition together with the additional force of his common sense. Thus, on the eve of giving the ignorant man a power equal to that of the intelligent one, and of handing over the supreme decision in the vital concerns of a country to unsafeguarded majorities less qualified for the task than ancient oligarchy or autocracy. But he had nothing of worth to suggest, no alternative save the return to abuses of the grossest kind which experience had proved to lead to revolution.
His ponderous declaration: "I write by the light of two eternal truths, religion and the monarchy," was a sort of cheap-jack recommendation of the so-called philosophy in his Comedie Humaine. His Catholic orthodoxy, if orthodoxy it were, savoured more of politics than religion. He did not wish the old ecclesiastical organization and faith of France to be changed, because he saw in it a useful police agency for restraining the masses. As for his Royalism, which had a smack of Frondism in it, he stuck to it because it accorded with his conservative, eclectic tastes, and not because he had worked it out as the best theory of government. Such dissertations as appear in his writings, on either the one or the other subject, have nothing more original about them than can be found in the most ordinary election speech or pulpit discourse.
And in the realm of pure speculative thought he was not great. Beyond the limits of the visible, his intuition failed him; so that he floundered helplessly when not upheld by the doctrines of others, which, since he did not understand them, he adapted to his purpose but awkwardly. Whether there were latent faculties in him that might have developed with training, it is impossible to affirm or deny; however, we may be forgiven the doubt. From a mind so forceful, the native perception, though uncultured, should have issued in something better than Lambert or Seraphita. Still, there is this to be said, that a man whose eyes were so constantly bent on facts, whose gaze was always spying out details which escaped the common observation, was embracing a plane parallel, if inferior to that which was covered by a Plato.
The title of the author of the Comedy to be called a philosopher can be defended only on the ground of his adding a new domain to the rule of science. He was not the discoverer of the law of cause and effect. Nor was he the one in his own country who did the most towards demonstrating the interdependence of the various branches of knowledge, this honour being reserved to Comte. But the transference of the minute causalities of life into fiction was systematized by him. He made the thing an artistic method, using it with the same power, though not the same chasteness, as George Eliot after him. His employment was not very logical—how could it be when the guiding mind was in chronic fermentation? He gives us this contradiction that human thought is at once the grandeur and destruction of life—an opinion imbued with ecclesiasticism, confusing thought with passion. It is passion alone which disintegrates; and, in the Comedie Humaine, such monomaniacs as Grandet, Claes, and Hulot are destroyed not by their thought but their desire.
Balzac's pessimism is not philosophic. In him it was not the despair of an intellect that had worn itself out in vainly seeking for the solution of the riddle of the universe, vainly striving after a theory that should reconcile nature's brute law with the human demand for justice and immanent goodness. By original temperament an optimist, he changed and grew pessimistic with the untoward happenings of his agitated career, and under the fostering of his native self-esteem. Possibly too, as Le Breton asserts, a secondary cause was his having imbibed the pretentious doctrines of the Romantic school, the disdains of the young artistic bloods of 1830, who held their clan composed the loftier, super-human race, the only one that counted. Berlioz carried this folly of pride to its highest pitch. In his Memoirs, he declared that the public (of course excluding himself) were an infamous tag-rag-and-bob-tail. The people of Paris, he protested, were more stupid and a hundred times more ferocious, in their caperings and revolutionary grimaces, than the baboons and orang-outangs of Borneo. Balzac at times adopted and expressed similar opinions. Gozlan relates that one day the owner of Les Jardies said to him in the attic of his hermitage: "Come, let us spit upon Paris." The novelist imagined that talents of the kind he possessed ought to be admitted to every honour; and his hatred of the Revolution and Republicanism was more because he believed they were inimical to art—and his art—than because they had cast down a throne. His bitterness was to some extent excusable, for he was exploited much during his lifetime, and had, even to the end, to bend his neck to the yoke. But he also belonged to the class of exploiters by his mental constitution. Could he have had his way, all the men of letters around him would have been in his pay, writing for their bare living and contributing to his fame. In this connection there is an anecdote narrated by Baudelaire, in the Echo des Theatres of the 25th of August 1846, and referable to the year 1839.
The Jardies hermit had a bill of twelve hundred francs to meet; and for this reason he was sad as he walked up and down the double passage of the Opera—he, the hardest commercial and literary head of the nineteenth century; he, the poetic brain upholstered with figures like a financier's office; he, the man of mythologic failures, of hyperbolic and phantasmagoric enterprises, the lanterns of which he always forgot to light; he, the great pursuer of dreams for ever in quest of the absolute; he, the funniest, most attractive as well as the vainest character of the Comedie Humaine; he, the original, as unbearable in private life as he was delightful in his writings; the big baby swollen with genius and conceit, who had so many qualities and so many failings that one feared to attack the latter for fear of injuring the former, and thus spoiling this incorrigible and fatal monstrosity.
At length, however, his forehead grew serene and he went towards the Rue de Richelieu with sublime and cadenced step. There he entered the den of a rich man (Curmer), who received him with due honour.
"Would you like," quoth he, "the day after to-morrow to have in the Siecle and the Debats two smart articles on the French depicted by themselves, the articles to be signed by me? I must have fifteen hundred francs. The affair is a grand one for you."
The editor, unlike his confreres, found the proposal reasonable, and the bargain was concluded on the spot, with the stipulation that the money should be paid on the delivery of the first article. Leaving the office, the visitor returned to the passage of the Opera; and there he met a diminutive young man of shrewish, witty countenance (Edouard Ourliac), known among the journalists for his clownish verve.
"Edouard, will you earn a hundred and fifty francs to-morrow?"