He took to hurried novel-writing. As yet he had not the experience of life requisite to give his productions any lasting value; but he had a vivid, inexhaustibly productive imagination, and had read enough to be able to write stories in a certain passable style, the style of most of the light literature of the day. In 1822 he published, under different pseudonyms, no fewer than five such novels; and during the following three years he wrote others which he himself, with all his self-esteem, could not regard as anything but pot-boilers. In 1822 he writes to his sister: "I did not send you Birague, because it is perfect trash. ... In Jean Louis there is some character-drawing, but the plot is wretched. The one merit of these books, dear, is that they bring me in a thousand francs; but I have received the sum in bills which have a long time to run—will it ever be paid?" Those who have toiled through one or more of these early works of Balzac's, will not consider his verdict too harsh. They are distinguished by a certain vivacity—what the French call verve—that is all the good that can be said of them. That they possessed the merit which their author himself described as their only one is doubtful, not only because Balzac in his later novels (see Un grand Homme de Province à Paris) gives most unflattering descriptions of the publishers who pay with promissory notes, but also because in 1825 he suddenly, in despair, gave up authorship for the time being, in the hope of making a living as a bookseller and printer.
His brain, which was constantly conceiving plans of every description, had conceived that of bringing out one-volume editions of the classic authors. No such editions as yet existed, and he felt convinced that they would be a good business speculation. And he was right; but the profits of this, as of all Balzac's later speculations, were reaped by others; the projector invariably lost by them. In 1837, for example, when he was in Genoa, the idea occurred to him that the ancient Romans had probably not exhausted their silver mines in Sardinia. He spoke of his idea to a Genoese acquaintance, and determined to follow it up. Next year he spent valuable time in taking a fatiguing journey to the island, to examine the slag of the mines. The state of matters answered exactly to his expectations; but when he applied to the authorities at Turin for permission to work the mines, he found that his Genoese friend had been beforehand with him, had acquired the exclusive right to do so, and was already well on the way to become a rich man. Undoubtedly many of the practical speculations which suggested themselves to Balzac's busy brain were mere chimeræ; nevertheless, his genius reveals itself in them. Just as Goethe's was a nature so at one with nature that his poet's eye, falling accidentally on a palm, discovered the secret of the metamorphosis of plants (one and the same original form in every part of the plant), and that his casual examination of a split sheep's skull laid the foundation of philosophic anatomy, so Balzac's was to such a degree the nature of the inventor and discoverer, on the small as well as on the great scale, that he seemed, like the legendary characters possessed of second sight, to know instinctively where riches lay hidden, seemed, as it were, to carry a divining rod which bent of itself towards gold, the nameless, sexless hero of his works. He certainly was not successful in his attempts to secure the treasure; he was a magician, not a business man.
This first idea of his was as felicitous as it was daring; he was to be type-founder, printer, bookseller, and author in one; for he himself, full of enthusiasm for his grand projects, wrote the prefaces for his editions of the classics. But, after he had persuaded his parents to put the greater part of their capital into the undertaking, after he had set agoing a type-foundry and printing establishment, and printed good, illustrated, one-volume editions of Molière and La Fontaine, the French booksellers to a man combined against their would-be colleague, flatly refused to circulate his editions, and quietly awaited his commercial ruin, to take up his idea and profit by it themselves. At the end of three years Balzac was compelled to sell his books as waste-paper, and dispose of his printing machinery at a great loss. He himself underwent all the misfortunes of the poor inventive printer in Ève et David. He was left not only poor, but so overburdened with debt that he had to work all the rest of his life simply to pay his creditors, regain his independence, and restore his mother's fortune. And this debt, to demolish which he had no weapon but his pen, was not a passive enemy; it grew, and attacked him from new quarters; as for long his only means of meeting one engagement was to incur another. It was in the course of these transactions that he became acquainted with all the various types of Parisian money-lenders, of whom he has given such striking portraits in Gobseck and kindred characters; and the words: "My debts! my creditors!" are constantly in his thoughts and of constant recurrence in those letters to his intimate friends in which the warm heart of the heavily burdened man allows itself free expression. "Remorse," he writes in one of his novels, "is not so bad as debt, for it cannot clap us into prison." He actually had a short experience of life in a debtor's prison, and to avoid a repetition of it had often to hide, to change his place of residence, or have his letters sent to misleading addresses. The genuine poet, he lived with his debts as with an inexhaustible source of emotion; his imagination received, as it were, a daily spur to industry when the thought of his debts awoke him and he seemed, as soon as he opened his eyes, to see his promissory notes appearing out of every corner and jumping like grasshoppers all over the room.
He set to work with herculean energy, and worked, one may say without a pause, through all the years of his youth and manhood, until, at the age of fifty, he collapsed from over-exertion—fell as suddenly as the bull that has received its death-thrust on a Spanish arena. The reason of production being so little of a pleasure, so entirely a labour to him, is to be sought in the fact that, though his great and active imaginative power was unceasingly impelling him to write, it was not supported by any innate or early acquired stylistic skill. In mastery of form Balzac was not the equal of many of his contemporaries. He never succeeded in writing a pleasing poem (those which are to be found in his novels are the work of others—Madame de Girardin, Théophile Gautier, Charles de Bernard, Lasailly), and he and none other was the author of the much derided, halting line with which his Louis Lambert begins the epic of the Incas:
"O Inca! ô roi infortuné et malheureux!"
Novel after novel did he write under a pseudonym and repudiate before he attained to a style; his struggle to obtain the mastery of French prose was a desperate one; and it was one of his greatest griefs that the young Romanticists who followed in the steps of Victor Hugo long refused to acknowledge him as a real artist. The delicately sympathetic Gautier, ever ready to admire, was the only author to greet him with prompt recognition. But Balzac's astonishment was boundless when he saw young Gautier, without preparation or any great exertion, and without needing to make any corrections, fling off, at a desk in the printer's office, an article irreproachable in both style and matter. It was long before he could be persuaded that Gautier had not had his feuilleton ready in his head. At last he grasped the fact that there is such a thing as innate faculty of style, a faculty which had been denied him. How he toiled to acquire it! How ardently he admired Gautier when he really comprehended the quality of his plastic talent! We come upon a curious proof of this so late as the year 1839, when Balzac, in describing the principal female characters in his novel Beatrix, employs almost word for word descriptions from articles written by Gautier two years previously on Jenny Colon and Mademoiselle Georges, the actresses.[1] We feel, in comparing the passages, how eagerness when we see how commonplace and feeble the additions from his own vocabulary are.
Balzac was bound to fail in his attempt to rival Gautier in the latter's special province, for this reason, that he sees and feels in a perfectly different way. Gautier the stylist is an artist of the first rank, but Gautier the author, in spite of his poetic qualities, is cold and at times arid. His talent may be defined as the talent of the plastic artist who has won a place for himself in literature. Balzac, on the other hand, is an inferior stylist, but an author of the highest rank. He cannot place his characters before us with a few telling words, because he does not himself see them in one single plastic situation. When, conjured up by his imagination, they present themselves to the eye of his mind, he sees them, not gradually, but at once, in different stages of their lives and in different costumes; he overlooks their whole career; he observes all the multitude of their peculiar movements and gestures, and hears the sound of their voices in utterances so characteristic that they bring the speaker bodily before us. It is not, as in the case of the stylist, a single picture, the result of a single, perhaps subtle, but somewhat dry association of ideas, which reveals the character to us; no, Balzac's character is composed of a hundred thousand associations of ideas which unconsciously blend and form a unit, complicatedly rich as nature itself, as that real human unit, which consists of a strange mixture of innumerable physical and spiritual elements. It would require a whole book to give a sufficient number of examples of Balzac's incomparable power of bringing personalities vividly before us by means of their manner of expressing themselves, or even simply by some peculiarity in their dress, their household arrangements, and the like.[2] His difficulty lay in the proper disposal of the wealth of material which his memory and his inspirations thrust upon him. At one time he would compress too many ideas, the association between which was intelligible to himself alone, into a few words (as when he says of an innocent, unoffending lady that "her ears were the ears of the slave and the mother"); at another, he would write down, one after the other, all the observations and fancies which his prolific brain suggested every time he invented a fictitious personage, and lose himself in a diffuse, descriptive, argumentative flow of words, which conveyed no distinct impression to the reader—the reason being that the electric communication between the organs of poetic vision and poetic eloquence in the author's brain was faulty, and at times altogether broken off. Tenfold labour had to supply the bitterly felt deficiency.
When we remember that, in those days of collaboration, Balzac never had a collaborator, never even a copyist, we can understand what patience and what stupendous exertion were required to produce, in the course of twenty years, the novels, tales, and plays, more than a hundred in number, which proceeded from his pen.
Whilst Hugo writes as the artists of the Renaissance painted, surrounded by a company of youthful admirers and pupils, Balzac sits alone in his study. He allows himself little sleep. He goes to bed between seven and eight, gets up again at midnight and works in his white, Dominican monk's, habit, with a gold chain round his waist, until daybreak, when, feeling the want of exercise, he rushes off himself to the printer's to deliver his manuscript and correct proofs. His is no ordinary proof-correcting. He demands eight or ten impressions of each sheet. This is partly because he is not certain of having found the final, correct expressions, but also because it is his habit to complete the general outline of his story first, and fill in the details by degrees. Half, sometimes more than half, the payment he receives, goes into the pocket of the printer; but not even extreme need will induce him to allow his work to appear before it seems to him as perfect as he can make it. He is the despair of the type-setter, but his proof-reading is also his own most painful task. The first impression is set with wide spaces between the paragraphs, and gigantic margins; and both of these are by degrees filled to overflowing. When he has done with it, the page, with its dots and dashes, strokes and stars, looks like a picture of a firework. Then the heavily built, untidily dressed man with the crushed felt hat and the sparkling eyes, hurries home along the crowded street, every here and there respectfully made way for by some one who knows or guesses him to be a genius. More hours of work follow. Before dinner he seeks recreation in a call on a lady, or a raid on the old curiosity shops in search of a rare piece of furniture or an old painting. Not till evening comes again does this indefatigable worker think of rest.
"Sometimes," writes Gautier, "he would come to my house in the morning, groaning, exhausted, dizzy with the fresh air, like a Vulcan escaped from his forge, and fling himself down on the sofa. His long night's work had made him ravenously hungry, and he would pound sardines and butter into a kind of paste which reminded him of a dish he had been accustomed to at home, and which he ate spread upon bread. This was his favourite food. As soon as he had eaten he would fall asleep, begging me, before he closed his eyes, to wake him in an hour. Paying no attention to this request, I took care that no noise in the house should disturb this well-earned slumber. When he awoke at last and saw the evening twilight spreading its grey shadows over the sky, he would jump up and overwhelm me with abuse, call me traitor, robber, murderer. I had been the means of his losing 10,000 francs, for he would have earned as much as that with the novel which he would have planned if he had been awake, even leaving possible second and third editions out of the question; I was causing the most terrible catastrophes and most inconceivable complications; I had made him miss appointments with financiers, publishers, duchesses; he would not be in a position to meet his engagements; this fatal sleep would cost him millions.... I was consoled by seeing the fresh Touraine colour returning to his cheeks."