It has been to us some satisfaction that the wrong of distortion by reduction in scale done to the majestic figure of Bossuet in our own treatment of him, and unavoidable there, could thus in a measure be redressed by return to the subject in effective quotation from Sainte-Beuve. Looking back on the extracts preceding, we feel that enough is expressed, or suggested, in them, to justify us in saying, There is Bossuet.
But at any rate we have great confidence in saying, There is Sainte-Beuve.
3. Balzac.
Honoré de Balzac is one of the heroes of literature. He set himself labors of Hercules in literary production, and he toiled at his tasks of will with a tireless tenacity little less than sublime. The moral spectacle of such courageous industry in Balzac, the present writer admires, not the less, but the more, that the intellectual achievement resulting seems to him not commensurately great. Balzac’s long “toil and endeavor” was not leavened and lightened and turned into play by that “reflex of unimpeded energy” in him which a lofty philosopher has defined happiness to be. He did his work hardly—with profuse sweat of his brow. His mind did not answer to that definition of genius which makes it a faculty of lighting its own fires. His fires Balzac lighted with late hours, artificial illumination, strong stimulant drinks. He burned himself out early in life—comparatively early, that is to say; he died at fifty-one.
The moral triumph of Balzac we have but half suggested. Not only did he lack the spontaneous joy of genius at work; he lacked also, for many and many a doubtful year, the encouragement of recognition and success. Book after book of his failed, and still he toiled on. The world was fairly conquered at last. The reverse of Tulliver’s experience happened with Balzac. One man, in his case, proved “too many” for the world.
For his own part, he freely confesses, the present writer not only admires; he wonders. Balzac’s novels do not please him, either as products of genius or as works of art. They please him solely as monuments of victorious labor. They have to his mind exactly the quality that was to have been expected from the history of their production. They smell of oil, they smack of sweat. They are full of stimulated, rather than stimulating, thought. So much as one passage in which imagination played its magnificent play in easy and easily perfect creation, one passage in which the words flowed of themselves, and did not come each pumped with a several stroke of author’s will, he cannot remember ever to have found in Balzac. He wonders, therefore, and helplessly wonders, that Balzac should be esteemed, as he is, and that by some good judges, one of the greatest writers in the world.
What Balzac undertook was to write the whole “human tale of this wide world”—that is, to represent in fiction all the manifold phases and aspects of human life and character. He calls the entire series of his novels “The Human Comedy.” This title, we have seen it stated, was not original with Balzac, but was adopted by him at the suggestion of a friend who hit upon it as a kind of balance and contrast to Dante’s expression, “Divine Comedy.” It is not quite a cynic conception of human character and human destiny that Balzac intended thus to express. Still, on the other hand, his view of human nature and human life cannot be said to be genial. The disagreeable preponderates in his fiction—the disagreeable one must call it, rather than the tragic. For true tragedy there is not height enough. In reading Balzac, you breathe for the most part an atmosphere of the not merely common, but—vulgar. Of course, the novelist himself would have said, Very well, such is man, and such is life. This one need not deny, but one can say, It was at least not desirable that readers should be obliged to feel the novelist to be himself vulgar, along with his characters. There is such a thing as refined dealing with people not refined.
Realism was Balzac’s aim, and realism was the rock on which Balzac suffered double shipwreck. In seeking to be realistic, he became vulgar; and in seeking to be realistic, he became unreal. For there is an air of unreality diffused everywhere over the pages, meant to be realistic or nothing, of this voluminous writer. Balzac evolved the personages of his fiction out of his own consciousness. They are none of them human beings, such as you meet in the real world. They are simulacra, images, bodiless projections, of the author’s own mind. They move over his canvas like the specters thrown by the magic-lantern on its screen.
Balzac and Dickens are sometimes paralleled. There certainly is in a number of particulars a superficial resemblance between them. Both undertake to be realists. Both concern themselves chiefly with people of the average sort—sort, perhaps, even tending toward the vulgar. Both exaggerate to a degree that makes them at times almost caricaturists. Both deal abundantly in minute detail of description. But the contrast too between them is great. Balzac is far less spontaneous than Dickens. You feel that Dickens improvises. You never feel this about Balzac. You can hear Balzac drive his Pegasus with shout and with lash. Dickens’s Pegasus often flies with his bit between his teeth. Dickens was an observer of men and of things—of books, a student never; there is perhaps scarcely another instance in nineteenth-century literature of an author who owed so little as did Dickens to study of books. From books, on the other hand, Balzac purveyed a large share of his material. Dickens writes as if unconscious that a race of men like the critics existed. Balzac writes in view of the critics. These in fact seem to be his audience quite as much as do the general public. Balzac, beginning that novel of his from which we are presently to draw our sole brief extract to exhibit his manner, enters, according to a fashion of his, upon an elaborate unnecessary description of the house in which the scene of his action is laid. But he prefaces thus:
Before describing this house, it may be well, in the interest of other writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic preliminaries, since they have raised a protest from certain ignorant and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing the generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?