Almost all Balzac's characteristic qualities stood him in good stead in the evolution of this broadly planned work. His almost animal liveliness, his inexhaustible flow of cutting epithet, lent themselves naturally to the reproduction of the conversation of the mixed, shabby, wanton, impudently clever company who sat at the table of the Pension Vauquer. There are hardly any noble characters in the book, and the author has consequently no opportunity of indulging in tasteless pathos; but the reader has countless opportunities of rejoicing in the unerring eye and the precision with which Balzac dissects the soul of a criminal, a coquette, a millionaire, an envious old maid. The neglected, disowned old father, from whom the book takes its title, is by no means an entirely successful character. Père Goriot is a victim, and Balzac always waxes sentimental over victims. With extremely bad taste he calls the old man "the Christ of paternal love"; and to the paternal love he imparts such a sensually hysterical character that he almost disgusts us with it.[1] Nevertheless the fact that the whole plot centres round this forsaken old man, upon whose heart his own daughters trample, gives to the composition a satisfactory unity and solidity. The whole Juvenal-like satire of society is concentrated, is compressed, as it were, into an epigram, in the passage which describes how Delphine does not visit her dying father because it is imperative, if she desires to mount a step higher on the social ladder, that she should avail herself of the long-coveted invitation to Madame Beauséant's ball—a ball to which "the whole of Paris" is crowding merely to spy with cruel curiosity for traces in the hostess's face of the pain caused her by the engagement of her lover, the news of which had only reached her that morning.
We follow Delphine as she drives, with Rastignac by her side, in her own carriage to the ball. The young man, who is well aware that she would drive over her father's corpse to show herself at this ball, but who is neither able to give her up nor brave enough to incur her displeasure by reproaching her, cannot refrain from saying a few words about the old man's pitiable condition. The tears come into her eyes. "I shall look ugly if I cry," she thinks; and they dry at once. "To-morrow morning I shall go to my father," she says, "and nurse him, and never leave his pillow." And she means what she says. She is not a radically bad woman, but she is a living picture of the discords of society; she belongs to the lower classes by birth, to the upper by marriage; she is rich, but the humiliating conditions of her marriage deprive her of the control of her fortune; she is pleasure-loving, empty-minded, and ambitious. Balzac's creative power was not equal to the production of a simple, pure, Shakespearean Cordelia; his region is not the region of the noble; but he has created a Regan and a Goneril who are more human and true to life than the great Englishman's.
[1] "Mon Dieu! pleurer, elle a pleuré?"—"La tête sur mon gilet," dit Eugène.—"Oh! donnez-le-moi, ce gilet," dit le père Goriot.
XVI
BALZAC
One day in 1836 Balzac appeared in his sister's room in the wildest of spirits. Imitating the gestures of a drum-major with his thick cane (on the cornelian handle of which was engraved in Turkish a sultan's motto: "I am the destroyer of obstacles"), he shouted to her during the pauses of an accompaniment of martial music made with his tongue: "Congratulate me, little one, for I am on the point of becoming a genius." He had conceived the idea of combining all his novels, those already published and those yet to be written, into one great work—La Comédie Humaine.
The plan was stupendous and perfectly original; nothing of the kind existed in any known literature; it was a product of the same genius for systématisation which at the beginning of his career had inspired him with the idea of writing a series of historical romances embracing a succession of centuries. But this was a far more interesting and fertile idea. For, if the work were successful, it would possess the same force of illusion as if it dealt with historic facts, and it would, moreover, not merely be a little fragment of life symbolically and artistically enlarged into an image of the whole, but might justly lay claim to be, in the scientific sense of the word, a whole. In the Divina Commedia Dante had, as it were, focussed all the philosophy and experience of life of the Middle Ages; his ambitious rival purposed giving to the world by means of two to three thousand characters, which each represented hundreds of others, a complete psychology of all the different classes of French society, and thus, indirectly, of his age.
It is undeniable that the result was something unique.