Balzac

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The quotations do not exhaust the list of portraits emanating from
Balzac's fellows, but they adequately illustrate the varying views,
which were many. Indeed, like the sculptor who produces several
studies of the same model and shows a different interpretation each
time, critics have presented us, in more than one instance, with
descriptions of the novelist, at an earlier and a later date, that
contain important discrepancies.

Balzac was an enigma because he was not always the same personality to
himself. Both his energies and his desires carried him outside the
limits in which a man's individuality is usually manifested. Despite
Monsieur Houssaye, one may even sympathize, though incredulous, with
admirers that would have him to be a universal genius, unfortunately
thwarted by fate--one who else might have opened up all the avenues of
knowledge that humanity can ever penetrate. This persuasion was
undoubtedly his own; and it partly explains his Faustus curiosities
leading him now and again into illegitimate and unwholesome
experiments, of which we get some glimpse in his books and
correspondence.

That he could have succeeded in other careers, the medical one, for
example, the painter's or sculptor's perhaps, or the mechanical
inventor's, seems likely; but his impulsiveness, his exuberance, and
his poor financial ability would have been hindrances in directions
where success depends largely on exact calculation, method, and
detail. In political life, his brilliance would assuredly have
sufficed to procure him prominence in opposition. As a minister he
would have inevitably fallen a victim to the inconsistencies of his
own attitude--inconsistencies due to the fact that his judgments were
intuitional and instinctive, with prejudices reacting on them, too
numerous and too strong to allow him to weigh things fairly and
deliberately. Moreover, his mind was too much engrossed by the sole
picturesqueness of phenomena to delve deep enough beneath them for
their essential relations. This is why it happens that his arguments
are often worse than his convictions, the latter being inherited, in
general, and at least having the residuary wisdom of tradition
together with the additional force of his common sense. Thus, on the
eve of giving the ignorant man a power equal to that of the
intelligent one, and of handing over the supreme decision in the vital
concerns of a country to unsafeguarded majorities less qualified for
the task than ancient oligarchy or autocracy. But he had nothing of
worth to suggest, no alternative save the return to abuses of the
grossest kind which experience had proved to lead to revolution.

His ponderous declaration: "I write by the light of two eternal
truths, religion and the monarchy," was a sort of cheap-jack
recommendation of the so-called philosophy in his _Comedie Humaine_.
His Catholic orthodoxy, if orthodoxy it were, savoured more of
politics than religion. He did not wish the old ecclesiastical
organization and faith of France to be changed, because he saw in it a
useful police agency for restraining the masses. As for his Royalism,
which had a smack of Frondism in it, he stuck to it because it
accorded with his conservative, eclectic tastes, and not because he
had worked it out as the best theory of government. Such dissertations
as appear in his writings, on either the one or the other subject,
have nothing more original about them than can be found in the most
ordinary election speech or pulpit discourse.

And in the realm of pure speculative thought he was not great. Beyond
the limits of the visible, his intuition failed him; so that he
floundered helplessly when not upheld by the doctrines of others,
which, since he did not understand them, he adapted to his purpose but
awkwardly. Whether there were latent faculties in him that might have
developed with training, it is impossible to affirm or deny; however,
we may be forgiven the doubt. From a mind so forceful, the native
perception, though uncultured, should have issued in something better
than _Lambert_ or _Seraphita_. Still, there is this to be said, that a
man whose eyes were so constantly bent on facts, whose gaze was always
spying out details which escaped the common observation, was embracing
a plane parallel, if inferior to that which was covered by a Plato.

The title of the author of the _Comedy_ to be called a philosopher can
be defended only on the ground of his adding a new domain to the rule
of science. He was not the discoverer of the law of cause and effect.
Nor was he the one in his own country who did the most towards
demonstrating the interdependence of the various branches of
knowledge, this honour being reserved to Comte. But the transference
of the minute causalities of life into fiction was systematized by
him. He made the thing an artistic method, using it with the same
power, though not the same chasteness, as George Eliot after him. His
employment was not very logical--how could it be when the guiding mind
was in chronic fermentation? He gives us this contradiction that human
thought is at once the grandeur and destruction of life--an opinion
imbued with ecclesiasticism, confusing thought with passion. It is
passion alone which disintegrates; and, in the _Comedie Humaine_, such
monomaniacs as Grandet, Claes, and Hulot are destroyed not by their
thought but their desire.

Balzac's pessimism is not philosophic. In him it was not the despair
of an intellect that had worn itself out in vainly seeking for the
solution of the riddle of the universe, vainly striving after a theory
that should reconcile nature's brute law with the human demand for
justice and immanent goodness. By original temperament an optimist, he
changed and grew pessimistic with the untoward happenings of his
agitated career, and under the fostering of his native self-esteem.
Possibly too, as Le Breton asserts, a secondary cause was his having
imbibed the pretentious doctrines of the Romantic school, the disdains
of the young artistic bloods of 1830, who held their clan composed the
loftier, super-human race, the only one that counted. Berlioz carried
this folly of pride to its highest pitch. In his _Memoirs_, he
declared that the public (of course excluding himself) were an
infamous tag-rag-and-bob-tail. The people of Paris, he protested, were
more stupid and a hundred times more ferocious, in their caperings and
revolutionary grimaces, than the baboons and orang-outangs of Borneo.
Balzac at times adopted and expressed similar opinions. Gozlan relates
that one day the owner of Les Jardies said to him in the attic of his
hermitage: "Come, let us spit upon Paris." The novelist imagined that
talents of the kind he possessed ought to be admitted to every honour;
and his hatred of the Revolution and Republicanism was more because he
believed they were inimical to art--and his art--than because they had
cast down a throne. His bitterness was to some extent excusable, for
he was exploited much during his lifetime, and had, even to the end,
to bend his neck to the yoke. But he also belonged to the class of
exploiters by his mental constitution. Could he have had his way, all
the men of letters around him would have been in his pay, writing for
their bare living and contributing to his fame. In this connection
there is an anecdote narrated by Baudelaire, in the _Echo des
Theatres_ of the 25th of August 1846, and referable to the year 1839.

The Jardies hermit had a bill of twelve hundred francs to meet; and
for this reason he was sad as he walked up and down the double passage
of the Opera--he, the hardest commercial and literary head of the
nineteenth century; he, the poetic brain upholstered with figures like
a financier's office; he, the man of mythologic failures, of
hyperbolic and phantasmagoric enterprises, the lanterns of which he
always forgot to light; he, the great pursuer of dreams for ever in
quest of the absolute; he, the funniest, most attractive as well as
the vainest character of the _Comedie Humaine_; he, the original, as
unbearable in private life as he was delightful in his writings; the
big baby swollen with genius and conceit, who had so many qualities
and so many failings that one feared to attack the latter for fear of
injuring the former, and thus spoiling this incorrigible and fatal
monstrosity.

At length, however, his forehead grew serene and he went towards the
Rue de Richelieu with sublime and cadenced step. There he entered the
den of a rich man (Curmer), who received him with due honour.

"Would you like," quoth he, "the day after to-morrow to have in the
_Siecle_ and the _Debats_ two smart articles on the French depicted by
themselves, the articles to be signed by me? I must have fifteen
hundred francs. The affair is a grand one for you."

The editor, unlike his _confreres_, found the proposal reasonable, and
the bargain was concluded on the spot, with the stipulation that the
money should be paid on the delivery of the first article. Leaving the
office, the visitor returned to the passage of the Opera; and there he
met a diminutive young man of shrewish, witty countenance (Edouard
Ourliac), known among the journalists for his clownish verve.

"Edouard, will you earn a hundred and fifty francs to-morrow?"

"Won't I, if I get the chance!" answered the latter.

"Then come and drink a cup of coffee."

"To-morrow," explained his principal, "I must have three big columns
on the French depicted by themselves, and I must have them early, for
I have to copy and sign them."

Edouard hastened away to his task, while the novelist went and ordered
a second article in the rue de Navarin.

The first article appeared two days later in the _Siecle_, and was
signed, strangely enough, neither by the little man nor by the great
man, but by a third person known in Bohemia for his tom-cat and
opera-comique amours (Gerard de Nerval). The second friend was big,
idle, and lymphatic. Moreover, he had no ideas; he knew only how to
thread words together like pearls; and, as it takes longer to heap up
three long columns of words than to make a volume of ideas, his article
appeared only several days later in the _Presse_.

The twelve-hundred-francs debt was paid. Each one was perfectly
satisfied, except the editor, who was not quite. And this was how a
man of genius discharged his liabilities.

Balzac's individuality is one of those that inevitably raise the
question as to how far genius and creative imagination are made up of
will-power, how far what is produced by great talent is sub-conscious
inspiration virtually independent of effort. Although Shelley confines
his assertions on the subject to poetry, he nevertheless seems to
imply that creation of any kind has little to do with the will. "The
mind in creation," he says, "is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness;
this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades
and changes as it is developed, and the ocnsciuso portions of our
natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could
this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is
impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but, when
composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline." The case
of Balzac suggests that the sort of genius Shelley had in his thought
is the exception rather than the rule. The author of the _Comedy_
himself asserts that great talents do not exist without great will.
"You have ideas in your brain?" he says. "Just so. I also. . . . What
is the use of that which one has in one's soul if no use is made of
it?" . . . "To conceive is to enjoy; it is to smoke enchanted
cigarettes; but, without the execution, everything goes away in dream
and smoke." . . . "Constant work is the law of art as it is that of
life; for art is creation idealized. Consequently, great artists and
poets do not wait for orders or customers; they bring forth to-day,
to-morrow, continually."

It may be, after all, that the difference is one of those verbal ones
to which Locke draws attention in his _Essay on the Human
Understanding_. Will-power is partly an inheritance and partly an
acquisition. And acquired qualities are always less puissantly
exercised, less effective in the results obtained. Even in poetry it
would appear that, without will to unlock the door, fine faculties
that are dormant may never make their existence known. Balzac gives us
an example of a native will that was for ever rushing through his
being and arousing to activity first one and then another of his
native powers. And, if the total accomplishment was not conform to the
tremendous liberation of force, it was because there was circumstance
harder than will and the intershock of energies that ran counter to
each other.

In fine, alas! there is something absent from the man which would have
both beautified himself and added a saner beauty to his work--the
pursuit of those finer ideals which mean consistent devotion to duty
and broad sympathy with human nature, irrespective of nation, colour,
and position, in its yearnings and in its fate. Fascinated by material
aims, worshipping the Napoleonic epopee to the extent of framing his
conduct by it, measuring the happiness of existence rather by its
honours and furniture than by its moral attainments, he missed the
first poetry of love as he missed the last wisdom of age. This
limitation of the man makes itself sorely felt in his writings, where
we, more often than not, tread a Dane's _Inferno_, unrelieved by the
brighter glimpses and kindlier impulses that still are found in our
world of self-seeking and suffering.