But this book was too much for our nerves, and would be, probably, for those of most people accustomed to breathe a healthier atmosphere.
Balzac has been a very fruitful writer, and, as he is fond of jugglers' tricks of every description, and holds nothing earnest or sacred, he is vain of the wonderful celerity with which some of his works, and those quite as good as any, have been written. They seem to have been conceived, composed, and written down with that degree of speed with which it is possible to lay pen to paper. Indeed, we think he cannot be surpassed in the ready and sustained command of his resources. His almost unequalled quickness and fidelity of eye, both as to the disposition of external objects, and the symptoms of human passion, combined with a strong memory, have filled his mind with materials, and we doubt not that if his thoughts could be put into writing with the swiftness of thought, he would give us one of his novels every week in the year.
Here end our praises of Balzac; what he is, as a man, in daily life, we know not. He must originally have had a heart, or he could not read so well the hearts of others; perhaps there are still private ties that touch him. But as a writer, never was the modern Mephistopheles, "the spirit that denieth," more worthily represented than by Balzac.
He combines the spirit of the man of science with that of the amateur collector. He delights to analyze, to classify; there is no anomaly too monstrous, no specimen too revolting, to insure his ardent but passionless scrutiny. But then he has taste and judgment to know what is fair, rare, and exquisite. He takes up such an object carefully, and puts it in a good light. But he has no hatred for what is loathsome, no contempt for what is base, no love for what is lovely, no faith in what is noble. To him there is no virtue and no vice; men and women are more or less finely organized; noble and tender conduct is more agreeable than the reverse, because it argues better health; that is all.
Nor is this from an intellectual calmness, nor from an unusual power of analyzing motives, and penetrating delusions merely; neither is it mere indifference. There is a touch of the demon, also, in Balzac, the cold but gayly familiar demon; and the smile of the amateur yields easily to a sneer, as he delights to show you on what foul juices the fair flower was fed. He is a thorough and willing materialist. The trance of religion is congestion of the brain; the joy of the poet the thrilling of the blood in the rapture of sense; and every good not only rises from, but hastens back into, the jaws of death and nothingness; a rainbow arch above a pestilential chaos!
Thus Balzac, with all his force and fulness of talent, never rises one moment into the region of genius. For genius is, in its nature, positive and creative, and cannot exist where there is no heart to believe in realities. Neither can he have a permanent influence on a nature which is not thoroughly corrupt. He might for a while stagger an ingenuous mind which had not yet thought for itself. But this could not last. His unbelief makes his thought too shallow. He has not that power which a mind, only in part sophisticated, may retain, where the heart still beats warmly, though it sometimes beats amiss. Write, paint, argue, as you will, where there is a sound spot in any human being, he cannot be made to believe that this present bodily frame is more than a temporary condition of his being, though one to which he may have become shamefully enslaved by fault of inheritance, education, or his own carelessness.
Taken in his own way, we know no modern tragedies more powerful than Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet," "Sweet Pea," "Search after the Absolute," "Father Goriot." See there goodness, aspiration, the loveliest instincts, stifled, strangled by fate, in the form of our own brute nature. The fate of the ancient Prometheus was happiness to that of these, who must pay, for ever having believed there was divine fire in heaven, by agonies of despair, and conscious degradation, unknown to those who began by believing man to be the most richly endowed of brutes—no more!
Balzac is admirable in his description of look, tone, gesture. He has a keen sense of whatever is peculiar to the individual. Nothing in modern romance surpasses the death-scene of Father Goriot, the Parisian Lear, in the almost immortal life with which the parental instincts are displayed. And with equal precision and delicacy of shading he will paint the slightest by-play in the manners of some young girl.
"Seraphitus" is merely a specimen of his great powers of intellectual transposition. Amid his delight at the botanical riches of the new and elevated region in which he is travelling, we catch, if only by echo, the hem and chuckle of the French materialist.
No more of him!—We leave him to his suicidal work.