Business, friendship and love, however, much more other things, were in Balzac's case always connected with and on the whole quite secondary to work. He would even sometimes resist the commands by which at long intervals Mme. Hanska would summon him to see her, and abstract the greater part of his actual visits to her in order to serve this still more absorbing mistress. He had, as we have seen, worked pretty hard, even before 1829, and his work had partly taken forms not yet mentioned—political pamphlets and miscellaneous articles which are now accessible in the Édition définitive of his works, and hardly one of which is irrelevant to a just conception of him. Nor did he by any means abandon these by-works after 1829; indeed, he at one time started and almost entirely wrote, a periodical called the Revue parisienne. He wrote some dramas and planned many more, though the few which reached the stage left it again promptly. Balzac's dramas, as they appear in his works, consist of Vautrin, Les Ressources de Quinola, Paméla Giraud (arranged for the stage by others), La Marâtre and Mercadet le faiseur, the last of which has, since his death, been not unsuccessful. But on the whole he did devote himself to his true vocation, with a furious energy beside which even Scott's, except in his sadder and later days, becomes leisurely. Balzac generally wrote (dining early and lightly, and sleeping for some hours immediately after dinner) from midnight till any hour in the following day—stretches of sixteen hours being not unknown, and the process being often continued for days and weeks. Besides his habit of correcting a small printed original into a long novel on the proofs, he was always altering and re-shaping his work, even before, in 1842, he carried out the idea of building it all into one huge structure—the Comédie humaine with its subdivisions of Scènes de la vie parisienne, Études philosophiques, &c. Much pains have been spent upon this title and Balzac's intentions in selecting it. But the "Human Comedy," as a description for mere studies of life as his, will explain itself at once or else can never be explained.
Of its constituents, however, some account must be given, and this can be best done through an exact and complete list of the whole work by years, with such abbreviated notes on the chief constituents as may lead up to a general critical summary. Of the two capital works of 1829, we have spoken. 1830, the epoch year, saw part (it was not fully published till the next) of La Peau de chagrin, one of the crudest, but according to some estimates, one of the greatest of the works, full of romantic extravagance and surplusage, but with an engrossing central idea—the Nemesis of accomplished desire—powerfully worked out; La Maison du chat qui pelote, a triumph of observation and nature, together with a crowd of things less in bulk but sometimes of the first excellence—El Verdugo, Étude de femme, La Paix du ménage, Le Bal de sceaux, La Vendetta, Gobseck, Une Double Famille, Les Deux Rêves, Adieu, L'Élixir de longue vie, Sarrazine, Une Passion dans le désert and Un Épisode sous la Terreur. In 1831, La Peau de chagrin appeared complete, accompanied by Le Réquisitionnaire, Les Proscrits, Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (a masterpiece fortunately not unrecognized), Jésus Christ en Flandre and Maître Cornélius. 1832 gave Madame Firmiani, Le Message, Le Colonel Chabert and Le Curé de Tours (two stories of contrasted but extraordinary excellence), La Bourse, La Femme abandonnée, Louis Lambert (autobiographical and philosophic), La Grenadière and Les Marana (a great favourite with the author). In 1833 appeared Ferragus, chef des dévorants, the first part of L'Histoire des treize (a collection in the more extravagant romantic manner, very popular at the time, and since a favourite with some, but few, good judges), Le Médecin de campagne (another pet of the author's, and a kind of intended document of his ability to support the cause of virtue, but, despite certain great things, especially a wonderful popular "legend of Napoleon," a little heavy as a whole), the universally admitted masterpiece of Eugénie Grandet, and L'Illustre Gaudissart (very amusing). 1833 also saw the beginning of a remarkable and never finished work-out of his usual scope but exceedingly powerful in parts—the Contes drolatiques, a series of tales of Old France in Old (or at least Rabelaisian) French, which were to have been a hundred in number but never got beyond the third batch of ten. They often borrow the licence of their 15th and 16th century models; but in La Succube and others there is undoubted genius and not a little art. 1834 continued the Treize with La Duchesse de Langeais and added La Recherche de l'absolu (one of Balzac's great studies of monomania, and thought by some to be the greatest, though others prefer Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu), La Femme de trente ans (the chief example of the author's caprice for re-handling, and very differently judged as a whole), with yet another of the acknowledged triumphs, Le Père Goriot. On the whole, this year's work, though not the author's largest, is perhaps his most unique. Next year (1835) followed Melmoth réconcilié (a tribute to the great influence which Maturin exercised, not over Balzac only, at this time in France), Un Drame au bord de la mer, the brilliant, if questionable, conclusion of Les Treize, La Fille aux yeux d'or, Le Contrat de mariage and Séraphita. This last, a Swedenborgian rhapsody of great beauty in parts, has divided critics almost more than anything else of its writer's, some seeing in it (with excuse) nothing but the short description given above in three words, the others (with justice) reckoning it his greatest triumph of style and his nearest attempt to reach poetry through prose. 1836 furnished La Messe de l'athée, Interdiction, Facino Cane, Le Lys dans la vallée (already referred to and of a somewhat sickly sweetness), L'Enfant maudit, La Vieille Fille and Le Secret des Ruggieri (connected with the earlier Les deux Rêves under the general title, Sur Cathérine de Médicis, and said to have been turned out by Balzac in a single night, which is hardly possible). In 1837 were published Les Deux Poètes, destined to form part of Illusions perdues, Les Employés, Gambara and another capital work, Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence
de César Birotteau, where Balzac's own unlucky experiences in trade are made thoroughly matter of art. 1838 was less fruitful, contributing only Le Cabinet des antiques, which had made an earlier partial appearance, La Maison Nucingen and Une Fille d'Ève. But 1839 made amends with the second part of Illusions perdues, Un Grand Homme de province à Paris (one of Balzac's minor diploma-pieces), Le Curé de village (a very considerable thing), and two smaller stories, Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan and Massimilla Doni. Pierrette, Z. Marcas, Un Prince de la Bohème and Pierre Grassou followed in 1840, and in 1841 Une Ténébreuse Affaire (one of his most remarkable workings-up of the minor facts of actual history), Le Martyr Calviniste (the conclusion of Sur Cathérine de Médicis), Ursule Mirouet (an admirable story), La Fausse Maîtresse and Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, on which again there have been very different opinions. 1842 supplied Albert Savarus (autobiographical largely), Un Début dans la vie, the very variously named and often rehandled Rabouilleuse (which, since Taine's exaltation of it, has often been taken as a Balzacian quintessence), and Autre étude de femme, yet another rehandling of earlier work. In 1843 came the introduction of the completed Sur Cathérine de Médicis, Honorine and La Muse du département (almost as often reconstructed as La Femme de trente ans), with Comment aiment les jeunes filles (a similar rehandling intended to start the collected Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes), and a further instalment of Illusions perdues, Les Souffrances d'un inventeur. Three out of the next four years were astonishingly fruitful. 1844 gave Modeste Mignon (a book with a place to itself, and said to be founded on a story actually written by Madame Hanska), Gaudissart II., A combien l'amour revient aux vieillards (a second part of the Splendeurs), Béatrix (one of the most powerful if not of the most agreeable), and the first and very promising part of Les Paysans. Only Un Homme d'affaires came out in 1845, but this was made up in 1846 by Les Comédiens sans le savoir (sketched earlier), another part of the Splendeurs, Où mènent les mauvais chemins, the first part of Les Parents pauvres, La Cousine Bette (sometimes considered the topmost achievement of Balzac's genius), and the final form of a work first issued fifteen years earlier and often retouched, Petites misères de la vie conjugale. 1847 was even richer, with Le Cousin Pons (the second part of Les Parents pauvres, and again a masterpiece), the conclusion of the Splendeurs, La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin, L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine (which had been on and off the stocks for five years), and the unfinished Député d'Arcis. This was the last scene of the comedy that appeared in the life of its author. The conclusion of the Député d'Arcis, published in 1853, and those of Les Paysans and Les Petits Bourgeois which appeared, the first in this year, the second wholly in 1855, are believed or known to be by Balzac's friend, Charles Rabou (1803-1871).
This immense and varied total stands to its author in a somewhat different relation from that of any other work to any other writer. It has been well said that the whole of Balzac's production was always in his head together; and this is the main justification for his syllabus of it as the "Comedy." Some part never came out of his head into print; we have numerous titles of work (sometimes spoken of in his letters as more or less finished) of which no trace remains, or only fragmentary MS. sketches. One apparently considerable book, La Bataille, which was to be devoted to the battle of Essling, and for which he actually visited the ground, is frequently referred to as in progress from the time of his early letters to Madame Hanska onwards; but it has never been found. Another result of this relation was the constant altering, re-shaping, re-connecting of the different parts. That if Balzac had lived as long as Hugo, and had preserved his faculties as well, he could never have finished the Comédie, is of course obvious: the life of Methuselah, with the powers of Shakespeare, would not suffice for that. But that he never would—even if by some impossibility he could—is almost equally certain. Whether there is any mark of decline in his latest work has been disputed, but there could hardly have been farther advance, and the character of the whole, not easy to define, is much less hard to comprehend, if prejudice be kept out of the way. That character was put early, but finally, by Victor Hugo in his funeral discourse on Balzac, whose work he declared, with unusual terseness, among other phrases of more or less gorgeous rhetoric, to be "observation and imagination." It may be doubted whether all the volumes written on Balzac (a reasoned catalogue of the best of which will be found below) have ever said more than these three words, or have ever said it more truly if the due stress be laid upon the "and." On the other side, most of the mistakes about him have arisen from laying undue stress on one of the two qualities, or from considering them separately rather than as inextricably mixed and blended. It is this blending which gives him his unique position. He is an observer of the most exact, the most minute, the most elaborate; but he suffuses this observation with so strange and constant an imaginative quality that he is, to some careful and experienced critics, never quite "real"—or almost always something more than real. He seems accustomed to create in a fashion which is not so much of the actual world as of some other, possible but not actual—no matter whether he deals with money or with love, with Paris or with the provinces, with old times or with new. A further puzzle has arisen from the fact that though Balzac has virtuous characters, he sees humanity on the whole "in black": and that, whether he actually prefers the delineation of vice, misfortune, failure, or not, he produces as a rule in his readers the sensation familiarly described as "uncomfortable." His morality has been fiercely attacked and valiantly defended, but it is absolutely certain that he wrote with no immoral intention, and with no indifference to morality. In the same way there has been much discussion of his style, which seldom achieves beauty, and sometimes falls short of correctness, but which still more seldom lacks force and adequacy to his own purpose. On the whole, to write with the shorthand necessary here, it is idle to claim for Balzac an absolute supremacy in the novel, while it may be questioned whether any single book of his, or any scene of a book, or even any single character or situation, is among the very greatest books, scenes, characters, situations in literature. But no novelist has created on the same scale, with the same range; none has such a cosmos of his own, pervaded with such a sense of the originality and power of its creator.
Balzac's life during these twenty years of strenuous production has, as regards the production itself, been already outlined, but its outward events, its distractions or avocations—apart from that almost weekly process of "raising the wind," of settling old debts by contracting new ones, which seems to have taken up no small part of it—must now be shortly dealt with. Besides constant visits to the Margonne family at Sache in Touraine, and to the Carrauds at Frapesle in Berry, he travelled frequently in France. He went in 1833 to Neuchatel for his first meeting with Madame Hanska, to Geneva later for his second, and to Vienna in 1835 for his third. He took at least two flights to Italy, in more or less curious circumstances. In 1838, he went on a journey to Sardinia to make his fortune by melting the silver out of the slag-heaps of Roman mines—a project, it seems, actually feasible and actually accomplished, but in which he was anticipated. The year before, tired of Paris apartments, he had bought ground at Ville d'Avray, and there constructed, certainly at great, though perhaps exaggerated expense, his villa of Les Jardies, which figures largely in the Balzacian legend. His rash and complicated literary engagements, and (it must be added) his disregard of them when the whim took him, brought him into frequent legal difficulties, the most serious of which was a law-suit with the Revue de Paris in 1836. In 1831, and again in 1834, he had thought of standing for election as Deputy, and in the latter year he actually did so both at Cambrai and Angoulême; but it is not certain that he received any votes. He also more than once took steps to become a candidate for the Academy, but retired on several occasions before the voting, and when at last, in 1849, he actually stood, he only obtained two votes.
As early as the Genevan meeting of 1833, Madame Hanska had formally promised to marry Balzac in the case of her husband's
death, and this occurred at the end of 1841. She would not, however, allow him even to visit her till the next year had expired, and then, though he travelled to St Petersburg and the engagement was renewed after a fashion, its fulfilment was indefinitely postponed. For some years Balzac met his beloved at Baden, Wiesbaden, Brussels, Paris, Rome and elsewhere. Only in September 1847 was he invited on the definite footing of her future husband to her estate of Wierzschovnia in the Ukraine; and even then the visit, interrupted by one excursion to Paris and back, was prolonged for more than two years before (on the 14th of March 1850) the wedding actually took place. But Balzac's own Peau de chagrin was now reduced to its last morsel. His health, weakened by his enormous labours, had been ruined by the Russian cold and his journeyings across Europe. The pair reached the house at Paris in the rue Fortunée, which Balzac had bought for his wife and filled with his collections, at the end of May. On Sunday, the 17th of August, Victor Hugo found Balzac dying, attended by his mother, but not by his wife. He actually died at half-past eleven that night and was buried on the 20th, the pall-bearers being Hugo himself, Dumas, Sainte-Beuve (an enemy, but in this case a generous one) and the statesman Baroche, in Père La Chaise, where Hugo delivered the speech cited above.
Bibliography.—The extraordinarily complicated bibliography of Balzac will be found all but complete in the Histoire des œuvres (1875 and later), attached by M. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul to the Édition définitive, and supplemented by him in numerous smaller works, Autour de Balzac, Une Page perdue de Balzac, &c. Summaries of it will be found appended to the introductory critical notices of each volume of the English translation edited by Saintsbury (London, 1895-1898), which also contains a short Memoir and general criticism. Before the Édition définitive (1869 onwards), the works had been issued during the author's life in various forms and instalments, the earliest Comédie humaine being of 1842 to 1846 in sixteen volumes. For many years, however, the edition best known was that referred to in Browning as "all Balzac's novels fifty volumes long," really fifty-five small and closely printed 24mos kept stereotyped with varying dates by Michel (Calmann) Lévy, which did not contain the miscellaneous works and was not arranged according to the author's last disposition, but did include the Œuvres de jeunesse. These were not reprinted in the Édition définitive, but this gives the miscellaneous works in four volumes, an invaluable volume of correspondence, and the Histoire des œuvres as cited. To this was added, in 1893, another volume, Répertoire des œuvres de Balzac, in which the history of the various personages of the Comédie is tracked throughout and ranged under separate articles by MM. Cerfbeer and Christophe with extraordinary pains, and with a result of usefulness which should have protected it from some critical sneers. In 1899 appeared, as the first volume of Œuvres posthumes, an instalment of the Lettres à l'étrangère, and in 1906 a second (up to 1844) with a portrait of Madame Hanska, and other illustrations.
Works on Balzac are very numerous, and some of them are of much importance. Sainte-Beuve and Balzac fell out, and a furious diatribe by the novelist on the critic is preserved; but the latter's postmortem examination in Causeries du lundi, vol. ii., is not unfair, though it could hardly be cordial. Gautier, who was a very intimate and trusty friend of Balzac, has left an excellent study, mainly personal, reprinted in his Portraits contemporains. Lamartine produced a volume, not of much value, on Balzac in 1866; and minor contemporaries—Gozlan, Lemer, Champfleury—supplied something. But the series of important studies of Balzac, based on the whole of his work and not biased by friendship or enmity, begins with Taine's Essay of 1858, reprinted in volume form, 1865. Even then the Œuvres diverses were accessible only by immense labour in the scattered originals, and the invaluable Correspondance not at all. It was not till the reunion of all in the Édition définitive was completed, that full study of man and work was possible. To this edition itself was attached a sort of official critical introduction, L'Œuvre de Balzac, by M. Marcel Barrière (1890). But this is largely occupied by elaborate analyses of the different books, and the purely critical part is small, and not of the first value. Better are M. Paul Flat's Essais sur Balzac (2 vols., 1893-1894), which busy themselves especially with tracing types of character. Important and new biographical details (including the proper spelling of the name) were given in M. Edmond Biré's Honoré de Balzac (1897). The Balzac ignoré of A. Cabanes (1899) is chiefly remarkable for its investigations of Balzac's fancy for occult studies, and the first part (Balzac imprimeur) of MM. Hanotaux and Vicaire's La Jeunesse de Balzac (1903) mentioned above, for its dealing with the printing business and the intimacy with Madame de Berny. Two most important studies of Balzac in French, are those of M. A. Le Breton, Balzac, l'homme et l'œuvre (1905), a somewhat severe, but critical and very well-informed examination, and M. Ferdinand Brunetière's Honoré de Balzac (1906), a brilliant but rather one-sided panegyric on the subject as the evolver of the modern novel proper, and a realist and observer par excellence. In English, translations of separate books are innumerable; of the whole, besides that mentioned above, but containing a few things there omitted, an American version by Miss Wormeley and others may be mentioned. The most elaborate monograph in English, till recently, was F. Wedmore's Balzac (1887), with a useful bibliography up to the time. The recent additions to our knowledge are utilized in Miss Mary F. Sandars' Balzac (1904), a rather popular, but full and readable summary, chiefly of the life, from all but the latest documents, and W. H. Helm's Aspects of Balzac (1905), which is critical as well as anecdotic. The present writer, besides the critical and biographical essays referred to above, prefixed a shorter one to a translation of Les Chouans executed by himself in 1890.
(G. Sa.)