Conversations in Ebury Street, Chapter 3

London: William Heineman, 1 January 1924, pages 34-67, 10,820 words

Conversations in Ebury Street is a nonlinear volume of nineteen chapters. Chapters 7-11 are essays in art criticism; chapter 19 is worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the ebook of Conversations in Ebury Street in the GMi Shop.

III

Now what is to be done with this wretched article? I said, awaking from my meditation on the qualities of the departed guest; and taking up Impressions and Opinions I turned over the leaves, but laid the book aside suddenly, disquieted by the opening: a city seen upon a violet evening, with a traveller striving through suburb after suburb, and arriving at last at Eugénie Grandet the certain capital of La Comédie Humaine. In former days I thought the capital was Les Illusions Perdues, no doubt captivated by Balzac's ordering of Lucien's clothes; but even in my immaturity I was not without the thought that the way for English readers is through the minor pieces rather than through the major. Very likely; but, like the whale, I must vomit this Balzac and swallow another, keeping the translations, which might be worse.... And turning the leaves over I came on the place where the article should begin! Here the beginning is inoffensive, and in my circumstance it is enough to avoid always the flagrantly offensive. My thoughts flitted from him whom I had described somewhat irreverently in Vale as a great destrier, slow to rise out of the dust of the roadway, but who, once on his hooves, could be heard from afar like thunder; by no means an excellent simile, one which I should not think of using in the book which is to replace Impressions and Opinions — a simile which I quote without being able to discover any reason in myself for the quotation; one cannot be held responsible for every thought that comes into one's mind, and every memory.... And my thoughts still flitting, passed from the great Touranian to Zola, to the day when I went to call on him at Medan, to the essential hour when I sat by the sofa on which the master rested, satisfied in his glory, whilst I, almost a boy, strove to ingratiate myself, saying everything that I thought would please him and succeeding very well up to a point, but bringing a cloud into the master's face when I agreed with him that his article on Balzac was not altogether a success. So great was my nervousness that I might have told him unwittingly that Henry James's article on Balzac was better, much better, and very likely would have done so had I read Henry James's article. I had not; my ignorance saved me; and before Alexis arrived I had gained a place in the master's esteem.

And returning from long ago to Ebury Street, I began to consider all articles on Balzac as bad, and that it might be wiser to abandon Impressions and Opinions for a new story. But no sooner had I begun to take pleasure in my escape from my old book of odds and oddments than I remembered that the library edition must contain a volume of criticism. I had come to loathe the essay, and whilst looking at it I had begun one in my thoughts, a long essay on a serious subject — the vanity of education or some more suitable title, instead of applying myself to my job: to contrive a volume of criticism to replace Impressions and Opinions. This must be done, said I to myself, though the tide of enforced education come in and overwhelm the natural intelligence of man. This volume of criticism must be forthcoming and quickly, for I have signed for twenty volumes, and whosoever reads me expects to hear me speak about Balzac. Whereupon I began to rue the time I had spent talking about Mr. Fisher; Husband would have been better pleased to hear me say that though it is not the lot of all critics to be remembered by what they failed to understand, Sainte­-Beuve's failure to appreciate Balzac's genius will assure him of the sneers of many a generation, and the pot of paint flung in the face of the public will survive Ruskin's finest prose passage. What should I know of Janin if Zola, in an admittedly inadequate article, had not pointed out that the journalist overlooked the importance of Lucien's daily expenditure in the little grub-shop, and that by stressing it Balzac was introducing a new element into fiction — the value of money.

Balzac is too vast for an article, and that is why it occurred to me to lead the reader by way of the minor pieces into the company of two thousand men and women and children. New faces meet us at every tum; hundreds of human souls float round and round as if in a vortex, the usurer everywhere, governing his own section as he governs it in life. We find all types of men and women: peasants working in fields and drinking in the inns, courtesans in the streets and in palaces, old men preyed upon by unscrupulous women, who in turn are the victims of unscrupulous young men. Balzac was a great harvester and his sheaves were souls: poets who waste their talents in love-dreams, diners-out who waste theirs in quips. As we read on, volume after volume, our wonder increases, for we come upon allusions full of anticipatory insight into those problems of clairvoyance and hypnotism and auto-suggestion which modem science is classifying within the natural; yes, and in The Human Comedy all the incidents of the land war in Ireland­ — the murder of the bailiff in Les Paysans differs barely from the many such murders we have read of in Ireland, and the boycotting of the General might be included with very little alteration in Captain Boycott's memoirs.

It will be asked how Balzac, who went to his bed at six o'clock in the evening and rose from it at twelve o'clock to write till six o'clock the next evening — shifts of eighteen hours — could have found time to experience the life he was describing, to enter into and tell minutely the soul secrets of more than two thousand men and women, and to endure this life not for the space of a week but for months at a time. The question is asked every time a book or an essay on Balzac is published, and whenever Balzac's name is mentioned in literary circles somebody says that he must have donned a footman's livery else he could not have described the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain, to which a better thinker answers that Balzac knew from the beginning how life was made and did not need to observe it. Only in the arts was he at fault; the arts cannot be divined, and let it be confessed that he shows himself often as sciolist, and nowhere more so than in La Cousine Bette, a book written in six weeks — shifts of eighteen hours — containing some souls that abide in eternity, reappearing with unimportant, casual modifications in every age and country — le Baron Hulot and his wife, who overhears her husband telling a servant girl that at the death of his wife she might be Madame la Baronne; Madame Marnieff, too, is in this book. The people of The Human Comedy are rarely social figments, more or less carefully described, nearly always the clear embodiments of a great visionary. His pen commands; visions fill his brain and are noted in his lonely garret, a cup of black coffee at his elbow. So did he write, for it was possible to write The Human Comedy in this way, and if I have told the story for the thousandth time, it is only to make plain my reasons for confining this paper to the minor pieces. Why rush into an essay on Balzac? for none can convey to a reader any faintest idea of the unsearchable Grandet — of his wife, his daughter, or his servant, of the drunken but brave soldier in Un Ménage de Garçon, of Lucien de Rubempré, of the Père Goriot, of Canalis, of —

I will begin with Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan: Many aristocratic fortunes dependent on the Court were swept away in the disasters of July, and Madame la Princesse de Cadignan was clever enough to attribute her ruin, which was really due to her extravagances, to these political crises. The Princess, married when she was sixteen to her mother's lover, the Duke de Maufrigneuse — queen of all queens of fashion under her first name, La Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, retired from the world to a small apartment consisting of no more than five rooms, where she devoted herself to her son's education. And when the time comes for the Princess to tell the story of her life to D' Arthez, she speaks thus of the Duchesse d'Uxelles:

I was never angry with the Duchesse for having loved Monsieur de Maufrigneuse better than poor Diana, and this is why. My mother had seen very little of me; she had forgotten me; but she behaved towards me in a way which is wicked between women and can only be described as horrible between mother and daughter. Mothers whose lives are like that of the Duchesse d'Uxelles keep their daughters far from them, and it was not until a fortnight before my marriage that I was introduced into society. You can guess my innocence; I knew nothing; I was without wit to suspect the trap that had been set. I had a fine fortune. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was overwhelmed with debts, and if I know now what it is to be in debt, my knowledge of life then was too slight for me even to suspect the danger. My fortune enabled the Duke to economise and so to pacify his creditors. He was thirty-eight when I married him, but these years were like those of military campaigns; they should count double. Ah! he was more than seventy­-six. At forty my mother still had pretensions to good looks, and I found myself between two jealousies. What an existence was mine for ten years! Ah! if it were known what this poor, little, suspected woman has suffered, watched by a mother jealous of her daughter! Good heavens, you who write dramas will never invent anything so black, so cruel, as that! Oh, my friend, you men cannot guess what life is with an old man à bonne fortunes, a man accustomed to the adoration of women of the world, and who finds neither incense nor censer at home, dead to everything and jealous for that very reason. I desired when the Duke de Maufrigneuse was wholly mine to be a good woman; but I came into rough contact with an embittered mind, with all the caprices of impotence, with all the puerilities of folly, with all the vanities of self-sufficiency, with a man who was in fine the most tiresome elegy in the world, who treated me like a child, and amused himself by humiliating my self-esteem at every tum, overwhelming me with his experience, and proving me ignorant in all things. So did the Princess coo in the ears of the great man who sat at her feet listening to her as a neophyte in one of the first days of the Christian faith might have listened to the epistle of an apostle.

Understand that the actors in this scene from Parisian life are a princess who has dissipated many fortunes, her own and those of her lovers, who knows all sensations except love, whose drawing-room is her temple, and whose ritual is love-confidences; the other is a man of genius, who knows the world theoretically, as Balsac knew it, and who in practice was as child-like as Balzac himself, and that is why D'Arthez was chosen. Fools love well sometimes, said the Marquise d'Espard to the Princess when the two friends sat together regretting that they had never loved any one of their many lovers: Fools love well sometimes.

But, replied the Princess, for this (that is to say, to believe in the speakers), even fools would not be sufficiently credulous. You are right, said the Marquise, laughing. And it is neither a fool nor yet a man of talent that we should seek. To solve such a problem a man of genius is necessary. Genius alone has child­-like faith, the religion of love, and allows his eyes to be banded. Look at Canalis and the Duchesse de Chaulieu. If you and I have met geniuses, we were too occupied, too frivolous, too carried away, too taken up with other things. But I would not leave the world without knowing the delights of true love, cried the Princess. It is nothing to inspire it, said Madame d'Espard, the difficulty is to feel it. I see many women who are only pretexts of a passion instead of being at once the cause and the effect.

These creatures of the drawing-room meet in middle age to hold conversations on the nature of love, and out of these the action of the story springs. Qui a bu, boira, the Princess grown tired of solitude and motherly duties, yearns for a new emotion, and Daniel d'Arthez is sought; Rastignac and De Trailles are commissioned to draw him from his studies. Genius meets worldly sagacity, and the accomplished charmer is shown spinning her web, her lovely head leaned upon her long white fingers in the lamplight, determined that this is to be no passing caprice; if she gives herself again it will be to a lover who believes her innocent, pure, incapable of untruth. Aud the man of genius, sceptical when sitting at his writing-table as Mephistopheles, is candid as a little child sitting at the feet of the Princess. How true this is! The philosopher is a child when he strives to put his knowledge into practice, the man of the world is a child when he strives to put his knowledge into words.

Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan might be entitled: The Seduction of Genius by Experience. It is animated by a sublime comprehension of the fascinating perversities of cerebral passion, and the confiding simplicities of a great man, who, wearied like Faust, with learning, desires the repose and consolation of love. Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan might also be entitled: The Philosophy of the Drawing-room. It is the drawing-room in essence. The Princess is a being born of the drawing­ room; she has been formed and coloured by the drawing-room as an insect by the chemical qualities and the colour of the plant upon which it lives. Her ideas of love, literature, art, and science are drawing-room ideas of love, literature, art, and science. The intonations of her voice, and every inflection of accent, have been produced by the drawing-room. Her weariness of life is drawing-room weariness of life. She is a creature of the drawing-room as the horse is a creature of the stable, as the eagle is of the cliff.

A book of maxims might be garnered in Balzac's novels, and not a few might be taken from this little story of not more than forty pages. Yes, when we are young we are full of fatuous stupidities; we resemble those poor young men who play with a toothpick to make believe that they have dined well. What is to be gained by leaving your husband? In a woman it is an admission of feebleness. One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature made a female, to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; in fine, to have invented love.

Adieu is an example of Balzac's romantic manner. The story is introduced by two sportsmen who, having sought game all the morning, wander into the shade of a wood in the hope of finding a house or habitation of some kind; and coming upon a ruined Abbey they stand spell-bound, so great is the desolation and ruin about them. In Balzac's words, a woman passes from a group of walnut trees by an iron gate lightly as the shadow of a cloud, and the men watch her, their surprise passing into amazement when they see her climb an apple tree and seat herself on one of the boughs, seize the fruit, eat, and then let the apples fall half-eaten. And their amazement quickens when descending from the tree she rolls upon the ground as a child might, throwing her feet and hands forward, remaining stretched upon the grass with the abandonment, the grace, and the naturalness of a young cat asleep in the sun. Adieu, she cried in a soft, harmonious voice, lacking, however, those notes of human interest which the two men would have welcomed. One of the men suddenly recognises the woman, and the sight of her affects him so violently that he falls to the ground like one dead; and his friend, fearing some terrible heart seizure, points his gun upwards and fires into the air to bring help quickly, the report of the gun clearly awakening in the woman (a moment ago blithe as a butterfly in the sunshine, now running hither and thither like a frightened hare) echoes of some terrible misfortune.

The reader will guess that the man who fell, overwhelmed at the sight of the half-witted woman, is none other than her lover, a soldier in Napoleon's army and with her when it encamped to kill the horses and eat them on the banks of the frozen Beresina.

I would I had space to give some of the details by which Balzac evokes the very motion, colour, smell, and sound of war; for these the reader must turn to the text itself, getting from me the mere thread of the story, that among the war-stricken fugitives there is a General and his wife, and Philip de Susy, who is striving to save their lives, striving to get them to the bridge before it is destroyed by the troops on the other side. But his last horse has been seized and eaten. He steals, however, horses from the Russian sentries, which are tied to the carriages, and they drive over the bodies of sleeping soldiers. You can't make an omelette without breaking the eggs, cries the grenadier, pricking the horses with his sword-point. But the bridge is burnt before they can reach it; a raft is constructed, place is made for the woman, and she cries: Adieu, to Philip. But the husband is thrown from the raft and killed among the ice, and, without a protector, lost in the disaster of the retreat, she follows the track of the army for two years, the plaything of every ruffian. She knows all the misfortunes of war, hunger,.cold, and cruelty, to be at last rescued from a madhouse in Germany and brought back to France. And the business of the story is to tell how her lover strives to win her out of her animality, for she is as a charming, wayward animal; and he tries to coax her daintily, until the old uncle finds him one day loading his pistols to shoot her.

Poor little one, cries her uncle, pressing the poor crazy thing to his breast, he would have killed you, egoist that he is; he would kill you because he suffers. He knows not how to love you for yourself, my child. We will forgive him. He is insane, and you are only crazed. Go! God alone should call you to himself. We think you are unhappy because you can share no longer our miseries — fools that we are! But, said he, placing her on his knees, you are happy, nothing annoys you; you live like the bird, like the hind.

She rushed and caught a young blackbird, crushed it, looked at it, and left it at the foot of a tree without thinking anything more about it.

Come, cried Philip, taking her in his arms, do you not feel my heart beating? I love you always. Philip is not dead. He is here, you lean upon him. You are my Stephanie, and I am your Philip.

Adieu, cried she, adieu!

Balzac carries the story further, but for our purpose it is not necessary to carry it to its exquisite conclusion. Enough it will be to suggest that there is in Ophelia much tender appreciation of the little space that divides the sane from the insane, and the immensity of the re­sponsibility which the transition, slight in itself, involves; but is the haunting question, have we gained in happiness since acquiring the power of looking before and after, so tenderly insinuated?

In these days when our literary ambitions are satisfied by writing nothing that young ladies may not discuss openly in their drawing-rooms, Sarrasine, a eunuch, will not find favour. Since Don Juan exclaimed against don­ning woman's attire, saying that it involved a denial of his sex, and got for answer:

Don it, or I will call

One who will leave you with no sex at all,

the third sex has been barred from our homespun as indelicate, and the report is current that my old friends Mudie and Smith went in search of advice and that they left the bishops' palace convinced that the Syrian eunuch differs in many little ways from the Roman: as Sarrasine hails from Rome and not from Baghdad the twain had no choice but to exclude him from select circulation­ — a process of reasoning which will seem less obscure when I tell that he was the leading soprano in the papal choir and the favourite of a cardinal whose wealth he inherited.

But it is in his old age that Balzac shows him to us, his strange beauty gone, a phantom, a ghost, a legend, that his relatives keep hidden away in a great palace where nobody sees him, so ashamed are they of him and anxious to conceal the source of their wealth. It happens, however, that despite their precautions to keep him out of sight, a guest, during the progress of a great ball in the palace, sees him pass through a curtained doorway, and turning to a friend, or to whosoever happens to be by him, asks in terror: Did you see? The other guest knows Sarrasine's story, and the two withdraw to a balcony, one to hear and the other to tell how a young Frenchman, captivated by the voice and the beauty of Sarrasine in his youth, and believing him to be a woman, perished by the hand of an assassin.

In allowing one of the guests to tell Sarrasine's story to another guest, Balzac may have chosen wisely, but an oblique narrative demands more care than Balzac was able to bestow upon it, and we cannot but think that Sarrasine was one of his hastily improvised stories. It is said that La Grenadière was improvised in eighteen hours; it may have been, and if it were we must assume that his black coffee failed to keep him sufficiently awake. And the same ill-luck, we think, befell Sarrasine. Balzac did not lose himself so completely in it as he did in La Grenadière; but if Sarrasine be almost negligible as art its importance in the history of prose narrative is great, for whosoever reads The Human Comedy thoughtfully will learn from it that the niche we should reserve for the abnormal is a very small one, and that the man of talent should refrain from introducing it into his stories, for though one man can steal the horse, another may not look over the hedge; and of all, let the man of talent not be led away by Terence's noble aphorism: I am a man and may not consider anything in humanity alien from myself.

One word more on the abnormal. It will be better for the industrious compiler of what is known as English fiction to continue to choose an ordinary, every-day story, for in developing it any originality of mind and vision he may possess will appear to advantage. Balzac finds lights that we would not willingly be without in the abnormal, but it cannot be contended that La Fille aux Yeux d'Or is worth Le Curé de Tours, or that anybody would hesitate if a choice were given him between Sarrasine or Une Vieille Fille.

Although somewhat lost amid numberless chefs-d'oeuvre, although rarely cited as a striking example of Balzac's genius, Une Vieille Fille is one of the first among the minor pieces. It seems to me to epitomise the resources of a mind profound and, at least in the conception of a subject, sensible to art. In Une Vieille Fille we meet a certain philosophic criticism peculiar to Balzac, and three characters conceived with imaginative incisiveness and executed with an alertness of thought only to be found in his very best work, and some two or three dramatic moments. The first of these is when at the dinner-hour the fair laundress slips into the Chevalier's room and confesses her trouble to him. He is far too cunning to show that he disbelieves her story.

With phrases in harmony with the traces of prosperous days that linger about the room — traces of the eighteenth century — he sends her away to lay the charge of seduction at the door of his rival Du Bousquier. The scene with Du Bousquier is equally good, for in it Balzac achieves his intention, which was to portray, and, in portraying, to show how these two old bachelors, who are both intriguing one against the other for the hand and fortune of Mlle. Connon, represent the ideas and outward appearance of two distinct epochs — the Chevalier de Valois, the aristocracy and elegance of the eighteenth century, Du Bousquier, the vulgarity and commercialism of the nineteenth. Another exquisite moment is when Mlle. Cormon hears that the Vicomte de Troisville is a married man, and yet another when the Chevalier comes to ask the hand of Mlle. Cormon: But this fine gentleman could only be killed in one way; he had lived by the Graces, and it was right that he should die by their hand. Whilst the Chevalier had been putting the finishing hand to his toilette, Du Bousquier entered the drawing-room of the disconsolate maid.

The soul of the story is the desire of Mlle. Cormon to be married, and the difficulties which beset her project. Through this simple subject Balzac passes as with a lantern in his hand, showing us bow the conscription had affected the marriage market and how the republican spirit persisted, and, notwithstanding the restoration, was beginning to make itself felt in the social life of the remote provinces; we are made to feel too that the monarchy is ephemeral and that republicanism is the abiding force, that its eclipse is more apparent than real.

Yet the machinery of this story, in which so many grave subjects enter, is the very simplest, and it is put in motion by one of Madame Lardot's laundresses, who, as we have seen, thought first of laying a charge of seduction against the elegant Chevalier, but who was easily persuaded that it would be to her far greater advantage to lay the charge against his rival Du Bousquier. Here are a few extracts from Balzac's description of an elderly gentleman, long, dry, and penniless, the greater part of whose youth had been passed in Paris, where, when he was about thirty, the revolution had surprised him in the midst of his conquests, but who now lived en province in two rooms above Madame Lardot's laundry, in the midst of grisettes, whom he looks kindly upon, making them presents of bits of ribbon and slight packets of chocolate creams:

He dined out every day and he played cards every evening. He passed for being a witty man, thanks to a defect which consisted in telling numberless anecdotes concerning the reign of Louis XV and the beginning of the revolution. When these stories were heard for the first time they were considered to be well told. Though the Chevalier de Valois never ascribed his witticisms to himself, nor spoke of his love affairs, his graces and his smiles were deliciously indiscreet. This good gentleman availed himself of the privilege of an old Voltairean noble not to attend mass, but his irreligion was looked upon indulgently on account of his devotion to the Royal cause. One of his graces, and the most remarked, was his manner, doubtless imitated from De Molé, of taking snuff from an old gold box ornamented with the portrait of the Princess Goritza, a charming Hungarian, celebrated for her beauty in the reign of Louis XV. Devoted to this illustrious stranger, in his youth he always spoke of her with emotion; and it was on her account that he had fought with Monsieur de Lauzun.

The Chevalier was now fifty-eight, but be never admitted to more than fifty; and the fib was accepted as truth, for he kept that slimness of figure which, it would seem, is the prerogative of dry and blond men, and among women as well as men, carries into middle age the semblance of youth. Yes, learn that all life, or all elegance, which is the expression of life, exists in the waist. Among the Chevalier's belongings must be numbered the nose which Nature had given him, a nose that divided, and trenchantly, his pale face into two sections that did not match, for one reddened during the labour of digestion. This fact is worthy of remark in a time when physiology occupies so much attention. The incandescence was on the left side.

Although the long, slim legs, the lank body and the pallid complexion of Monsieur de Valois did not proclaim a healthy constitution, he ate like an ogre, and sought to excuse his excessive appetite by pretending to be afflicted with a malady known en province as a hot liver. The flushing of his face gave a certain credence to this story. But in a country where meals lengthen into thirty or forty dishes and last for four hours, the stomach of the Chevalier must have seemed a gift from Providence to the town. According to certain doctors the flushing of the left side of the face denotes a prodigal heart. The fast life of the Chevalier confirmed these assertions, happily relieving the historian from all responsibility. Notwithstanding these symptoms, Valois had a nervous constitution, consequently vivacious. If his liver burnt (ardit), to use an old expression, his heart did not bum less. If his face was lined, if his hair was silvered, a trained observer would have detected there the stigmas of passion and the furrows of pleasure. En la patte d'oie caractéristique et les marches du palais se montraient ces rides élégantes si prisées à la cour de Cythère. In this spruce Chevalier everything pointed to a ladies' man. He was so minute in his ablutions that his cheeks were a pleasure to look upon; they seemed to have been washed in some miraculous water, and that part of the skull which the hair refused to cover shone like ivory. Constant combing gave a false appearance of youth to his hair and eyebrows. Without using perfume the Chevalier exhaled a perfume of youth that rafraîchissait son air. His gentlemanly hands, cared for like those of a petite maîtresse, attracted the eye by their rose-coloured nails carefully trimmed. If it were not for his majestic and superlative nose he would have been poupin. We must, however, spoil this portrait by an admission of a weakness. The Chevalier put cotton in his ears, and still continued to wear in them two little negroes' heads in diamonds, admirably fashioned, it is true; and he strove to justify these singular appendages by saying that since he had had his ears pierced he no longer suffered from neuralgia. We do not offer the Chevalier as an accomplished man, but should we not forgive old bachelors whose hearts send so much blood to their faces? and their adorable absurdities, are they not founded, perhaps, upon sublime secrets? Besides, the Chevalier made up for the negroes' heads by so many other graces that society considered itself sufficiently indemnified.

I pass over the interview between the enterprising laundress and Du Bousquier, from whom she extorted six hundred francs, going immediately afterwards to lay her distressful case before Madame Granson, the treasurer of La Societé Maternelle. It was necessary that Madame Granson should have a son who likewise aspired to the hand of Mlle. Cormon; but it is not easy to say why Balzac thought fit to hamper the action of his story, hitherto so simple and direct, by making Suzanne in love with the melancholy young poet. Indeed the error is more grave than would appear at first sight. For the suggestion that Suzanne is in love with Athanase turns what would have been a perfect short story into a novel which has accidentally been cut down to the limits of a short story. And if a critic were to urge this reason for assigning a higher place to Le Curé de Tours than to Une Vieille Fille, I should admit that Le Curé de Tours is a more perfect story, and would be tempted to say that whereas no critic who has been at the job himself would deny that the long story and the short one are two different things (as distinct as the sheep and the goat, from which two animals, I believe, no mule has ever been obtained), still there are many who think the short story should confine itself to a bare telling of an anecdote, a somewhat journalistic view of literature; anecdotes are very colourless and uninteresting when divorced from the circumstance that produces them, and to make my meaning clear I will say that the mere anecdote is not much more interesting than a drawing in outline, or the melody detached from its harmony. The melodic line interests the musician for the sake of the harmony it leads him into, and the anecdote is sought by the poet for the same reason, for the ideas that it evokes in his mind. His taste and genius are determined by his management of the melody on one hand and the harmony on the other. The painter must model, but he must be careful to keep the portrait in the canvas. It may be argued that sometimes Balzac over-models, over-harmonises, over-writes, but if my memory be not at fault (I have not read Une Vieille Fille for thirty years), the charge of over-weighting the anecdote cannot be urged against his admirable picture of Mlle. Cormon, of her country, her house, and her history. On her famous Thursday evenings we see the salon lighted up and the guests arriving, the elegant Chevalier producing his box, gazing for a moment on the features of the Princess Goritza, and then taking snuff. We see the brutal and arrogant Du Bousquier, and the pale and melancholy poet who loves Mlle. Cormon sincerely; we hear the shrewd, poverty-stricken mother, Madame Granson, whispering to him: Look at the Chevalier; study him, imitate his manners, see with what ease he presents himself; his air does not seem borrowed, like yours. For goodness sake, speak; one would think you knew nothing, you, who know Hebrew by heart. There is the Abbé de Sponde, Mlle. Cormon's uncle. All these people assemble in the great square reception room; four doors, four windows draped with heavy green curtains, walls wainscoted with grey, painted wood, and an oblong mirror above the chimney-piece. Everything breathes the old and unalterable province. And having painted with rare insight her house and her surroundings, Balzac sets to work to paint the portrait of la vieille fille, Mlle. Cormon: One gave one reason, another gave another, but the poor girl was as pure as an angel, healthy as a child, and full of goodness, for Nature had intended her to receive all the pleasures, all the happiness, and all the labours of maternity.

Nevertheless Mlle. Cormon did not find in her appearance any aids to her desire. She had no other beauty but that which is improperly called la beauté du diable, and which consists in the coarse freshness of youth, which, theologically speaking, the devil could not have, unless we may justify the expression by the constant desire to cool himself. The heiress's feet were large and flat; her leg, which she often showed, but quite unintentionally, when she lifted her dress after rain, and when she stepped out of St. Léonard, could not be taken for the leg of a woman; it was a sinewy leg, with a small calf, hard and pronounced like a sailor's. A thick, healthy waist, a bosom like a wet nurse's, strong and dimpling arms, red hands. Everything about her harmonised with the rounded form and the fat white beauty of Normandy. Prominent eyes of an undecided colour gave to the face, whose outlines were without nobility, an air of astonishment, of sheep-like simplicity, not unsuitable to an old maid; if Rose had not been innocent, she would have looked as though she were. Her aquiline nose contrasted with the smallness of her forehead, for it is seldom that a nose so shapen does not imply a fine brow; red, thick lips testify to a kind heart, but the brow betokened so little intelligence that it was clear the heart was not ruled by the head. It is possible to be good without being gracious. Virtue must be blameless always, though vice may plead the fault of her qualities. Her light brown hair, so strangely long, lent to her face that beauty which comes of force and of abundance, the two principal characteristics of Rose Cormon. In her best days Rose affected a three-quarter view, that a very pretty ear might be seen showing between the azured whiteness of her neck and her temples, and the ear was brought into still further evidence by the enormous head-dress. Seen in this way in a ball-dress she might appear to be good-looking. Her protuberant form, her waist, her vigorous health, drew from the officers of the Empire this exclamation: What a fine slip of a girl! But with years the plumpness, increased by a life of virtue and tranquillity, had become so badly distributed over the body that it had destroyed its primitive proportions, and now no pair of stays could find her waist or her hips, and she appeared to be made in one straight block....

Skipping some few lines of too minute physiological examination, we come upon this passage:

But the poor girl was already over forty! At this moment, after having fought so long to acquire those interests which make a woman's life, but nevertheless, being forced to remain a maid, she fortified her virtue by the most severe religious practices. She had had recourse to religion, that great consolation of carefully guarded virginities. Her confessor for the last three years had foolishly explained the theory of mortification to Mlle. Cormon, and had counselled the use of the scourge. These absurd practices had begun to spread a monastic tint over the face of Rose Cormon, and seeing her white skin taking those yellow tones which announce maturity she despaired. The light down which adorned the corners of her upper lip threatened to increase and spread like a whiff of smoke. The temples had begun to look glassy. In fine, decadence had commenced. It was known in Alençon that she suffered from heating of the blood; she took the Chevalier into her confidence, enumerating the number of foot-baths, and consulting him concerning cooling medicines. The sly dog drew forth his snuff-box, and for form of conclusion contemplated the Princess Goritza.

Before proceeding further into our examination of the minor pieces, let us pause to consider what this fine passage foretells. Until the end of the eighteenth century literature and painting were separable arts; literature being occupied exclusively with thoughts, and not concerned with the folds of the dress, their shape, and the tones they took in the shadow, and again the tones they took when the lady bade her lover good-bye, passing as she said the words into the light of the lamp which stood on a small table, and whose pink shade was clearly defined on the rich purple of the window curtains. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that women began to shriek and sob amid the blue cushions of the sofa, and it was in eighteen hundred and eighty that Angelica stood in her ecstasy looking through the whiteness of the room.

But Balzac's description of Mlle. Connon is something more than Zola's phrase: In ecstasy Angelica looked through the whiteness of the room. For by being quite sincere, that is to say unconscious that he was laying the foundation of a new art, Balzac did not forget that the intention of the old art was to lay bare the soul, and in writing the description of Rose's leg, his intention was to lay bare her soul, believing, as he undoubtedly did believe, that the soul can be read in the face, in the hand, even in the leg. When I came upon the description of her leg the book dropped from my hand, and I cried: The whole of Rose Cormon is in her leg. Yet the leg is but an accent in his portrait; we remember the leg as a wonderful detail, but it does not arrest the reader's attention; he is drawn on to the end of the paragraph, and at the end of the paragraph Rose Cormon stands outside of the little drama in which Balzac saw ber involved. We see her in many stories of our own invention, as somebody we have known intimately in real life, part and parcel of our kind. And Balzac, possessing as strong a hold over dialogue as he does over description, rarely fails to supply his characters with the right words. For instance, how admirably suited to the occasion this is:

Mademoiselle, said he, in great haste, your uncle has sent you an express messenger; the son of Mother Grosmort has arrived with a letter. The fellow started from Alençon before daylight, and he has arrived all the same. He ran like Penelope (Penelope is Mlle. Cormon's bay mare). Shouldn't he have a glass of wine?

What can have happened, Josette? My uncle, could he —

He would not have written, said the lady's-maid, who had guessed her mistress's fears.

Quick! quick! cried Mlle. Cormon after having read the first lines. Let Jacquelin harness Penelope at once. And do you, my good girl, see that everything is packed in half an hour. We return to town at once.

Jacquelin! cried Josette, stimulated by the sentiment which Mlle. Cormon's face expressed; and instructed by Josette, Jacquelin came forward, saying:

But Penelope is eating her hay!

What does that matter; I want to start at once.

But Mademoiselle, it is going to rain.

Well, then, we shall get wet.

The house is on fire, cried Josette, a little piqued by her mistress's silence, for after reading her letter she re-read it again and again.

Finish your coffee at least; do not upset yourself; see how red you are.

I am red, Josette, said she, going to a glass whence the quicksilver was peeling, and therefore gave back a distorted reflection of her face. My goodness, thought Mlle. Cormon, if I should look ugly.

Her worthy uncle had written to his niece that Monsieur de Troisville, a military officer who had seen service in Russia, the grandson of one of his firmest friends, intended to come and live at Alençon, and had asked for hospitality, whilst reminding him of the friendship which the Abbé had borne for his grand­father the Vicomte de Troisville, chef d'escadron under Louis XIV. The importance of this visit in the life of Mlle. Cormon was like that of Waterloo in the life of Napoleon. It behoved Mlle. Cormon to rearrange her house. She turned her boudoir into a bedroom; a new bed was bought to suit the room; and the upshot of it all was the fainting of the poor lady in full view of all her guests on hearing the Vicomte reply to a question put to him by the Chevalier, that he has been married for the last fifteen years and has four children.

Rose's marriage disappointments, her desire of children, the entire philosophy of the married life of an old maid who has married an old man, is given with an insight and a power of wide comprehension of life and things that Balzac has never surpassed, because the last pages of Une Vieille Fille are unsurpassable.

One excellent reason for believing that the genius of Balzac can be approached through the minor pieces is the existence of the Curé de Tours, for unlike many of Balzac's short stories it is not a novel reduced to the limits of a short story — a bundle of events excellently well imagined, but hastily arranged, showing bad cutting and awkwardly sewed seams on every side. It begins at exactly the right point; the development proceeds without long waits; nowhere is there an unnecessary line; and the art it recalls is that of Turgenev. Balzac had many qualities; he was everything in tum, even delicate, and in the Curé de Tours the means are even slighter than the dropping of a handkerchief. The Abbé Birotteau returns home, happy at heart, for he has spent a delightful evening at Madame de Listonière's. His prospects of being made a canon have been discussed, the guests agreeing that he would be appointed. There are other reasons for his feeling singularly content with himself and the world. It is not very long since the Abbé Chapelaud left him by will the books and the furniture which the poor Abbé had not coveted, but which had been his hoc erat in votis, for the last dozen years. The hope of a lifetime, realised only a year ago, and the memory still an active principle in him, and the pleasure of assurance that still further fortune awaited him, combined to render him almost indifferent to the danger of the shower in which he had been caught, and the possible touch of gout it might result in. It seemed to him strange, however, that Marianne should keep him waiting some minutes before she opened the door; and when Marianne, to excuse herself, said she was obeying Mademoiselle's orders, the gentle current of the Abbé's happiness stopped; and on finding his candlestick, left outside his door instead of in the kitchen, according to custom, he entered his room in mute amazement, where another surprise awaited him, for there was no fire; and the time that Marianne took to light one! And all that night in the handsome bed that he had inherited from the Abbé Chapelaud, the Abbé lay, overcome and terrified by the presentiment of immeasurable misfortune, unable to banish from his mind the thought that the delay in opening the door, the removal of the candlestick, and the absence of the fire in his bedroom, could hardly be attributed to accident. At last the poor Abbé fell asleep, hoping that the morning would enlighten him concerning the motives of Mlle. Gamard's displeasure. But the secret motives of Mlle. Gamard's displeasure were destined to remain for ever unknown to him. Mlle. Gamard was an elderly maiden lady who always had priests as boarders. The Abbé Chapelaud had lived with her in the most perfect comfort for over a dozen years — nowhere a grain of dust, beautifully washed linen surplices, and albs smelling of iris, etc. On the ground floor the tall, angular, yellow­ tinted Abbé Troubert, liked by nobody and not received by Madame de Listonière, lived in a damp, bare apartment. He, too, had his eye on the wide, airy apartment on the first floor, filled with the beautiful furniture that the Abbé Chapelaud had left to the Abbé Birotteau, and he says when the Abbé Birotteau is away spending the evening at Madame de Listonière's: The Abbé Birottenn does not find us amusing. He is a wit­ — a gourmet! He likes fashionable society, brilliant conversation, and the gossip of the town. It is thus that we hear for the first time of the terrible Abbé Troubert, who afterwards becomes so powerful: His hands in Paris and his elbows on his table in Tours. But a word of explanation is necessary to make clear the terrible significance of the Abbé Troubert's words. It had long been Mlle. Gamard's ambition to have an At Home, and when the Abbé Birotteau came to occupy the apartment of the Abbé Chapelaud, he lingered after dinner in Mlle. Gamard's drawing-room, played Boston with her, and helped her and himself to pass an agreeable evening. The Abbé Birotteau, although quite witless, was good, kind, and amiable, and his presence in Mlle. Gamard's drawing-room attracted several other friends, and for a moment it seemed as if Mlle. Gamard was about to realise her life's ambition. But the Abbé, although himself a fool, like many another fool could not bear the conversation of fools, and when he took to spending his evenings at Madame de Listonière's, he brought away with him many other guests, and Mlle. Gamard was obliged to give up her soirées.

It is easy to imagine how this cruel thwarting of her social ambitions engendered in the heart of this old maid a ferocious hatred of the Abbé; it is easy, I say, to imagine this hatred; yes, it is easy to do so as we imagine things; but Balzac's imagination is quite different from ours; and using this simple theme as a loom he weaves a world of human passion, folly, goodness, and fashionable selfishness.

The story is one of pure observation — a great mind directed on what is commonly termed the minutiae of life. But are not things only great and small in proportion as we think of them? Is not the world but man's thought, and in the envelope of Balzac's mind the little folk in the city of Tours rise up at once as large, as mean, and as pathetic as life itself — the little folk who are determined for a moment to defend the dear Abbé in the persecution that is being directed against him, but who, a moment after, are forced to abandon him to protect their own interests, which are being menaced by the terrible Abbé Troubert.

The story is fortunate in every way. Besides the even more than usually brilliant envelope of thought in which Balzac never failed to enfold all he wrote, the Curé de Tours is well written. The composition is balanced within and without, and so evenly that no one of the epigrams that light up the pages starts out of its setting or frets, or for one moment fatigues the eye. Here are a few:

Every fresh choice implies disdain for the object that has been refused.

If great things are simple to understand and easy to explain, little things demand an elaboration of detail.

Morality and political economy are opposed to the individual who consumes without producing, who holds a place without distributing good or evil; for evil is but good, the results of which are not at once visible.

Nevertheless these trifles made up the sum of his entire life; his dear life full of occupations in emptiness, full of emptiness in occupations; a life colourless and grey, and where deep sentiments were pain, and the absence of emotion felicity.

Jealousy in Touraine, as is usually the case in provincial life, formed the substance of the language.

Celibates replace sentiments by habits.

If we do not always know where we are going, we always know the fatigues of the journey.

Out of this handful of maxims there are at least four that would hold their own against the best that could be found in La Rochefoucauld, and they were gathered almost at haphazard from a short story written in the space of a couple of nights, printed with others in one of the fifty volumes which form The Human Comedy!

After the Curé de Tours perhaps the most celebrated among the minor pieces is Massimilla Doni. Balzac himself held this story in the highest esteem, but it is disjointed and ill-proportioned; and it may be that the musical criticism enabled him to overlook these faults. On the subject of digression we should be indulgent, if the digression be interesting or valuable. But the eulogy of the Moses in Egypt shows no critical discernment, and an innocent notation of his own impressions would have been more interesting than crude technical praise of a work that has not stood the test of time; to be quite plain, only the criticism of the craftsman is valid. A cabinet-maker will always know more about the leg of a table than a tailor or candlestick-maker.

It has been said that Balzac had not time to live; it might be added that he had not time to think. Thoughts came to him intuitively, as the song comes to a bird, and it is not unlikely that one of the vulgarly seductive phrases of the Moses haunted his ear, and generated in his mind a scheme for a musical novel — the Israelites languishing in Egyptian captivity.... The modern equivalent? — the Venetians under Austrian rule.

Emilio is a young Venetian whose whole fortune does not consist of more than sixty or seventy pounds a year; he lives in the palace of his ancestors amid precious marbles and works of the highest art, no portion of which he may sell. He is in love with Massimilla Doni as Dante was in love with Beatrice, and one night, after an ecstatic evening, as he returns home in his gondola, he sees his palace decorated and lighted as if for a festival. Thinking that it is some surprise that Massimilla Doni is preparing for him, he asks no questions, but seats himself at the supper table, which he finds spread with rare meats and wines. He eats and drinks so heartily that he immediately afterwards yields to an overpowering somnolence. Soon after a woman enters, a woman that reminded me of a fantastic English engraving invented for a forget-me-not, une belle assemblée, or a Book of Beauty. The Prince trembles with pleasure. His soul, his heart, his reason turn from the thought of any infidelity; but the brutal and capricious infidelity dominate his soul. But the woman is not alone; she is followed by a monster — a fearsome duke, Massimilla Doni's husband, a melomaniac, whose last pleasure is music. The lady with him is a great singer, upon whom he expends fortunes so that he may accompany her voice on the violin, for certain harmonies convulse him with delight. But it would be profitless to follow the story into its many circumlocutions, and tell how the great singer is persuaded to yield the young man to Massimilla Doni, and how Massimilla Doni is induced to descend from the palace of reserve and purity. The intrigue surely savours of comic opera. So beautiful a theme­ — a young man hesitating between the real and the ideal — should have been worked out on the simplest and most natural lines, and that the beauty of the theme survives the vulgarity of the treatment is the highest tribute we can pay to Balzac. C'est du mauvais romantisme, but the grip of Balzac is so intense that truth is transferred from reality to art. Balzac describes the monster:

Like that of Neapolitans the costume of the unknown consisted of five colours, if the black of the hat be admissible as a colour; the trousers were olive, the red waistcoat glittered with gilded buttons, the coat verged upon green, and the linen inclined to yellow. This man seemed to have accepted the task of justifying the truth of the Neapolitan that Gerolamo always introduces into his theatre of marionettes. The eyes seemed to be of glass. The nose shaped like an ace of clubs was odiously prominent; and it kindly covered a hole which it would be a libel upon man to call a mouth, and where showed three or four white tusks loose in their sockets, lapping one over the other. The ears drooped by their own weight, giving to this man an odd resemblance to a dog. The complexion, apparently containing several metals infused into the blood according to the prescription of some Hippocrates, verged upon black. The pointed forehead, badly hidden by flat, sparse hairs which fell like filaments of spun glass, crowned with red lumps a grotesquely comic face. Lastly, although thin and of ordinary height, this gentleman had long arms and broad shoulders; but notwithstanding these deformities, and although you would have said he was seventy, he was not without a certain cyclopean majesty; his manners were aristocratic, and he had that air of security which belongs to the rich. For those whose stomachs were sufficiently strong to observe him, his story was written by passions upon a noble clay that had turned to mud. You would have divined the great lord, who, rich in his youth, had sold his body to Debauch at the price of excessive pleasures. Debauch had destroyed a human creature and made another to its purpose; thousands of bottles had passed beneath the purple arches of that grotesque nose, leaving their lees upon the lips. Long and wasting indigestions had carried away the teeth. The eyes had faded in the light of gaming-tables. The blood was charged with impure principles which had exhausted the nervous system. The play of the digestive forces had absorbed intelligence. Love had scattered the brilliant tresses of the young man. Like a greedy inheritor, every vice had left its mark upon a still living corpse. When we observe Nature, we discover in her jests a very superior irony; Nature had placed toads next to flowers, and in such wise was this duke near to this rose of love.

Le style c'est l'homme, is an old saw, one that has been repeated in and out of season, and my excuse for citing it is that perhaps no better exemplification of it could be found than Balzac were all literature ransacked for vindication of its truth. We see the giant in the description of the duke pushing forward in mad haste, crazed with ideas, impetuously fumbling for the right words, and finding expression at last. And to show Balzac as he is, I have translated word for word, preserving, as well as I knew how, every ungainly edge. He wrote well, magnificently when the inspiration was by him; nobody was ever more continuously inspired, and he always had something to say, wherefore he revised to say more, never taking surreptitious pleasure in the art of writing, and his method, like every other, has advantages together with many disadvantages. Note how much better he is in the original French than he is or can ever be in translation, for in the original an association of ideas unites, or rather blends, the words, as an effect of light blends the different parts of a landscape; this enveloping film is, of course, removed in translation, and I have preferred to leave the body naked rather than to weave for it a veil upon my own loom. This is but subterfuge; far better tell the truth about Balzac's style. It has been said that Balzac had not time to live; it might be added that Balzac had not time to write. He lived in ideas; ideas were always about him — ideas on all subjects; and writing was merely the operation of noting them down. In Balzac there is neither question of good style nor of bad style; he simply did not write; he registered his ideas, and his ideas are always so interesting that you read without noticing the ruts of verbal expression he slips into. It is not until we translate Balzac that we fully realise his deficiencies. For instance, the phrase I left untranslated in the description of the Chevalier de Valois, En la patte d'oie

caractéristique et les marches du palais se montraient ces rides élégantes, si prisées à la cour de Cythère. Patte d'oie I always understood to be the French for crowsfeet; but it is hard to guess what he means by les marches du palais; and why in les marches du palais se montraient ces rides élégantes, si prisées à la cour de Cythère. And what I can explain still less is the fact that until we come to translate or to read very, very attentively, the page appears to us to be not only well but splendidly written.

Balzac lived in the midst of the romantic movement, and had his genius not been high and durable it would have succumbed and been lost in the romantic current in which so much genius was lost. But the realistic and critical method of which he was inventor and creator, lived too strongly in him, and the romance that swept about him only tended to purify and ventilate the abundance of his genius; it was the romantic movement that saved him from drifting among the mud­ banks and shallow shores of Naturalism. Rembrandt, a romanticist at heart, lived in an age of plain realism, and for many a year strove to reconcile the principle which be individually represented with the spirit of the time he lived in. I think he failed to do this in Ronde de Nuit, and I think he succeeded in that incomparable picture, The Good Samaritan, in the Louvre; and in just the same way I think Balzac succeeded in reconciling two discordant principles in Adieu, Séraphita, La Peau de Chagrin, Sarrasine, and failed to do so in Massimilla Doni and Une Ténébreuse Affaire.

The Human Comedy is littered with stories, and every one, with the exception of La Grenadière, contains something noteworthy or wonderful, an incident or a character. The volume which contains Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan commences with La Maison Nucingen, and closes with a short tale, some half a dozen pages, called Facino Cane. Facino Cane, a Venetian nobleman, is, when the story opens, a poor blind musician who plays the flageolet at servants' weddings. But he was in his youth the hero of many an adventure. He was imprisoned in a Venice dungeon, whence by the aid of a broken dagger he dug his way through a wall, and all the while be was digging he saw the darkness full of gold and diamonds, for he is, according to his story, gifted by Nature with the faculty of seeing gold. He stops, he says now, before the jewellers' shops, and the yellow of the dear metal flows through the empty orbs to his brain. After many months' toil he reached the vaults in which the treasures of the Doges were concealed. Then he entered into a conspiracy with his gaolers, and escaped by the sea, carrying a great part of the treasure with him. I have no faintest notion as to the date of the first publication of Monte Cristo, but were I possessed of all the riches of the Doges, I would stake all, yea, and my life to boot, that Monte Cristo was published after 1836. That is the date of Facino Cane.

To secure great work two things, as Mr. Matthew Arnold said, are necessary — the man and the moment; in other words, a man is great when all men are great. And Balzac lived when a concurrence of natural causes had combined to render France especially sensible to the reception of ideas. The Revolution had loosened the founts of human thought; Napoleon had passed like a wild dream through Europe; the fields of conventionality were laid waste, religious, political, and literary, and once more the French mind had become a virgin soil ready to receive the seed. And was it not so in our own great literary epoch? The Reformation and the discovery of America enwombed Marlowe and Shakespeare, and the rivalry between Balzac and Shakespeare seems to be between verse and prose rather than between French and English genius. Balzac's empire is wider than Shakespeare's; his subjects are more numerous and his sovereignty not quite so secure. But between him and any other writer in prose fiction there is little comparison. On this point there can be no difference of opinion, and he spoke truly when he said: The world belongs to me because I understand it.