i

stronger than ever, even than under the spell of first acquaintance and of the early time, is the sense—thanks to a renewal of intimacy and, i am tempted to say, of loyalty—that balzac stands signally apart, that he is the first and foremost member of his craft, and that above all the balzac-lover is in no position till he has cleared the ground by saying so. the balzac-lover alone, for that matter, is worthy to have his word on so happy an occasion as this[4] about the author of “la comédie humaine,” and it is indeed not easy to see how the amount of attention so inevitably induced could at the worst have failed to find itself turning to an act of homage. i have been deeply affected, to be frank, by the mere refreshment of memory, which has brought in its train moreover consequences critical and sentimental too numerous to figure here in their completeness. the authors and the books that have, as we say, done something for us, become part of the answer to our curiosity when our curiosity had the freshness of youth, these particular agents exist for us, with the lapse of time, as the substance itself of knowledge: they have been intellectually so swallowed, digested and assimilated that we take their general use and suggestion for granted, cease to be aware of them because they have passed out of sight. but they have passed out of sight simply by having passed into our lives. they have become a part of our personal history, a part of ourselves, very often, so far as we may have succeeded in best expressing ourselves. endless, however, are the uses of great persons and great things, and it may easily happen in these cases that the connection, even as an “excitement”—the form mainly of the connections of youth—is never really broken. we have largely been living on our benefactor—which is the highest acknowledgment one can make; only, thanks to a blest law that operates in the long run to rekindle excitement, we are accessible to the sense of having neglected him. even when we may not constantly have read him over the neglect is quite an illusion, but the illusion perhaps prepares us for the finest emotion we are to have owed to the acquaintance. without having abandoned or denied our author we yet come expressly back to him, and if not quite in tatters and in penitence like the prodigal son, with something at all events of the tenderness with which we revert to the parental threshold and hearthstone, if not, more fortunately, to the parental presence. the beauty of this adventure, that of seeing the dust blown off a relation that had been put away as on a shelf, almost out of reach, at the back of one’s mind, consists in finding the precious object not only fresh and intact, but with its firm lacquer still further figured, gilded and enriched. it is all overscored with traces and impressions—vivid, definite, almost as valuable as itself—of the recognitions and agitations it originally produced in us. our old—that is our young—feelings are very nearly what page after page most gives us. the case has become a case of authority plus association. if balzac in himself is indubitably wanting in the sufficiently common felicity we know as charm, it is this association that may on occasion contribute the grace.

the impression then, confirmed and brightened, is of the mass and weight of the figure and of the extent of ground it occupies; a tract on which we might all of us together quite pitch our little tents, open our little booths, deal in our little wares, and not materially either diminish the area or impede the circulation of the occupant. i seem to see him in such an image moving about as gulliver among the pigmies, and not less good-natured than gulliver for the exercise of any function, without exception, that can illustrate his larger life. the first and the last word about the author of “les contes drolatiques” is that of all novelists he is the most serious—by which i am far from meaning that in the human comedy as he shows it the comic is an absent quantity. his sense of the comic was on the scale of his extraordinary senses in general, though his expression of it suffers perhaps exceptionally from that odd want of elbow-room—the penalty somehow of his close-packed, pressed-down contents—which reminds us of some designedly beautiful thing but half-disengaged from the clay or the marble. it is the scheme and the scope that are supreme in him, applying this moreover not to mere great intention, but to the concrete form, the proved case, in which we possess them. we most of us aspire to achieve at the best but a patch here and there, to pluck a sprig or a single branch, to break ground in a corner of the great garden of life. balzac’s plan was simply to do everything that could be done. he proposed to himself to “turn over” the great garden from north to south and from east to west; a task—immense, heroic, to this day immeasurable—that he bequeathed us the partial performance of, a prodigious ragged clod, in the twenty monstrous years representing his productive career, years of concentration and sacrifice the vision of which still makes us ache. he had indeed a striking good fortune, the only one he was to enjoy as an harassed and exasperated worker: the great garden of life presented itself to him absolutely and exactly in the guise of the great garden of france, a subject vast and comprehensive enough, yet with definite edges and corners. this identity of his universal with his local and national vision is the particular thing we should doubtless call his greatest strength were we preparing agreeably to speak of it also as his visible weakness. of balzac’s weaknesses, however, it takes some assurance to talk; there is always plenty of time for them; they are the last signs we know him by—such things truly as in other painters of manners often come under the head of mere exuberance of energy. so little in short do they earn the invidious name even when we feel them as defects.

what he did above all was to read the universe, as hard and as loud as he could, into the france of his time; his own eyes regarding his work as at once the drama of man and a mirror of the mass of social phenomena the most rounded and registered, most organised and administered, and thereby most exposed to systematic observation and portrayal, that the world had seen. there are happily other interesting societies, but these are for schemes of such an order comparatively loose and incoherent, with more extent and perhaps more variety, but with less of the great enclosed and exhibited quality, less neatness and sharpness of arrangement, fewer categories, sub-divisions, juxtapositions. balzac’s france was both inspiring enough for an immense prose epic and reducible enough for a report or a chart. to allow his achievement all its dignity we should doubtless say also treatable enough for a history, since it was as a patient historian, a benedictine of the actual, the living painter of his living time, that he regarded himself and handled his material. all painters of manners and fashions, if we will, are historians, even when they least don the uniform: fielding, dickens, thackeray, george eliot, hawthorne among ourselves. but the great difference between the great frenchman and the eminent others is that, with an imagination of the highest power, an unequalled intensity of vision, he saw his subject in the light of science as well, in the light of the bearing of all its parts on each other, and under pressure of a passion for exactitude, an appetite, the appetite of an ogre, for all the kinds of facts. we find i think in the union here suggested something like the truth about his genius, the nearest approach to a final account of him. of imagination on one side all compact, he was on the other an insatiable reporter of the immediate, the material, the current combination, and perpetually moved by the historian’s impulse to fix, preserve and explain them. one asks one’s self as one reads him what concern the poet has with so much arithmetic and so much criticism, so many statistics and documents, what concern the critic and the economist have with so many passions, characters and adventures. the contradiction is always before us; it springs from the inordinate scale of the author’s two faces; it explains more than anything else his eccentricities and difficulties. it accounts for his want of grace, his want of the lightness associated with an amusing literary form, his bristling surface, his closeness of texture, so rough with richness, yet so productive of the effect we have in mind when we speak of not being able to see the wood for the trees.

a thorough-paced votary, for that matter, can easily afford to declare at once that this confounding duality of character does more things still, or does at least the most important of all—introduces us without mercy (mercy for ourselves i mean) to the oddest truth we could have dreamed of meeting in such a connection. it was certainly a priori not to be expected we should feel it of him, but our hero is after all not in his magnificence totally an artist: which would be the strangest thing possible, one must hasten to add, were not the smallness of the practical difference so made even stranger. his endowment and his effect are each so great that the anomaly makes at the most a difference only by adding to his interest for the critic. the critic worth his salt is indiscreetly curious and wants ever to know how and why—whereby balzac is thus a still rarer case for him, suggesting that exceptional curiosity may have exceptional rewards. the question of what makes the artist on a great scale is interesting enough; but we feel it in balzac’s company to be nothing to the question of what on an equal scale frustrates him. the scattered pieces, the disjecta membra of the character are here so numerous and so splendid that they prove misleading; we pile them together, and the heap assuredly is monumental; it forms an overtopping figure. the genius this figure stands for, none the less, is really such a lesson to the artist as perfection itself would be powerless to give; it carries him so much further into the special mystery. where it carries him, at the same time, i must not in this scant space attempt to say—which would be a loss of the fine thread of my argument. i stick to our point in putting it, more concisely, that the artist of the comédie humaine is half smothered by the historian. yet it belongs as well to the matter also to meet the question of whether the historian himself may not be an artist—in which case balzac’s catastrophe would seem to lose its excuse. the answer of course is that the reporter, however philosophic, has one law, and the originator, however substantially fed, has another; so that the two laws can with no sort of harmony or congruity make, for the finer sense, a common household. balzac’s catastrophe—so to name it once again—was in this perpetual conflict and final impossibility, an impossibility that explains his defeat on the classic side and extends so far at times as to make us think of his work as, from the point of view of beauty, a tragic waste of effort.

what it would come to, we judge, is that the irreconcilability of the two kinds of law is, more simply expressed, but the irreconcilability of two different ways of composing one’s effect. the principle of composition that his free imagination would have, or certainly might have, handsomely imposed on him is perpetually dislocated by the quite opposite principle of the earnest seeker, the inquirer to a useful end, in whom nothing is free but a born antipathy to his yoke-fellow. such a production as “le curé de village,” the wonderful story of madame graslin, so nearly a masterpiece yet so ultimately not one, would be, in this connection, could i take due space for it, a perfect illustration. if, as i say, madame graslin’s creator was confined by his doom to patches and pieces, no piece is finer than the first half of the book in question, the half in which the picture is determined by his unequalled power of putting people on their feet, planting them before us in their habit as they lived—a faculty nourished by observation as much as one will, but with the inner vision all the while wide-awake, the vision for which ideas are as living as facts and assume an equal intensity. this intensity, greatest indeed in the facts, has in balzac a force all its own, to which none other in any novelist i know can be likened. his touch communicates on the spot to the object, the creature evoked, the hardness and permanence that certain substances, some sorts of stone, acquire by exposure to the air. the hardening medium, for the image soaked in it, is the air of his mind. it would take but little more to make the peopled world of fiction as we know it elsewhere affect us by contrast as a world of rather gray pulp. this mixture of the solid and the vivid is balzac at his best, and it prevails without a break, without a note not admirably true, in “le curé de village”—since i have named that instance—up to the point at which madame graslin moves out from limoges to montégnac in her ardent passion of penitence, her determination to expiate her strange and undiscovered association with a dark misdeed by living and working for others. her drama is a particularly inward one, interesting, and in the highest degree, so long as she herself, her nature, her behaviour, her personal history and the relations in which they place her, control the picture and feed our illusion. the firmness with which the author makes them play this part, the whole constitution of the scene and of its developments from the moment we cross the threshold of her dusky stuffy old-time birth-house, is a rare delight, producing in the reader that sense of local and material immersion which is one of balzac’s supreme secrets. what characteristically befalls, however, is that the spell accompanies us but part of the way—only until, at a given moment, his attention ruthlessly transfers itself from inside to outside, from the centre of his subject to its circumference.

this is balzac caught in the very fact of his monstrous duality, caught in his most complete self-expression. he is clearly quite unwitting that in handing over his data to his twin-brother the impassioned economist and surveyor, the insatiate general inquirer and reporter, he is in any sort betraying our confidence, for his good conscience at such times, the spirit of edification in him, is a lesson even to the best of us, his rich robust temperament nowhere more striking, no more marked anywhere the great push of the shoulder with which he makes his theme move, overcharged though it may be like a carrier’s van. it is not therefore assuredly that he loses either sincerity or power in putting before us to the last detail such a matter as, in this case, his heroine’s management of her property, her tenantry, her economic opportunities and visions, for these are cases in which he never shrinks nor relents, in which positively he stiffens and terribly towers—to remind us again of m. taine’s simplifying word about his being an artist doubled with a man of business. balzac was indeed doubled if ever a writer was, and to that extent that we almost as often, while we read, feel ourselves thinking of him as a man of business doubled with an artist. whichever way we turn it the oddity never fails, nor the wonder of the ease with which either character bears the burden of the other. i use the word burden because, as the fusion is never complete—witness in the book before us the fatal break of “tone,” the one unpardonable sin for the novelist—we are beset by the conviction that but for this strangest of dooms one or other of the two partners might, to our relief and to his own, have been disembarrassed. the disembarrassment, for each, by a more insidious fusion, would probably have conduced to the mastership of interest proceeding from form, or at all events to the search for it, that balzac fails to embody. perhaps the possibility of an artist constructed on such strong lines is one of those fine things that are not of this world, a mere dream of the fond critical spirit. let these speculations and condonations at least pass as the amusement, as a result of the high spirits—if high spirits be the word—of the reader feeling himself again in touch. it was not of our author’s difficulties—that is of his difficulty, the great one—that i proposed to speak, but of his immense clear action. even that is not truly an impression of ease, and it is strange and striking that we are in fact so attached by his want of the unity that keeps surfaces smooth and dangers down as scarce to feel sure at any moment that we shall not come back to it with most curiosity. we are never so curious about successes as about interesting failures. the more reason therefore to speak promptly, and once for all, of the scale on which, in its own quarter of his genius, success worked itself out for him.

it is to that i should come back—to the infinite reach in him of the painter and the poet. we can never know what might have become of him with less importunity in his consciousness of the machinery of life, of its furniture and fittings, of all that, right and left, he causes to assail us, sometimes almost to suffocation, under the general rubric of things. things, in this sense with him, are at once our delight and our despair; we pass from being inordinately beguiled and convinced by them to feeling that his universe fairly smells too much of them, that the larger ether, the diviner air, is in peril of finding among them scarce room to circulate. his landscapes, his “local colour”—thick in his pages at a time when it was to be found in his pages almost alone—his towns, his streets, his houses, his saumurs, angoulêmes, guérandes, his great prose turner-views of the land of the loire, his rooms, shops, interiors, details of domesticity and traffic, are a short list of the terms into which he saw the real as clamouring to be rendered and into which he rendered it with unequalled authority. it would be doubtless more to the point to make our profit of this consummation than to try to reconstruct a balzac planted more in the open. we hardly, as the case stands, know most whether to admire in such an example as the short tale of “la grenadière” the exquisite feeling for “natural objects” with which it overflows like a brimming wine-cup, the energy of perception and description which so multiplies them for beauty’s sake and for the love of their beauty, or the general wealth of genius that can calculate, or at least count, so little and spend so joyously. the tale practically exists for the sake of the enchanting aspects involved—those of the embowered white house that nestles on its terraced hill above the great french river, and we can think, frankly, of no one else with an equal amount of business on his hands who would either have so put himself out for aspects or made them almost by themselves a living subject. a born son of touraine, it must be said, he pictures his province, on every pretext and occasion, with filial passion and extraordinary breadth. the prime aspect in his scene all the while, it must be added, is the money aspect. the general money question so loads him up and weighs him down that he moves through the human comedy, from beginning to end, very much in the fashion of a camel, the ship of the desert, surmounted with a cargo. “things” for him are francs and centimes more than any others, and i give up as inscrutable, unfathomable, the nature, the peculiar avidity of his interest in them. it makes us wonder again and again what then is the use on balzac’s scale of the divine faculty. the imagination, as we all know, may be employed up to a certain point in inventing uses for money; but its office beyond that point is surely to make us forget that anything so odious exists. this is what balzac never forgot; his universe goes on expressing itself for him, to its furthest reaches, on its finest sides, in the terms of the market. to say these things, however, is after all to come out where we want, to suggest his extraordinary scale and his terrible completeness. i am not sure that he does not see character too, see passion, motive, personality, as quite in the order of the “things” we have spoken of. he makes them no less concrete and palpable, handles them no less directly and freely. it is the whole business in fine—that grand total to which he proposed to himself to do high justice—that gives him his place apart, makes him, among the novelists, the largest weightiest presence. there are some of his obsessions—that of the material, that of the financial, that of the “social,” that of the technical, political, civil—for which i feel myself unable to judge him, judgment losing itself unexpectedly in a particular shade of pity. the way to judge him is to try to walk all round him—on which we see how remarkably far we have to go. he is the only member of his order really monumental, the sturdiest-seated mass that rises in our path.

[4]

the appearance of a translation of the “deux jeunes mariées” in a century of french romance.

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we recognise none the less that the finest consequence of these re-established relations is linked with just that appearance in him, that obsession of the actual under so many heads, that makes us look at him, as we would at some rare animal in captivity, between the bars of a cage. it amounts to a sort of suffered doom, since to be solicited by the world from all quarters at once, what is that for the spirit but a denial of escape? we feel his doom to be his want of a private door, and that he felt it, though more obscurely, himself. when we speak of his want of charm therefore we perhaps so surrender the question as but to show our own poverty. if charm, to cut it short, is what he lacks, how comes it that he so touches and holds us that—above all if we be actual or possible fellow-workers—we are uncomfortably conscious of the disloyalty of almost any shade of surrender? we are lodged perhaps by our excited sensibility in a dilemma of which one of the horns is a compassion that savours of patronage; but we must resign ourselves to that by reflecting that our partiality at least takes nothing away from him. it leaves him solidly where he is and only brings us near, brings us to a view of all his formidable parts and properties. the conception of the comédie humaine represents them all, and represents them mostly in their felicity and their triumph—or at least the execution does: in spite of which we irresistibly find ourselves thinking of him, in reperusals, as most essentially the victim of a cruel joke. the joke is one of the jokes of fate, the fate that rode him for twenty years at so terrible a pace and with the whip so constantly applied. to have wanted to do so much, to have thought it possible, to have faced and in a manner resisted the effort, to have felt life poisoned and consumed by such a bravery of self-committal—these things form for us in him a face of trouble that, oddly enough, is not appreciably lighted by the fact of his success. it was the having wanted to do so much that was the trap, whatever possibilities of glory might accompany the good faith with which he fell into it. what accompanies us as we frequent him is a sense of the deepening ache of that good faith with the increase of his working consciousness, the merciless development of his huge subject and of the rigour of all the conditions. we see the whole thing quite as if destiny had said to him: “you want to ‘do’ france, presumptuous, magnificent, miserable man—the france of revolutions, revivals, restorations, of bonapartes, bourbons, republics, of war and peace, of blood and romanticism, of violent change and intimate continuity, the france of the first half of your century? very well; you most distinctly shall, and you shall particularly let me hear, even if the great groan of your labour do fill at moments the temple of letters, how you like the job.” we must of course not appear to deny the existence of a robust joy in him, the joy of power and creation, the joy of the observer and the dreamer who finds a use for his observations and his dreams as fast as they come. the “contes drolatiques” would by themselves sufficiently contradict us, and the savour of the “contes drolatiques” is not confined to these productions. his work at large tastes of the same kind of humour, and we feel him again and again, like any other great healthy producer of these matters, beguiled and carried along. he would have been, i dare say, the last not to insist that the artist has pleasures forever indescribable; he lived in short in his human comedy with the largest life we can attribute to the largest capacity. there are particular parts of his subject from which, with our sense of his enjoyment of them, we have to check the impulse to call him away—frequently as i confess in this relation that impulse arises.

the relation is with the special element of his spectacle from which he never fully detaches himself, the element, to express it succinctly, of the “old families” and the great ladies. balzac frankly revelled in his conception of an aristocracy—a conception that never succeeded in becoming his happiest; whether, objectively, thanks to the facts supplied him by the society he studied, or through one of the strangest deviations of taste that the literary critic is in an important connection likely to encounter. nothing would in fact be more interesting than to attempt a general measure of the part played in the total comedy, to his imagination, by the old families; and one or two contributions to such an attempt i must not fail presently to make. i glance at them here, however, the delectable class, but as most representing on the author’s part free and amused creation; by which too i am far from hinting that the amusement is at all at their expense. it is in their great ladies that the old families most shine out for him, images of strange colour and form, but “felt” as we say, to their finger-tips, and extraordinarily interesting as a mark of the high predominance—predominance of character, of cleverness, of will, of general “personality”—that almost every scene of the comedy attributes to women. it attributes to them in fact a recognised, an uncontested supremacy; it is through them that the hierarchy of old families most expresses itself; and it is as surrounded by them even as some magnificent indulgent pasha by his overflowing seraglio that balzac sits most at his ease. all of which reaffirms—if it be needed—that his inspiration, and the sense of it, were even greater than his task. and yet such betrayals of spontaneity in him make for an old friend at the end of the chapter no great difference in respect to the pathos—since it amounts to that—of his genius-ridden aspect. it comes to us as we go back to him that his spirit had fairly made of itself a cage in which he was to turn round and round, always unwinding his reel, much in the manner of a criminal condemned to hard labour for life. the cage is simply the complicated but dreadfully definite french world that built itself so solidly in and roofed itself so impenetrably over him.

it is not that, caught there with him though we be, we ourselves prematurely seek an issue: we throw ourselves back, on the contrary, for the particular sense of it, into his ancient superseded comparatively rococo and quite patriarchal france—patriarchal in spite of social and political convulsions; into his old-time antediluvian paris, all picturesque and all workable, full, to the fancy, of an amenity that has passed away; into his intensely differentiated sphere of la province, evoked in each sharpest or faintest note of its difference, described systematically as narrow and flat, and yet attaching us if only by the contagion of the author’s overflowing sensibility. he feels in his vast exhibition many things, but there is nothing he feels with the communicable shocks and vibrations, the sustained fury of perception—not always a fierceness of judgment, which is another matter—that la province excites in him. half our interest in him springs still from our own sense that, for all the convulsions, the revolutions and experiments that have come and gone, the order he describes is the old order that our sense of the past perversely recurs to as to something happy we have irretrievably missed. his pages bristle with the revelation of the lingering earlier world, the world in which places and people still had their queerness, their strong marks, their sharp type, and in which, as before the platitude that was to come, the observer with an appetite for the salient could by way of precaution fill his lungs. balzac’s appetite for the salient was voracious, yet he came, as it were, in time, in spite of his so often speaking as if what he sees about him is but the last desolation of the modern. his conservatism, the most entire, consistent and convinced that ever was—yet even at that much inclined to whistling in the dark as if to the tune of “oh how medi?val i am!”—was doubtless the best point of view from which he could rake his field. but if what he sniffed from afar in that position was the extremity of change, we in turn feel both subject and painter drenched with the smell of the past. it is preserved in his work as nowhere else—not vague nor faint nor delicate, but as strong to-day as when first distilled.

it may seem odd to find a conscious melancholy in the fact that a great worker succeeded in clasping his opportunity in such an embrace, this being exactly our usual measure of the felicity of great workers. i speak, i hasten to reassert, all in the name of sympathy—without which it would have been detestable to speak at all; and the sentiment puts its hand instinctively on the thing that makes it least futile. this particular thing then is not in the least balzac’s own hold of his terrible mass of matter; it is absolutely the convolutions of the serpent he had with a magnificent courage invited to wind itself round him. we must use the common image—he had created his frankenstein monster. it is the fellow-craftsman who can most feel for him—it being apparently possible to read him from another point of view without getting really into his presence. we undergo with him from book to book, from picture to picture, the convolutions of the serpent, we especially whose refined performances are given, as we know, but with the small common or garden snake. i stick to this to justify my image just above of his having been “caged” by the intensity with which he saw his general matter as a whole. to see it always as a whole is our wise, our virtuous effort, the very condition, as we keep in mind, of superior art. balzac was in this connection then wise and virtuous to the most exemplary degree; so that he doubtless ought logically but to prompt to complacent reflections. no painter ever saw his general matter nearly so much as a whole. why is it then that we hover about him, if we are real balzacians, not with cheerful chatter, but with a consideration deeper in its reach than any mere moralising? the reason is largely that if you wish with absolute immaculate virtue to look at your matter as a whole and yet remain a theme for cheerful chatter, you must be careful to take some quantity that will not hug you to death. balzac’s active intention was, to vary our simile, a beast with a hundred claws, and the spectacle is in the hugging process of which, as energy against energy, the beast was capable. its victim died of the process at fifty, and if what we see in the long gallery in which it is mirrored is not the defeat, but the admirable resistance, we none the less never lose the sense that the fighter is shut up with his fate. he has locked himself in—it is doubtless his own fault—and thrown the key away. most of all perhaps the impression comes—the impression of the adventurer committed and anxious, but with no retreat—from the so formidably concrete nature of his plastic stuff. when we work in the open, as it were, our material is not classed and catalogued, so that we have at hand a hundred ways of being loose, superficial, disingenuous, and yet passing, to our no small profit, for remarkable. balzac had no “open”; he held that the great central normal fruitful country of his birth and race, overarched with its infinite social complexity, yielded a sufficiency of earth and sea and sky. we seem to see as his catastrophe that the sky, all the same, came down on him. he couldn’t keep it up—in more senses than one. these are perhaps fine fancies for a critic to weave about a literary figure of whom he has undertaken to give a plain account; but i leave them so on the plea that there are relations in which, for the balzacian, criticism simply drops out. that is not a liberty, i admit, ever to be much encouraged; critics in fact are the only people who have a right occasionally to take it. there is no such plain account of the comédie humaine as that it makes us fold up our yard-measure and put away our note-book quite as we do with some extraordinary character, some mysterious and various stranger, who brings with him his own standards and his own air. there is a kind of eminent presence that abashes even the interviewer, moves him to respect and wonder, makes him, for consideration itself, not insist. this takes of course a personage sole of his kind. but such a personage precisely is balzac.

iii

by all of which have i none the less felt it but too clear that i must not pretend in this place to take apart the pieces of his immense complicated work, to number them or group them or dispose them about. the most we can do is to pick one up here and there and wonder, as we weigh it in our hand, at its close compact substance. that is all even m. taine could do in the longest and most penetrating study of which our author has been the subject. every piece we handle is so full of stuff, condensed like the edibles provided for campaigns and explorations, positively so charged with distilled life, that we find ourselves dropping it, in certain states of sensibility, as we drop an object unguardedly touched that startles us by being animate. we seem really scarce to want anything to be so animate. it would verily take balzac to detail balzac, and he has had in fact balzacians nearly enough affiliated to affront the task with courage. the “répertoire de la comédie humaine” of mm. anatole cerfberr and jules christophe is a closely-printed octavo of 550 pages which constitutes in relation to his characters great and small an impeccable biographical dictionary. his votaries and expositors are so numerous that the balzac library of comment and research must be, of its type, one of the most copious. m. de lovenjoul has laboured all round the subject; his “histoire des ?uvres” alone is another crowded octavo of 400 pages; in connection with which i must mention miss wormeley, the devoted american translator, interpreter, worshipper, who in the course of her own studies has so often found occasion to differ from m. de lovenjoul on matters of fact and questions of date and of appreciation. miss wormeley, m. paul bourget and many others are examples of the passionate piety that our author can inspire. as i turn over the encyclopedia of his characters i note that whereas such works usually commemorate but the ostensibly eminent of a race and time, every creature so much as named in the fictive swarm is in this case preserved to fame: so close is the implication that to have been named by such a dispenser of life and privilege is to be, as we say it of baronets and peers, created. he infinitely divided moreover, as we know, he subdivided, altered and multiplied his heads and categories—his “vie parisienne,” his “vie de province,” his “vie politique,” his “parents pauvres,” his “études philosophiques,” his “splendeurs et misères des courtisanes,” his “envers de l’histoire contemporaine” and all the rest; so that nominal reference to them becomes the more difficult. yet without prejudice either to the energy of conception with which he mapped out his theme as with chalk on a huge blackboard, or to the prodigious patience with which he executed his plan, practically filling in with a wealth of illustration, from sources that to this day we fail to make out, every compartment of his table, m. de lovenjoul draws up the list, year by year, from 1822 to 1848, of his mass of work, giving us thus the measure of the tension represented for him by almost any twelvemonth. it is wholly unequalled, considering the quality of balzac’s show, by any other eminent abundance.

i must be pardoned for coming back to it, for seeming unable to leave it; it enshrouds so interesting a mystery. how was so solidly systematic a literary attack on life to be conjoined with whatever workable minimum of needful intermission, of free observation, of personal experience? some small possibility of personal experience and disinterested life must, at the worst, from deep within or far without, feed and fortify the strained productive machine. these things were luxuries that balzac appears really never to have tasted on any appreciable scale. his published letters—the driest and most starved of those of any man of equal distinction—are with the exception of those to madame de hanska, whom he married shortly before his death, almost exclusively the audible wail of a galley-slave chained to the oar. m. zola, in our time, among the novelists, has sacrificed to the huge plan in something of the same manner, yet with goodly modern differences that leave him a comparatively simple instance. his work assuredly has been more nearly dried up by the sacrifice than ever balzac’s was—so miraculously, given the conditions, was balzac’s to escape the anti-climax. method and system, in the chronicle of the tribe of rougon-macquart, an economy in itself certainly of the rarest and most interesting, have spread so from centre to circumference that they have ended by being almost the only thing we feel. and then m. zola has survived and triumphed in his lifetime, has continued and lasted, has piled up and, if the remark be not frivolous, enjoyed in all its agréments the reward for which balzac toiled and sweated in vain. on top of which he will have had also his literary great-grandfather’s heroic example to start from and profit by, the positive heritage of a fils de famille to enjoy, spend, save, waste. balzac had frankly no heritage at all but his stiff subject, and by way of model not even in any direct or immediate manner that of the inner light and kindly admonition of his genius. nothing adds more to the strangeness of his general performance than his having failed so long to find his inner light, groped for it almost ten years, missed it again and again, moved straight away from it, turned his back on it, lived in fine round about it, in a darkness still scarce penetrable, a darkness into which we peep only half to make out the dreary little waste of his numerous ?uvres de jeunesse. to m. zola was vouchsafed the good fortune of settling down to the rougon-macquart with the happiest promptitude; it was as if time for one look about him—and i say it without disparagement to the reach of his look—had sufficiently served his purpose. balzac moreover might have written five hundred novels without our feeling in him the faintest hint of the breath of doom, if he had only been comfortably capable of conceiving the short cut of the fashion practised by others under his eyes. as alexandre dumas and george sand, illustrious contemporaries, cultivated a personal life and a disinterested consciousness by the bushel, having, for their easier duration, not too consistently known, as the true painter knows it, the obsession of the thing to be done, so balzac was condemned by his constitution itself, by his inveterately seeing this “thing to be done” as part and parcel, as of the very essence, of his enterprise. the latter existed for him, as the process worked and hallucination settled, in the form, and the form only, of the thing done, and not in any hocus-pocus about doing. there was no kindly convenient escape for him by the little swinging back-door of the thing not done. he desired—no man more—to get out of his obsession, but only at the other end, that is by boring through it. “how then, thus deprived of the outer air almost as much as if he were gouging a passage for a railway through an alp, did he live?” is the question that haunts us—with the consequence for the most part of promptly meeting its fairly tragic answer. he did not live—save in his imagination, or by other aid than he could find there; his imagination was all his experience; he had provably no time for the real thing. this brings us to the rich if simple truth that his imagination alone did the business, carried through both the conception and the execution—as large an effort and as proportionate a success, in all but the vulgar sense, as the faculty when equally handicapped was ever concerned in. handicapped i say because this interesting fact about him, with the claim it makes, rests on the ground, the high distinction, that more than all the rest of us put together he went in, as we say, for detail, circumstance and specification, proposed to himself all the connections of every part of his matter and the full total of the parts. the whole thing, it is impossible not to keep repeating, was what he deemed treatable. one really knows in all imaginative literature no undertaking to compare with it for courage, good faith and sublimity. there, once more, was the necessity that rode him and that places him apart in our homage. it is no light thing to have been condemned to become provably sublime. and looking through, or trying to, at what is beneath and behind, we are left benevolently uncertain if the predominant quantity be audacity or innocence.

it is of course inevitable at this point to seem to hear the colder critic promptly take us up. he undertook the whole thing—oh exactly, the ponderous person! but did he “do” the whole thing, if you please, any more than sundry others of fewer pretensions? the retort to this it can only be a positive joy to make, so high a note instantly sounds as an effect of the inquiry. nothing is more interesting and amusing than to find one’s self recognising both that balzac’s pretensions were immense, portentous, and that yet, taking him—and taking them—altogether, they but minister in the long run to our fondness. they affect us not only as the endearing eccentricities of a person we greatly admire, but fairly as the very condition of his having become such a person. we take them thus in the first place for the very terms of his plan, and in the second for a part of that high robustness and that general richness of nature which made him in face of such a project believe in himself. one would really scarce have liked to see such a job as la comédie humaine tackled without swagger. to think of the thing really as practicable was swagger, and of the very rarest order. so to think assuredly implied pretensions, pretensions that risked showing as monstrous should the enterprise fail to succeed. it is for the colder critic to take the trouble to make out that of the two parties to it the body of pretension remains greater than the success. one may put it moreover at the worst for him, may recognise that it is in the matter of opinion still more than in the matter of knowledge that balzac offers himself as universally competent. he has flights of judgment—on subjects the most special as well as the most general—that are vertiginous and on his alighting from which we greet him with a special indulgence. we can easily imagine him to respond, confessing humorously—if he had only time—to such a benevolent understanding smile as would fain hold our own eyes a moment. then it is that he would most show us his scheme and his necessities and how in operation they all hang together. naturally everything about everything, though how he had time to learn it is the last thing he has time to tell us; which matters the less, moreover, as it is not over the question of his knowledge that we sociably invite him, as it were (and remembering the two augurs behind the altar) to wink at us for a sign. his convictions it is that are his great pardonable “swagger”; to them in particular i refer as his general operative condition, the constituted terms of his experiment, and not less as his consolation, his support, his amusement by the way. they embrace everything in the world—that is in his world of the so parti-coloured france of his age: religion, morals, politics, economics, physics, esthetics, letters, art, science, sociology, every question of faith, every branch of research. they represent thus his equipment of ideas, those ideas of which it will never do for a man who aspires to constitute a state to be deprived. he must take them with him as an ambassador extraordinary takes with him secretaries, uniforms, stars and garters, a gilded coach and a high assurance. balzac’s opinions are his gilded coach, in which he is more amused than anything else to feel himself riding, but which is indispensably concerned in getting him over the ground. what more inevitable than that they should be intensely catholic, intensely monarchical, intensely saturated with the real genius—as between 1830 and 1848 he believed it to be—of the french character and french institutions?

nothing is happier for us than that he should have enjoyed his outlook before the first half of the century closed. he could then still treat his subject as comparatively homogeneous. any country could have a revolution—every country had had one. a restoration was merely what a revolution involved, and the empire had been for the french but a revolutionary incident, in addition to being by good luck for the novelist an immensely pictorial one. he was free therefore to arrange the background of the comedy in the manner that seemed to him best to suit anything so great; in the manner at the same time prescribed according to his contention by the noblest traditions. the church, the throne, the noblesse, the bourgeoisie, the people, the peasantry, all in their order and each solidly kept in it, these were precious things, things his superabundant insistence on the price of which is what i refer to as his exuberance of opinion. it was a luxury for more reasons than one, though one, presently to be mentioned, handsomely predominates. the meaning of that exchange of intelligences in the rear of the oracle which i have figured for him with the perceptive friend bears simply on his pleading guilty to the purport of the friend’s discrimination. the point the latter makes with him—a beautiful cordial critical point—is that he truly cares for nothing in the world, thank goodness, so much as for the passions and embroilments of men and women, the free play of character and the sharp revelation of type, all the real stuff of drama and the natural food of novelists. religion, morals, politics, economics, esthetics would be thus, as systematic matter, very well in their place, but quite secondary and subservient. balzac’s attitude is again and again that he cares for the adventures and emotions because, as his last word, he cares for the good and the greatness of the state—which is where his swagger, with a whole society on his hands, comes in. what we on our side in a thousand places gratefully feel is that he cares for his monarchical and hierarchical and ecclesiastical society because it rounds itself for his mind into the most congruous and capacious theatre for the repertory of his innumerable comedians. it has above all, for a painter abhorrent of the superficial, the inestimable benefit of the accumulated, of strong marks and fine shades, contrasts and complications. there had certainly been since 1789 dispersals and confusions enough, but the thick tradition, no more at the most than half smothered, lay under them all. so the whole of his faith and no small part of his working omniscience were neither more nor less than that historic sense which i have spoken of as the spur of his invention and which he possessed as no other novelist has done. we immediately feel that to name it in connection with him is to answer every question he suggests and to account for each of his idiosyncrasies in turn. the novel, the tale, however brief, the passage, the sentence by itself, the situation, the person, the place, the motive exposed, the speech reported—these things were in his view history, with the absoluteness and the dignity of history. this is the source both of his weight and of his wealth. what is the historic sense after all but animated, but impassioned knowledge seeking to enlarge itself? i have said that his imagination did the whole thing, no other explanation—no reckoning of the possibilities of personal saturation—meeting the mysteries of the case. therefore his imagination achieved the miracle of absolutely resolving itself into multifarious knowledge. since history proceeds by documents he constructed, as he needed them, the documents too—fictive sources that imitated the actual to the life. it was of course a terrible business, but at least in the light of it his claims to creatorship are justified—which is what was to be shown.

iv

it is very well even in the sketchiest attempt at a portrait of his genius to try to take particulars in their order: one peeps over the shoulder of another at the moment we get a feature into focus. the loud appeal not to be left out prevails among them all, and certainly with the excuse that each as we fix it seems to fall most into the picture. i have so indulged myself as to his general air that i find a whole list of vivid contributive marks almost left on my hands. such a list, in any study of balzac, is delightful for intimate edification as well as for the fine humour of the thing; we proceed from one of the items of his breathing physiognomy to the other with quite the same sense of life, the same active curiosity, with which we push our way through the thick undergrowth of one of the novels. the difficulty is really that the special point for which we at the moment observe him melts into all the other points, is swallowed up before our eyes in the formidable mass. the french apply the happiest term to certain characters when they speak of them as entiers, and if the word had been invented for balzac it could scarce better have expressed him. he is “entire” as was never a man of his craft; he moves always in his mass; wherever we find him we find him in force; whatever touch he applies he applies it with his whole apparatus. he is like an army gathered to besiege a cottage equally with a city, and living voraciously in either case on all the country about. it may well be, at any rate, that his infatuation with the idea of the social, the practical primacy of “the sex” is the article at the top of one’s list; there could certainly be no better occasion than this of a rich reissue of the “deux jeunes mariées” for placing it there at a venture. here indeed precisely we get a sharp example of the way in which, as i have just said, a capital illustration of one of his sides becomes, just as we take it up, a capital illustration of another. the correspondence of louise de chaulieu and renée de maucombe is in fact one of those cases that light up with a great golden glow all his parts at once. we needn’t mean by this that such parts are themselves absolutely all golden—given the amount of tinsel for instance in his view, supereminent, transcendent here, of the old families and the great ladies. what we do convey, however, is that his creative temperament finds in such data as these one of its best occasions for shining out. again we fondly recognise his splendid, his attaching swagger—that of a “bounder” of genius and of feeling; again we see how, with opportunity, its elements may vibrate into a perfect ecstasy of creation.

why shouldn’t a man swagger, he treats us to the diversion of asking ourselves, who has created from top to toe the most brilliant, the most historic, the most insolent, above all the most detailed and discriminated of aristocracies? balzac carried the uppermost class of his comedy, from the princes, dukes, and unspeakable duchesses down to his poor barons de province, about in his pocket as he might have carried a tolerably befingered pack of cards, to deal them about with a flourish of the highest authority whenever there was the chance of a game. he knew them up and down and in and out, their arms, infallibly supplied, their quarterings, pedigrees, services, intermarriages, relationships, ramifications and other enthralling attributes. this indeed is comparatively simple learning; the real wonder is rather when we linger on the ground of the patrician consciousness itself, the innermost, the esoteric, the spirit, temper, tone—tone above all—of the titled and the proud. the questions multiply for every scene of the comedy; there is no one who makes us walk in such a cloud of them. the clouds elsewhere, in comparison, are at best of questions not worth asking. was the patrician consciousness that figured as our author’s model so splendidly fatuous as he—almost without irony, often in fact with a certain poetic sympathy—everywhere represents it? his imagination lives in it, breathes its scented air, swallows this element with the smack of the lips of the connoisseur; but i feel that we never know, even to the end, whether he be here directly historic or only quite misguidedly romantic. the romantic side of him has the extent of all the others; it represents in the oddest manner his escape from the walled and roofed structure into which he had built himself—his longing for the vaguely-felt outside and as much as might be of the rest of the globe. but it is characteristic of him that the most he could do for this relief was to bring the fantastic into the circle and fit it somehow to his conditions. was his tone for the duchess, the marquise but the imported fantastic, one of those smashes of the window-pane of the real that reactions sometimes produce even in the stubborn? or are we to take it as observed, as really reported, as, for all its difference from our notion of the natural—and, quite as much, of the artificial—in another and happier strain of manners, substantially true? the whole episode, in “les illusions perdues,” of madame de bargeton’s “chucking” lucien de rubempré, on reaching paris with him, under pressure of madame d’espard’s shockability as to his coat and trousers and other such matters, is either a magnificent lurid document or the baseless fabric of a vision. the great wonder is that, as i rejoice to put in, we can never really discover which, and that we feel as we read that we can’t, and that we suffer at the hands of no other author this particular helplessness of immersion. it is done—we are always thrown back on that; we can’t get out of it; all we can do is to say that the true itself can’t be more than done and that if the false in this way equals it we must give up looking for the difference. alone among novelists balzac has the secret of an insistence that somehow makes the difference nought. he warms his facts into life—as witness the certainty that the episode i just cited has absolutely as much of that property as if perfect matching had been achieved. if the great ladies in question didn’t behave, wouldn’t, couldn’t have behaved, like a pair of nervous snobs, why so much the worse, we say to ourselves, for the great ladies in question. we know them so—they owe their being to our so seeing them; whereas we never can tell ourselves how we should otherwise have known them or what quantity of being they would on a different footing have been able to put forth.

the case is the same with louise de chaulieu, who besides coming out of her convent school, as a quite young thing, with an amount of sophistication that would have chilled the heart of a horse-dealer, exhales—and to her familiar friend, a young person of a supposedly equal breeding—an extravagance of complacency in her “social position” that makes us rub our eyes. whereupon after a little the same phenomenon occurs; we swallow her bragging, against our better reason, or at any rate against our startled sense, under coercion of the total intensity. we do more than this, we cease to care for the question, which loses itself in the hot fusion of the whole picture. he has “gone for” his subject, in the vulgar phrase, with an avidity that makes the attack of his most eminent rivals affect us as the intercourse between introduced indifferences at a dull evening party. he squeezes it till it cries out, we hardly know whether for pleasure or pain. in the case before us for example—without wandering from book to book, impossible here, i make the most of the ground already broken—he has seen at once that the state of marriage itself, sounded to its depths, is, in the connection, his real theme. he sees it of course in the conditions that exist for him, but he weighs it to the last ounce, feels it in all its dimensions, as well as in all his own, and would scorn to take refuge in any engaging side-issue. he gets, for further intensity, into the very skin of his jeunes mariées—into each alternately, as they are different enough; so that, to repeat again, any other mode of representing women, or of representing anybody, becomes, in juxtaposition, a thing so void of the active contortions of truth as to be comparatively wooden. he bears children with madame de l’estorade, knows intimately how she suffers for them, and not less intimately how her correspondent suffers, as well as enjoys, without them. big as he is he makes himself small to be handled by her with young maternal passion and positively to handle her in turn with infantile innocence. these things are the very flourishes, the little technical amusements of his penetrating power. but it is doubtless in his hand for such a matter as the jealous passion of louise de chaulieu, the free play of her intelligence and the almost beautiful good faith of her egotism, that he is most individual. it is one of the neatest examples of his extraordinary leading gift, his art—which is really moreover not an art—of working the exhibition of a given character up to intensity. i say it is not an art because it acts for us rather as a hunger on the part of his nature to take on in all freedom another nature—take it by a direct process of the senses. art is for the mass of us who have only the process of art, comparatively so stiff. the thing amounts with him to a kind of shameless personal, physical, not merely intellectual, duality—the very spirit and secret of transmigration.