[2] Emile Zola writes of the characters in Jacques (Documents littéraires, 222): "I cannot describe the impression produced upon me by such characters; they confuse me, they astonish me, as people would who had made a wager to walk upon their hands. Their bitterness and everlasting complaints are quite incomprehensible to me. What is it they complain of? What is it they want? They take life from the wrong side; hence it is only natural that they should be unhappy. Life is fortunately a much more complaisant damsel than they make her out to be. One can always get on with her if one is good-natured enough to put up with the unpleasant hours," In caricaturing George Sand, Zola draws his own portrait, or rather his own caricature, for he is certainly not so narrow-mindedly matter-of-fact as this.
[3] Even that determined antagonist of Romanticism and George Sand, Émile Zola, is obliged to write of George Sand: "The Romantic spirit animated her creations, but her style remained classic." Documents littéraires. 217.
[4] The writer of an article in Le Figaro (Supplément littéraire) for June 3, 1893, maintains that it is Jules Sandeau who is referred to in this passage; but he is mistaken. See Cosmopolis of May 1896, p. 440.
[5] The Prince de Ligne is writing of the qualities of the true soldier, as De Musset writes of those of the true poet. He says: "Si vous ne rêvez pas militaire, si vous ne dévorez pas les livres et les plans de guerre, si vous ne baisez pas les pas des vieux soldats, si vous ne pleurez pas au récit de leurs combats, si vous ne mourez pas du désir d'en voir et de honte de n'en avoir pas vu, quoique ce ne soit pas votre faute, quittez vite un habit que vous déshonorez. Si l'exercice même d'une seule bataille ne vous transporte pas, si vous ne sentez pas la volonté de vous trouver partout, si vous êtes distrait, si vous ne tremblez pas que la pluie n'empêche votre régiment de manœuvrer; donnez-y votre place à un jeune homme tel que je le veux," &c., &c. The manner in which the prose style is reproduced in verse by De Musset shows his artistic genius even more plainly than the invention of a new style would have done. A hint from Émile Montégut put me on the track of this passage.
[6] Lucrezia Floriani, 169, 67, 130, 127, 38.
[XII]
BALZAC
Side by side with George Sand and her work we come upon the man whose art she herself characterised as the antipodes of her own. Whilst she, in this particular a genuine Romanticist, turned with repugnance from the social conditions of her day, more disposed to revile and escape from them than to examine and depict them, he, if he did not feel contented, at least felt quite at home in his surroundings, and almost from the beginning of his career regarded the society of his own day and the immediately preceding period as his artistic property, his inexhaustible mine. George Sand was a great character limner, but she was almost more essentially a great landscape painter; and she represented human beings as the landscape painter represents plants; what she showed was the part of humanity which seeks and bathes in the light. Balzac's point of view was the opposite: the part of the human plant which he understood and loved to paint was the root. What Victor Hugo, in La Légende des Siècles, says of the satyr, is applicable to Balzac: