Balzac's books create a complete world, which has many points of contact with reality; but, in a deep essential sense, is the projection of the novelist's own passionate imagination. A thundering tide of subterranean energy, furious and titanic, sweeps, with its weight of ponderous details, through every page of these dramatic volumes. Every character has its obsession, its secret vice, its spiritual drug. Even when, as in the case of Vautrin, he lets his demonic fancy carry him very far, there is a grandeur, an amplitude, a smouldering flame of passion, which redeem a thousand preposterous extravagances.
His dramatic psychology is often drowned in the tide of his creative energy; but though his world is not always the world of our experience, it is always a world in which we are magnetized to feel at home. It is consistent with its own amazing laws; the laws of the incredible Balzacian genius. Profoundly moral in its basic tendency, the "Human Comedy" seems to point, in its philosophical undercurrent, at the permanent need in our wayward and childish emotionalism, for wise and master-guides, both in the sphere of religion and in the sphere of politics.
32. GUY DE MAUPASSANT. LE MAISON TELLIER. MADAME TELLIER'S ESTABLISHMENT. Any translation, preferably not one bound in paper or in an "Edition de Luxe."
Guy de Maupassant's short stories remain, with those of Henry James
and Joseph Conrad, the very best of their kind. After "Madame
Tellier's Establishment" perhaps the stories called respectively "A
Farm Girl" and "Love" are the best he wrote.
He has the eternal excellencies of savage humanity, savage sincerity, and savage brevity. His pessimism is deep, absolute, unshaken;—and the world, as we know it, deserves what he gives it of sensualized literary reactions, each one like the falling thud of the blade of a murderous axe.
His racking, scooping, combing insight, into the recesses of man's natural appetites will never be surpassed. How under the glance of his Norman anger, all manner of pretty subterfuges fade away; and "the real thing" stands out, as Nature and the Earth know it—"stark, bleak, terrible and lovely." His subjects may not wander very far from the basic situations. He does not deal in spiritual subtleties. But when he hits, he hits the mark.
33. STENDHAL (HENRI BEYLE). LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR. Either the original French or any translation, if possible with a preface; for the life of Stendhal is of extraordinary interest.
Stendhal is one of those who, following Goethe and anticipating Nietzsche, has not hesitated to propound the psychological justifications for a life based upon pagan rather than Christian ethics. A shrewd and sly observer, with his own peculiar brand of the egoistic cult, Stendhal lived a life of desperately absorbing emotions, most of them intellectual and erotic. He made an æsthetic use of the Will to Power before even Nietzsche used that singular expression. In "Le Rouge et le Noir" the eternal sex-struggle with its fierce accompaniment of "Odi et Amo" is concentrated in the clash of opposing forms of pride; the pride of intellect against the pride of sex-vanity.
No writer has ever lived with more contempt for mere sedentary theories or a fiercer mania for the jagged and multifarious edges of life's pluralistic eccentricity. For any reader teased and worried by idealistic perversion this obstinate materialistic sage will have untold value. And yet he knows, none better, the place of sentiment in life!
34. ANATOLE FRANCE. L'ORME DE MAIL. L'ABBE JEROME COIGNARD. LE LIVRE DE MON AMI. Either in French or the authorized English translation.