Honoré de Balzac

by Théophile Gautier

There have been a number of critiques on Balzac and he has been discussed in many ways, but in my opinion one very characteristic feature has not been emphasized: this point is the absolute modernity of his genius. Balzac owes nothing to antiquity; for him there are neither Greeks nor Romans, and he has no need to cry for deliverance from them. One does not find in the composition of his talent any trace of Homer, of Virgil, of Horace, not even of De Viris Illustribus; nobody was ever less classical.

Balzac, like Gavarni, observed his contemporaries; and, in art, the supreme difficulty is to portray that which one sees before one's eyes; one can pass through one's time without appreciating it, and that is what many eminent minds have done.

To be of his time, nothing would appear to be simpler but nothing is more difficult! To wear no glasses, neither blue nor green, to think with his own brain, to use the speech of the present day, not stitch together a colorful fabric from the phrases of his predecessors! Balzac possessed this rare merit. The ages have their perspective and their distance; at that distance the great masses move away, the lines end, the flickering details disappear; with the help of classical memories, of melodious names from antiquity, the least rhetorician could create a tragedy, a poem, an historical study. But, to find yourself in the crowd, to be elbowed by it, and to appreciate its features, understand its flow, sort out its personalities, outline the features of so many diverse beings, to show the motives for their actions, that demands an entirely special genius, and this genius, the author of La Comédie Humaine had to a degree that no one has equaled and probably no one will equal.

This profound understanding of modern things rendered Balzac, it must be said, insensitive to sculptural beauty. He read with a careless eye the stanzas of white marble with which Greek art sung the perfection of the human form. In the museum of antiquities, he looked at the Venus de Milo without great ecstasy, but the Parisian woman who has stopped in front of the immortal statue, draped in her long cashmere shawl running without a crease from the neck to the heel, wearing her hat with a veil from Chantilly, gloved with her tight Jouvin gloves, showing from under the hem of her flounced dress the polished tip of her worn boots, made his eyes sparkle with pleasure. He analyzed her coquettish allure, he savored at length her skillful graces, only to find as she did that the goddess was too heavyset and would not be an attractive addition to the homes of Mesdames de Beauséant, de Listomère, or d'Espard. Ideal beauty, with its serene and pure lines, was too simple, too cold, too harmonious for this complicated, exuberant and diverse genius. He also says somewhere: "It is necessary to be Raphaël to portray many virgins." Character pleased him more than style, and he preferred looks to beauty. In his portraits of women, he never fails to put a mark, a crease, a wrinkle, a red blemish, a softened and tired corner, a vein that is too apparent, some detail indicating the bruises of life that a poet, in tracing the same image, would surely have suppressed, mistakenly without a doubt.

I do not intend to criticize Balzac in this. This fault is his principal strength. He accepted nothing of the mythologies and traditions of the past, and he did not know, happily for us, that ideal that was achieved with the verses of the poets, the marbles of Greece and Rome, the paintings of the Renaissance, which stands between the eyes of artists and reality. He loved the woman of our day just as she is, and not as a pale statue; he loved her for her virtues, for her vices, for her fantasies, for her shawls, for her dresses, for her hats, and followed her across her life, far beyond the point in the journey where love abandons her. He prolonged her youth by many seasons, gave her springs with the summers of Saint‑Martin, and gilded her twilight years with the most splendid rays. We are so classical, in France, that we have not perceived, after two thousand years, that roses, in our climate, do not bloom in April as in the descriptions of poets of antiquity, but in June, and that our women begin to be beautiful at the age at which those of Greece, who are more precocious, cease to be. How many charming types he has imagined or reproduced! Madame Firmiani, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, the Princess de Cadignan, Madame de Morsauf, Lady Dudley, the Duchess de Langeais, Madame Jules, Modeste Mignon, Diane de Chaulieu, without counting the middle class women, the seamstresses and the ladies of ill repute.

And how he loved and knew that modern Paris, whose beauty the amateurs of local color and the picturesque of that time appreciated so little! He roamed across it in every direction night and day; there is not a forgotten alley, a foul passage, a narrow, muddy and black street which did not become under his pen an etching of Rembrandt, full of teeming and mysterious darkness or sparkling with a trembling star of light. Wealth and poverty, pleasure and suffering, shame and glory, grace and ugliness, he knew all of his beloved town; it was for him an enormous, hybrid, formidable monster, an octopus with one hundred thousand arms that he heard and saw as a living thing, and which constituted in his eyes an immense individual. See with regard to this the marvelous pages placed at the beginning of La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, in which Balzac, impinging on the art of the musician, had wanted, as in a grand orchestral symphony, to make all of the voices sing together, all of the sobbing, all of the cries, all of the rumors, all of the grinding of Paris at work!

From this modernity on which I purposefully dwell arose, without his suspecting it, a difficulty in labor that Balzac experienced in his efforts to complete his work: the French language as refined by the classics of the seventeenth century is not suitable, when one conforms to it, other than to express general ideas, and to portray conventional figures in a vague setting. To describe this multiplicity of details, of characters, of types, of architectures, of furnishings, Balzac was obliged to create for himself a special language, composed of all of the technical terms, all of the argots of science, of the workshop, of the theater, even of the lecture hall. Every word that said something was welcomed, and the sentence, in order to receive it, opened a space, a parenthetic expression, and lengthened itself obligingly. It is this that made superficial critics say that Balzac did not know how to write. He possessed, even though he did not know it, a style and a very beautiful style, the necessary, inevitable, and mathematical style of his ideas!

VI

No one could have the ambition to write a complete biography of Balzac; any relationship with him was necessarily limited by gaps, absences, disappearances. Work absolutely ruled the life of Balzac, and if, as he himself says with touching sensitivity in a letter to his sister, he has painlessly sacrificed the joys and distractions of existence to this jealous god, it cost him to renounce all company that might have led to friendship. To reply with a few words to a long letter became for him who was overburdened with labor a prodigality that he could rarely permit himself; he was the slave of his work and a voluntary slave. He had, with a very good and very tender heart, the selfishness of the great worker. And who could have dreamed of being mad at his pressured negligences and his apparent forgetfulness, when one saw the results of his escapes or his seclusions? When, the work completed, he would reappear, one would have said that he had left you the day before, and he would take up the interrupted conversation once again, as if sometimes six months and more had not passed. He made trips within France to study localities that he included in Scènes de Province, and he withdrew to the houses of friends, in Touraine, or in the Charente, finding there a calm that the creditors did not always allow him in Paris. After some great work, he permitted himself, occasionally, a longer excursion to Germany, northern Italy, or Switzerland; but these rapid excursions, made with the preoccupations of bills that were due to be paid, contracts to fulfill, and limited funds for travel, may have fatigued him more than they gave him rest. His vast gaze took in the skies, the horizons, the mountains, the countryside, the monuments, the houses, the interiors to commit them to that universal and meticulous memory that never failed him. Superior in this to descriptive poets, Balzac saw man at the same time as nature; he studied the physiognomies, the manners, the passions, the characters in the same glance as locations, clothing and furnishings. One detail sufficed for him, as the least fragment of bone did for Cuvier, to accurately imagine and reconstitute a personality glimpsed while passing. Balzac has often been praised, and rightly so, for his power of observation; but, however great he was, it is not necessary to imagine that the author of La Comédie Humaine always drew from nature his portraits whose truth was so clearly from elsewhere. His process did not resemble in any way that of Henri Monnier, who followed in real life an individual in order to make a sketch with a pencil and a pen, drawing his least gestures, writing down his most insignificant phrases in order to obtain at the same time a photographic plate and a page of shorthand notes. Buried most of the time in the excavations of his work, Balzac could not materially observe the two thousand characters who play their role in his comedy of one hundred acts; but every man, when he looks inward, contains humanity: it is a microcosm in which nothing is missing.

He has, not always, but often observed within himself the numerous types that live in his work. That is why they are so complete. No one could absolutely comprehend the life of another; in such a case, there are motives that remain obscure, unknown details, actions of which one loses track. In even the most faithful portrait, some creativity is necessary. Balzac has thus created much more than he saw. His rare faculties of the analyst, of the physiologist, of the anatomist, have merely served the poet in him, just as the assistant serves the professor at his lectern when he passes him the substances that he needs for his demonstrations.