There are two marked tendencies of extreme displayed by the short-story: The first, and the more modern, is a fondness for over-compression; that is, the practice of skeletonizing the story, of giving little more than a bare, swift outline of the action, and only so much accessory material as may be needed to round out a body decently clothed upon with flesh. The story is everything, the setting almost nothing. It scarcely need be said that this tendency comes perilously near to robbing the short-story of the literary qualities which it should rightly display. A few of Maupassant’s compact and abrupt shorter fictions may serve to illustrate this characteristic—not to mention unhappy examples all too prevalent to-day.
The second tendency is quite in the other extreme. I speak of it now because most of Balzac’s shorter stories are of this type,—which gives much space to detail, the development of setting, and the building up of a well-rounded and fully-garbed body to carry the soul of the story. If the scenario-story is likely to swing to an extreme of compression, the leisurely type is prone to over-leisureliness, as is often seen in the shorter work of Mr. James, and the later little fictions by Mr. Howells, wherein, and so far properly too, the story is not made to be everything, but wherein—not so wisely—circumstances and air are accorded even more than due value. The effect is to draw the narrative away from the unity and compression characteristic of the short-story type, and range it with those other fictional forms which, while cognate to, are really something different from the short-story.
Balzac’s short-stories—so to call them—were written from three to five years before Poe wrote “Berenice” (1835), which was his first short-story to anticipate and meet fully the requirements of the type as formulated by the author himself, in his criticism of Hawthorne’s “Tales,” in 1842. But Balzac drew more and more away from the impressionistic, unified, condensed short-story, for it was evidently not his ideal form, and took up the detailed psychological novel of manners. Even in the story given herewith in translation, we find a wealth of detail and an extent of time covered in the action which are not part and parcel of the true short-story, technically considered. But, lest these comments seem to cite these qualities in derogation of Balzac’s art be it noted that Balzac’s little fictions, with all their fullness, are greater than many technically perfect short-stories in their miraculous compression. Certainly it is only this dual element of fullness and consequent diffused final effect which prevented him from anticipating Poe as the first conscious artist of the short-story—yet with this one reservation I reserve much, for compression and unity of final impression are the very twin arteries of this fictional form. Balzac’s short-stories approached technical perfection just as closely as did the short-stories of those two American forerunners of Poe—Irving and Hawthorne.
It is illuminating to observe that Balzac’s full-method of short-story art was not the reflex of the successful novelist who was sure of his public and for that reason dared the expansive treatment. The truth is that of his successful novels only The Chouans had been written in 1829 before he began, in 1830, that brilliant series of shorter stories which place him among the masters.
The fictive art of Balzac is more clearly displayed in his short-stories than in his novels. By far the greater number of his novels are filled with a vast amount of contributory detail not always germane to the plot. As stories, they often mark time. The author’s great motive was to make faithful transcripts from life, to present realities, to penetrate into the deeps of the human soul and disclose its inner life, to delineate the high and the low places of the whole social system of his era. On this giant-journey he was often allured from the highway of his story by side-paths rich in interest, and the great realistic novelist did not any more hesitate to follow out these beckoning byways than did Victor Hugo in his equally great romances. The inevitable in each case was a far from unified type of fiction.
In Balzac’s short-stories, however, we discern but very little of this tendency, fully expanded though they are, and that is why I have ventured to assert their artistic superiority to his novels. True, the genius of this greatest of French novelists can be fully appreciated only by those who make a study of his longer works with their tremendous sweep of character presentment, minuteness of setting, and depth of psychological inquiry. But for approximate singleness of effect—a great factor in the consideration of fictional merit—we must turn to his short-stories.
This contrast in method is due not merely to Balzac’s fondness for making excursions in his novels, but it is largely attributable to the nature of the nouvelle, or expanded short-story form. Any short-story, being complete in itself and not one of a series, necessarily bears a much less close relation to any other of its kind than does any one of Balzac’s novels to his other novels. Each of these is an integrated part of a great life-record which he was engaged in completing—but which, unhappily, was never consummated.
The themes of all Balzac’s short-stories are consistent with the artistic requirements of the nouvelle; that is to say, they are transcriptions of exceptional marginalia from common life, always dealing with the unusual, and occasionally with the unique. Because of this quality, it seems evident that, as Brunetière has pointed out, Balzac elected to develop these incidents in short-story form rather than expand them into novels. Treated in the short-story, they stand for what they are—extraordinary happenings in common life (as distinguished from impossible “incidents” which are told in fantastic and ultra-romantic short-stories); in the novel, they would have been enlarged out of their true focus, and so have seemed to bear a more important, a more typical, relation to life as a whole than any such exceptional incidents ever do. Hence, again, Balzac has used in his short-stories less the realistic method of narration than the romantic. Pure realism as a method is suited to the novel, where life shows whole; but the short-story, which presents a section, a phase, an incident of life, and by which we do not hope to gain a picture of an age, of a whole social system, or even of an entire individual life, is almost compelled to adopt the methods of romanticism even when laying its fictional foundations, as Balzac did, deep in the ground of reality.
In attempting to get a view of his broad genius we must remember our author’s versatility, not alone of gift but of temper; and since a consideration of his novels is not pertinent to this paper, let us see if the many-sided Balzac is not clearly revealed in a varied half-dozen of his greatest short-stories.