Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and back-side of some certain section of life: as in "Cousin Pons" and "Cousine Bette."—The corner of Paris where artists, courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity, picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of mankind,—this he paints so that we do not so much look on as move amidst the throng. In the first-named novel, assuredly a very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one of fiction's superlative successes: to know him is to love him in all his weakness. In the second book, Bette is a female vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is heart-warming and sweet. And you know that both are true, true as they would not have been apart: "helpless each without the other."
Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces, "Caesar Birotteau." We can see in it the prototype of much that comes later in French fiction: Daudet's "Risler Aine et Froment Jeune" and Zola's "L'Argent," to name but two. Such a story sums up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.
Nor should it be forgotten that this close student of human nature, whose work appears so often severely mundane, and most strong when its roots go down into the earth, sometimes seeming to prefer the rankness and slime of human growths,—can on occasion soar into the empyrean, into the mystic region of dreams and ideals and all manner of subtle imaginings. Witness such fiction as "The Magic Skin," "Seraphita," and "The Quest of the Absolute." It is hard to believe that the author of such creations is he of "Pere Goriot" or "Cousine Bette." But it is Balzac's wisdom to see that such pictures are quite as truly part of the Human Comedy: because they represent man giving play to his soul—exercising his highest faculties. Nor does the realistic novelist in such efforts have the air of one who has left his true business in order to disport himself for once in an alien element. On the contrary, he seems absolutely at home: for the time, this is his only affair, his natural interest.
And so with illustrations practically inexhaustible, which the long list prodigally offers. But the scope and variety have been already suggested; the best rule with Balzac is, each one to his taste, always remembering that in a writer so catholic, there is a peculiar advantage in an extended study. Nor can from twenty to twenty-five of his best books be read without a growing conviction that here is a man of genius who has done a unique thing.
It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before. But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half. In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac's recipe. English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence. We shall see in dealing with Dickens how definitely the English writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and sympathetic to Dickens' own nature.
As to the accuracy with which he gave a representation of contemporary life—thus deserving the name realist—considerable may be said in the way of qualification. Much of it applies with similar force to Zola, later to be hailed as a king among modern realists in the naturalistic extreme to which he pushed the movement. Balzac, through his remarkable instinct for detail and particularity, did introduce into nineteenth century fiction an effect of greater truth in the depiction of life. Nobody perhaps had—nobody has since—presented mis-en-scene as did he. He builds up an impression by hundreds of strokes, each seemingly insignificant, but adding to a totality that becomes impressive. Moreover, again and again in his psychologic analysis there are home-thrusts which bring the blood to the face of any honest person. His detail is thus quite as much subjective as external. It were a great mistake to regard Balzac as merely a writer who photographed things outside in the world; he is intensely interested in the things within—and if objectivity meant realism exclusively, he would be no realist at all.
But farther than this; with all his care for minute touches and his broad and painstaking observation, it is not so much life, after all, as a vision of life which he gives. This contradicts what was said early in the present chapter: but the two statements stand for the change likely to come to any student of Balzac: his objective personality at last resolves itself into a vividly personal interpretation. His breadth blinds one for a while, that is all. Hence Balzac may be called an incurable romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist. Like all first-class art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction. He said in the Preface to "Pere Goriot" that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but "a possibly better world." He has done so. The most untrue thing in a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life? Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer than truth. Balzac understood this, remembered it in his heart. He is too big as man and artist to be confined within the narrow realistic formula. While, as we have seen, he does not take sides on moral issues, nor allow himself to be a special pleader for this or that view, his work strikes a moral balance in that it shows universal humanity—not humanity tranced in metaphysics, or pathologic in analysis, or enmeshed in sensualism. In this sense, Balzac is a great realist. There is no danger of any novelist—any painter of life—doing harm, if he but gives us the whole. It is the story-teller who rolls some prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him: he who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his audience. Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of representing things as they are. But this matters not, if only a writer's nature be large and vigorous enough to report of humanity in a trustworthy way. Balzac was much too well endowed in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual meaning.
In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty of the social historian was more than to give a statement of present conditions—the social documents of the moment,—variable as they might be for purposes of deduction. He insisted that the coming,—perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be prophesied;—those future ameliorations, whether individual or collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast. Let me again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man who is called arch-realist of his day: "The novelist should depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better world." In the very novel where he said it ("Pere Goriot") he may seem to have violated the principle: but taking his fiction in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the pronunciamento exemplifies his practice.
Balzac's work has a Shaksperian universality, because it is so distinctly French,—a familiar paradox in literature. He was French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the social organisms through which man could best work out his salvation. We find him teaching that humanity, in terms of Gallic temperament, and in time limits between the Revolution and the Second Republic, is on the whole best served by living under a constitutional monarchy and in vital touch with Mother Church,—that form of religion which is a racial inheritance from the Past. In a sense, then, he was a man with the limitations of his place and time, as, in truth, was Shakspere. But the study of literature instructs us that it is exactly those who most vitally grasp and voice their own land and period, who are apt to give a comprehensive view of humanity at large; to present man sub specie aeternitatis. This is so because, thoroughly to present any particular part of mankind, is to portray all mankind. It is all tarred by the same stick, after all. It is only in the superficials that unlikenesses lie.
Balzac was intensely modern. Had he lived today, he might have been foremost in championing the separation of Church and State and looked on serenely at the sequestration of the religious houses. But writing his main fiction from 1830 to 1850, his attitude was an enlightened one, that of a thoughtful patriot.