These French writers possess the art of plunging at once in medias res, and Balzac places you, in the twinkling of an eye, in one of the lowest boarding-houses of Paris. At first all is dirt, hubbub, and unsavory odors; but from the vapors of the caldron evolves a web of many-colored life, of terrible pathos, and original humor, not unenlivened by pale golden threads of beauty, which had better never been.
All the characters are excellently drawn: the harpy mistress of the house; Mlle. Michonnet the spy, and her imbecile lover; Mme. Coutuner, with her purblind strivings after virtue, and her real, though meagre respectability; Vautrim, the disguised galley-slave, with his cynical philosophy and Bonaparte character; and the young students of medicine, cheering the dense fog with the scintillations of their wit, and the joyousness and petulance with which their age meets the most adverse circumstances, at least in France!
The connection between this abject poverty and the highest luxury of Parisian life is made naturally by Eugene, connected to his misfortune with a noble family, of which his own is a poor and young branch, studying a profession and sighing to live like a duke, and Le Père Goriot, who has stripped himself of all his wealth for his daughters, who are more naturally unnatural than those of Lear. The transitions are made with as much swiftness as a curtain is drawn upon the stage, yet with no feeling of abruptness, so skilfully are the incidents woven into one another.
And be it recorded to the credit of Balzac, that, much as he appears to have suffered from the want of wealth, the vices which pollute it are represented with as terrible force as those of poverty.
The book affords play for similar powers, and brings a similar range of motives into action with Scott's "Fortunes of Nigel." If less rich than that work, it is more original, and has a force of pencil all its own.
Insight and a master's hand are admirable throughout; but the product of genius is Le Père Goriot. And, wonderful to relate, this character is as much ennobled, made as poetical by abandonment to a single instinct, as others by the force of will. Prometheus, chained on his rock, and giving his heart to the birds of prey for aims so majestic, is scarcely a more affecting, a more reverent object, than the rich confectioner whose intellect has never been awakened at all, except in the way of buying and selling, and who gives up his acuteness even there, and commits such unspeakable follies through paternal love; a blind love too, nowise superior to that of the pelican!
Analyze it as you will, see the difference between this and the instinct of the artist or the philanthropist, and it produces on your mind the same impression of a present divinity. And scarce any tears could be more sacred than those which choke the breath at the death-bed of this man, who forgot that he was a man, to be wholly a father, this poor, mad, stupid, father Goriot. I know nothing in fiction to surpass the terrible, unpretending pathos of this scene, nor the power with which the mistaken benediction given to the two medical students whom he takes for his daughters, is redeemed from burlesque.
The scepticism as to virtue in this book is fearful, but the love for innocence and beautiful instincts casts a softening tint over the gloom. We never saw any thing sweeter or more natural than the letters of the mother and sisters of Eugene, when they so delightfully sent him the money of which he had been wicked enough to plunder them. These traits of domestic life are given with much grace and delicacy of sentiment.
How few writers can paint abandon, without running into exaggeration! and here the task was one of peculiar difficulty. It seemed as if the writer were conscious enough of his power to propose to himself the most difficult task he could undertake.
A respectable reviewer in "Les Deux Mondes" would wish us to think that there is no life in Paris like what Balzac paints; but we can never believe that: evidently it is "too true," though we doubt not there is more redemption than he sees.