Some of Balzac’s Minor Pieces

Fortnightly Review, 1 October 1889, pages 491-504, 7,013 words

As a traveller in the unknown East, standing on the last ridge of the last hill, sees a city, and in awe contemplates the walls fabulous with terraces and gates, the domes and the towers clothed in all the light of the heavens, so does the imaginative reader view the vast sections into which the Human Comedy is so eloquently divided — scenes from private life, scenes from provincial life, scenes from Parisian life, scenes from political life, scenes from military life, scenes from country life, philosophical studies, analytical studies, &c. These are the streets and thoroughfares which intersect and divide this great city of thought; below each division, the titles of the volumes rise like spires and pinnacles, and unconsciously the reader passes from story to story like a sightseer from bridges to palaces through streets and gardens inexhaustible.

Jonah marched three days into Nineveh, before he began to preach: Nineveh was little compared with the Human Comedy. I have walked many years in its streets and mused many years on its terraces, but so abundant is that city of thought with all beauty of imaginative design, so resplendent with all jewels of wit, so full of the many enchantments of various love, so terrible with all accents of pain, grief, sorrow, and pathetic melancholy that the mind may retain only a portion of the wonders there displayed. With Balzac it is as with a great city, neither can be learnt completely; at each fresh acquirement the mind loses something hitherto its own. And, when we close the fiftieth volume and take up the first which we read ten, maybe twenty years before, what we have not forgotten we read with new lights, for the light of middle age is different from that of youth.

Impossible it is then to write an article on Balzac as it is to write one on life itself, and the guide that comes forth from the city to meet the stranger will do well to limit the range of the first excursion. If he is a wise guide he will say, “Let us not attempt too much this first day, let us pass it in some quiet suburb rather than in the torrid magnificences of the town; come with me and we will at leisure examine some quaint interesting places where may be studied the characteristics and the genius of the city.” And even so would I address the reader wholly unacquainted with the Human Comedy.

I have not yet been able to understand criticism as an exact science, and still hold that the best and most interesting critic is he who attempts no more than to tell through his author the story of his own soul. I have always felt that even the first steps in criticism as an exact science, viz., to prove that Shelley was a better poet than Tupper, are as far beyond my powers as they are beyond my desires, therefore I shall not even try to define Balzac’s position in the literary firmament, as some of my learned brethren would say, and shall continue writing this paper with no higher aim than a truthful telling of my own feelings towards this great man.

Balzac re-created all things. There was in him a greater Dickens, a greater Thackeray, a greater Eliot, a greater Fielding, a greater Edgar Poe. And this is an occasion to say that notwithstanding all that has been said about Baudelaire’s indebtedness to Edgar Poe, the only French writer touched at all with the true spirit of Poe’s genius was Balzac, and he, because he seems to have boxed the compass of the human mind, from Rabelais to Spinoza, from Dickens to Herbert Spencer, from Swedenborg to Miss Austin.

His criticism of life seems to me as profound as Thackeray’s is trivial and insignificant, and as beautifully sincere and virile as George Eliot’s is canting and pedantic; and to-day it is more living than when he wrote, for he was enormously, incomprehensibly in advance of his time and able by intuitive knowledge of the inherent qualities of things to divine all latent possibilities; we find allusions full of strange anticipatory insight into those problems of clairvoyance and hypnotism and auto-suggestion which modern science is rescuing from the pollution of supernatural belief and classifying within the natural laws; and all mysterious instinctive comprehension of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is contained in the last pages of Le Lys dans la Vallée.

Balzac’s intuitive knowledge of the latent forces in things which circumstances might at any moment develop into active forces, led him to see that if peasants combined that the laws would prove powerless to tear from them either the rent or the land, and that by passive resistance and secret murder, the landlords could be forced to sell their properties to the peasants at nominal prices. No Irish agitator could draw up a plan of campaign more effectually than Balzac did in this book written fifty years ago. In this book will be found every incident of the land war in Ireland; indeed, the murder of the bailiff differs not at all from the many such murders we have read of in Ireland in these last ten years, and the boycotting of the general might be included with very little alteration in Captain Boycott’s memoirs; and the schemes for land reform propounded in that wonderful chapter, “En quoi le cabaret est le parlement du peuple,” wonderful from the title to the closing word, might pass without exciting suspicion, for extracts from one of Michael Davitt’s speeches. To have looked so far into the future and with such precision and graphic detail, constructing a world to come from a single fact, as Cuvier constructed a past animal from a single bone, must strike even the casual reader as a most extraordinary intellectual feat and quite beyond the reach of any other novelist.

It was necessary to evoke some vision of Balzac’s gigantic intellect; for the purpose of this article is not to merely show how beautifully cameos may be carved, but to show rather how beautifully a giant can carve cameos when he is so minded. Nor do I select my cameos among the marvellous collection which is open to me to choose from: I take the first that come under my hand, and my choice is guided if at all only by the wish to take those which in choice of subject wander into devious coverts of the soul unexplored by English writers.

Yes, to give a glimpse of Balzac in abnormal mood is part of my desire; Sarrasine will do this, Les Secrets de la Princesse Cadignan will show him in philosophic temper and in the fashionable world, Adieu will as well but not better than a dozen other stories, display his romantic method and Facino Cane will give some slight inkling of the profit to which inferior writers have turned his mighty labours. I will begin with Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan.

“The revolution of July destroyed many aristocratic fortunes upheld by the Court, and Madame la Princesse de Cadignan had the cleverness to lay at the door of these political crises her ruin, which was really due to her prodigalities. The princess heretofore so celebrated — queen of all queens of fashion under her first name La Duchesse de la 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.”

The princess was married when she was sixteen to her mother’s lover, the Duke de Maufrigneuse, and when the princess tells the story of her life to d’Arthez, the great writer whom Balzac probably meant for himself, she speaks thus of the Duchesse d’Uxelles.

“Well, I never was angry with the duchesse for having loved Monsieur de Maufrigneuse better than poor Diana, and this is why. My mother knew very little of me: she had forgotten me: but she conducted herself towards me in a way which is wicked between women and horrible between mother and daughter. I knew nothing, I was incapable of guessing the secret of this alliance. I had a handsome fortune. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was overwhelmed with debt. If I learnt later what it was to have debts I was at the time too ignorant of life to suspect it. The economies the duke was enabled to make by the help of my fortune sufficed to appease his creditors. He was thirty-eight when I married him, but those years were like those of the campaigns of military men, and should count double. Ah! he was in truth 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 is an old man à bonnes fortunes. What life is with a man, accustomed to the adoration of women of the world and who finds neither incense nor censor 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 in rough contact with all the asperities of a chagrined mind, with all the caprices of powerlessness, 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 turn, overwhelming me with his experience and proving me ignorant of 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 Balzac knew it, and who in practice was as childlike as Balzac himself. Arthez was chosen for that very reason, for as the Marquise d’Espard said to the princess when the two friends sat together, regretting they had never loved any one of their many lovers:

“Fools love well sometimes,” said the marquise. “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. “But 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 willingly allows his eyes to be banded. Look at Canalis and the Duchess de Chaulieu. If you and I have met geniuses, they were perhaps too far from us and we were too occupied, too frivolous, too carried away, too taken up with other things.” “Ah! 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.”

It is out of conversation, a few sentences, one of which I have translated, between the princess and Madame Despard that 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. Infinite genius meets infinite worldly sagacity, and with what art is the web spun, and with what art is the accomplished charmer shown waiting, her lovely head leaned upon her long white fingers in the lamplight, an exquisite expression of tender melancholy. She is 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. The poor man of genius, sceptical, when sitting at his writing table, as Mephistopheles, is candid as a little child, sitting at the princess’s feet. How true this is! The philosopher is as 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. I have said elsewhere than in this article that a book of maxims surpassing those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert might be garnered in Balzac’s novels. Here are a few taken from this little story which does not consist of more than forty pages.

“Yes, when we are young we are full of fatuous stupidities, we resembled 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 only thought of perpetuating the species; in fine to have invented love.”

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 a creature of the cliff.

Balzac saw that the drawing-room was the great feature of civilisation. Since Dickens, no one in England has had sufficient strength of imagination to get outside of his habit and seek the pathetic and the picturesque where Morris wall-papers and Liberty silk are unknown; and although an immense amount of wholly unnecessary scribbling is done concerning drawing-rooms, their decoration and flirtations, none has attempted to understand and to raise the drawing-rcom out of a dreary fictional lieu commun. To say that Lady So-and-so’s drawing-room is furnished in pink is sufficient for the English writer. But Balzac goes deeper; he saw that the drawing-room is perhaps the last expression of an exhausted civilisation, and he expressed the drawing-room in the Princesse de Cadignan, its morals and its education; her very attitudes symbolise the drawing-room. Here is one.

“She arrived early so as to be seated on the ottoman by the fire-side close to Madame d’Espard just as she desired to be seen, in one of those attitudes in which science hides behind an exquisite naturalness, one of those poses sought and studied which bring into relief the beautiful serpentine line of the body, beginning at the feet ascending to the hip, and in admirable roundnesses continuing to the shoulders, affording sight of the entire profile of the body.”

How entirely drawing-room this is!

Adieu is an example of Balzac’s romantic manner, and we shall see the enchantment he weaves about the beautiful word. Two sportsmen, tired after a hard day, wander out of the sun’s way into the cool of a large wood, seeking a house or habitation of some kind. Presently they come upon open spaces, at the end of which is an Abbey partly in ruins. “What disorder,” cried Monsieur d’Albon, “after pleasing for a moment in the sombre impression that the ruins gave to the landscape, which appeared to have been struck as if by a malediction.” Then, after a detailed description of the place, we catch a glimpse of a woman passing lightly as the shadow of a cloud from beneath the walnut trees growing by the iron gate. The men find their way to the ruined Abbey, which they discover to be still used as an habitation. The strange woman again appears, and this is how she is described: —

“The two men were astonished to see her jump on the bough of an apple tree and swing there with the lightness of a bird. She seized the fruit, ate, and then let the apples fall with that gracious softness which we admire in squirrels. Her limbs possessed an elasticity which relieved every slightest movement from all appearance of effort or difficulty. She played upon the ground, rolled there as might a child; then suddenly throwing her feet and hands forward remained stretched on the grass with the abandonment, the grace and naturalness of a young cat asleep in the sun.

“‘Adieu,’ cried she with soft harmonious voice, but without the melody, impatiently awaited by the two sportsmen, seeming to reveal the slightest trace of sentiment or idea.”

But one of the men recognises the woman, he cries her name, and his emotion on seeing her is so great that he faints, and is taken home by his friend, who returns on horseback at his earnest request to make inquiries as to the identity of the mysterious woman. He learns her story from her uncle, who lives in the ruined Abbey.

The scene is on the banks of the Beresina; and Marechal Victor had left there a thousand men in guard of the bridges, which they were charged to destroy when the Russians appeared. But instead of crossing the river the remnant of Napoleon’s army encamped in the snow, feeding on horseflesh, cooked before fires made of broken carts and waggons.

“The apathy of these poor soldiers cannot be understood by those who have traversed those vast deserts of snow, without other perspective except a horizon of snow, without other drink than the snow, without other bed than snow, without other nourishment than a frozen beet-root, a handful of meal, or a piece of horseflesh…. Although the artillery of the left wing of the Russian army fired without ceasing on this mass, sometimes seen as a great black stain, sometimes as a great blaze in the middle of the snow, the indefatigable bullets seemed no more to the torpid crowd than one more discomfort.”

I would I had space to give some of the extraordinary details by which Balzac evokes the very motion, colour, smell, and sound of awful war. Among these war-stricken fugitives there is a general and his wife, and Philip de Susy 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 cried “Adieu” to Philip. But the husband was thrown from the raft and killed among the ice, and without a protector, lost in the disaster of the retreat, she followed the track of the army for two years, the plaything of every ruffian. In a word, she knew all the misfortunes of war, hunger, thirst, cold, and cruelty, until she was at last rescued from a madhouse in Germany and brought back to France. No words except Balzac’s can tell how her lover in the woods about the lonely ruined abbey strives to win her back to reason…. Ah! the infinite pity of his efforts to coax her, as he might a wayward animal with lump sugar, and all his various hopes and disappointments, until the old uncle finds him one day loading his pistols to shoot her.

“‘Poor little one,’ cried 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, shall we not? He is insane, and you are only crazed. Go, God alone should call you to himself. We think you are unhappy because you can participate no longer in 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 farther, but for our purpose it is not necessary to follow it to its exquisite conclusion. The magic must have been already perceived by the reader. Its pathetic simplicity might have been equalled by Shakespeare if he had written prose fiction, he might have given an equally aerial picture of the return of the human, through suffering, to the pure animal, that gracious wiping out, by benevolent nature, of thought when the burden became too great to bear.

The most casual reader will hardly fail to see how unlike this exquisite story is to the wooden fictions of Charles Reade. There is in Ophelia much tender appreciation of the little breadth that divides the sane from the insane and the immensity of the responsibility which the transition, slight in itself, involves; but is the very haunting question, if we have gained in happiness since we have acquired the power of looking before and after, so tenderly insinuated?

In these days, when the domestication of literature is proceeding apace, and our standard of literary ability seems a negative one, namely, to write nothing that young ladies may not openly discuss in their drawing-rooms, the marvellous story of Sarrasine will find little favour; and not because it is immoral, but because it is unconcerned with the accepted ideals of the nineteenth century, the tea-table, the curate, the young lady who wants to be married, &c. To the nineteenth century the abnormal is intolerable, even frank sensuality receives a better welcome. And as education proceeds, natural taste, that is to say, individual taste withers, and man becomes blinder every day to the charms of the bizarre, and more intolerant to the exotic. But is not the strange, the perverse, the abnormal, the very heart of art, without which it cannot live, without which it is an inanimate thing? The abnormal is the heart of art, without which it may not palpitate, but must lie inert, even as a picture by M. Bouguereau. The abnormal is found in all great writers; it is not their whole flesh, but it is their heart. The abnormal must always be felt, although it may rarely form the subject of picture or poem. To make the abnormal ever visible and obtrusively present is to violate the harmony of Nature; to avoid the abnormal is to introduce a fatal accent of insincerity. But Balzac’s mind being absolutely pure, and his genius wholly valid, he was led to give the abnormal exactly the same prominence in the Human Comedy as it has in Nature; and his treatment and comprehension of it was no wise inferior to his treatment and comprehension of the great and primal emotions. Balzac has called genius a terrible malady: he was qualified to define it; yet there is a marked element of health in all great work. Shakespeare’s genius was unquestionably healthier than that of any of his contemporaries, yet he wrote the Sonnets; Balzac’s genius was unquestionably saner than any of his contemporaries, if we except Hugo’s, and yet Balzac wrote La Fille aux Yeux d Ors, La dernière Incarnation de Vautrin, Une Passion dans le Désert, Seraphita and Sarrasine. Therefore it may be said that the final achievement of genius is the introduction and artistic use of the abnormal.

It would be both interesting and instructive to analyse these strangest flowers of genius; but having regard for the susceptibilities of the public, especially that part of the public that reads the daily papers, I will turn at once to Massamilla, a story which is held in such high esteem by students of Balzac that it would be impossible for me to pass it without notice, although, in truth, I care for it not nearly so much as for Adieu, Pierette, Le Curé de Tours, or Une Vieille Fille. The romantic note which I hold to be one of the essentials of Balzac’s genius, and which pervades even his most realistic work, and without which it would not stand on a much lower plane, seems to me to have taken  —  well, very nearly taken, a vulgar turn in Massamilla Doni. The theme is a beautiful one, full of psychological interests of the rarest kind, but in this instance the master’s development of the theme seems to me a little doubtful; of this I am sure, that the same developments in other hands would have been quite intolerable, just as the developments Shakespeare gives to Falstaff’s love intrigues would have in any other hands drifted immediately into the very vulgarest vaudeville. Shakespeare’s genius saved his comedy, and Balzac’s genius has saved story; but in this instance, I think, not so triumphantly. 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 Massamilla 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 festival. Thinking that it is some surprise that Massamilla Doni is preparing for him he asks no question, but seats himself at the supper table which he finds spread with rare comestibles 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 you 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 turned from the thought of any infidelity; but the brutal and capricious infidelity dominated his soul.” And for envelopment of this theme, a young man hesitating between the real and ideal, Balzac chooses Venice  —  Venice, with all enchantments of time and history, lineage, gondolas, palaces; and this Venice he clothes with the music of Rossini’s Moses, the lamentations of Israel under Pharaoh’s lash being appropriate and symbolic of Venice under Austria. The woman who has entered Emilio’s palace is not alone. She is accompanied by a monster, and I give in its entirety Balzac’s description of this monster. In every writer we find passages which, although not very excellent in themselves, seem to reveal, as in a mirror, the strength and weakness of the writer’s genius.

Like that of Neapolitans, the costume of the unknown consisted of five colours, if the black of the hat is 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. The nose 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, which lapped 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. In fine, 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 cyclopedian 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 digestions 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 of a very superior irony; Nature has 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, and one that has been repeated in and out of season: my excuse for citing it is that perhaps no better exemplification of it could be found were all literature ransacked for vindication of its truth. How easily we see the intellectual giant in this description, pushing forward in mad haste, crazed with ideas, impetuously fumbling for the right words, and finding expression at last. To show my god as he really is I have translated word for word, preserving as well as I knew how every ungainly edge. Sometimes, it is true, I have not understood, and I admit my entire inability to understand, and therefore to adequately translate, the following phrase descriptive of the Duke’s mouth: “Et où se montraient trois ou quatres défences blanches douées de movement, qui se placaient d’elles-même les unes entre les autres.” The looseness of the original French is, of course, magnified in the 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. Yet I would not have it understood that I do not consider Balzac a great stylist; he made style with ideas, and to me, at least, it is impossible to imagine that the passage in question would be better in any other form. Would it be better by the introduction of any of Thackeray’s simperings? Does any one think that any touch of George Eliot’s pedantry would be preferable to its vehemence?

But to return to the story. The duke is the husband of Massamilla Doni; he is a melomaniac; and the last pleasure left to him is music. The lady with him is a great opera singer, upon whom he expends fortunes, so that he may be able to accompany her voice on the violin, for certain harmonies convulse him with delight. The real title is Nostalgia: all the characters are suffering from some form of nostalgia, and that is why Balzac chose Venice for the scene of this tale. One alone is incurable. “The love of a fatherland that exists no longer is a passion for which there is no remedy.” 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 Massamilla Doni, and how Massamilla Doni is induced to descend from her palace of reserve and purity. The intrigue seems unworthy of the beauty of theme, so full of suggestion and divine possibilities, and we can only say that in other hands its loveliness would have vanished utterly in the vulgarity of the treatment.

It may be argued that Vanity Fair is superior to the Père Goriot and that the Mill on the Floss is a greater work than Eugenie Grandet, but it cannot be contended that Thackeray or Eliot, or even Dickens, came in their shorter works within range of such marvels as Jesus Christ en Flandres, Une Vieille Fille, La Maison Nucingen or any other handful of stories that may be gathered on the endless shore of the Human Comedy. The Human Comedy is littered with stories, and each is a supreme invention, and each reveals absolute power to attain the end desired even if it be inexcusable. To write a novel without a love interest is a feat that only the very strongest may attempt, and this feat Balzac accomplishes whenever he chooses, as a matter of course. In La Maison Nucingen he sets himself a still more difficult task. As a party of friends are finishing dinner in a private room in a fashionable restaurant another party sits down to dinner in the room on the other side. The walls are thin, and what they say is overheard. This dinner party consists, as Balzac puts it, of the four most celebrated vultures of Parisian society. Their conversation fills sixty-eight closely printed pages; and they tear Paris, plunging their beaks into the very entrails, dragging them forth. After sixty-eight pages of the most astonishing conversation, one of the party says, “There is some one next door.” Bricou answers significantly, “There is always some one next door.”

The volume which contains Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan commences with La Maison Nucingen, 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 the wall, and all the while he is digging he sees the darkness full of gold and diamonds, for he is, according to his account, 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 orbits 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. Being a writer of fiction myself I am not deceived by those superficial likenesses which are gathered by shallow critics and flung in the face of contemporary writers. Most foolish charges of plagiarism were urged against Mr. Rider Haggard on the publication of She; he was even severely criticised for introducing verses not written by himself into one of his books. While the controversy was raging I remember wondering why the erudite Mr. Lang did not defend his friend by citing Balzac’s conduct in precisely similar circumstances. The sonnets and verses which Lucien is supposed to have written are not by Balzac. The names of the authors are, I believe, known, but be sure every student of French verse can read the name of its author in the last lines of that exquisite sonnet “La Tulipe.”

“Mais la nature, hélas! n’a pas versé d’odeur

Dans son calice fait comme un vase de Chine.”

As plainly as the author of Les Emaux et Camées is recognisable in that last verse, that thief Dumas is seen stealing Monte Cristo from Facino Cane. 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.

The Human Comedy was produced amid maddening pecuniary difficulties, and in literary history there is nothing more pathetic than his account of his efforts to pay off his debts, yet they never led him into any prostitution of his genius. There is something strangely whimsical in the idea of writing Seraphita to pay off a debt. He often mentions in his letters that he has been working eighteen hours; that he rose at two and continued his cerebral debauch until noon. Balzac died in harness, killed by the Herculean task of improvising La Cousine Bette in six weeks.

Many, no doubt, think that Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, and Goethe, were greater writers than Balzac. Personally I can imagine nothing greater, but that by the way. The point I should like to bring out clearly and distinctly is that if Balzac is not judged fit to dispute the highest place with Shakespeare, the only deficiencies that may be urged against him are verbal deficiencies. It is certain that of all imaginative writers he ruled over the greatest variety of subjects, peopling his vast empire with a greater number of human souls and ideas. It is certain also that the criticism of life contained in his fifty volumes is at once the most comprehensive, the most elaborate, the most philosophic attempted by any writer of imaginative literature, and these facts being granted, and I hardly see how they can be disputed, my point cannot be gainsaid — namely, that if the first wreath be given to Shakespeare it is accorded for purely verbal excellences.

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, rendering the French mind again, as it were, virgin soil, ready and in season to receive the seed. In our own great literary epoch was it not evenso? Was it not the Reformation and the discovery of America which resulted first in Marlowe and then in Shakespeare? Balzac could follow the tale of the Napoleonic wars even into the life-disappointments of old maids, and write the history of one of nature’s greatest convulsions, even in the humblest of households. Balzac alone could epitomise Balzac, and he did so when he said, “The world belongs to me because I understand it.” To me there is more wisdom and more divine imagination in Balzac than in any other writer; he looked farther into the future than human eyes could see, and that I am finishing these pages with tears in my eyes, that I have written so many upon four short stories, and could have written as many more, so rich in thought is his very slightest page, is a tribute to his genius, if such a rushlight as myself may pay tribute to such a miracle of glory as he. Some will deem this hysterical and exaggerated praise, but only those who do not know the master, or those who think they know him because they have read the Père Goriot. To arrive even at a fragmentary and superficial power you must have read at least thirty of the fifty volumes which go to make up that city of thought so well named “The Human Comedy.” As God is said to have created Adam from a handful of clay, so did Balzac create the French novel. Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Goncourt, Bourget, Maupassant, and Henry James have only taken and developed that part of Balzac which individually they superficially represent. “I am at a loss to say from what root Balzac sprang. To compare for a moment any of our novelists with him would be, as every man of letters knows, absurd! Shakespeare is the only writer that can be pitted against him, and as I understand criticism more as the story of the critic’s soul than as an exact science, I say that I would willingly give up Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, &c., for the yellow books.

GEORGE MOORE.