Balzac

Impressions and Opinions, 1 March 1891, pages 1-64, 13,959 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. 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 through palaces 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.

Just as a guide meeting a traveller climbing the last ridge of the last hill would I address the reader: ‘Come with me,' I say, ‘we will spend the day in a suburb where you will learn much, but the city you must explore yourself, for they who have attempted to explain its beauties have failed. There was Sainte-Beuve, there was Janin; both fell into memorable disaster; and the first discredited the critical labour of his life by failing to understand the great genius of his age,'

The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand. That Sainte-Beuve understood Hugo, who cares? but his failure to understand Balzac will assure him of the sneers of many a generation. The same with Ruskin; who cares that he understood Turner? We know that he did not understand Whistler, and the ‘pot of paint flung in the face of the public' will survive his finest prose passage. And the unfortunate Janin, writing of Les Illusions Perdues, one of Balzac's very greatest works, depreciates, indeed he even tries to turn into ridicule, Balzac's constant reference to the exact sums of money that Lucien spent daily in the restaurant. These pecuniary details appeared to Janin to indicate a low and sordid mind. Janin failed to understand how by thus apportioning out the daily expenditure of Lucien, showing how the young poet might live on his little fortune while educating himself, Balzac was introducing a new element into fiction – the value of money. Balzac was the first to perceive 'that money was as necessary to a young man in the nineteenth century as a coat of mail was in the fifteenth.'

Zola himself was not successful in his study of Balzac. He told me that of all his critical studies his Essay on Balzac was the one he was least satisfied with. And he is right; his Essay on Balzac does not compare, for instance, with his Essay on Flaubert. So, having regard for the celebrated failures that have preceded this attempt, it occurred to me that possibly the only way to a suggestion of the vastness of Balzac lay through the minor pieces. However this may be, and before we start on our adventure, let us for a moment view the city from this last ridge, whence we can see it spreading over the plain, beautiful in its magnitude – famous public ways and squares clearly defined; and far away, under the horizon, vapoury indications of rampart and outlying fort.

The works of no other writer offer so complete a representation of the spectacle of civilised life as the Human Comedy. That sensation of endless extent and ceaseless agitation, which is life, the Human Comedy produces exactly. If we think of its fifty volumes, we are impressed with the same perplexed sense of turmoil and variety as when we climb out of the slum of personal interests and desires, and from a height of the imagination look down upon life, seeing image succeeding image and yet things remaining the same, seeing things tumbling forward, hastening always, passing away, and leaving no trace. The Human Comedy justifies its name; it is the only literature that produces the endless agitation and panoramic movement of civilised life. To do this may not be the final achievement, the highest artistic aim: I contest not the point, I state a fact that alone among writers Balzac has succeeded in doing this.

For in the fifty volumes you find all that represents civilisation. Civilisation in the nineteenth century is money, and Balzac, with his unerring wisdom which saw into the heart of things, knew, or rather felt, that money would be the stake for which Christianity would fight its last great battle. Therefore the grim faces of misers meet you at every turning. All varieties of misers are to be found in the Human Comedy: the sordid wine-making peasant counting the sugar in the bowl, starving his wife; the hideous country miser and usurer, holding the entire village in his grip, receiving the first-fruits of farm-yard and garden; the terrible and cynical miser, conscious that he is the type and epitome of the evil of the city – terrible indeed is the Père Gobsek, and terrible is the signature which precedes and announces him. There are others, and around misers and usurers and money-makers hundreds of human souls float round and round as in a vortex; the usurer everywhere, each governing his own section as he governs it in life. We find too the drama of love depicted in all its infinite phases. Love with flowers of Resignation in his hands, and the light of Resignation on his face, and between the sublime figures of Séraphita and the Duchesse de Langeais, we have the awful story of the man that lust pursues even past white hair into final decrepitude. Then turning from the mad sublimity of Lady Dudley in La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, we meet with the beautiful human nature of Eugénie Grandet; from Eugénie Grandet to the Comtesse in Le Lys de la Vallée there is but a step. There human nature ascends to pause only on the threshold of divine nature. So pure is the Comtesse, that were it not for that short moment when in the midst of death she declares that she will live, desiring, in one absorbing moment of passion, life for love's sake, she would never have been quite human; but soon spirit regains dominion over flesh, and she passes from the human into angelic estate. Never shall I forget the emotions, strangling in their intensity, with which I read those last pages – those pages in which the calm frenzy of renunciation is expressed, – that scene when the priest enters and exhorts, and when we see falling from her passion and desire until nothing is left but the pure will-less soul of the saint. This death is but the representation of the philosophy of abnegation of self, which Schopenhauer taught as being the only gate through which lasting happiness may be found.

All classes of society are represented in the Human Comedy, and all types of men. There are peasants working in fields and drinking in cabarets, there are courtesans in the streets and in palaces, there are old men being preyed upon by unscrupulous women, who in turn are the victims of unscrupulous young men. There are men who sacrifice their lives to art, and others who sacrifice their life to pleasure, there are poets who waste their talents in love-dreams, there are poets who waste their talents in bon-mots. There are full-length portraits, half-length, heads and silhouettes. The characters pass and repass, and as in life you stumble unexpectedly upon acquaintances.

This innumerable and unceasing eruption of souls is accompanied with a poignant and searching criticism of life, sometimes the criticism is direct and personal, more often it proceeds experimentally by comparison with the immediate past; we find allusions full of 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.

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 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 will be asked how Balzac could have written so much and yet found time to experience the life he was describing.

The vulgar do not know that the artist makes but little use of his empirical knowledge of life, and that he relies almost entirely upon his inner consciousness of the truth. In Balzac perception of the truth extended over an inconceivably wide area; the perception was not so pure as in Shakespeare, but it was wider. Living as Balzac did in the giddiness and exaltation of an unceasing creation, I can imagine him lifting his face from the paper like one still under the influence of the dream, unable for a moment to bear with the intensity of the enchantment. In the somnambulism of his genius he lived peopling a perfectly imagined world with souls as troubled with passions and all the racking inquietude of existence as those that wander in that moment which we are pleased to call real life. Of his own soul and his own troubles he must have lived nearly unconscious, hardly aware of their existence. He often mentions in his letters that he has been working eighteen hours, and it is not infrequent to find him saying that he rose at two in the morning; he would then continue his cerebral debauch till noon. And the story of the improvisation of the Cousine Bette in six weeks is one of the wonders of literary history. Think of the book! To have woven such a fabric, to have created so many souls, and to have lived through it all in six weeks! … Surely no one who reads these lines need wonder why my illustrious predecessors failed to write any adequate essay on Balzac; and surely all, even should they find no further wisdom in this essay, will admit that it was fortunate in conception, and that probably the only way to convey a suggestion of the genius of the great novelist lies through the minor pieces.

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 Manfrigneuse, 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 Manfrigneuse, 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 Manfrigneuse 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 Manfrigneuse 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 Manfrigneuse 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 child-like 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 Duchesse 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 d'Espard 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' 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.

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-room 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.

I have said elsewhere than in this article that a book of maxims surpassing those of La Rochefoucauld 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 tooth-pick 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.'

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 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 re- veal 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 Maréchal 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 horse-flesh, cooked before fires made of broken carts and wagons.

‘The apathy of these poor soldiers cannot be understood except by those who have traversed those vast deserts of snow, without other perspective except a horizon of snow, without other drink than snow, without other bed than snow, without other nourishment than a frozen beet-root, a handful of meal, or a piece of horse-flesh…. 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 further, 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. The imagination is exquisite, and its pathetic simplicity might have been equalled by Shakespeare if he had written prose fiction; he might have given an equally pure 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.

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, etc. 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 the abnormal is found in all great writers, and though not their flesh, 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 irreproachably 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 nowise 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. But 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'Or, La dernière Incarnation de Vautrin, Une Passion dans le Désert, Séraphita, and Sarrasine. Therefore it may be said that the final achievement of genius is the introduction and artistic use of the abnormal.

And this for a reason which will not be suspected by the casual student of fiction, and which when first stated will seem like paradox. But it surely is true, except for those who stand high among the highest, that the choice of any but the most ordinary theme will lead into commonplace. Even in the hands of a man of talent the abnormal slips into sterile eccentricity, which is the dreariest form of commonplace; but let the man of talent choose an ordinary every-day story, and in developing it any originality of mind and vision he may possess will appear to its very best advantage. Genius can, we know, do all things – it can even make the abnormal interesting: but even genius does not find in the abnormal the sublime moments of the soul that it finds in the normal, and truly it cannot be said that La Fille aux Yeux d'Or is worth Le Curé de Tours, or that any one would hesitate if 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. Une Vieille Fille seems to me to epitomise the most completely and the most perfectly the recourses of a mind at once so profound, and, at least in the conception of subject, so unfailingly artistic. I say so because I find in Une Vieille Fille that philosophic criticism of his own time, that power of contrasting and opposing it with its immediate past, so peculiar to Balzac, and which no other writer of fiction possessed before or since. I find also in this story three characters conceived with rare philosophic and imaginative incisiveness, and executed with an elaborateness and alertness of thought only to be found in his very best work; and I find, although these qualities predominate almost to excess in the 165 pages which form the story, some two or three rare and exquisite dramatic moments. Nothing more exquisite, according to me, than the scene where 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 delicious 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 Cormon, 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. While 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 how 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 the elegant Chevalier which seem to me to display higher power of mind than any that Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot would have revealed had they been called upon to describe 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 Louis xv. and the commencement of the revolution. When these stories were heard for the first time they were considered to be well told, the Chevalier de Valois had the merit of never ascribing his bon-mots to himself, and of never speaking of his love affairs; but his graces and his smiles were guilty of delicious indiscretions. This good gentleman availed himself of the privilege of an old Voltairean noble not to attend mass, and his irreligion was looked on with indulgence 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. Attached in his youth to this illustrious stranger, he never spoke of her without emotion; and it was on her account that he had fought with Monsieur de Lauzan.

'The Chevalier was now fifty-eight, but he did not admit that he was more than fifty; and he could permit himself this harmless deception, for amid the many advantages of those who are thin and blonde he preserved that juvenility of figure, which saves men no less than women from the appearance of age. Learn that all life, and all elegance that is the expression of life, exists in the waist. Among the Chevalier's belongings must be numbered the nose which nature had presented him with. This nose vigorously divided a pale face into two sections which did not seem to know one another, one of which reddened during the labour of digestion. This fact is worthy of remark at a time when physiology is so much occupied with the human heart. The incandescence took place on the left side.

‘Notwithstanding the tall and slight legs, the meagre body and the wan complexion of Monsieur de Valois did not announce that his health was of the best, but he ate like an ogre, and pretended to be afflicted with a malady known "en Province" as a hot liver, hoping hereby to excuse his excessive appetite. The reddening 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 seemed to be a gift from Providence to this good 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, the responsibility of which happily does not weigh upon the historian. Notwithstanding these symptoms Valois had a nervous constitution, consequently vivacious. If his liver burnt (ardait), to employ an old expression, his heart did not burn 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. [A mixture of patois and bad grammar renders any but a conjectural translation an impossibility.] "En la patte d'oie caractéristique" et les marches du palais se montraient ces élégantes rides si prisées à la cour de Cythère." In this spruce Chevalier everything pointed to "un homme à femmes" (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. That part of the skull which the hair refused to cover shone like ivory. The regularity obtained by constant combing gave a false appearance of youth to his hair and eyebrows. Without using perfume the Chevalier exhaled a perfume of youth that “rafraichissait son aire." His gentlemanly hands, cared for like those of a "petite maîtresse,'' attracted the eye by their rose-coloured nails carefully trimmed. Without his majestic and superlative nose he would have been"poupon." We must, however, spoil this portrait by an admission of a weakness. The Chevalier put cotton in his ears, and still continued to wear there two little negroes' heads in diamonds, admirably made it is true; and he strove to justify these singular appendages by saying that since he had had his ears pierced he had 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.'

This long quotation seems to me to justify itself. For pure power of mind, combined with astonishing alertness of mind, I think it is unmatchable. It would be easy to set examples that surpass it in all qualities, except excessive alertness to seize every aspect of the subject, and power to see deep down into it, noting at once the hidden reason for every peculiarity of structure. It reminds me of a fine Holbein; it is as incisive as Holbein, but it has a dash which recalls the manner of Hogarth.

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 Société Maternelle. It was necessary that Madame Granson should have a son who likewise aspired to the hand of Mlle Cormon, but I confess that I fail to see 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 the Curé de Tours than to Une Vieille Fille, I confess that I should find myself unable to advance any valid argument against his plea.

Balzac then paints the portrait of Mlle Cormon's county, her house and her history. We see the salon lighted up and the guests arriving on the famous Thursday evenings – 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, with four doors and four windows, and modestly wainscoted with grey painted wood. One oblong mirror above the chimney-piece, and the windows are draped with heavy green curtains. Everything breathes the old and unalterable province. 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 pleasures, all 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. Leonard, 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 nurse, strong and dimpling arms, red hands. Everything about her harmonised with 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 she were. Her aquiline nose contrasted with the smallness of her forehead, for it is seldom that this shaped nose does not of necessity imply a fine brow notwithstanding the thick red lips, indicative of a great goodness, the forehead announced too few ideas for it to be possible that the heart was directed by the intelligence: she was probably good without being gracious. Therefore virtue is often reproached for her faults whilst one is full of indulgence for those of vice. 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 of her face, so 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 insensibly 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 advised Mlle Cormon in the theory of mortification, 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 draw itself 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.'

I do not think it too much to say that this passage is the origin of the intention of all that has been done since in fiction, and indeed of a great deal of writing outside of fiction. I will try and justify this assertion.

It will not be denied that what differentiates the literature of the nineteenth century from that of all preceding centuries is the art of doing, or attempting to do, with the pen what it has been the legitimate aim of the brush ever since a painter began to wield one. 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. Until the end of the seventeenth century women never shrieked and sobbed amid the blue cushions of the sofa, and Angelica had not stood in her ecstasy looking through the whiteness of the room. No fact is more indisputable than that the appearance of the purely pictorial in literature dates from the beginning of this century, and since the death of Balzac the discovery has been pursued with unabated vigour in almost every European language. In France and England hardly a great writer has refrained from the new method of expression. It would be curious to note the many talents the new art has called into existence, and how in turn it has been developed and burlesqued; but here I am only interested to state that the finest piece of pictorial writing was achieved by Balzac, the inventor of the method. He employed the method unconsciously, whereas, in Gautier and in Zola, the knowledge of the means they were employing introduced an element of exaggeration which is not atoned for even by the many great qualities which enabled them to use the new method in a more striking manner than its inventor could. But besides the merit of unconsciousness – that first form of sincerity – Balzac's description of Mlle Cormon is something more than mere picturesque description; it 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 the intention of the old art, which was to lay bare the soul, and in writing the passage under consideration his intention was merely to give you Rose Cormon's soul, his genius leading him to do so by a road which had not been traversed before. For every physiological detail is a surprising revelation of the soul within, whereas Gautier's or Zola's description of surfaces reveal the soul rather less than did the brushes of the Dutch painters. And yet, notwithstanding his psychological intentions, Balzac's description of Rose Cormon is the most successful piece of pictorial description in existence. Is there another working from which ten painters would be more likely to produce ten pictures that would not widely differ one from the other? The soul of Becky Sharp is certainly distinct enough, but of her physical appearance we can form hardly an idea; we may imagine her soul in a hundred fleshly forms, but Rose Cormon's soul we can imagine only in the form that Balzac placed it in. When I came upon the description of her leg, the book dropped from my hand in admiration of the master's genius. The whole of Rose Cormon is in that wonderful leg. But the leg that would have meant so much to another was but an accent in Balzac's picture; he was sure of being able to give a culminating touch when he wished, no matter what had gone before, and with physiological detail he created the soul of Rose Cormon, endowing it with a life intense as any in fiction. She stands outside of the little drama in which Balzac saw her involved, and may be imagined in different dramas; we can see her outside of all story, as some one we have known intimately in real life. Greater praise I cannot give. For to create soul is to accomplish the work of God.

The story too is full of the most charming details, for Balzac possessed as strong a hold over dialogue as he did over description, and he rarely failed 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 chap 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 Cormoii 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's that matter; I want to start at once.’

But, Mlle, it is going to rain.'

‘Well, then, we shall get wet.'

‘The house is on fire,' said 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 what Waterloo was in the life of Napoleon. Of the household arrangement I will only tell that Mlle Cormon turned her boudoir into a bedroom, and a new bed was bought to suit the room, and she faints 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 disappointments in her marriage, 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, and 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. In this short story, which hardly reaches to a hundred pages, his genius attains its highest, purest, and completest form. The Curé de Tours is the genius of Balzac in epitome; and a reader of first-rate intelligence, reading it for the first time, knowing nothing of the author, would say ‘this man is great among the great ones of the world, the brains herein are inferior to none.'

It is the finest short story ever written. Look at it from every side and you will find no fault. 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, and showing bad cutting and awkwardly sewed seams on every side. The Curé de Tours is perfectly proportioned: it begins at exactly the right point; the development proceeds without long waits; nowhere is there an unnecessary line; and it ends in sequences rhythmical and as final as those which unite the parts of Beethoven's finest symphony. It would be vain to look anywhere for fault or flaw. The art displayed in the composition is equal even to that which seemed to be always at the command of Turgueneff – the art is as fine, as delicate, and as decisive as the Russian's; I will not compare it with that implacable directness which in Maupassant has captivated the minds of the unwary and the superficial. Not Turgueneff nor Maupassant nor Bret Harte has exceeded the mastery of handling manifested in this story. True that Turgueneff, Maupassant, and Bret Harte in their best short stories are far too consummate artists to leave fag-ends undipped or litter lying about. True that they do exactly what they want to do. The difference between their work and this story is that Balzac desired greater ends than they, and accomplished them as faultlessly as they did their lesser ends. A man juggles with three, four, and five billiard balls, but if another comes and performs the same feats with cannon balls?

We have heard what Shakespeare produced by the mere dropping of a handkerchief. In the Curé de Tours the means are even slighter. True that neither murder nor suicide results – it is purposely but a storm in a teapot; storms in which are involved the lives and the happiness of human beings, are equal, – the intensity and not the extent of the storm is of importance; and there may be light and darkness in the narrowest sky that awaken sensations of the widest universe. Quite certain it is that such were Balzac's opinions while composing the Curé de Tours; it was composed with the intention of exhibiting this truth, too often disregarded or not understood. This is obvious almost in the first lines, when he shows us the Abbé Birotteau going 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, and all there agreed 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 opening the door; and when Marianne, to excuse herself, said that she had only obeyed orders received from Mademoiselle, the Abbé received a shock, the more violent because falling in the midst of his happiness. But when he found that his candlestick had been left outside his door instead of in the kitchen, according to custom, he entered his apartments in mute amazement. There another surprise awaited him – there was no fire; and the time that Marianne took to light one! The Abbé lay in the handsome bed which he had inherited from the Abbé Chapelaud, unable to sleep, overcome and terrified by the presentiment of immeasurable misfortune. For he could not banish from his mind that the delay in opening the door, the removal of the candlestick, and the absence of the fire in his bedroom could be attributed to accident. And 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 had 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 aubes smelling of iris, etc. On the ground floor the tall, angular, yellow-tinted Abbé Troubert, liked by nobody and not received by Madame 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 Birotteau 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 Birbtteau 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 the ambition of her life. But the Abbé, although himself a fool, like many another fool, could not bear the conversation of fools, and when he took to passing his evenings at Madame 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 imagining 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. This short story is a foretaste of the Human Comedy. For no writer of the first magnitude ever epitomised thus concisely all the great qualities of which his genius was composed. In La Vieille Fille we have the great thinker and the great social critic, but we have not the great artist; in the Curé de Tours we have the thinker, the critic, and the artist, and, as it should be, each enforces the other.

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; the world is 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 extremely well written. The composition is balanced within and without, and so evenly, that no one of the epigrams which 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!

We have seen therefore that among the minor pieces the Curé de Tours is the finest example of Balzac's realistic method; in Adieu he touches high-water mark in his romantic manner. Among his studies of the abnormal Une Passion dans le Désert and Sarrasine are the best. The former is founded on a story, told to him by a showman, of a pantheress, that met a soldier starving in the desert, and taken with a sudden fancy galloped off and brought him back the hind quarter of an antelope, and in such wise continued to feed the soldier for many months. A cat when it likes you will bring in a rat and lay it at your feet; and Balzac tells the story of this strange caprice with rare intensity, and a subtle comprehension of the affections of the feline. Sarrasine is a rare and wonderful piece of work, but the conventionalities of this century prevent me from speaking of it.

After the Curé de Tours perhaps the most celebrated among the minor pieces is Massimilia Doni. I am aware of the great admiration that students of Balzac hold it in; but I confess that I do not share this admiration. There are some exquisite passages in this story, but it is disjointed and ill-proportioned. This is my opinion, but I am bound to say that Balzac himself held this story in the very highest esteem. Therefore it is encumbent upon me to attempt to justify my disparagement.

In the first place, the musical criticism seems to me to be a grievous disfigurement. On the subject of digression we should be indulgent, if the digression is interesting or valuable. But the eulogy of the Moses in Egypt shows no critical discernment, nor does it reveal any natural love of music. A naive notation of his own impressions would have been more interesting, but crude technical praise of a work which has not stood the test of time is never very interesting however eminent the critic.

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 notes come to a bird. He had never time to hear, he had never time to think about music. But one of the vulgarly seductive phrases of the Moses haunted in his ear, and before it had departed some plausible criticism must have met his eye 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. That is the genesis of Massimilia Doni.

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 Massimilia 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 Massimilia Doni is preparing for him, he asks no questions, 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 e turned from the thought of any infidelity; but the brutal and capricious infidelity dominated his soul.' But the woman is not alone; she is followed by a monster, a fearful duke, who is of course Massimilia Doni's husband. The duke is a melomaniac, and the last pleasure left to him 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 Massimilia Doni, and how Massimilia Doni is induced to descend from 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. That the beauty of the theme survives the vulgarity of the treatment is the highest tribute I can here pay to Balzac. C’est du mauvais romantisme… that is the true criticism of this story. And the second-rate romanticism of the composition penetrates and permeates the execution. An extract will explain my meaning. This is how Balzac describes the monster, the melomaniac who accompanies the woman: –

‘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, 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. In fine, although thin and of ordinary height, this gentleman had long arms and broad shoulders; but notwithstanding these de- formities, 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 I'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 Balzac as he 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 défenses blanches douées de mouvement, qui se plaçaient 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.

…But no, 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 he 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 bad style nor of good style; he simply did not write; he noted down his ideas, and his ideas are always so interesting that you read without noticing the impossibilities of verbal expression which he constantly slips into. It is not until you translate Balzac that you 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 élégantes rides si prisées à la cour de Cythère. Patte d'oie I always understood to be the French equivalent for crowsfeet; it is impossible even to conjecture what he means by les marches du palais, but letting that pass, I find myself quite unable to explain the grammatical construction of se montraient in the sentence. We find another equally bad on the same page: Ses sourcils comme ses cheveux jouaient la jeunesse par la régularité que leur imprimait le peigne. And what I can explain still less than the meaning of his ungrammatical sentences is the fact that until you come to translate or to read very, very attentively, the page appears to you to be not only well but magnificently well written. The constant supply of ideas, I suppose, is the explanation of so astonishing a deception…. But I see no sufficient reason to pursue the subject further. When it has been said that Balzac did not write, but that he found an idea for every sentence, all has been said that is worth saying.

Balzac lived in the midst of the romantic movement, and had his genius not been infinitely high and durable it would have succumbed and been lost in that great current which bore away all but him. But the realistic and critical method, of which he was inventor and creator, lived too strongly in him, and the romance which 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 romantist at heart, lived in an age of plain realism, and for many a year he strove to reconcile the principle which he 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 that Balzac succeeded in reconciling two discordant principles in Adieu, Seraphita, La Peau de Chagrin, Sarrrasine, and failed to do so in Massimilia Doni and Une ténébreuse Affaire.

It would be foolish to argue that Vanity Fair is superior to the Père Goriot, that the Mill on the Floss is more beautiful than Eugénie Grandet, that David Copperfield is preferable to La Cousine Bette, or that Tom Jones is worth Les Illusions Perdues, but any one or all these propositions would be more tenable than, for instance, that Thackeray or Eliot or Dickens came in their shorter works within range of such marvels as Le Curé de Tours, Jésus-Christ en Flandre, 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. 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 Cana. Facino Cana, 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 Cana. 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 Cana.

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 even so? Was it not the Reformation and the discovery of America which resulted first in Marlowe and then in Shakespeare? And as Shakespeare seems to have expressed all ideas that poetry may sing, so does Balzac seem to have expressed all the ideas that prose may speak. The rivalry between these two great men seems to be between verse and prose, rather than between French and English genius. Is it better to reign despotically over a single country or to stretch your power vaguely over an entire continent? 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 working in prose fiction there is little comparison. He peopled his vast empire with surely a greater number of souls and ideas than did Dickens or Thackeray, or Fielding, or Eliot, or Turgueneff, or Tolstoi. 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.' To me there is more wisdom and more divine imagination in Balzac than in any other writer; he looked further 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 five or six 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 knowledge 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. In conclusion, I will say that as I understand criticism more as the story of the critic's soul than as an exact science, I confess that I would willingly give up Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, etc., for the yellow books.