Balzac's country has, like the real country, its ministers, its judges, its generals, its financiers, manufacturers, merchants, and peasants. It has its priests, its town and country doctors, its men of fashion, its painters, sculptors, and designers, its poets, prose authors, and journalists, its old and its newly created aristocracy, its vain and unfaithful, and its lovable, victimised wives, its authoresses of genius and its provincial blue-stockings, its old maids, its actresses, and its host of courtesans. And the illusion is astonishing and complete.
The personages reappear in one after another of the numerous novels; we make acquaintance with them in all the different stages of their lives; they are constantly being alluded to by other characters when they do not appear themselves; the descriptions of their appearance, dress, homes, habits, and daily life are as minute and exact as if they had been given by a dressmaker, a doctor, a tradesman, or a lawyer, and at the same time so vivid that we feel as if we must certainly find the person described either in the street and house indicated as his home, or else paying a call upon the distinguished lady whose salon is the rendezvous of all the people of fashion in the novels. It seems almost impossible that these beings, one and all, should be mere figments of the brain; we involuntarily think of the France of that day as peopled by them.
And it is the whole of France. For Balzac described in their turn towns and districts in every part of the country.[1] Far from despising the provinces, he took a pride in displaying his intimate knowledge of all the peculiarities of their stagnant life, of their virtues, all culminating in resignation, and their vices, the offspring of narrow-mindedness. But Paris in a very special manner lives in his pages. And Balzac's Paris is not the old city of Notre-Dame de Paris, the picturesque, medieval capital with its marked social contrasts, its animated street life, and its superstitious ecclesiasticism; still less is it Victor Hugo's ideal Paris, that impossible New Jerusalem of intellect and enlightenment; it is the real modern city with its joy, its sorrow, and its shame—the entrancing wonder of our own age, which throws the seven of antiquity into the shade—the gigantic polypus with the hundred thousand tentacles which drag everything, near and far, into its clutches—the great cancer eating into France. The Paris of the author's own day lives in his books, with its narrow streets, of which he gives Rembrandt-like etchings, with its rattle and shrieks, its street cries in the early morning and its mighty evening chorus of voices—a sea of sound which he reproduces for us with an orchestral effect, reminding us of the men initiated into the mysteries of old, who seemed to have eaten drums and drunk cymbals.[2] Balzac knows about everything in Paris—the architecture of the houses, the furniture of the rooms, the pedigrees of the fortunes, the successive owners of the valuable objects of art, the ladies' toilettes, the dandies tailors' bills, the lawsuits which divide families, the state of health, means of subsistence, needs, and desires of all the different classes of the population. He had absorbed the town through every pore. Contemporary novelists sought refuge from the mist-veiled sun of Paris and the commonplace modern Parisian, in Spain, or Africa, or the East; but to Balzac no sun was fairer than that which shone on Paris. Those about him endeavoured to conjure forth the shades of a distant or departed beauty: but to him ugliness was no more repulsive than the nettle is to the botanist, the snake to the zoologist, or disease to the doctor. He would never, in Faust's place, have called Helen from the grave; he would have been much more likely to send for his friend Vidocq, the Prefect of Police and quondam criminal, and get him to tell tales of what he had gone through and seen and heard.
By dint of observation he amasses an enormous collection of separate traits, and the cataloguing of these traits frequently makes the introductory part of his novel tiresome and confusing; at the end of an interminable description of a house, a figure, a face, a nose, the reader sees nothing, is simply bored. But then comes a moment when the author's glowing imagination melts and fuses together all these commonplace elements presented to it by his faithful memory, as Benvenuto Cellini melted down plates and spoons and from them cast his Perseus. Goethe says (in his diary of February 26, 1780): "The collecting and putting together of details does not help me to understand. But after I have long occupied myself in dragging together sticks and straws, and have attempted to warm myself in vain, although there is fire at the heart of the heap and smoke everywhere, suddenly the flame springs up and the whole is in a blaze." In Balzac's novels the descriptive parts are often smothered in smoke, but the flame never fails to burst forth.
For Balzac was not merely an observer; he was a seer. If he happened to meet a workman and his wife going home from the theatre between eleven and twelve at night, he as likely as not followed them the whole way to their little house beyond the outer boulevards. He heard them talk (the mother dragging their child after her by the hand) first of the play, then of their own affairs. They talked of the money that was to be paid them next day, spending it in imagination in twenty different ways, quarrelling during the process and revealing their characters in the squabble. And Balzac listened so intently to their complaints of the length of the winter, the dearness of potatoes, the rise in the price of turf, that he at last lived their life, and, as we are told in his Facino Cane, "felt their rags upon his back and walked with his feet in their soleless shoes." Their dreams, their necessities, entered into his soul, and he went about in a kind of waking dream. Whilst this mental intoxication lasted he gave up all his usual habits and became something different from himself, became the age. He did not only write his stories, he lived them; his fictitious characters were so vividly present to him that he spoke of them to his acquaintances as if they actually existed. When he undertook a journey to a place he wished to describe, he would say: "I am going to Alençon, where Mademoiselle Carmon lives; to Grenoble, where Dr. Bénassis lives." He used to give his sister the news of his imaginary world. "Do you know who it is Félix de Vandenesse is marrying? A Mademoiselle de Grandville. It is a good match, in spite of all Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille has cost the family." One day when Jules Sandeau was speaking of his sister, who was ill, Balzac, who had been listening absently for some time, suddenly said: "This is all very well, my friend; but now to return to realities—let us talk of Eugénie Grandet." It was necessary that the illusion in his own case should be as strong as this, if he was to communicate it to others with approximate strength. His imagination had the commanding power which allows no doubt to arise. It exercised this quality in practical matters too. Amongst the hundreds of projects which occurred to him as possible means of freeing himself from debt, was that of covering the bare fields surrounding the little country-house of Les Jardies (which he had bought that he might have a security to give his mother) with enormous forcing-houses, which, because of the entire absence of shelter from the sun's rays, would require very little artificial heat. In these forcing-houses a hundred thousand pine-apples were to be grown, which, sold at five francs each, instead of at the ordinary price of twenty, would yield the fortunate grower a yearly income of 400,000 francs "without his requiring to produce a scrap of manuscript." With such convincing eloquence did the originator of this plan demonstrate the absolute certainty of its success, that his friends actually looked out for a shop on one of the boulevards for the retail of the pine-apples, and consulted him as to the form and colour of the signboard. At another time he was firmly persuaded, I know not upon what grounds, that he had discovered the place in the outskirts of Paris where Toussaint Louverture had buried his treasure; and so successful was he in communicating his belief to his friends Sandeau and Gautier, neither of them particularly simple-minded persons, that these two gentlemen armed themselves with spades and stole like criminals out of Paris at five o'clock in the morning to dig at the spot indicated—naturally to find nothing. The expression, "the power of imagination," is peculiarly applicable in Balzac's case.
And this imagination which prevailed over others was his own tyrant. It gave him no peace. Not satisfied with the conception of plans, with the sweet, but barren joy of artistic dreams, it compelled him to be continually carrying out his plans, to keep himself in that habit of producing, without which inspiration so soon vanishes.
When, writing in La Cousine Bette of the gifted sculptor, Wenceslas Steinbockes idleness, he quotes these words of "a great writer": "I sit down to my work with despair and rise from it with sorrow," he is obviously in a half-modest way quoting himself. And he adds: "If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtius flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent." The method of production which he describes is his own; but it is not the only, not even the highest method. More tranquil, less modern spirits have kept their heads clear and their eyes undimmed above the seething crater of their work; and by doing so have preserved a sound critical sense which has prevented them from ever becoming as tediously entangled in their material as the author of Le Curé de Village and Le Medicin de Campagne. But, on the other hand, a certain dull glow, a thrilling, enthralling something which has become a necessity to modern nerves, is too often lacking in their works.
In the long preface to the Comédie Humaine Balzac sets forth his intentions and his aim. He begins by expressing his contempt for the usual method of writing history. "In reading those dry and most unattractive registers of events which go by the name of history, we observe," he writes, "that the historians of all countries and ages have forgotten to give us the history of morals." This deficiency he intends, as far as it lies in his power, to supply. He purposes producing a record of the passions, virtues, and vices of society by condensing kindred characters into types—thus, with patience and perseverance, writing the book which Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, and Persia "have unfortunately neglected to bequeath to us." We see what a low opinion Balzac has of history. His extremely slight acquaintance with it made it easier for him to be contemptuous. Nor was he himself really the historian of his age; he was, to use his own striking and correct expression, its naturalist. He followed the lead of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who demonstrated the unity of structure of all the different species. Among scientists he felt himself a scientist, a professor of sociology. "Society produces from man, according to environment, as many different men as there are species in zoology. The difference between soldier, labourer, official, lawyer, idler, scientist, statesman, merchant, sailor, poet, priest, is, though more difficult to grasp, quite as great as the difference between wolf, lion, horse, raven, shark, seal, and cow." The analogy is not complete, partly because, as Balzac himself immediately admits, the wife and husband of society do not always correspond to each other as do the male and female of the zoologist, partly because it is in the power of the social individual to pass from one class or calling to another, whereas in nature transition from one species to another is impossible during the lifetime of an individual.
What Balzac really means, and what is perfectly true, is that the standpoint from which he views society corresponds exactly, as a rule, to the standpoint from which the scientist investigates nature. He never moralises and condemns; he never, in this unlike most of his fellows, allows himself to be led by disgust or enthusiasm to describe otherwise than truthfully; to him, as to the naturalist, nothing is too small, nothing too great to be examined and explained. Seen through the microscope, the spider is larger and more complicatedly organised than the hugest elephant; regarded from the scientific standpoint, the majestic lion is only a pair of jaws upon four legs. The kind of food determines the shape of tooth, jaw, shoulder-blade, muscle, and claw, and explains the majesty. And in exactly the same manner, that which under certain circumstances seems a foul, despicable crime, reveals itself, regarded from another standpoint, to be a miniature edition of one of the grand, brilliant vices of which history tells—and this is Balzac's standpoint.
Even in as early a work as Eugénie Grandet we come upon expressions which prove it. The time is approaching when Eugénie will be forced to confess to the miser who is her father that she no longer possesses her ducats, that she has actually given them away. "Three days later," writes Balzac, "a terrible drama was to be enacted—a bourgeois tragedy without poison, dagger, or bloodshed, yet more cruel than any of those which happened in the famous family of the Atrides." This is as much as to say: My middle-class novel is more tragic than your classic tragedy. In Père Goriot, when the mistress of the famous boarding-house is loudly and despairingly bewailing the departure of her boarders, Balzac remarks: "The lamentations which Lord Byron has put into the mouth of Tasso are beautiful, but they lack the profound truth of Madame Vauquer's." Which means: The pettiness and vulgarity which I describe, is, vigorously apprehended, more interesting than all your noble generalities. In César Birotteau Balzac not only makes jesting reference in his titles to Montesquieu's famous book on the Roman Empire, but, with the audacity of genius, compares his elaborate, lengthy description of a clever Parisian perfumer's successes and misfortunes with the story of the Trojan wars and the changeful fortunes of Napoleon. "Troy and Napoleon are only heroic epics. May this tale be an epic of middle-class life, of destinies to which no poet has turned his attention, so destitute of all greatness do they appear. Its subject is not a single man, but a whole host of sufferings." Which is as much as to say: In literature nothing is in itself little or great; in a poor hairdresser's struggle for existence I can read a heroic poem; I show how the events of a humble private life, if we connect them with their causes and trace these back to their source, are as important, as interesting and engrossing as the great revolutions in the lives of nations. And when, in that masterpiece, Un Ménage de Garçon, the cunning, handsome bravo, Max Gilet, is killed in a duel, the author observes: "Thus died one of those men who are capable of great things when their environment is favourable; a man whom nature had treated like a spoiled child, for she had given him the courage, the coolness, and the political sagacity of a Cæsar Borgia." So effective is the last of these reflections, that the reader feels as if he had not understood Max's character until now, when he sees it in the light of this name.