BALZAC
 
 Translated, with Notes, by 
 WILFRID THORLEY
 
 BALZAC 
 
 BY 
 
 SMILE FAGUET 
 
 or THE ACADMIE FRAJJJAISE 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 1914
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 HIS LIFE . 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS ..... 33 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND .' .49 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP . . . .74 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 HIS CHARACTERS ... .92 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 HIS TASTE 1G4 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 HIS STYLE ....... 195 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH . . . .219 
 
 INDEX 259 
 
 2081468
 
 BALZAC 
 
 HIS LIFE 
 
 HONORE BALZAC, who subsequently assumed 
 the name of Honore de Balzac, was born at 
 Tours on the 16th of May (Saint Honore's Day) 
 1799. His father, Fra^ois Balssa, had very 
 early changed his name to Balzac ; he was 
 born at Nougairie, in the departement of the 
 Tarn, in 1746. Honore's grandfather went by 
 the name of Balssa, and farmed land in the 
 parish of Nougairie ; his mother's name was 
 Laure Sallambier, and she was born at Paris 
 in 1778. This duality of strain in Balzac's 
 progenitors frees the biographer from any need 
 to go into the question of ethnology. Balzac 
 was not the product of Touraine, nor of Lan- 
 guedoc, nor of Paris ; he was merely of the 
 French breed. 
 
 His father was vigorous, full-blooded, a great 
 talker and reader, a man of startling projects 
 
 A
 
 2 BALZAC 
 
 and ideas (traits of character which are again 
 to be met with in his son) ; in later life hardly 
 caring for anything save how to prolong his 
 days so that he might at least rival Fontenelle. 1 
 Honore de Balzac has bestowed many of his 
 father's characteristics on Doctor Benassi, in 
 the Medecin de Campagne. 
 
 M. Balzac, the elder, had been, under the 
 former regime, a lawyer of the humbler sort 
 and very obscure. The Revolution doubtlessly 
 brought him the shoulder-tap to higher dignity, 
 for we find him, in 1793, figuring in the Alman- 
 ack National as municipal official and member 
 of the general council of the Commune. He 
 was then sent to the frontier of the Nord as 
 director of supplies. In 1797 he married 
 Laure Sallambier, whose father belonged to 
 the same governmental board. From 1804 to 
 1811 he was master of the workhouse at 
 Tours. From 1798 onward he had been 
 occupied in the direction of the almshouses 
 at Tours, and in this town Honore was born, 
 and the mot du temps culled by Taine ' It 's a 
 fine hospital mushroom ' was probably, while 
 
 1 Fontenelle was a nephew of Corneille. He wrote popular 
 scientific works of great worth, and died a centenarian in 1757- 
 TR.
 
 HIS LIFE 3 
 
 being at the same time an attempt at defining 
 his literary temperament, an allusion to his 
 place of origin. Balzac's father was, over and 
 above his administrative duties, second deputy 
 to the mayor of the township of Tours. In 
 1814 he re-entered at Paris the department of 
 supplies which had first occupied him as direc- 
 tor, and stayed there until his retirement in 
 1819, when he went to live at Villeparisis, and 
 later on at Versailles. He was to live on until 
 1829, when he passed away at the age of eighty- 
 three years at Versailles. 
 
 Honore's mother, thirty-two years younger 
 than her husband and twenty-one years older 
 than her son, was a highly intelligent woman, 
 very witty, very pretty, with beautiful eyes, a 
 long thin nose, a thin and rather tight lipped 
 mouth ; dry, masterful, and overbearing, her 
 hobby being occult science and the daringly 
 metaphysical authors, a bent which she handed 
 on at one time to her son. She was to outlive 
 Honore by some years ; she died, in 1853, at 
 seventy-five years of age. It is generally 
 believed that Balzac put his mother's least 
 pleasing traits into his portrait of la Cousine 
 Bette. 
 
 Honore, the eldest of the children, had two
 
 4 BALZAC 
 
 sisters and a brother. The elder of his sisters, 
 Laure, two years younger than Honore, was 
 the best friend that he ever had on this earth, 
 his confidante and good counsellor ; and she 
 has left behind for us some infinitely interesting 
 memoirs. She became the wife of M. Surville. 
 The second, Laurence, married M. de Montzaigle 
 and died quite young in 1826. His brother, 
 after a scapegrace boyhood and youth, emi- 
 grated to America, where he led a life of hard- 
 ship and died while still comparatively young. 
 Honore's first school was the lycee of Tours 
 which he attended for some time as a day 
 scholar, and a page dealing with this experience 
 is to be found in his Lys dans la Vallee ; then 
 though for what reason I have been unable to 
 discover he was sent to the College of Ven- 
 dome in 1807, he being then nine years old. 
 The College of Vendome, very famous for other 
 reasons at this time, was under the direction 
 of the Oratorians. 1 They were severe. 
 Honore did not take at all kindly to study 
 properly so called ; but he read enormously 
 everything on which he could lay his hands, 
 and everything that he could smuggle out of 
 the library. He was looked upon as a deplor- 
 
 1 A religious order formerly much occupied m teaching. TR,
 
 HIS LIFE 5 
 
 able pupil and passed much of his time in 
 detention. He wrote also, as the whim 
 prompted him, all manner of things, on sub- 
 jects generally far beyond a boy of his years. 
 Later on in life he gave some account of his 
 college days in Louis Lambert. The outcome 
 of all this was a kind of brain fever which 
 caused much alarm. His mother was sum- 
 moned. She found him pale, thin, unsettled, 
 and to all appearance in a stupor. His grand- 
 mother cried out, ' That 's how the college 
 gives them back to us.' He was taken away. 
 This was on the 22nd of August 1813, he being 
 then fifteen. 
 
 His health mended rapidly and he entered, 
 as day scholar, the third class of the lycee of 
 Tours. In 1814, his father having been ap- 
 pointed, as before mentioned, director of the 
 first division for town supplies at Paris, Honore 
 was sent to the institution Lepitre (for which 
 see also le Lys dans la Vallee) in the Marais. 
 M. Lepitre picked out the young Honore, be- 
 friended him, and acquired rather a strong 
 influence over the lad. M. Lepitre, who had 
 risked his life for the royal family during the 
 Terror, was a strong Catholic and monarchist. 
 It is quite possible that his ideas may have
 
 6 BALZAC 
 
 roused an answering echo in the young man's 
 mind. 
 
 His studies, never in fact other than badly 
 done, having come to an end, Honore entered 
 a lawyer's office, that of M. Guyonnet-Merville. 
 From seventeen to twenty, very active, he 
 was taken up with legal procedure, studied law, 
 and regularly attended the classes at the 
 Faculty of Letters. He was a very needy 
 student, the very type of the poor scholar, for 
 his father made him no allowance whatever. 
 Balzac has set that down very carefully in la 
 Peau de Chagrin. 
 
 At twenty or twenty-one his father made 
 him a dazzling offer, a lawyer to whom M. 
 Francois Balzac had once done a good turn 
 offering to make Honore his confidential clerk 
 right away, and then, after a short term of 
 probation, his successor, on the very easiest of 
 terms. But Honore fought shy of the lawyer ; 
 ever since his college days, and especially after 
 the classes at the Sorbonne, he had nursed 
 literary ambitions which he could no longer 
 hold in check. Terrible domestic upheavals 
 followed on his refusal. Honore was obstinate, 
 and his mother inflexible. His father was less 
 so. He decided to put the young man to the
 
 HIS LIFE 7 
 
 test. For two years Honore lived alone, with 
 an allowance just sufficient to meet his bare 
 needs, and tried his luck at literature. For a 
 writer two years of probation is a ridiculously 
 short period, but such was the paternal decision. 
 During this time and thereafter, M. Franois 
 Balzac having just been pensioned off, the 
 family was living at Villeparisis. 
 
 Honore, in an attic in the Rue Lesdiguieres, 
 near the Arsenal, worked furiously for two 
 years. He has described with hardly a word 
 of hyperbole what a terrible life he then led 
 in the Peau de Chagrin and in Albert Savarus. 
 His determination was unflinching. He wrote 
 to his sister Laure, ' With an assured income of 
 1500 francs, I might work for fame ; but time 
 is needed for such an undertaking, and first of 
 all I must settle how to make a living. All the 
 same I shall not become a lawyer. Look on 
 me as dead if ever I am snuffed out under a 
 lawyer's wig. I would rather be a dray-horse 
 that goes its thirty or forty rounds in an hour, 
 drinks, eats, and sleeps at set times. And this 
 mechanical rotation is called life, this incessant 
 round ! Laure, Laure, my only two wishes 
 and how immense they are ! to be famous, and 
 to be loved, will they ever be fulfilled ? '
 
 8 BALZAC 
 
 He brought forth a tragedy which he read to 
 a committee of friends, among whom was that 
 M. Surville who was to become his sister's hus- 
 band. Disapproval was unanimous. Choice 
 of a new umpire, the elder M. Surville, a 
 former professor, according to some, or the 
 poet Andrieux as others say, resulted in a like 
 disapproval of even greater severity. What 
 did Honore conclude ? That he ' had no gift 
 for tragedy,' and set to work again. 
 
 However, as he broke down from overwork, 
 his relenting parents withdrew him to Ville- 
 parisis. He worked on there, although less 
 at ease and deprived of the solitude which his 
 work required, and there he made the acquaint- 
 ance of Mme. de Berny. Mme. de Berny, the 
 daughter of a German musician and instru- 
 mentalist to Marie Antoinette by one of her 
 chambermaids, was born at Versailles in 1777. 
 She was thus forty-five years old in 1822, and 
 Honore's senior by twenty-one years. She 
 had been married at fifteen to Gabriel de 
 Berny, who became an advisory judge at the 
 Royal Court at Paris, and had borne him 
 eight children; but she did not love her 
 husband, who was morose and peevish. 
 She became first Honore's friend and then
 
 HIS LIFE 9 
 
 his mistress, her friendship for him outlasting 
 her life. 
 
 She fostered in him tkose Catholic and 
 monarchical feelings which it seems quite likely 
 that he had already conceived ; she kept alive 
 his interest in the bygone court ; she gave 
 him that liking for aristocratic elegance which 
 he always retained in spite of his temperament 
 driving him in quite other directions ; she urged 
 him on to write; she urged him on still more 
 perhaps to try his hand in business, and it 
 seems to me that there is a good deal of likeness 
 between Mme. de Berny and Mme. de Warens. 
 In any case, Balzac loved her whole-heartedly. 
 He has said somewhere, obviously thinking of 
 her, c A man's first love should be a woman's 
 last ' ; and his works often show us quite young 
 men falling in love with women already well 
 on in life : Rubempre and Mme. de Bargeton, 
 Gaston de Nueil and Mme. de Beauseant, etc. 
 This kind of love in a man points to a certain 
 innate indelicacy which it develops. 
 
 Balzac took to novel-writing, and particu- 
 larly (like Rubempre) to novel-writing of the 
 Scott kind. He sought a publisher, and found 
 him, young, intelligent, and enterprising, in the 
 person of Le Poitivin, whom he had probably
 
 10 BALZAC 
 
 known in Paris during his period of literary 
 prenticeship. Le Poitivin published him and 
 paid him. Balzac brought out in rapid suc- 
 cession seven novels very hastily put together, 
 which, even on his own showing, were quite 
 worthless ; but he felt the oncoming of ideas ; 
 he felt himself ripening, and wrote to his sister, 
 ' A little longer, and between the me of to-day 
 and the me of to-morrow there will be the 
 difference that exists between the youth of 
 twenty and the man of thirty years. I reflect ; 
 my ideas gather strength ; I see that nature 
 has not been niggardly with me in the matter 
 of heart and head.' Every one has told him- 
 self as much ; but here there was no mistake 
 about it. 
 
 However he believed that, dallying in this 
 way, he was spending himself without earning 
 enough to live on, and he begot either from his 
 own unfortunate whim or that of Mme. de 
 Berny the notion of launching out into busi- 
 ness, so that, having made his pile quickly, he 
 might thereafter settle down to a life of artistry 
 wholly tranquil and secure. He quickly turned 
 publisher with the small capital that he was 
 able to get together, and especially with what 
 was forthcoming from Mme. de Berny. He
 
 HIS LIFE 11 
 
 failed completely in this first attempt and got 
 into debt. In order to run down his money he 
 set out on another undertaking with a new 
 partner and came out of it with as little success. 
 In order to extricate himself, he set up, along 
 with a certain Laurent and Mme. de Berny, a 
 foundry for casting printer's type. The out- 
 come was equally disastrous. In order to save 
 her son from bankruptcy, Mme. Balzac sacri- 
 ficed her whole fortune ; but he was still 
 burdened with a heavy debt, for what amount 
 has not, I believe, ever been known, and this 
 he dragged after him until the end of his days. 
 
 He once more set to work as a writer with the 
 fury of despair. This was in 1829, the year 
 of his father's death. Not for the sake of rest, 
 but in order that he might live in purer air, 
 and in a house of ampler room and among 
 new surroundings, Balzac accepted at Fougeres 
 the hospitality of M. de Pomereul, who had 
 formerly been under great obligation to his 
 guest's father, and there he studied Brittany 
 and the Bretons. Hence his first book worthy, 
 and truly worthy, of attention, Us Chouans, 
 the result of long pondering, and written care- 
 fully and slowly. 
 
 He then went back to the home which was
 
 12 BALZAC 
 
 now at Versailles, and thus, hard by Paris, he 
 tried to get on to good terms with those in the 
 best society and in the literary world. Mme. 
 de Berny helped him in this. She had kept 
 on good terms with Sophie Gay, 1 whose ac- 
 quaintance he made, as well as that of her 
 daughter Delphine, already famous, and later 
 to become still more so under the name of Mme. 
 de Girardin. He witnessed, too, the opening 
 of Mme. de Bagration's salon-door to welcome 
 him. In spite of his bulkiness, which was 
 becoming marked, his ill manners, the com- 
 plete ignorance of how to dress well which 
 always marked him, and his lack of wit, he 
 was liked on account of his good nature, his 
 gaiety, his frankness, and why not say so, 
 since it is a weakness of which salons stand in 
 need ? his volubility. 
 
 Among literary people he knew Henri 
 Monnier, La Touche, and George Sand (the 
 last-named, deeply interested by les Chouans 
 and la Physiologic du Mariage, first paying him 
 a visit without any preliminary formality), the 
 
 1 She wrote interesting novels now chiefly noteworthy as side- 
 lights on the Directoire and the Empire, and died in 1852, three 
 years before her daughter Delphine. The latter became the wife 
 of a well-known pamphleteer, and wrote light verses and comedies 
 of worth. TH.
 
 HIS LIFE 13 
 
 Duchess d'Abrantes (Mme. Junot), who, under 
 the Empire, had been one of the most beauti- 
 ful, most brilliant, and most royally prodigal 
 of Parisian women, and who, in 1830, was 
 living wretchedly on the slender earnings of a 
 feeble but indefatigable pen. We can fancy 
 how, next to her father himself, who had seen 
 at such close range the military world of the 
 Empire, Mme. d'Abrantes was of use to him 
 in bringing back to life before his gaze the 
 various personages, with their might and their 
 meanness, their greatness and their weakness, 
 as they lived during the heroic period of the 
 first Napoleon. 
 
 In 1831 he got to know Mme. la Duchesse de 
 Castries in circumstances which were with 
 Balzac of rather frequent occurrence, as they 
 are, it should be added, with most men of 
 letters. The Duchess wrote to him anony- 
 mously (as she did to Sainte-Beuve after the 
 publication of Volupte) ; he replied ; a corre- 
 spondence was set going, and the Duchess ended 
 by lifting her mask and begging the writer to 
 come and see her. The Duchess de Castries 
 seems to have been venturesome, of highly 
 extravagant whims, coquettish, and, in short, 
 disposed to love no one ardently except her
 
 14 BALZAC 
 
 own self. Balzac was greatly taken with her. 
 For her sake he became quite a society man 
 during the years 1831 and 1832 ; for her sake 
 he gave more and more parade to those Catholic 
 and legitimist sentiments which had indeed 
 always been his ; for her sake his debts swelled 
 rather than shrank; perhaps it was for her 
 sake also that he offered himself as a candidate 
 to the electoral committee of several wards, 
 and failed in all of them. In obedience to a 
 summons from Mme. de Castries he joined her 
 at Aix-les-Bains, where he remained for some 
 weeks, and a plan having been arranged for 
 travelling in Italy, he set out with the lady, 
 her husband, and the Duke of Fitz-James, but 
 only accompanied them as far as Geneva, where 
 some kind of a quarrel put an end both to the 
 trip and to his relations with the Duchess, and 
 brought about his return to Paris. When the 
 Duchess herself returned to town, nothing 
 further was required of Balzac, for the sake of 
 due seemliness, than to put in a few polite 
 appearances at the de Castries' drawing-room. 
 We may be sure that the Duchesse de Langeois 
 of Balzac's work derives from the Duchess de 
 Castries. 
 
 1832 saw the beginning epistolary at start-
 
 HIS LIFE 15 
 
 ing, but later on of a more material kind of 
 Balzac's connection with Mme. Hanska, since 
 his first known letter to this lady dates from 
 the first month of the following year. Mme. 
 Hanska, nee Rezvuszka, was a young Polish 
 woman of the bluest blood and very wealthy, 
 a great lover of French literature, and much 
 taken with Balzac's novels. Like Mme. de 
 Castries and several others, she wrote to Balzac, 
 and first of all a friendly correspondence, and 
 then an amorous friendship sprang up between 
 them. 
 
 From 1833 to 1837 (and later, but especially 
 during these four years) Balzac made many 
 prolonged stays in the provinces, in Angoumois, 
 Touraine, Berri (Issoudan), Brittany(Guerande), 
 Limousin, Auvergne, Savoy, Dauphiny, and 
 Provence. He was fond of provincial France 
 as a country where types and characters re- 
 mained whole without being blunted or worn 
 thin by continual friction, as is the case in the 
 larger towns. The outcome of these journeys 
 and long stays in small towns was the famous 
 series of novels classed together under the 
 general title of Scenes de la Vie de Province. 
 
 Towards 1833 his mother, being more than 
 ever taken up with occult science, lured him
 
 16 BALZAC 
 
 after her along the same track, and hence he 
 came to deal with man's communication with 
 the beyond, and with the power of magnetism 
 as shown in Ursule Mirouet and Seraphita. 
 It should be added that no period was more 
 crazy after occultism and all its kindred than 
 that of Louis Philippe : the subject may be 
 fruitfully studied in the Hierophantes of M. 
 Fabre des Essarts. 
 
 In the spring of the same year Balzac first 
 met Mme. Hanska, who had come with her 
 husband to Neuchatel, where Balzac joined her. 
 He saw her seldom and always in company, 
 but these short glimpses inspired him with a 
 deep passion which continued growing almost 
 up to the day of his death. At the end of 
 December he went back to Switzerland, M. and 
 Mme. Hanska having settled down at Geneva 
 for some time, and there he stayed for six 
 weeks, enjoying her hospitality, or at least 
 seeing her a good deal. He returned to Paris 
 at the beginning of February 1834. 
 
 In 1835 Mme. de Berny got a judicial separa- 
 tion from her husband, our only cause for sur- 
 prise being that she had not done so sooner, 
 without casting any special blame, we may add, 
 on Balzac, with whom she had now very few
 
 HIS LIFE 17 
 
 dealings. In 1836 she died at la Boulonniere, 
 near Nemours, at the age of fifty-eight years. 
 In spite of his new passions, her death was a 
 heavy blow for Balzac. He often said that she 
 was the only woman that he had ever loved. 
 It seems to me that it would be fairer to say 
 that she was the only woman who had truly 
 loved him. 
 
 In the midst of the romances which he was 
 writing and the romances of real life which he 
 was beginning or just leaving behind him, the 
 business dealings at which he was once more 
 trying his hand, Balzac turned his thoughts 
 toward the drama and journalism. In 1839 he 
 submitted VEcole des Menages to the management 
 of the Renaissance, by whom it was refused. 
 In 1840 he started the Revue Parisienne, in 
 which he was very hard on Sainte-Beuve, 
 La Touche, Eugene Sue, Thiers, and even Victor 
 Hugo. The Revue Parisienne, lacking the 
 sinews of war, survived only three months. 
 In 1840 he brought out Vautrin at the Porte- 
 Saint-Martin theatre, and this again, since it 
 was bad, was coldly received, and suppressed 
 after the first performance owing to Frederic 
 Lemaitre having made himself up as Louis 
 Philippe. Balzac attributed his disaster to the
 
 18 BALZAC 
 
 forelock of Frederic Lemaitre, ' a disaster which 
 a barber's tongs might have set right,' and the 
 animosity of the newspaper men. ' Does the 
 author put it down to journalism ? If so he 
 can only congratulate it for having thus justi- 
 fied by its conduct all that he said of it else- 
 where.' This is an allusion to his portraits of 
 journalists and his pictures of the press world 
 in the Illusions perdues. 
 
 In 1841, at the Odeon, he produced les 
 Ressources de Quinola, not at all a bad piece, 
 which fell completely flat. 
 
 During the same year M. Hanska died, and 
 Balzac thought he might now achieve the happy 
 consummation of his sentimental life. But 
 nothing came of it. For reasons which remain 
 hidden from us, in spite of the fact that we may 
 now read the letters of Balzac to Mme. Hanska, 
 the projected marriage was indefinitely post- 
 poned. 
 
 In 1843 Balzac presented at the Gaiety a 
 gloomy drama entitled Pamela Giraud, which 
 once more was a complete failure. The same 
 year Mme. Hanska took up her residence at St. 
 Petersburg, in order to bring out her daughter 
 in Russian society. Balzac went there to see 
 her, stayed as her guest for three months, was
 
 HIS LIFE 19 
 
 charmed again by the lady and by his first impact 
 with things Russian, and returned to Paris to 
 take up once more his frightful burden of work. 
 
 In 1845 Mme. Hanska, having betrothed her 
 daughter to the Count Mniszech, set out for 
 Dresden with them, and was there joined by 
 Balzac, who, ardently enamoured of all three, 
 accompanied them to Marseilles, Geneva, Rome, 
 Naples, and came back to Paris in despair at 
 having to leave them. 
 
 In the following March he returned to Italy 
 to see his friends and stayed there some weeks, 
 then coming back to Paris, which he again left 
 in August for Wiesbaden, where Mme. Hanska 
 was then staying, and whence, after a fort- 
 night's visit, he once more returned to the 
 capital. 
 
 Towards the close of 1846 Mme. Hanska 
 visited Paris in order to consult the doctors 
 about her health, which was much shaken, 
 and there she remained for several weeks. 
 
 In 1847 Balzac went as far afield as Vierz- 
 chownia in Ukraine, in order to visit Mme. 
 Hanska on her estate there. He was once more 
 perfectly happy, made a tour in Southern 
 Russia, admired Kiev, studied the customs of 
 the country, was much interested in the monu-
 
 20 BALZAC 
 
 ments, and once more greatly enjoyed his role 
 of tourist and observer. He was back again 
 in Paris at the beginning of 1848. 
 
 He brought out there, at last with success, 
 la Mardlre, which was played at the Theatre 
 Historique, and offered to the Theatre Francais 
 and elsewhere his best piece, Mercadet le 
 Faiseur, which was only to see the footlights, 
 accompanied by hearty applause, after its 
 author had passed away. 
 
 In the month of September he went back to 
 Russia. He was very ill there, his chest be- 
 coming diseased, as his heart had already been 
 for a long time. He dragged along for eighteen 
 months, devotedly cared for but unable to get 
 better. Slightly improved in 1850, he doubt- 
 lessly begged Mme. Hanska to bestow herself 
 in marriage. She consented ; but for marriage 
 with a foreigner the Emperor's permission was 
 necessary, and this was granted only on con- 
 dition that Mme. Hanska gave up all her 
 belongings to her children. She agreed to do 
 so on condition that they allowed her an in- 
 come. She married Balzac on the 14th of 
 March 1850, eighteen years having passed by 
 since the connection had first begun. 
 
 No sooner was he married than Balzac again
 
 HIS LIFE 21 
 
 fell ill, and found it impossible to bring home 
 his wife with him to Paris before the end of 
 May. He was extremely weak. A letter (of 
 which considerable portions were published in 
 the Intermediaire des Chercheurs et Curieux for 
 the 30th of November 1912) was written by Mme. 
 de Balzac on the 9th of May to her daughter, 
 Mme. de Mniszech, the mother being then in 
 a town on the borders of Russia (since she still 
 had Galicia before her), but already within the 
 domain of Austria (since there was a Russian 
 consul there). ' I am at the Hotel de Russie,' 
 she says. ' Our dear good B., in spite of his 
 painful condition, is running all over the place. 
 Our Russian consul is exceedingly kind to him. 
 He accompanies him everywhere, making 
 everything easy for him. Nothing, neither our 
 chests nor our personal luggage, is to -be 
 opened ! Think what a frightful loss of time 
 that will save us, and how much annoyance we 
 shall be spared ! Don't worry, my dear angel, 
 about the Galician roads, which are both 
 excellent and without risk ; we shall moreover 
 travel both day and night. . . . My husband 
 has just come back ; he has carried through all 
 his business with admirable speed ; we set 
 out to-day. I had no idea what an adorable
 
 22 BALZAC 
 
 creature he is ; after knowing him for seven- 
 teen years, I daily discover in him new qualities 
 of which I have been hitherto unconscious. 
 If only he might have his health ! Speak about 
 it, I beg of you, to M. Knothe. You have no 
 idea what he went through last night. I hope 
 that his native air may do him good ; but if 
 this hope should be denied me, I shall deserve 
 your pity, I assure you. It is so good to be 
 thus loved and befriended. There is also 
 something very much the matter with his poor 
 eyes. I don't know what it all means, and I 
 am at times very anxious and downhearted. 
 I hope to send you better news to-morrow, when 
 I will write again. . . . Our good B. . . . kisses 
 your little hands and begs you not to worry, 
 that he will be all right as soon as he touches 
 French soil . . . etc.' At last they reached 
 Paris. Their return was marked by a lugubri- 
 ous incident : Balzac had made ready for his 
 wife a luxuriously furnished house in the Rue 
 Fortunee. Bringing her home in the evening, 
 he found it lit up throughout, but was unable 
 to get in. He was obliged to send for a lock- 
 smith, and an entry was at last effected. The 
 servant left in charge of the house had suddenly 
 gone mad some hours before.
 
 HIS LIFE 23 
 
 After some weeks of comparatively good 
 health, Balzac was once more stricken down 
 and unable to leave his bed. He was devotedly 
 nursed by his mother, Mme. Honore de Balzac 
 having left his bedside, and perhaps the house, 
 for what reason has never been made clear, 
 though it is thought that since their return to 
 Paris her feelings towards her husband had 
 begun to cool. 
 
 Balzac died on the 18th of August 1850. 
 He had a royal funeral. The Minister of the 
 Interior, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and 
 Sainte-Beuve (the last-named in spite of an old 
 enmity) were his pall-bearers. Victor Hugo 
 pronounced an eloquent discourse at his grave- 
 side. 
 
 Balzac was not a member of the French 
 Academy. He had offered himself as a candi- 
 date in 1839, while still young for this sort of 
 distinction, but already at the height of his 
 fame ; but he withdrew to make way for Victor 
 Hugo. In 1841 he made further overtures for 
 admission, but again withdrew. In 1847 he 
 came forward to fill the vacant chair of Bal- 
 lanche and won but two votes in his favour, 
 those of Victor Hugo and M. de Pongerville, 
 as the former has borne witness. In 1849 he
 
 24 BALZAC 
 
 came forward for the two vacancies caused 
 by the deaths of Chateaubriand and Vatout, 
 receiving but two votes on each occasion. 
 
 In his earliest years he was small but well- 
 shaped, with a fine forehead, fine chestnut eyes, 
 short curly hair, cheeks and chin rounded, 
 thick and humoursome lips, a short nose rather 
 hard in line with wide and mobile nostrils. 
 Later on, in later youth, he grew stout, with a 
 thick neck, a prominent stomach, and a double 
 chin ; spoiling his looks by letting his hair 
 grow long and leaving it unkempt, with a thick 
 and drooping moustache. He kept always his 
 very fine wide brow, high and rounded, and his 
 fine eyes, not very large, but well-formed and 
 full of sprinkled gold, and his glance sparkling 
 with intelligence, frankness, and curiosity. His 
 manners were awkward, abrupt, and without 
 grace ; his behaviour at once pretentious and 
 easy-going. He was absolutely wanting in all 
 that is known as distinction. 
 
 His character was likewise commonplace. 
 He was without moral elegance, without deli- 
 cacy, I will not go the length of saying without 
 morality, for it is obvious that he was honest 
 in his business dealings, in which he was more 
 sinned against than sinning ; but I should say
 
 HIS LIFE 25 
 
 quite without any tenderness of conscience. 
 The easy-going way in which he accepted Mme. 
 de Berny's money was not above-board, and 
 it seems very likely that his fidelity to Mme. 
 Hanska was prompted almost as much by the 
 lady's fortune as by her person, however 
 worthy she may otherwise have been of it. 
 
 He had that profound egotism shared alike 
 by almost all artists, but with him quite open 
 and unashamed, and beyond his power either 
 to cloak or to keep under that consists in 
 looking on everything as insignificant when 
 set beside his own work. One day Jules 
 Sandeau, at that time his secretary, coming 
 home from attending his sister's funeral, 
 Balzac asked kindly after his family, and then, 
 the reply hardly having reached his ears, went 
 on, 4 Come along, that 's enough for that sub- 
 ject, let 's get back to something serious. Old 
 Goriot . . .' And he never outgrew this kink. 
 One rather important character in his works is 
 Doctor Bianchon. When near his death he 
 said, ' Fetch Bianchon ; there 's nobody but 
 Bianchon can pull me through.' He was 
 jealous of his rivals, even sometimes of those 
 that were dead. Sainte-Beuve having pub- 
 lished an article on Loyson, whose poetry was
 
 26 BALZAC 
 
 well worth being brought back to light, he 
 wrote, ' The mind of M. Sainte-Beuve is of the 
 bat order. . . . His soft and yielding phrase, 
 cowardly and without sinew, plays round about 
 his subjects ; he prowls in the darkness like a 
 jackal ; he goes into the graveyards, and carries 
 off respectable corpses that have done nothing 
 to the author that he should disturb them in 
 this way, such as the Loysons, the . . .' 
 Balzac was jealous of Loyson, just as Sainte- 
 Beuve was jealous of Chateaubriand. 
 
 But he had some qualities that were of quite 
 a high order. Sainte-Beuve said of him, in 
 accusing him of a business transaction which it 
 is now almost certain never took place, 4 This 
 mixing up of glory with gain makes me grow 
 weary.' Now, if this be found wearisome, it is 
 the mixing that must be blamed. He was fond 
 of money ; but he also loved fame, and it was 
 never entirely for the one, and it was always for 
 the other as well that he laboured. He was 
 fond of telling how when in Russia, a lady's 
 companion, as she brought in the tea, heard 
 her hostess say, ' Ah well ! You say then, M. 
 Balzac . . .' and dropped her tray in her 
 astonishment. ' I know what glory is,' he 
 would add, with real happiness. As a matter
 
 HIS LIFE 27 
 
 of fact the tray would doubtlessly have fallen 
 just as promptly for Frederic Soulie ; x but the 
 saying is not therefore the less agreeable and 
 shows the speaker in a kindly light. 
 
 Again, he was certainly good, generous, and 
 straightforward. He kept in his service for 
 a long time a secretary, since then become 
 famous, who did nothing whatever, and was 
 wholly undeserving of his indulgence. 2 His 
 disposition was homely and jovial, though it 
 would be better to say that it was ardent : he 
 could be wrathful, carried away by frightful 
 fits of temper, and still oftener by grossly 
 vulgar merriment, jocularity, and enormous 
 outbursts of laughter. It was said of Fonten- 
 elle, 4 You have never laughed ! ' 4 1 have 
 never laughed,' was his answer ; ' that is to 
 say, I have never gone Ha ! Ha ! Ha ! ' Bal- 
 zac, on the other hand, never smiled ; but he 
 was uttering his Ha ! Ha ! Ha ! nearly all 
 the time. He belonged to the common stock, 
 both in the good and the evil sense of the term, 
 from his head to his heels. 
 
 1 Frederic Soulie (1800-47), a pleasant writer with a very loose 
 style and no pretensions to profundity, whose novels are now 
 forgotten. TR. 
 
 2 This seems to be another reference to Jules Sandeau, George 
 Sand's first lover, and the author of the classic Roche aux Mouettes. 
 Tn.
 
 28 BALZAC 
 
 His aristocratic opinions, as so often happens 
 with political opinions, were in complete con- 
 tradiction to his temperament. He was of the 
 common folk, and held aristocratic opinions, 
 just as Beranger, on the contrary, wanted to 
 be of the common folk, and succeeded in reach- 
 ing them, though he had both the temperament 
 and the character of a careful middle-class man, 
 shrewd, skilful, cunning, frugal and fastidious 
 in his tastes. 
 
 He had comrades rather than friends. Mme. 
 de Girardin liked him well enough, notwith- 
 standing that at times his blundering proved 
 rather awkward for her ; Gautier regarded him 
 with that amiable and majestic condescension 
 beyond which his friendships never led him ; 
 Hugo loved him admiringly, and knew more- 
 over how to keep him at arm's-length ; George 
 Sand, who always admired him, whom he liked, 
 and whose portrait he has drawn finely in his 
 Mademoiselle Maupin, found him too Rabe- 
 laisian, and said to him, ' You are a lewd fellow,' 
 to which he replied, ' You are a beast,' her 
 rejoinder being, c I 'm well aware of it.' I find 
 only Henri Monnier, Leon Gozlan, Mery, and 
 some smaller fry, with whom he had regular 
 and close dealings.
 
 HIS LIFE 29 
 
 He was not disliked by Lamartine, which is 
 singularly to his honour. The great poet of 
 the ideal thus speaks of him : ' Balzac was 
 standing [at Mme. de Girardin's] before the 
 fireplace of this beloved salon where I have seen 
 pass and pose [I think that was put in quite 
 guilelessly] so many remarkable men and 
 women. He was not tall, although the bright- 
 ness of his face and the mobility of his figure 
 made it impossible to reckon his height, for it 
 wavered with his thought ; there seemed to be 
 a gap between him and the ground ; now he 
 would stoop down to earth as though to gather 
 up a sheaf of ideas, and then he would draw 
 himself up on tiptoe in order to follow the flight 
 of his thought towards infinity. He broke 
 off for no more than a minute on my account 
 [he was not in the least shy ; he had not even 
 so much diffidence as befits politeness] ; he 
 was carried away by his conversation with 
 M. and Mme. de Girardin. He gave me a 
 lively, searching, and gracious glance, of 
 extreme benevolence. I drew near him to 
 shake his hand, and saw that we understood 
 one another straight away and without further 
 need of words ; he was in full stream, and could 
 not spare the time for a stoppage. I sat down
 
 30 BALZAC 
 
 and he went on with his monologue, as though 
 my presence had roused him into new life 
 instead of interrupting him. The listening 
 which I gave to his speech afforded me the 
 opportunity of observing his figure in its 
 everlasting undulation. He was fat, solid, 
 square below and across the shoulders ; neck, 
 chest, body, buttocks, and limbs all strongly 
 built, with much of the stoutness of Mirabeau, 
 but without over- weight ; there was so much 
 of soul in it all, that it was borne lightly and 
 joyously, like a supple envelope, and in nowise 
 as a burden ; his arms gesticulated easily ; he 
 talked as though he were an orator holding 
 forth. . . .' We know that, under the name 
 of Canalis, Balzac has sketched a very beautiful 
 and kindly portrait of Lamartine. 
 
 He was a hard worker ; we need not call him 
 an indefatigable one, since it is obvious that 
 fatigue did overcome him, and that, with a 
 strong constitution and born to reach his eighty 
 years, like his father before him, he yet died at 
 fifty. But he was an arduous and powerful 
 workman. He wrote nearly a hundred works 
 (some of them short) in twenty-five or twenty- 
 six years, and did so, not, as has been said, like 
 4 a force of nature ' which always performs the
 
 HIS LIFE 31 
 
 like function, but in the midst of a thousand 
 projects, a thousand enterprises, and a thousand 
 plans which bubbled up incessantly from his 
 seething brain ; in the midst of a hundred 
 journey ings, and always in the grasp of the 
 harassing cares and deadly embarrassments of 
 his everlasting and eternally renewed debts. 
 His work was usually done by night ; he some- 
 times worked both day and night, not going 
 out and hardly stirring from his writing-table ; 
 keeping himself going, and unfortunately spur- 
 ring himself on with innumerable cups of black 
 coffee. La Cousine Bette was thus written in 
 six weeks, which works out at ten pages a day, 
 or (more likely) from seven to eight hours of 
 work per day, which is a tremendous rate for 
 those who know what one hour of literary work 
 really means. He corrected, or rather aug- 
 mented, without end. He required five, six, or 
 seven proofs from the printer. It often hap- 
 pened that the manuscript which he delivered 
 to the compositors was for him nothing more 
 than a rough outline which he filled in or a 
 square of canvas on which he embroidered. 
 Like Victor Hugo (as we know from the study 
 of his manuscripts), the reading of his text 
 inspired and suggested his finest traits ; but
 
 32 BALZAC 
 
 what inspired Hugo was his own script, whereas 
 with Balzac it was the print that roused him. 
 
 He was an admirable literary workman, 
 upright, conscientious, scrupulous, and arduous. 
 He is of those who have deserved, even on moral 
 grounds, both worldly success and lasting fame.
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 33 
 
 II 
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 
 
 As his biography has shown us, Balzac's in- 
 tellectual culture was of the slightest. He had 
 hardly any time for reading, reflecting, or medi- 
 tating. It is obvious in reading him that he 
 knew nothing of history, had no knowledge of 
 the character or customs of foreign peoples, nor 
 of philosophy, nor of the literature of antiquity, 
 and knew nothing or next to nothing of the 
 literature of the modern world. As regards 
 any one else it might very well be said, 4 You 
 know nothing about it ; a novelist does not 
 betray his ignorance by the story that he tells, 
 and he may be very well posted without your 
 being aware of it.' That is quite true ; but, 
 since Balzac was everlastingly mixing up his 
 dissertations with the stories he had to tell, 
 his inadequate culture is as readily perceived 
 as it would be if we were dealing with a didactic 
 author, and his intellectual upbringing is clearly 
 seen to be of the slightest. It need not be
 
 34 BALZAC 
 
 asked, in dealing with him, what reading had 
 an influence on his mind. It is quite plain 
 that nothing left any trace on him, nor stirred 
 him into a ferment. Of Walter Scott alone 
 need we affirm that he had read him with relish, 
 and that he had a very keen desire to follow in 
 his footsteps. 
 
 This lack, though a very grave one, need be 
 no absolute bar to the begetting of general 
 ideas in a vigorous mind. Only, in that case, 
 the ideas can never be other than those proper 
 to the individual temperament and its domestic 
 upbringing. Though it may sometimes seem 
 to be otherwise, it is those very ideas and no 
 others that Balzac had. His philosophy is 
 crude and narrow, full of trenchant axioms, 
 violent paradoxes, without any fineness or 
 subtle differentiation, just like that of a 
 man who studies the brewing of beer. Having 
 met with many hardships at the outset of his 
 life, he looks on men with some bitterness, is 
 misanthropic, and a pessimist in the current 
 meaning now given to that word. Generally 
 speaking, man is for him a brute, made up 
 merely of instincts and interests. An absolute 
 government and a tyrannic religion are neces- 
 sary to hold him in. Balzac, as his domestic
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 35 
 
 upbringing inclined him to be, was a Christian. 
 But how came he to be one and for what 
 reasons ? Because 4 Christianity, and especially 
 Catholicism, being a complete system for 
 repressing man's depraved inclinations, is the 
 strongest element of social order.' He seems 
 to lean (without being yet quite positive or 
 definitely ranging himself on the side of political 
 Catholicism) towards the catholicising function 
 of the monarchy and the catholicising means of 
 rehabilitating it and drawing it into closer 
 understanding with the people, but with a view 
 to bringing the people back to the legitimate 
 monarchy. He makes his village priest say, 4 My 
 sufferings having given me a close knowledge 
 of secret charity as it has been set forth by the 
 great Saint Paul in his adorable epistle, it was 
 my earnest wish to stanch the unhealing 
 wounds of the poor in some neglected corner 
 of earth so as to prove by my example, if it 
 should please God to bless my efforts, that the 
 Catholic religion, as exemplified in human works, 
 is the only good and beautiful civilising power.' 
 Speaking of another priest, Balzac says, 4 This 
 priest belonged to that small portion of the 
 French clergy who are in favour of granting 
 such concessions as would tend to identify the
 
 36 BALZAC 
 
 Church with popular interests, and thus help 
 it to reconquer, by the application of true 
 evangelical doctrine, its former influence on the 
 masses, so that it might then join hands with 
 the monarchy.' 
 
 His ideas as to our social makeshifts seem to 
 be identical with those of Rousseau, though it 
 is very likely that he never read the Discours 
 sur rinegalite. He makes one of his char- 
 acters say to the Marquise d'Anglemont, ' Obey 
 society ! Why, sir, all our ills are the outcome 
 of that. God has not made only one law for mis- 
 fortune ; but in gathering themselves together, 
 men have falsified His work. We women [for 
 example] are worse treated by civilisation than 
 we should be if nature had her way with us. 
 Nature burdens us with physical penalties 
 which you have done nothing to mitigate, and 
 civilisation has developed sentiments which 
 you continually belie. Nature stifles her weak- 
 lings ; you condemn them to live on and suffer 
 continual unhappiness. . . .' 
 
 In politics, properly so called, he is, as I have 
 before said, in favour of absolute power and of 
 keeping the mob in a state of passive obedience 
 and ignorance. His whole political creed might 
 quite well be summed up in the axiom of Vol-
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 37 
 
 taire, ' When the people start to use their 
 reason, all is lost. 5 The journalist Blondet 
 said, ' If the press did not exist, it would be 
 necessary to invent it ; but here it is, and by 
 it we live.' 4 You will die of it,' answered the 
 diplomatist ; 4 don't you see that the superiority 
 of the masses, supposing that you enlighten 
 them, will render individual greatness more 
 difficult, that in fostering reason in the heart of 
 the lower classes you will reap revolt and that 
 you will be its first victims ? . . .' Hence his 
 horror of the liberty of the press, since it being 
 impossible that newspapers should be anything 
 else than the expression of the passions of the 
 million, they render articulate the 4 reason ' 
 of the mob and thus make it more eager than 
 before, and that without being answerable, and 
 therefore, without bounds. The press, instead 
 of being a priesthood, has degenerated into a 
 party weapon ; from this it has turned to 
 money-making, and in all such business there 
 is neither faith nor law. Every newspaper, as 
 Blondet has said, is a shop that sells to the 
 public the sort of words that are most to its 
 liking. Were there a newspaper for hunch- 
 backs, it would demonstrate, late and early, 
 the beauty, the goodness, and the necessity of
 
 38 BALZAC 
 
 hunchbacks. A newspaper is not made to 
 enlighten opinion, but to flatter it. Thus all 
 newspapers must become, before long, cowardly, 
 hypocritical, lying, murderous ; they will deal 
 death to ideas, system, men, and will batten 
 on their slaughter . . . [and] they will then 
 enjoy the privileges granted to reasoning 
 beings : the evil will come about without 
 any one being held guilty. . . . We shall 
 all alike be guiltless, we shall be able to 
 wash from our hands all trace of shame. 
 Napoleon said, ' Nobody is answerable for 
 collective crimes ! ' 
 
 It is true that Balzac contradicts himself 
 elsewhere by remarking that the great number 
 of newspapers serves to neutralise their force, 
 and this, if not a remedy, at least brings some 
 measure of relief. ' These restrictions, in- 
 vented in the time of M. de Villele, who might 
 have given the death-blow to newspapers by 
 scattering them broadcast among the people, 
 created instead a kind of privilege by making 
 the founding of a newspaper an almost im- 
 possible undertaking. . . .' But, in short, it 
 seems highly desirable that newspapers should 
 be simply suppressed, or restricted to the mere 
 office of news-bearers.
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 39 
 
 What is more curious, the thing which he 
 demanded of authority has been effected by 
 the mob itself. The crowd asked for news- 
 papers which would give it news, and formerly 
 all the newspapers were political, whereas to- 
 day only the non-political have regular sub- 
 scribers ; and the political sheets, kept going 
 by party funds, and by people who desire a 
 daily renewal of their convictions by the read- 
 ing of their newspapers, lead a very precarious 
 existence. 
 
 It is needless to say that he is quite opposed 
 to everything that goes to-day by the name of 
 Democracy. He saw in it clearly, firstly, its 
 danger for the middle classes, a section of whom 
 were imprudently clamouring for it in his own 
 time ; secondly, the danger of the thing in 
 itself, which was, to his mind, the fact that it 
 can only lead to anarchy. As to the first, he 
 says, ' Universal suffrage which is to-day 
 demanded by those belonging to the party 
 known as the constitutional opposition. . . . 
 The triumph of those ideas which serve liberal- 
 ism in its rash warfare against the prosperous 
 Bourbon government would spell disaster for 
 France and for the liberals themselves. The 
 leaders of the left know this quite well. For
 
 40 BALZAC 
 
 them the struggle is no more than a question 
 of power. If the middle class foster, under 
 the banner of the opposition, the very social 
 superiorities against which their own vanity 
 is in revolt, such a triumph would at once 
 bring about a struggle between themselves and 
 the people, who would look on them as a sort 
 of aristocracy, of a meaner kind indeed, yet 
 an aristocracy whose privileges would be the 
 more irksome from its greater nearness to 
 themselves. . . .' Secondly, democracy is in 
 itself a danger to society, which it rends 
 asunder : ' Universal suffrage was an excellent 
 principle for the Church, since there all indi- 
 viduals were equally well-educated, brought 
 into line by the same system, knowing quite 
 well what they wanted and where they were 
 going [in a word, universal suffrage is excellent 
 for an aristocratic body]. But ... in truth, 
 I think I have given proof of my devotion to 
 the poor and the suffering, and I could hardly 
 be accused of wishing that harm should befall 
 itj only, while full of admiration for it in those 
 laborious paths along which it toils, sublimely 
 patient and resigned, I declare it incapable of 
 taking any share in government. I look on 
 the working classes as the minors of a nation
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 41 
 
 who should always remain as its wards in 
 chancery. Thus, to my thinking, the word 
 election is likely to cause as much harm as 
 has already been wrought by those mis- 
 understood and ill-defined words conscience 
 and liberty, which have been scattered 
 abroad as symbols of revolt and orders of 
 destruction.' 
 
 Another point which he makes is this, that 
 the modern spirit, with its unbridled material- 
 ism, destroys successively the spirit of the 
 family and the family itself ; that it replaces, 
 as the sociologists would say, the family unit 
 by the individual unit, and that it is, in conse- 
 quence, seething with anarchy and the poison 
 of dissolution. 4 Societies must always be 
 based on the family. Necessarily a makeshift, 
 incessantly splitting up, recomposed only to 
 break asunder again, without any link between 
 the future and the past, the family of old times 
 no longer exists in France. [He means to say 
 that the family of to-day has nothing in common 
 with that of bygone days which no longer 
 exists in France.] Those who have helped 
 forward the destruction of the ancient building 
 have been logical in sharing equally the family 
 goods, in restricting paternal authority, in
 
 42 BALZAC 
 
 making each child the head of a new family, in 
 doing away with large responsibilities ; but 
 is the social state thus reconstructed as stable, 
 with its new laws tested for so short a while, as 
 was the monarchy with its old abuses ? In 
 the loss of family solidarity, society loses that 
 fundamental strength Montesquieu discovered 
 and called honour. 1 It has isolated every one 
 so as to domineer the more easily ; it has shared 
 out everything in order to weaken all. It 
 rules over units, over figures thrown together 
 like grains of wheat in a heap. Can general 
 interests ever replace the family ? Time alone 
 can resolve this great problem. 5 
 
 Hence one of Balzac's bugbears is the civil 
 code, which was drawn up with a view, in fore- 
 cast, of a tradition-hating and all-levelling 
 democracy. The civil code legalised divorce, 
 which had only been abolished by the Chambre 
 introuvable 2 of 1816 and which the liberals 
 desired to restore, since they looked on it as one 
 of the benefits achieved by the French Revolu- 
 tion, and Balzac writes, ' . . . Perhaps no 
 
 1 Let us overlook the fact that Balzac, never having read 
 Montesquieu and speaking merely from hearsay, has no inkling of 
 what the latter meant by honour. 
 
 2 An ultra-royalist and blindly reactionary government to which 
 this nickname has stuck. TR.
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 43 
 
 picture from my hand shows better than this 
 how the indissolubility of marriage is indis- 
 pensable to European society. . . .' The civil 
 code had done away with the family, or done 
 its best to do away with it. It had wiped out 
 primogeniture and freedom of willing by 
 testament, had insisted on the father's belong- 
 ings being shared by all his children equally, 
 to the destruction of the house and the con- 
 tinuity of the family line from generation to 
 generation, and Balzac writes, ' The family, 
 sir ? Is there any such thing ? I deny the 
 family [I deny that the family exists] in a 
 society which, on the death of father or of 
 mother, divides up their possessions and bids 
 each go his own way. The family is a tempor- 
 ary and haphazard association which falls to 
 pieces as soon as a death occurs. Our laws 
 have broken up our homes, our heritages, the 
 permanence of example and tradition. I see 
 nothing but ruins around me. . . .' And he 
 writes again, ' The civil code's right of inherit- 
 ance, which ordains the sharing up of pro- 
 perty, is the stake which, by being continually 
 driven in, splits up the land into tiny morsels, 
 individualises fortunes by taking away their 
 necessary stability, and which, by taking
 
 44 BALZAC 
 
 everything to pieces without ever putting it 
 together again, will culminate in the destruction 
 of France.' 
 
 The modern code again has set up juries, and 
 Balzac, in passing, lets fall this curious remark 
 as to their mentality' Hulot found that his 
 vice absolved him ; vice, in the midst of its 
 unbridled luxury, smiled on him. The gran- 
 deur of his crime was held to be an ex- 
 tenuating circumstance, just as happens with 
 juries.' 
 
 His literary ideas are never outlined with 
 sufficient clearness to permit a direct reply to 
 an inquiry as to what were the aesthetic theories 
 which he held. His verdict on Ruy Bias shows 
 that he looked on the romantic drama (and by 
 that we mean also the romanesque drama) as 
 extravagant ; his verdict on George Sand's 
 Jacques ' false from beginning to end . . . 
 these writers wander in space . . . driving 
 their steeds through vacancy ' that roman- 
 esque characters (of which many may be met 
 with both in life and in his own works) were not 
 at all to his liking. His verdict on the 
 Volupte of Sainte-Beuve and on that writer's 
 style proves, on the one hand, that the virtu- 
 ous and declamatory woman seemed to him
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 45 
 
 4 not womanish enough,' and on the other hand, 
 that he could not bear the style of psychological 
 analysis, finely shaded and slightly precious. 
 His general verdict on George Sand, in which 
 he puts his finger on her weak spots, and by 
 inference, on all that is lacking, shows that, 
 to Balzac's way of thinking, in order to write 
 a novel there must be i strength of conception, 
 power of constructing a plan, the faculty of 
 getting at the truth, and that of touching the 
 heart.' And all that, though interesting 
 enough, is not very new. 
 
 Here we have all, or very nearly all, of Bal- 
 zac's general ideas, and it is quite needless for 
 me to remark that they are merely those com- 
 mon during his time to the circles in which 
 he moved, and that they would only be really 
 worth study had they been gone into so thor- 
 oughly as to give them a meaning special to 
 himself, or, on the other hand, if they had been 
 expressed with such clearness and radiancy as 
 sometimes gives newness to notions that are 
 trite. It is not so here, and if sometimes, as 
 we have just seen in those lines of his above 
 quoted, there is some skill in the way he ex- 
 presses his doctrines, he has just as often a way 
 of setting them forth that gives rise to a doubt
 
 46 BALZAC 
 
 as to whether he understands what he is talking 
 about, as may be seen in the following example, 
 which is only one of many that we might bring 
 forward : ' The fault of governments in our 
 day is that they mould society less for man than 
 man for society. An unending struggle goes 
 on between the individual and the system that 
 would exploit him, and which he strives to 
 exploit for his own profit ; while formerly man, 
 in reality freer, bore himself more generously 
 towards the common weal. The circle round 
 the centre of which the interests of men now 
 revolve is insensibly enlarged ; the mind which 
 is able to resume in itself all the scattered 
 elements will never be other than a magnificent 
 exception ; for, habitually, in the moral world 
 as in the physical, movement gains in intensity 
 what it loses in dispersion. Society should not 
 be founded on exceptions. First of all, when 
 man was merely a father and no more, his 
 heart beat warmly, concentrated within his 
 own home. Later on he lived for a small 
 republic ; thence sprang the great historic 
 devotions of Greece and of Rome. Then he 
 became the living shrine of a caste or of a 
 religion for the greatness of which he often 
 showed sublime behaviour ; but therein the
 
 HIS GENERAL IDEAS 47 
 
 scope of his interests was widened by intel- 
 lectual extension on every side. To-day his 
 life is allied to that of an immense country; 
 soon, we are told, he will belong to the whole 
 world. Is not this moral cosmopolitism, the 
 hope of Christian Rome, a sublime mistake ? 
 It is so natural to believe in the realisation of 
 a noble chimera, in the brotherhood of man ! 
 But, alas, the human mechanism cannot boast 
 such god-like proportions. Minds whose scope 
 is vast enough to experience the kind of feeling 
 reserved only for the great, will never belong 
 either to simple citizens or to fathers of families. 
 Certain physiologists hold that when the brain 
 thus expands, the heart must contract. Non- 
 sense ! The seeming selfishness of men who 
 bear in their bosoms the burden of a science, a 
 nation, or of laws, what is it but the most 
 noble of passions, and, in its own way, the 
 mothering of multitudes ? In order to bring 
 forth new peoples or to produce new ideas must 
 they not comprise in their powerful heads the 
 breasts of woman and the force of God ? The 
 story of a Pope Innocent in., of a Peter the 
 Great, and of every leader of an age or of a 
 nation would prove, if needed, in the highest 
 way, this far-reaching thought for which
 
 48 BALZAC 
 
 Troubert stood sponsor in the shadow of 
 Saint-Gatien's cloisters.' 
 
 Now such stuff is pitiful, and it is very fre- 
 quent with him ; so that Balzac as thinker 
 cannot be spoken of without some hesitation.
 
 Ill 
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 
 
 HE believes, as I have said, man to be wicked, 
 a prey to his instincts, appetites, vices, and 
 interests, and generally quite incapable of 
 disinterested or charitable conduct. It even 
 looks as though he were rather glad when 
 rascals succeeded ; his own generally got on 
 and finished up in a blaze of glory. He seems 
 to hanker after the bitter pleasure that con- 
 sists in discovering that in order to get on it is 
 only necessary to be a rogue. That is just the 
 mental outlook of the misanthrope who bears 
 a grudge against the successful good man for 
 spoiling his enjoyment in despising mankind. 
 ' I see plainly,' said a misanthrope, ' that some 
 honest men make their way in the world ; but 
 I begrudge it them, since they upset my theories 
 and deprive me of the enjoyment that I get 
 from the scoundrels that come out on top.' 
 
 Now this notion is quite false. Obviously it 
 is not the saints that get on or that can get on.
 
 50 BALZAC 
 
 They have too many scruples ; they have too 
 many qualms of conscience ; they are too prone 
 to ask themselves after a success, ' What crime 
 is it that I have been about ? ' Moreover, they 
 have too much brotherly good-feeling, and just 
 when they are about to help themselves to a 
 slice they begin wondering if it will not do some 
 one harm, and it is only too sure that they must 
 always answer ' Yes.' Saints do not succeed, 
 nor is success within their power. 
 
 But no more is it the scoundrels that get on. 
 At least they very seldom do so. They are too 
 eager, too hasty to be prudent, circumspect, 
 or astute, and they are always blundering. 
 The blunders of Tartuffe have a good deal of 
 truth in them. 
 
 It is the persevering respectable nobodies 
 who get on, and certainly Balzac has often 
 bestowed success on them, for he has a clear- 
 seeing eye ; but, allowing himself to be led 
 away by his theories, he destroys verisimilitude 
 by conferring it too often on downright rogues. 
 
 As for his looking on man as being almost 
 always a blind follower of his appetites and 
 interests, it must be allowed, at the outset, 
 that he is right, following it up with an observa- 
 tion which may excuse him, and adding that
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 51 
 
 he himself makes many and very considerable 
 exceptions. 
 
 The observation which at least excuses him 
 is this : We must not say, as has been said with 
 an authority which almost makes me waver 
 despite conviction, that a novelist can no more 
 be reproached with immorality than a historian, 
 and that if the mission of the novel is to show 
 us life as a whole, it should enjoy the same 
 freedom as is granted to history, and its sole 
 duty should be subjection to its material. We 
 should not say that, for the simple reason that 
 the novelist is not subject to his material, 
 while the historian is so, completely. The 
 historian must submit to the real facts and to 
 all of them, while the novelist may choose 
 where he will. If, then, history is only immoral 
 when it is untruthful, the novel is immoral 
 both when it is untruthful and when, without 
 being untruthful it prefers the evil rather than 
 the good in mankind, in order to describe it 
 with an obvious complaisance. 
 
 It is no such excuse then that we need bring 
 forward in Balzac's defence, or rather in order 
 to settle in our minds how he may be excused. 
 It must be said that Balzac and from the 
 artistic standpoint it is one of his great merits
 
 52 BALZAC 
 
 has given us a view of men not merely as they 
 are in themselves or within the narrow circle 
 of their own dwellings and homes, but in their 
 common dealings one with another, and in 
 their social relations. Now this is the best 
 way, if I may so express it, of seeing their worst 
 side, and of seeing them worse than they really 
 are. A glance at life as a whole reveals the 
 struggle for life as its most outstanding feature. 
 None of us at bottom are either all good or all 
 evil ; but we seem, and indeed we are, worse 
 in our outward deeds than we are in our in- 
 ward selves. Left alone within our family 
 circle, we usually aspire towards what is good. 
 Once outside, we are carried away by conflict- 
 ing interests that send us jostling rudely one 
 against the other, which rouse and madden in 
 us that instinct to struggle which we then feel 
 necessary for us to win our way through. 
 These instincts, which we would gladly leave 
 in slumber, are roused by the sight of a com- 
 petitor who himself feels his own stirring at 
 the sight of ourselves. Men must therefore 
 appear in the most unfavourable light to a 
 novelist who depicts society and man as a social 
 unit. Now, this is just what Balzac always 
 did. It is hardly possible that the social novel
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 53 
 
 should be otherwise than pessimistic when set 
 beside the homely, the intimate, and the 
 domestic novel ; and the test, as interesting as 
 it is easy to apply, is that as soon as a social 
 novel becomes domestic it ceases to be gloomy, 
 as in Peace and War, and it brightens up and 
 shows us the same men in a much better light 
 than they had appeared but a short while 
 before. 
 
 And I would add that Balzac has, moreover, 
 made many exceptions. His work shows us 
 many upright people who are not victims. If 
 we counted we should find the straight folk 
 nearly as many as the crooked. The righteous 
 people are generally priests, doctors, officers 
 of the first Empire (and if Philippe Brideau 
 may always be quoted, so should the heroic 
 veterans of honour who appear in la Cousine 
 Bette), artists, collectors, literary men such as 
 Cenacle, who is in such strong contrast to the 
 journalists of Illusions per dues, business men 
 such as Cesar Birotteau, legal men such as the 
 advocate Derville, etc. 
 
 There are women admirably honest and noble- 
 hearted, such as the Baroness Hulot, Ursule 
 Mirouet, Eugenie Grandet, and even Mme. de 
 Mortsauf.
 
 54 BALZAC 
 
 And it has been said (and I have myself con- 
 firmed it) that his honest people are usually 
 a trifle silly. It is true that among them we 
 find a Schmucke and an Abbe Birotteau ; but 
 that is not to say that they are all like that, and 
 the country doctor, Doctor Mirouet, the advo- 
 cate Derville, and many others are not at all so. 
 He shows us many honest people who know 
 what they are about and are quite shrewd, and 
 many who devote themselves to humanity 
 without expecting any reward, or those who, 
 disillusioned, retire to their tents slightly 
 wearied but entirely serene. Of such is Der- 
 ville c Do you know that there are three men 
 in society, the priest, the doctor, and the 
 lawyer, who cannot think well of the world ? 
 They all wear black, perhaps because they are 
 in mourning for all virtue and for all illusions. 
 The unhappiest of them all is the lawyer. 
 When a man seeks out the priest, he is driven 
 on by repentance, by remorse, by a faith which 
 makes him of interest, which ennobles him, and 
 brings consolation to the soul of the mediator, 
 whose task cannot be carried out without some 
 sense of joyousness : he purifies, he makes 
 good past trespass, he reconciles. But we 
 lawyers see nothing but the same ill feelings ;
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 55 
 
 nothing alters them ; our studies are like foul 
 cisterns that cannot be cleansed. I know. 
 ... I know. ... In short all the horrors that 
 novelists fancy they invent still fall short of the 
 truth. I am going away to live in the country 
 with my wife.' 
 
 Balzac gives us pictures, then, of very intelli- 
 gent and very virtuous people, who find vice 
 revolting and cannot bear the sight of it. To 
 this we may add that his virtuous people, 
 though they may seem rather silly, are not so 
 much so when looked at closely. There is a 
 great deal of truth in showing them us as find- 
 ing in the heroism of their friendship the 
 cleverness and cunning which are prompted in 
 others only by cupidity or mean trickery ; and 
 such characters as Schmucke and Pons, whom, 
 moreover, he has painted lovingly, are very 
 interesting when considered in this light. 
 
 When all has been reckoned up (and unfortun- 
 ately this is no more than a phrase, since in 
 such matters our reckoning can never be com- 
 plete), Balzac does not seem to me to have 
 cast too much of a slur on humanity. Only a 
 very little contradiction might tempt me to 
 aver that he was inclined to flatter it. The 
 illusion comes about from the fact that his
 
 56 BALZAC 
 
 rogues are so powerfully depicted, and he 
 excelled so wonderfully in portraying such 
 types, that all his other characters are thrown 
 into shadow and seem blurred beside them ; 
 but it is no fault of his if the rogues stand out 
 more distinctly, in higher relief, and with a 
 more vivid colouring, simply as the result of 
 their offering greater opportunities to the 
 painter. The same thing happens in the novel 
 as in the tragedy, where the terrible bandit 
 makes a far greater impression on the spectator 
 and remains unforgettably in his memory, 
 while the honest man, although having been in 
 nowise overlooked, wins no more than his bare 
 approval and is readily forgotten. 
 
 Notice again that Balzac always kept ' some 
 of virtue's soiled wrappings ' about him (as 
 Vautrin has it), and these are very pleasant to 
 observe. Is it not curious to notice that he 
 has full faith in the remorse of criminals (see 
 the conclusion of Ursule Mirouet), while it is 
 proved beyond doubt that only honest people 
 know remorse, and that rogues have no notion 
 of what it means ? Balzac was too good a 
 psychologist, and knew men too well to bestow 
 remorse on an out-and-out rogue ; he gives it 
 to a man who has made only one slip or rare
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 57 
 
 ones ; and yet he gives it also to a man who has 
 never had a noble or an honest thought, one 
 who has never thought of anything else but 
 money, one to whom we should deem remorse 
 forbidden; and this failing, or half failing, is 
 greatly to his honour. 
 
 He saw in society first of all, and before 
 everything else, the auri sacra fames, the famous 
 thirst for gold, the mad and universal onrush 
 in pursuit of fortune. The sentence of La 
 Bruyere but slightly varied might well serve 
 as a headline to almost the whole of Balzac's 
 work 'There are some foul souls, kneaded 
 together out of filth and spawn, who yearn 
 after money and personal advantage in just 
 the same way as those finer souls who yearn 
 after glory and virtue, incapable of any other 
 delight than that which comes from gain or the 
 avoidance of loss ; inquisitive and eagerly 
 hankering after the smallest farthing, their 
 whole attention taken up by their debtors, 
 everlastingly uneasy about the rise and fall 
 of money values, weighed down and smothered 
 by contracts, title-deeds, and parchment. Such 
 men are neither friends nor citizens, nor per- 
 chance are they men : what they want is money.' 
 Money is, in Balzac, what the far-away Princess
 
 58 BALZAC 
 
 is for Rostand's knights- errant, what Italy was 
 for the companions of ^Eneas, 4 that towards 
 which the rowers steered,' indefatigably, over 
 hidden rocks and through tempests, braving 
 even death for its sake. You know the famous 
 sonnet of Heredia through which he has so 
 skilfully threaded the two motives which drove 
 onward the Cenquistadores to the conquest 
 of the West Indian isles : 
 
 As hawks, their lofty eyries bare of prey, 
 
 Quit the ancestral shambles and sweep down, 
 Athirst for rapine or for high renown, 
 
 Freebooters and proud captains sailed away. 
 
 They sought that wondrous metal hoard that lay 
 
 In the remotest dark of caverns lone ; 
 
 The trade-winds, on their tightened canvas blown, 
 Toward veiled western borders clove the spray. 
 
 At eve all eager for the heroic war, 
 
 The phosphorescent waves filled all their rest 
 With phantom glory of the gold in quest ; 
 
 Or, from the prow, they counted star by star 
 New splendours rise beyond the last wave's crest 
 
 Over unknown horizons very far. 
 
 From these two motives, the thirst for gold 
 and the love of adventure, of the mysterious 
 and of the unknown, cut away the second ; of 
 the heroic and brutal dreams leave only the 
 brutal, and you have exactly the mental out-
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 59 
 
 look of mankind as it seemed to Balzac almost 
 wholly. It is his first and his most outstanding 
 characteristic. * " May the devil take your good 
 God," replied Grandet grumbling [in Eugenie 
 Grandet]. Misers have no belief in a future 
 life ; the present is all in all to them. This 
 reflection throws a very sinister light on the 
 days in which we are living, when, more than 
 ever before, it is money that dominates our 
 laws, our politics, and our whole way of living. 
 Institutions, books, men, and doctrines all 
 conspire to undermine that belief in a future 
 life on which the social edifice has been sup- 
 ported for eighteen hundred years. Now the 
 grave is hardly looked upon as a stage of 
 transition. The future to which we looked 
 forward far beyond the requiem has been trans- 
 ferred into the present. To reach per fas aut 
 nefas the worldly paradise of luxury and un- 
 limited enjoyment, to harden the heart and 
 mortify the body in order to get hold of fleeting 
 possessions, just as formerly men suffered life- 
 long martyrdom in order to ensure their 
 eternal welfare such is now the general 
 thought ! And it is a thought moreover which 
 is written plainly everywhere, even in the laws 
 which ask of a legislator " How do you pay ? "
 
 60 BALZAC 
 
 instead of " How do you think ? " When this 
 doctrine is passed on from the middle classes 
 to the lower, what is to become of the country ? ' 
 In la Cousine Bette we find : ' You make a 
 great mistake, my dear angel, if you think that 
 it is King Louis Philippe who reigns, and he 
 himself is under no delusion about it. He knows 
 as well as any of us, that, over and above the 
 charter of the Constitution, there is the holy, 
 venerated, solid, pleasant, gracious, lovely, 
 noble, young, and almighty coin of one hundred 
 sous. . . . May the God of the Jews away with 
 it ! In short it is the eternal allegory of the 
 golden calf. . . .' And again : ' " How does this 
 great evil come about?" asks the baroness. 
 " From the lack of religion," replies the doctor, 
 " and from the inroads of finance, which is 
 nothing else than selfishness solidified. Money, 
 formerly, was not everything ; we allowed that 
 there were superiorities of which money was 
 the award. There was nobility, talent, service 
 rendered to the state ; but to-day the law 
 makes money the standard ; it has even made 
 it a test of fitness for the vote. Certain magis- 
 trates are not eligible ; Jean Jacques Rousseau 
 would not be eligible ! [nor an elector]. The 
 perpetual dividing up of inheritance forces
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 61 
 
 everybody to look out for himself as soon as he 
 reaches twenty years. Ah well ! between the 
 necessity of making a fortune and the slow 
 corruption of underhand manoeuvring, no 
 obstacles are set ; for religious sentiment is far 
 to seek in France, despite the noble efforts 
 of those who are striving to bring about a 
 Catholic revival ; there you have what every- 
 body is saying who contemplates, as I do, 
 society in its nethermost depths.' 
 
 Such is Balzac's central thought. But that, 
 were it not for the intensity that he puts into 
 it, would hardly distinguish him from his pre- 
 decessors, and Marivaux (in his Paysan par- 
 venu and in his Marianne) and Le Sage and La 
 Bruyere have all naturally realised it quite 
 as fully. But what Balzac has strikingly 
 underlined and with his own special mark is 
 the new scope for ambition in the modern 
 world. Under the old-time regime, graces 
 being reserved for a single privileged class, the 
 strife for favour was restricted to it. In modern 
 society it is spread throughout the whole nation. 
 In a state which has remained centralised while 
 becoming democratic, the whole country takes 
 on the character of the court of Versailles. 
 When Figaro said to Almaviva, c You took the
 
 62 BALZAC 
 
 trouble to be born,' the latter might have 
 answered, ' And also to intrigue. And do you 
 complain of that ? A time will come when you 
 will be obliged to spend as much time on in- 
 trigue as we do.' Balzac saw that quite plainly, 
 and it is one of the things which gives to his 
 work its cohesion, its reality, and its life. The 
 importance of connections, the often-heard 
 4 Whom do you know ? ' which has now replaced 
 the former ' Of what family ? ' ; the constant 
 preoccupation with friendships to be fostered 
 or to be conferred, of influences to be brought 
 into play, of recommendations to be obtained 
 by hook or by crook, are all found time and 
 again in the pages of his work. Balzac does 
 not name a clerk in the law-courts without 
 pointing out that he is related to the Parisots, 
 nor a justice of the peace without having made 
 sure that he is second cousin to the Grandlieus. 
 There are negotiations for bringing about 
 marriages, diplomatic campaigns for acquiring 
 inheritances, Wars of the Roses, with alliances, 
 agreements, sharing out of the spoil, truces, and 
 treaties, all with a view to climbing the social 
 ladder. Modern life is there, not the whole of 
 it certainly, but it is there truthfully shown and 
 observed in a new and original way, in the
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 63 
 
 unity of its main impulse and its infinite variety 
 of circumstance. And in such trafficking he is 
 worthy of close attention and a very important 
 witness as to what was taking place in his own 
 time. 
 
 Certain things even which are no longer true 
 and let us beware of putting it down too 
 readily to the romanesque and the romantic 
 were at the time of writing almost as bad as he 
 made them out to be. For example, the enor- 
 mous power which he attributes to the press, 
 to a handful of literary bandits making repu- 
 tations or ruining them, seems to us a paradox 
 in days when newspapers hold only a very 
 uncertain sway and their power is mainly 
 financial. But let us remember that in Bal- 
 zac's day the press was not free, that the 
 number of newspapers was very limited, and 
 that it is just in such circumstances that the 
 press becomes almighty, its authority being 
 in inverse ratio to the freedom which it enjoys ; 
 and the small number of newspapers makes it 
 very easy for them to join hands, while a 
 multiplicity of them on the contrary serves to 
 neutralise the mass, a phenomenon which, as 
 we have already seen, Balzac himself antici- 
 pated.
 
 64 BALZAC 
 
 Sometimes even this ' realist ' or ' naturalist ' 
 (if this quite unsuitable label must be fixed on 
 him) makes a sort of sudden leap into the 
 realms of the ideal, which is very curious and 
 renders him very attractive. It is rare, but 
 still it does happen. I am not alluding to the 
 occultism of Seraphita or the magnetism of 
 Ursule Mirouet, which seem to me to be simply 
 the outcome of Balzac's curiosity during a 
 passing whim, a curiosity that was roused by 
 his mother's reading of Swedenborg, and, in 
 addition, by the movement strongly imbued 
 with occultism and cabalism which took place 
 about 1840 ; I allude rather to what may be 
 called the poetry of realism, to the exaltation 
 of humble joys, the manner in which he felt 
 and expressed the strong and healthy relish 
 of popular labour, the manner in which he felt 
 and makes us feel the freshness of the soul that 
 rests before plunging once more into physical 
 activity. * We arrived just at that point when 
 the vine-harvesting in Touraine becomes a 
 downright festival. The house is full of people 
 and of provisions. The wine-presses are going 
 all the time. Everything seems to be alive 
 with the movement of coopers, of two-wheeled 
 carts loaded with laughing girls, of people who,
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 65 
 
 earning the best wages of the whole year, start 
 singing on the slightest excuse. ... I looked 
 at the pretty hedges all beaded and spiked, 
 and covered with red fruit ; I hearkened to the 
 shouting children, I gazed at the swarming 
 harvesters, the cartful of casks, and the men 
 with baskets strapped on their backs. . . . 
 Then I fell to gathering the grapes, filling my 
 basket, and going to empty it into the grape- 
 barrel in silence and with a great steadiness of 
 bodily endeavour that was kept going with a 
 slow and measured stride that seemed to set 
 free my soul. I tasted the ineffable pleasure 
 of an open-air labour that drives life onward 
 by curbing the passions which, without such 
 physical drill, might burn up everything. I 
 felt how much wisdom there is in such recur- 
 rent toil, and I realised the meaning of the 
 monastic orders.' The style may not be first- 
 rate, but the inspiration is on a high plane, 
 the thought is powerful, the painting shows a 
 vision of wide range, and I should be very glad 
 for the honour of my country if the admirable 
 passage which Tolstoi devotes to the hay- 
 making were directly derived from it. In any 
 case it is a singular merit in each that it recalls 
 the other, 
 
 JE
 
 66 BALZAC 
 
 It has been said that from his general view 
 of the modern world love was entirely shut out. 
 That seems to me to be very far from the truth. 
 As a matter of fact, young lads in love are rare 
 enough, and Balzac's young men are mastered 
 by ambition, which, we may remark in passing, 
 is yet another fact not to be denied ; but he 
 gives us plenty of young girls and young women 
 who are in love. There is Ursule Mirouet, 
 there is Eugenie Grandet, there is Modeste 
 Mignon, there is la femme de trente ans 9 there is 
 la femme abandonee, there is the lady of la 
 Grenadiere, there is Coralie of the Illusions 
 perdues, and there are plenty of others. His 
 women in love are generally rather childish; 
 they fall in love for nothing at all, without any 
 apparent psychological reason, and in a sudden 
 flash, though we need not say it never happens 
 otherwise, but it is quite rare (Ursule Mirouet, 
 Eugenie Grandet, Coralie) ; sometimes in cir- 
 cumstances which, without Balzac intending or 
 foreseeing it, are comical : Ursule Mirouet 
 falling in love with Savinien on seeing him 
 in the distance shaving himself and ' bearing 
 himself with such grace . . .' It cannot be 
 denied that they are a trifle silly ; but they love 
 profoundly, with a gentle stubbornness, so
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 67 
 
 quiet and resigned, that makes them very 
 pathetic. 
 
 And as regards love at another age, let us 
 not forget that Balzac gave us the woman of 
 thirty as pathetic and not ridiculous in her 
 loving, and that this type, to which he owed 
 half of his success with the public (and I believe 
 he knew what he was about), is from every point 
 of view excellent, the more so since, carried 
 away, likely enough, by certain of his own 
 memories, he drew it with accuracy, a flawless 
 detail, and the finest of shading. I pass by his 
 elderly lovers, who are quite admirable (I mean 
 the portraits which he draws of them), and, to 
 sum up, I am astonished that it should so often 
 be said of Balzac's work that ' there is too little 
 love in it.' With plenty of experience, and 
 knowing well what was required, Balzac took 
 good care that love should always figure in his 
 novels, since it is bound to be met with in the 
 dramas of real life ; he has given it as large a 
 place in his works as it occupies in the world 
 without, so much so that I am half inclined to 
 say that there is more love in Balzac than in 
 life itself ; but here again is a case where 
 statistics are difficult to come at. 
 
 Elsewhere there are gaps. Indeed, this
 
 68 BALZAC 
 
 picture of mankind, this ample comedy of a 
 hundred diverse acts of which the scene is the 
 whole world, as his admirers have so often 
 said and as he himself claimed, is brimful of 
 widely diverse characters, it is true ; and yet 
 they have been gathered together from a com- 
 paratively small circle. His knowledge was 
 confined to the middle classes, and what he 
 knew of the upper ten was very slight and 
 obviously of the most superficial kind. Solici- 
 tors, attorneys, barristers, 1 recorders, bailiffs, 
 money-lenders, dealers, shopkeepers, book- 
 keepers, country squires, provincial men of 
 independent means, smallholders, the clergy 
 of town or country, doctors, students, stage 
 folk (but ill-known), journalists : that is his 
 world. Where are the workmen, officials, 
 soldiers, manufacturers, judges, parliamentary 
 people, election agents, bureaucrats (save 
 Marneffe, Us Employes being negligible), 
 the professors (so important between 1830 and 
 1848, as Brunetiere remarked so well), the 
 monks, nuns, women teachers, and domestic 
 servants ? The huge world of the peasantry 
 was quite unknown to him, as is clearly shown 
 
 1 Brunetiere says that there are no barristers in Balzac ; there 
 are no others, it is true, save only Albert Savarus,
 
 by what he has said of them ; and it is curious 
 that George Sand's idealised peasants, although 
 highly fashioned, are a very great deal nearer 
 the truth than his own, which are wholly 
 imaginary. 
 
 Another very serious shortcoming is that 
 there are no children in Balzac. We get only 
 a passing glimpse, lightly outlined in la Grena- 
 diere. A picture of mankind without any 
 children in it is very incomplete. 
 
 This painter of humanity, it must be owned, 
 shows us no more than the middle classes under 
 Louis Philippe, with its memories of the by- 
 gone military world of the first Empire ; nothing 
 beyond that : but that in nowise prevents him 
 from reaching the highest rank among those 
 who paint society for us in the pages of the 
 novel ; but we must not overstate the case. 
 
 And what he knew best of all, in spite of his 
 being the first to exploit the novel of provincial 
 life, was Paris. There, observe that from the 
 upper ten (though his hand was still not very 
 sure when depicting high life) down to the 
 gate-keepers, policemen, and street bullies, he 
 knew almost everything, and gave everything 
 so stern a look and such a lifelike mien that 
 we recognise two or three hundred men and
 
 70 BALZAC 
 
 women whom we have never seen, who lived 
 in our father's time, and who are just as 
 familiar to us as though they lived in our own. 
 Balzac might well be called King of Paris, in 
 so far as it be granted that it is kings who 
 know their subjects. 
 
 Moreover, he detested it whole-heartedly. 
 ' " When Bliicher," said the foreign diplomatist, 
 " arrived on the heights of Montmartre with 
 Saacken in 1814 excuse me, gentlemen, for 
 reminding you of this fatal day Saacken, 
 who was a dull lout, said : ' We are going to 
 burn up Paris.' ' Take care that you do 
 nothing of the sort,' answered Bliicher, pointing 
 out the vast canker that lay stretching away 
 beneath them, swollen and smoking, in the 
 valley of the Seine, ' that thing alone will bring 
 death to France.' " ' 
 
 And again : * Charles was nonetheless a 
 child of Paris, trained by the habits of Paris, 
 even by Annette herself, to calculate every- 
 thing, and already an old man beneath his 
 mask of youthful seeming. He had received the 
 ghastly education of a world where, in a single 
 evening, more wrong is done by thought and 
 word than justice can punish in the assize courts, 
 where smart talk deals out summary death to
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 71 
 
 the loftiest ideals ; where only those who see 
 plainly are regarded as clever ; and there 
 seeing plainly implies an entire lack of belief 
 in anything, whether it be in sentiments, or 
 men, or even in events : for sham events are 
 always being invented in such circles. There, 
 to see plainly you must weigh every morning 
 your friend's purse, so that you may know how 
 to keep on the safe side ; you must be careful 
 lest you admire anything, whether it be works 
 of art or noble deeds, and you must not attri- 
 bute to anything a higher motive than personal 
 advantage.' And given Balzac's personal 
 temperament, we may be sure that the things 
 he said the most ill of were the things which he 
 knew best. 
 
 In this connection he clearly recognised yet 
 another essential element of modern French 
 life (I cannot call it the best), to wit, provincial 
 jealousy in respect of Paris, a jealousy so fruit- 
 ful of disastrous consequences that the pro- 
 vinces have given up reading because books 
 are made at Paris ; that a patient leaving 
 Paris for the provinces is at once treated by 
 his new doctor in a manner different from the 
 one who looked after him in the capital, 
 Parisian medical men being all regarded alike
 
 72 BALZAC 
 
 as dunces or quacks ; so that the provincial, 
 should he make his way at Paris, is looked at 
 askance by his fellow-townsmen when he 
 returns among them, and so on. ' " At last 
 we 've got rid of the Parisians," ejaculated 
 Max. "The man that struck me had no idea 
 of doing us such a good turn." The next day, 
 the departure of the Parisians was celebrated 
 by the whole town as a victory for the Province 
 against [sic] Paris. Some of Max's friends 
 held forth with great severity on the Brideaus : 
 " Ah well, these Parisian fellows fancied that 
 we were noodles and that they had only to 
 hold out their hats for legacies to come pouring 
 in like rain ! " " They came here after our 
 wool ; but they are going back fleeced. . . . 
 And their counsel was a Parisian barrister, if 
 you please." " Ah ! they had concocted a 
 plan ? " " Why, yes ; they thought that they 
 were going to make old Rouget knuckle under ; 
 but the Parisians found the task too heavy for 
 them and the barrister won't crow over the 
 Berrichons." " Do you know what is abomin- 
 able ? why, these Parisian fellows." The 
 town looked on the Brideaus as Parisians and 
 foreigners ; and hence they sided with Max and 
 Mori.'
 
 HIS GENERAL VIEW OF MANKIND 73 
 
 Such is Balzac's general outlook on the 
 society of his day and on society as a whole. 
 No one in such a matter is in a position to say, 
 4 This is true, and that is false,' so slender must 
 be the information even of the best informed 
 among us. Moreover, I shall take very good 
 care not to attach any importance to the pretty 
 and spiteful saying of Sainte-Beuve : ' Balzac, 
 the novelist who best knew the corruption of 
 his time and was one of those who added to 
 it ' ; nor this other of the same critic : ' No 
 one has ever made such a parade of the dirty 
 linen of the human rubbish-heap.' I shall say 
 merely this : that Balzac was the historian 
 who best knew a certain section of the society 
 of his day; who had the closest knowledge of 
 its ruling passions ; who knew all that was 
 evil in it, and even all that was good; who 
 excelled in showing its anatomy and in painting 
 it with a slight tendency to give it us in its more 
 evil guise, but with a power less sure of mastery 
 in rendering the good than the evil, even though 
 he may perhaps have been equally desirous of 
 doing justice to both.
 
 74 BALZAC 
 
 IV 
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 
 
 WE have seen that Balzac pronounced George 
 Sand lacking in the power of ' laying down the 
 main lines of a design.' He had a good deal 
 of justification for such a verdict, but he was 
 quite the dupe of his own flattery in imagining 
 that he himself was any better off. His work 
 is always clear, but his way of putting it 
 together makes it quite other than a work of 
 art. The proportions are in nowise measured. 
 His openings are almost always prodigiously 
 slow, and his conclusions at times very abrupt 
 he sometimes brings them about by an accident 
 (as in Ursule Mirouet), which offends all the 
 laws of great art. At other times they are 
 too long foreseen, and so long drawn out as 
 to make the reader restive and impatient ; 
 though there are exceptions, such as Eugenie 
 Grandet, le Cousin Pons, and le Colonel Chabert. 
 But more often than not the author hails 
 his hors-d'oeuvre with an expansive hospitality
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 75 
 
 that is anything but pleasing. His huge de- 
 scriptive beginnings are well known. I own 
 to being greatly interested by their careful 
 realism, just as I am interested by many pages 
 of Stendhal's Memoires d'un Tourists ; I grant 
 also that no proper understanding of the 
 human animal is possible unless you give me 
 a close view of the surroundings in which he 
 moves and the house which he inhabits. But 
 too much is too much, and I have no need of 
 a hundred pages to get an impression of reality 
 or to discern the aspect of a house, and I often 
 have the feeling with Balzac that he is describ- 
 ing for the sake of describing, and that he has 
 more than a little of the well-known garrulity 
 of the tourist. 
 
 And this is the more marked since his descrip- 
 tions of dwellings not always, but often 
 enough do not help in the least towards an 
 understanding of the characters. The essen- 
 tial protagonists in Pere Goriot are Goriot, 
 Rastignac, and Vautrin. All three find them- 
 selves at the Pension Vauquer by stress of 
 circumstances, and the Pension Vauquer has 
 not had, and does not have, the slightest 
 influence on their characters, and is therefore 
 quite irrelevant. The Vauquer dwelling ex-
 
 76 BALZAC 
 
 plains nothing but Mme. Vauquer. 4 Every 
 inmate helps to account for the pension, just 
 as the pension implies everybody in it.' 
 Granted ; but she herself is the only person 
 whom the pension explains or implies, and she 
 is just the least important character in the 
 novel. Hence the description is unnecessary. 
 I admit that, in itself, it is very agreeable. 
 
 These preliminary descriptions are often 
 quite toilsome. The reader feels that, even 
 if useful, they should be brief and agile at the 
 beginning, and that afterwards they should 
 fall easily into line with the main body of the 
 story. Material reality surrounds us and fol- 
 lows us throughout our whole existence ; it 
 should be shown running like a thread through 
 the whole story, drawn out here and there 
 with skill, merged in the behaviour of the 
 personages, and showing us the picture held 
 within the elastic framework of worldly circum- 
 stance. And so true is this, it seems to me, 
 that, having set out with these descriptions 
 of material things, Balzac begins them all over 
 again, and has partly to repeat them in the 
 course of his story. This clearly shows that 
 at the beginning they were irrelevant, at least 
 when set forth at such length.
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 77 
 
 Another still more serious fault appears in 
 those digressions, those excursus, those para- 
 bases (and in this matter our pedantic termino- 
 logy is quite the most fitting) with which 
 Balzac continually intrudes upon his story ; 
 and these intrusions are of such a kind that, 
 were the telling duly planned and put together 
 with art, they would necessitate a complete 
 re-casting. George Sand at least delivered 
 such dissertations and arguments from the 
 mouths of her characters, which helped some- 
 what in the telling of her story and in letting 
 us see into the mind of the speakers. Balzac 
 holds up his story, starts talking on his own 
 account, and gives us a lecture. It looks as 
 though, goaded on by the demon of journalism 
 we know that he founded a review and often 
 tried to found others and having a lot of 
 reserve ' copy ' at the back of his drawer 
 which he was unable to get printed in the 
 newspapers of his day, he drained it all into 
 his novels. Sometimes he starts off with a 
 lecture which replaces the huge description 
 with which he is so fond of beginning his 
 novels ; sometimes his lectures are patched 
 on to the fabric of his story so brusquely and 
 at such length as to rend it in twain. He
 
 78 BALZAC 
 
 breaks off his narrative in the Lys dans la 
 Vallee in order to pluck us by the sleeve and 
 say : t Notice how profoundly English love 
 differs from our own. It is devastating and 
 volcanic ; no one but an Englishman could 
 have written Romeo and Juliet ; Juliet's love 
 is essentially English.' I should be more 
 inclined to believe that it was Italian, but it 
 is not that that I find so little to my liking ; 
 it is the sight of the narrative broken off for 
 the sake of an ethnological lecture. As a 
 matter of fact, at this point neither did I find 
 the story itself of any further interest. 
 
 On the other hand, old Goriot gives Rasti- 
 gnac confidences of the highest interest. Ras- 
 tignac is admirable in them ; but Balzac 
 intervenes with ' One thing is worth notic- 
 ing. . . .' Let us on with our noticing then ! 
 'No matter how coarse a woman may be, no 
 sooner does she express a strong and genuine 
 affection, than she seems to give off a particu- 
 lar fluid that softens her features, lights up 
 her gestures, and gives a more varied thrill 
 to the tones of her voice. The most stupid 
 creature, under the spur of passion, often soars 
 to the greatest eloquence of idea, though it may 
 not be of language, and seems to move within
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 79 
 
 a sphere of light. There was, at this moment, 
 in the voice and gesture of this good man, that 
 personal magnetism that marks out the great 
 actor. But are not our finer feelings the 
 poetry of the will ' [?] 
 
 Rastignac calls on Madame de Nucingen, with 
 whom he is not in love, though he is curious 
 about her ; Balzac does not follow the caller, 
 but bids us follow himself in these words : ' A 
 young man perhaps finds as much charm in his 
 first intrigue as he does in his first love. Assur- 
 ance of success has a thousandfold bliss to 
 which men do not own, and the whole attrac- 
 tion of certain women lies in that desire is the 
 offspring no less of hardship than of ease in 
 conquering. All the passions of men are 
 assuredly fanned into being and their flames 
 fostered either by one or the other of these two 
 causes, which share between them the empire 
 of love. It may be that this division is settled 
 by the great question of the temperaments 
 which dominate whatever may be said to the 
 contrary the social world [ah ! has any one 
 ever denied the fact ?] If melancholy people 
 require coyness to spur them on, it is likely 
 enough that nervous or full-blooded folk would 
 retire from the attack if resistance were too
 
 80 BALZAC 
 
 prolonged. In other words, the elegy is just 
 as essentially lymphatic as the dithyramb is 
 bilious. . . .' 
 
 Madame Hulot has just shown indulgence, 
 mingled with a vast deal of weakness, for her 
 husband. Balzac draws us aside to remark : 
 ' The moralist can hardly deny that people who 
 are both well-bred and vicious may be much 
 more pleasant than those who are virtuous. 
 Having to condone for their ill-deeds, they 
 pave the way for indulgence by being very 
 easy-going with the faults of those who should 
 judge them, and so they pass for excellent 
 fellows. Although there are charming people 
 among the virtuous, virtue deems that her own 
 beauty should suffice, without her stooping to 
 win us over ; and then really righteous people 
 (for we must rule out the hypocrites) are nearly 
 always a little uneasy as to their standing ; 
 they think themselves cheated in the world's 
 wide market, and they are rather apt to speak 
 sharply in the manner of folks who fancy 
 themselves slighted. . . .' 
 
 Elsewhere, because a young artist's first 
 work happens to be dashing, he says : ' It is 
 not every work of genius which has this degree 
 of brilliance, this splendour that is obvious to
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 81 
 
 every one, no matter how ignorant he may be. 
 Thus certain pictures of Raphael, such as the 
 celebrated ' Transfiguration,' the ' Madonna de 
 Foligno,' the frescoes of the ' Stanze ' in the 
 Vatican, do not win our immediate homage as 
 do the ' Violin Player ' in the Sciarra Gallery, 
 the ' Portraits of the Doni ' and the 4 Vision of 
 Ezekiel ' in the Pitti Gallery, the ' Carrying of 
 the Cross ' in the Borghese Gallery, the ' Mar- 
 riage of the Virgin ' in the Brera Museum at 
 Milan. The ' Saint John the Baptist ' of the 
 Tribune, ' Saint Luke painting the Virgin ' in 
 the Academy at Rome are by no means so 
 winning as the ' Portrait of Leon x.' and the 
 4 Virgin ' at Dresden. Nevertheless they are 
 all of equal worth. Moreover, the ' Stanze,' 
 the ' Transfiguration,' the cameos, and the 
 three small easel-pictures at the Vatican reach 
 to the highest level of the perfect and the 
 sublime. But these masterpieces strain the 
 understanding even of the least - qualified 
 student, and require study for their adequate 
 appreciation ; whereas the 4 Violinist,' the 
 4 Marriage of the Virgin,' the ' Vision of Ezekiel ' 
 go straight through the eyes to the heart, and 
 are at home there ; you love to welcome them 
 thus without the least effort. But this is not
 
 82 BALZAC 
 
 the summit of art; it is only its happiness. 
 Here we have a proof that the creation of works 
 of art is beset with the same risks as are births 
 in a family, where we find children so luckily 
 favoured as to be born beautiful and without 
 hurt to their mother, children on whom every- 
 thing smiles, who succeed in everything ; and 
 just as there are flowers of genius, so there are 
 these blossoms of love. This brio (an untrans- 
 latable Italian word which we are beginning 
 to use) is characteristic of early works. It 
 springs from the headiness and high mettle of 
 youthful, untamed talent which is found again 
 later on during certain happy hours ; but this 
 brio then no longer springs from the artist's 
 heart, and, instead of throwing it into his work 
 as a volcano flings up its fire, he is passive 
 beneath its sway, he owes it to circumstances 
 to love, to rivalry, often to hatred, or yet 
 again to the need for keeping up his reputa- 
 tion. . . .' The writing of la Cousine Bette 
 followed on Balzac's return from Italy, and he 
 wanted to turn his travels to account. 
 
 Because a young man whom Mme. Marneffe 
 is bent on leading captive happens to be Polish, 
 he says, 4 There is something childish about the 
 Slav, as with all primitively savage peoples
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 83 
 
 [are not all peoples primitively savage ?], when 
 they have overflowed among the civilised 
 nations without being themselves really civil- 
 ised. This race has spread like a flood and has 
 covered a vast extent of the world. It inhabits 
 deserts where the spaces are so vast that it is at 
 ease there ; they do not jostle together as in 
 Europe, and civilisation is impossible without 
 the continual interaction of minds and of 
 interests. The Ukraine, Russia, the plains of 
 the Danube the Slav people, in short is a 
 link between Europe and Asia, between civil- 
 isation and barbarism. Thus the Poles, the 
 richest section of the Slav people, have the 
 characteristic childishness and inconsistency of 
 nations still in their callow youth. . . .' There- 
 after follows a summary of the history of Poland 
 which restriction of space forbids me to quote. 
 This sort of thing is continual. Because 
 Cousine Bette happens to have a sculptor 
 friend, we get the following observations : 
 ' Sculpture, like playwriting, is at once the 
 easiest and most difficult of all the arts [??] 
 Michael Angelo, Michael Colombes, Jean Gou- 
 jon, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polycletus, Pujet, 
 Canova, and Albert Diirer stand as brothers 
 beside Milton, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare,
 
 84 BALZAC 
 
 Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. There is such 
 grandeur in the work that a single statue is 
 enough to win immortality for its maker. . . . 
 If Paganini . . .' and there follow two 
 further pages of reflections equally new, 
 original, and relevant. 
 
 This perpetual commentary which accom- 
 panies Balzac's work is the most tiresome thing 
 in the world. Balzac's works are like an 
 edition annotated by a blundering, vulgar, and 
 garrulous critic who has had the hardihood to 
 insert his notes in the text, and the critic is in 
 this case no other than Balzac himself. He has 
 found champions to defend him. We have 
 been told, for example, that the modern novelist, 
 being a moralist, a psychologist, and a philo- 
 sopher, should be allowed to expound as much 
 as he narrates, and to make his work at once 
 didactic and epic. The claim implies a con- 
 fusion of kinds. The writer who sets out to 
 tell a story ought not to wander off into dis- 
 cussions, at the risk of making his tale weari- 
 some, besides being mongrel and ambiguous 
 in form. The writer who sets out to instruct 
 should never indulge in story-telling, save as a 
 means of bringing proofs to bear in support of 
 the thing he is teaching, and this should be
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 85 
 
 done by short, concise, and carefully chosen 
 examples, lest his teaching be lost sight of, just as 
 in the other case the story-telling is overlooked. 
 
 Why not mingle the two kinds ? Is it so 
 easy to distinguish between them ? Because 
 by mixing the two together both are weakened 
 and the final effect falls flat. And another 
 reason is that by coming forward himself in the 
 midst of his story, the author obtrudes and 
 seems too anxious lest he should be overlooked ; 
 and by displaying such an overweening interest 
 in his own creations he seems to say, ' Aren't 
 they rather curious, rather original, and rather 
 representative of a certain social class, of a 
 certain period, and of a certain temperament ? ' 
 And all that is for us to say and not for him, 
 and we do not like to hear it from his lips ; 
 the novelist who proceeds in this fashion may 
 perhaps assume some authority as a thinker, 
 but in Balzac's case it is quite otherwise, and 
 merely detracts from his effectiveness as a 
 teller of tales. 
 
 Yet another objection is that if he intrudes 
 in support of an argument, he is immediately 
 suspected of having drawn his people and 
 planned his story with this end in view, while 
 subordinating everything to that end, and we
 
 86 BALZAC 
 
 reject his claims as observer and historian. He 
 is just like a historian who upholds a special 
 theory, and is straight away suspected of 
 garbling his facts. It is at once assumed of 
 the novelist with a purpose that he has observed 
 nothing but what will support the theory with 
 which he set out, or what will conveniently 
 fall in with that theory. Though this is quite 
 untrue of Balzac, no observer having ever been 
 more attentive, obedient, and loyal to the thing 
 observed than was he, yet he behaves through- 
 out as though it were quite otherwise with him, 
 and we have the right to expect him, far more 
 than a lesser man, to avoid this blundering, 
 and to content himself with his observation 
 and insight, since in these alone he has so much 
 wealth. There is at bottom a good deal of 
 truth in the whimsical saying of M. Anatole 
 France, ' Poets do not think.' I would add, 
 with certain reserves which will appear later 
 ' nor should they do so.' They should be 
 deeply moved and should make us share their 
 emotion. Undoubtedly there are poets whose 
 poetry is the outcome of thought. There is 
 such a thing as philosophical poetry, in which 
 the poet's emotion springs from an idea, and it 
 is the emotion of this idea that he communi-
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 87 
 
 cates. And yet even a non-philosophical poet 
 should think before writing, reflect on many 
 things, shuffle and re-weld a multitude of ideas ; 
 but when he conies to writing, his business is 
 no longer to think but to feel, or rather he 
 should only begin writing after his thinking is 
 over, and when emotion masters him, it being 
 quite understood at the same time that this 
 man who is speaking is one who has added to 
 his stature, grown finer and more ripe by the 
 many ideas which have passed through his 
 mind. And when we come to the story-teller, 
 the novelist, the epic-writer, I claim that the 
 stress of his thinking should have made a 
 bigger, stronger, and more fruitful man of him ; 
 but that when he writes he should leave his 
 thinking on one side, and be entirely possessed 
 by the creatures of his brain, seeing them too 
 vividly and following them too ardently in the 
 unfolding of their lives to spare any thought 
 for himself, any reflection, any room for general 
 ideas or discussion of problems ; he should be 
 too much enslaved also by his own narra- 
 tive that is to say, by the peremptory logic 
 of facts and by the begetting of events each 
 the offspring of others, and begetting them 
 in turn to have any time for pondering on
 
 88 BALZAC 
 
 anything else whatever save this logic and 
 this fertility. 
 
 The author whose narrative is thus cut to 
 pieces by journalistic articles gives me the 
 impression that he writes six pages of his novel, 
 goes for a walk, picks up a thought on which 
 he happens, and jots it down on returning 
 because it seems to him to be interesting ; or 
 else he makes me think that, after having 
 written his novel, he started flirting with 
 general ideas, grasped hold of some of them, and 
 set them down on the manuscript of his novel. 
 But I ought, by your leave, in reading a novel, 
 rather to get the impression that the author 
 wrote it just as I read it, in a single draft with- 
 out any vacillation or turning back, borne away 
 and consumed by his subject ; and I ought 
 moreover to believe that, on re-reading his 
 finished work, he was still held fascinated, 
 solely by the creatures of his brain. I should 
 rather say that only that novel is a good one 
 in which I never give a thought to its writer, 
 and that an author spoils it when he leads me 
 to think of him. 
 
 And a novelist, like an epic poet and I do not 
 see why novelists should be exempt from the 
 law to which epic poets have always been
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 89 
 
 subject should only think through the minds 
 of his characters, and ought not to put his own 
 thoughts into their mouths. Can you conceive 
 Virgil setting forth his notions on the immor- 
 tality of the soul, the transmigration of souls, 
 the penalties or rewards of the beyond, and the 
 life of the universe. He does so indeed, but 
 by means of a narrative and of conversations 
 between Anchises and his son. The novelist 
 himself should never speak. 
 
 Need I say that Balzac has too surely the 
 instinct of his craft not to have submitted often 
 to this law, and that he has very often embodied 
 his ideas in the speech of his characters (Medecin 
 de Campagne, Cure de Village, Illusions per dues) ? 
 And yet he often overlooked this law of which 
 he was so well aware. A novelist himself 
 should never speak. 
 
 Such was the theory of Flaubert, and in his 
 work we shall find perhaps no more than a single 
 personal reflection, ' Thus went on, before these 
 cheerful commonplace people, half a century of 
 servitude ' ; such was the theory of de Mau- 
 passant; and it seems to me that they were 
 right, and that their novels as they made them 
 in nowise tend to prove them wrong. And the 
 fact that Balzac, by his own great trespassing,
 
 90 BALZAC 
 
 warned off the great artists who followed him 
 from likewise going astray, and gave them a 
 holy horror of the writer who obtrudes himself 
 on the story he is telling, is just one of my 
 reasons for being grateful to him. Do you 
 recall Boileau's line on Homer ? 
 
 Each line, each word speeds onward to the event. 
 
 It would be hard to find a more ridiculous line, 
 nor could anything be less characteristic of 
 Homer than the thought which it contains, 
 the real truth of the matter being quite the 
 reverse. And yet, had Boileau meant to say 
 that the march of Homer's narrative, although 
 slow and winding, is never interrupted, that 
 though there are passages that are long drawn 
 out, there is never any turning aside, and that 
 the author never indulges in personal reflections 
 had he meant no more than that, he would 
 have been quite right. Our nineteenth-century 
 Homer is very different, and his person is 
 singularly obtrusive. 
 
 It was a fault inherent in his very tempera- 
 ment, in the strong individuality which he 
 could never put aside, in his liking for thrashing 
 everything out in interminable talk, in his 
 garrulity, and in his incorrigible weakness for
 
 HIS ART AND ITS MAKE-UP 91 
 
 appearing before the footlights. Certainly he 
 yielded himself entirely to his subject, as well 
 as being wholly given up to his characters and 
 to his narrative, though never to the extent 
 of self-effacement ; and the man who by 
 nature should have been best able to avoid 
 the pitfall of personal obtrusion in his work, 
 is just the man who fell into it the oftenest. 
 The art of composition which was his suffered 
 great hurt from his stumbling.
 
 92 BALZAC 
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 
 
 IT is as a creator of beings that are alive with 
 vital strength, and in this sort the peer of 
 Homer, Shakespeare, and Moliere, that Balzac 
 showed his outstanding greatness; and this 
 quality being both the rarest and finest of an 
 artist's equipment and throwing into the back- 
 ground every flaw or failing, he has made a 
 great impression on his fellow-mortals, and 
 achieved a fame that remains unmarred by the 
 onslaughts of time. 
 
 He had a singular gift for observing not 
 perhaps so very much greater than that of 
 many others, even inferior, I should say, to the 
 faculty possessed by La Bruyere or Saint- 
 Simon, and yet, when all is said, very great 
 indeed a gift which was in no way burdened 
 or blunted by bookish memories, a gift which 
 allowed Balzac the very rare privilege of 
 looking on everything and everybody with 
 freshly opened eyes : but above and beyond
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 93 
 
 everything else he had an imagination which, 
 starting from the slightest observation and 
 following it up with sedulous fidelity, drew 
 from it such fulness of meaning that it became 
 a poem, rich, varied, and full of life. 
 
 He really had imagination, the thing in 
 itself, and not the shallow counterpart that 
 fulfils itself in words, which creates metaphors, 
 laboriously builds up symbols ; but the genuine 
 imagination that creates things, living people, 
 and events. 
 
 Things : since the things which he describes 
 take on a distinct physiognomy, a life, and a soul, 
 he can show us a house as 4 a state of mind, 5 
 just as Amiel saw landscape. One house is a 
 resigned misery ; another has the air of a dumb 
 tomb crammed with gold ; another stands for 
 open-heartedness of a gentle and rather sleepy 
 kind ; another is pompous and overbearing 
 pride ; and yet another is slyness and double- 
 dealing personified in stone. 
 
 Living people : since the men and women 
 whom he shows us are just as familiar as the 
 living people whom we meet with daily, nay, 
 they are more so, and here is the proof of it 
 we see in them not merely what he shows us, 
 but even the things that he withholds ; we
 
 94 BALZAC 
 
 know on what errands they have been speeding 
 without his guidance, and what thoughts have 
 come to them even when he leaves these unre- 
 vealed, and what words they have spoken when 
 he has not thought it his duty to set down their 
 speech for us. They are beings whom we know 
 so thoroughly that we are ourselves able to 
 reconstitute and reconstruct the parts which 
 he has not shown us, just as I have a sure 
 knowledge of the childhood of Achilles, the 
 youth of lago or of Tartuffe, even though 
 Homer, Shakespeare, and Moliere have told me 
 nothing about them. 
 
 Events : since in Balzac an event is nearly 
 always the outcome of the inexorable interplay 
 of successive factors, dominated by a mind 
 that commands the whole of them, embracing 
 all, and with such complete mastery that in 
 him alone it seems to have both life and dwell- 
 ing, like Minerva in the brain of Jove. 
 
 He thus dwelt in a world which he begat 
 from his observation even when it was fleeting, 
 a world entirely of his own fashioning, of whose 
 life and action he was the source. Logical, 
 complete, and lifelike creatures sprang from 
 his brain and moved before his eyes as they 
 now move before ours. And they acted, every
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 95 
 
 one of them, with the inevitable speech and the 
 inevitable deed befitting their temperament, 
 education, or environment, with the character 
 proper to their breeding or constitution, with 
 habits suiting their character, notions suiting 
 these habits, words proper to their ideas and 
 deeds to their language ; full, solid, completely 
 put together and set going, some of them most 
 complex and others at times too simple (and 
 this is a point to which we shall recur later), 
 but all alike alive and breathing. 
 
 This is the outstanding feature, and it is the 
 one endowment essential to the artist : the 
 feeling of life, and the power to produce the 
 illusion of it. 
 
 This power which he possessed in so extra- 
 ordinary a degree was strengthened and given 
 fuller scope by his gift for seeing things and 
 people in detail. It is not the same faculty. 
 Artists so great as Corneille and Victor Hugo 
 are without it. They can only create life that 
 is ample and strong ; either they despise or 
 they are insensible to the small things of life, 
 and their contempt for them can only result 
 from want of sensibility ; the watching or 
 pursuit of slight and apparently insignificant 
 clues is quite beyond them, though it is just
 
 96 BALZAC 
 
 these which give both to beings and to things 
 the special aspect by which we know them. 
 To understand this properly, just think of what 
 we ordinary everyday people are like. We 
 say ' So-and-so seems a good sort,' or 4 1 don't 
 like the look of What 's-his-name.' We have a 
 general impression, right enough perhaps, but a 
 trifle vague. Now, the impression which we 
 get is the outcome of a hundred details uncon- 
 sciously absorbed. The great artist sees the 
 whole of them, but picks out and sets down 
 only the most telling, so that, on meeting with 
 each one, we exclaim, ' How true that is ! I 've 
 noticed the same thing.' But we have not 
 really noticed it ; we have only glimpsed it, 
 and not until the artist reveals it to us does 
 the detail stand out, at his bidding, from the 
 background of our darkened memory. 
 
 Perhaps no one ever had such a faculty 
 of impressive observation, of tenacious and 
 illuminative memory, as was Balzac's. That 
 was enough to make him a great novelist ; but 
 it was not all. He had the gift of seeing in his 
 mind and bringing into life there ensembles, 
 groups of humanity, almost organised societies 
 with the action and reaction of its various 
 individuals on each other. And this is an
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 97 
 
 absolutely higher endowment. The number 
 of those who have been thus gifted is soon 
 counted. Shakespeare and Moliere are the 
 most illustrious. Wielding this power, the 
 novelist becomes a kind of epic poet ; not 
 merely does he create life, not merely does he 
 surprise it in the most trivial of his character- 
 istic details, but he embraces the ample whole, 
 and each creature of his brain, though already 
 living, is nourished into fuller life by contact, 
 interaction, and impulse from the life of all the 
 others. A world has been created of which 
 Balzac was neither more nor less than creator. 
 When la Comedie Humaine occurred to Balzac 
 as a general title for all his works (exclusive of 
 his 'prentice tales), it was due to nothing else 
 than an attack of megalomania or the idea of 
 a smart tradesman ; and yet he saw a truth 
 (though he exaggerated it to a fanciful degree), 
 the real truth being that his characters, always 
 living in his mind, and hence reappearing from 
 novel to novel, older or younger, in different 
 circumstances or different surroundings, but 
 with a recognisable basis of the personal 
 mannerism or commonplace proper to them, 
 do indeed form a society, a people, a nation 
 which is almost real, just as for the poets of
 
 98 BALZAC 
 
 antiquity the gods of Olympus are a race of 
 individuals with distinct characters which they 
 preserve throughout all their various vicissi- 
 tudes, and of which their dealings one with 
 another serve only to accentuate the moral 
 aspect. Balzac felt that he had created his 
 own special mythology, and in that he was 
 quite right. He created a real living world, 
 limited indeed, and far from fulfilling the show- 
 man's title that he gave it, but yet a real world 
 that within its own limits was alive with 
 intense life. It is a pity that Moliere, his 
 peer as a creator of a living world of men and 
 women, did not pursue the careers of his various 
 characters from one piece to another, so that 
 we might have seen Chrysale in the guise of an 
 elder Sganarelle (in rficole des Maris), Tartuffe 
 as an elderly Don Juan, and so on. But 
 perhaps I am going astray. 
 
 Just as La Bruyere had done more rarely 
 (in le Riche el le Pauvre), and just as Moliere 
 was so fond of doing (in the portrait of Tartuffe 
 by Dorine), with a fondness which, unfortun- 
 ately for us, he might very well have forgone, 
 since he placed his characters in flesh and blood 
 on the boards of a theatre, Balzac set himself 
 first of all to the visualisation of his characters
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 99 
 
 in their physical aspect, down to the smallest 
 detail. Then he gave them a name, under the 
 delusion that there is some analogy between a 
 man's name and his character ; but quite rightly 
 persuaded that certain names stir up ideas 
 which are gratified on discovering that their 
 bearers happen to fit them perfectly. Next, 
 he sought from out of his memory or he in- 
 vented a dwelling that should exactly fit the 
 character which he saw before him, a dwelling 
 that should explain the character, and by whom 
 it should in turn be explained. Then he 
 wrought on the character already conceived, 
 as a well-informed psychologist who was at the 
 same time very clever in filling up the gaps in 
 his knowledge by guesswork, founded on the 
 hints which he got from what he already knew ; 
 and a man who can do this has mastered the 
 logic of his characters. And last of all, he set 
 about the real work proper to the novelist, by 
 inventing such events as would put his char- 
 acter in proper relation to his chosen scene, and 
 he deduced such events as were the necessary 
 or probable outcome of the character with 
 whom he was dealing. 
 
 He saw, as I have said, his creation physically 
 down to the smallest detail, but with an
 
 100 BALZAC 
 
 essential outstanding feature which gave to it 
 a special unity or mark, and he knew how to 
 drive this home and mark it indelibly in the 
 reader's mind. This can hardly be properly 
 shown save by examples. Mme. Vauquer, the 
 boarding-house proprietress : ' Soon the widow 
 appears, decked in a bonnet from under which 
 there peeps a draggled wisp of hair ; she 
 traipses along in her crinkled slippers. Her 
 plump but withered face from the midst of 
 which stands out a nose like a parrot's beak ; 
 her plump little hands, her body as sleek and 
 well-favoured as a church rat, her bodice ready 
 to burst and shifting as she moves, are all 
 in keeping with that room where misfortune 
 oozes out and speculation cowers, and where 
 Mme. Vauquer breathes the stuffy and unwhole- 
 some air without being sickened by it. Her 
 face chill as the first autumnal frost, her wrinkled 
 eyes whose expression varies from the simper 
 of a ballet-girl to the sharp frown of the money- 
 changer, in short her whole person explains 
 the boarding-house, as the boarding-house 
 implies her person. The faded plumpness of 
 this little woman is just as consequent on the 
 life she leads as is typhus from the exhalations 
 of a hospital.'
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 101 
 
 4 Old Mile. Michonneau wore above her eyes 
 a filthy shade of green taffety, rimmed with 
 iron-wire, which would have frightened away 
 the very angel of pity ; her shawl, with its 
 thin and weeping fringes, seemed to cloak a 
 skeleton, so many-cornered were the features 
 it covered. What acid had eaten away all her 
 feminine contours ? She must once have been 
 quite pretty. Was it vice, or sorrow, or 
 cupidity ? Had she loved too well, had she 
 been a dealer in ladies' left-off clothing, or 
 merely a courtesan ? Her blank look was 
 chilling, her wizened face threatening ; she 
 had the shrill voice of the grasshopper screeching 
 in its bush at the approach of winter.' 
 
 What gives that portrait its unity, what 
 gathers it all up into a single impression, a 
 single feeling, is the idea of chilliness. She 
 herself is cold under clothes as ' slender ' as 
 herself ; she is like a skeleton ; she is eaten 
 away as by an acid ; her wan look is like cold 
 water or frosted mica ; her voice is chilling, 
 sharp, and shrill as that of a grasshopper ; but 
 as a grasshopper reminds you of summer, the 
 author hastens to add ' at the approach of 
 winter ' (which, by the way, is wrong, for at the 
 approach of winter grasshoppers are dead).
 
 102 BALZAC 
 
 Mile. Michonneau is as gaunt and skinny and 
 sharp and chilly as winter. She is winter's 
 blast itself. 
 
 ' M. Poiret was a kind of mechanism. On 
 seeing him stretching himself out like a grey 
 shadow in a walk at the Zoological Gardens, 
 wearing on his head a limp cap, scarcely 
 grasping his walking-stick, with a yellowing 
 book in his hand, the faded lappets of his over- 
 coat floating loose and ill concealing almost 
 empty breeches and blue-hosed spindle-shanks 
 that shook like a drunkard's, and showing his 
 dingy white waistcoat and his coarse crumpled 
 muslin shirt-frill that matched but ill with the 
 black tie round his scraggy turkey neck, many 
 people wondered whether that Chinese shadow 
 really belonged to the hardy seed of Japheth's 
 sons that went hovering over the Boulevard 
 des Italiens. What sort of work was it that 
 had shrivelled him up like that ? What had 
 he been ? Why, no doubt a clerk in some 
 office. . . .' 
 
 This is the portrait of a man that has never 
 been anything more than a mere cog-wheel. 
 The very first word shows it : ' He was a kind 
 of mechanism.' All the rest refers and brings 
 us back to that. Physically, he is but a shadow ;
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 103 
 
 he takes up but little room, and slips between 
 two layers of air so closely that they are hardly 
 disturbed by his passing. He exists as little 
 as may be, having never been more than an 
 almost futile sheet flattened down between two 
 other sheets in the social book. His dress is 
 not wholly careless ; but it is old-fashioned and 
 piteous ; old-fashioned, for no change in social 
 position ever led the wearer to alter it ; piteous, 
 for his poverty forbids its renewal, and his 
 physiological wretchedness appears through it 
 and brings home to him his guilt. A social 
 waif who remains neat and not without a cer- 
 tain dignity (as witnessed by his shirt-frill), 
 but pitiful and, above all, ridiculous. 
 
 ' Though Mile. Victorine Taillefer had a 
 sickly whiteness like that of young girls suffer- 
 ing from chlorosis, and though she was con- 
 nected with the general suffering that formed 
 the background of this picture, by a habitual 
 sadness, a worried face, a poor and weakly air, 
 she had, notwithstanding all this, a face that 
 was not old, and a voice and movements that 
 were lively enough. Her young sorrow seemed 
 like a shrub with its leaves turned yellow from 
 having been newly planted in uncongenial soil. 
 Her reddish physiognomy [badly written, for
 
 104 BALZAC 
 
 it was not her physiognomy which was reddish 
 but her face itself], her tawny fair hair, her 
 too slender waist, expressed the sort of grace 
 which modern poets find in statues of the 
 Middle Ages. Her dark grey eyes expressed 
 Christian meekness and resignation. Her 
 simple and inexpensive clothing betrayed her 
 youthful contours. Had she been happy she 
 would have been quite ravishing ; happiness 
 is woman's poetry. Had the joy of a ball 
 reflected its rosy hues on that face turned 
 pale already ; had the softness of good living 
 smoothed out her shrunken cheeks and made 
 them ruddy instead ; had love given life anew 
 to her melancholy eyes, Victorine might have 
 matched the finest of belles.' 
 
 The key to the understanding of the text is 
 here the likening of Victorine to a shrub newly 
 transplanted into uncongenial soil, the leaves 
 of which have turned yellow. Victorine has 
 fortuitous bad health. Red-haired and dark- 
 eyed, she is at bottom of robust health ; she is 
 pretty and well-shaped ; but poverty trans- 
 planted her into an unhealthy dwelling ; she is 
 withering away ; slender as she is, she is be- 
 coming still more markedly so; pretty, she is 
 losing the distinction of her features ; though
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 105 
 
 winning, she is without mirth ; you might almost 
 say that her beauty has turned inward. She 
 has none of that outward blossoming which is 
 only begotten of happiness or the illusion of it. 
 In years to come she will be a Mile. Michonneau, 
 and the shade with the iron-wire will welcome 
 her dark grey eyes after long weeping. She is 
 a shrub newly transplanted into uncongenial 
 soil, that is all ; the description of this girl can 
 all be referred back to that definition, charm- 
 ing, moreover, in its wistful melancholy. 
 
 ' Mr. Vautrin, a man of forty, was one of those 
 people of whom it is said, " He 's an awfully 
 fine fellow." He had broad shoulders, a well- 
 developed chest, muscles that stood out, hands 
 that were thick and square, and his knuckles 
 were remarkable for the thick red hairs that 
 grew on them in tufts. His face furrowed 
 by premature wrinkles suggested a harshness 
 which his simple and affable ways belied. His 
 bass voice, harmonising with his coarse cheer- 
 fulness, was not displeasing. He was obliging 
 and fond of laughing. If a lock went wrong, 
 he soon took it to pieces, mended, oiled, and 
 fitted it together again, saying, " That 's my 
 hobby." For he knew everything : ships, the 
 sea, France, foreign countries, business, men,
 
 106 BALZAC 
 
 events, the law, hotels, and prisons. If any one 
 made any show of a grievance he at once offered 
 his services. He had several times lent money 
 to Mme. Vauquer and to some of her boarders, 
 but those whom he had obliged would rather 
 have died than not pay him back, so much did 
 he impress them with fear, in spite of his good- 
 natured air, by the deep and resolute glance that 
 he gave them. The way in which he would 
 spit out saliva bespoke an imperturbable self- 
 control which would never allow him to shrink 
 even from the committal of a crime to get him- 
 self out of a tight corner. Like a stern judge, 
 his eye seemed to fathom the depths of every 
 question, of every conscience, of every feeling. 
 . . . He knew or he guessed the affairs of 
 everybody about him, whilst no one could 
 fathom either his thoughts or his occupations. 
 Although he had set up his seeming good 
 nature, his never-failing kindness and gaiety, 
 as a barrier between himself and others, yet 
 the appalling depth of his character would often 
 break through it and stand revealed.' 
 
 Vautrin is a bandit, and yet a man of power- 
 ful intelligence and will. But for the proper 
 conduct of his story it is necessary that the 
 author should avoid saying so at the outset.
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 107 
 
 That is why he introduces him at first only as 
 a man who is disquieting. He is physically 
 strong and robust, and fit for endurance. He 
 is a good sort of fellow, cheerful, always jolly 
 and comforting. You cannot help finding him 
 attractive. You are grateful to him for his 
 good health, and that is only human. But he 
 is unfathomable ; nobody knows anything 
 about him, nor what he does, and people more 
 wideawake than those at the Vauquer pension 
 would have got uneasy about it ; still, they are 
 all of them unconsciously somewhat awe- 
 stricken, not so much from their knowing 
 nothing about him as for the feeling they have 
 that he guesses every one of their thoughts. 
 He has, moreover, a certain deep and penetrat- 
 ing glance and a certain harshness in his face 
 when not smiling, which compare oddly with 
 his accommodating ways, and which would 
 certainly in less sluggish minds raise a suspicion 
 that they were not genuine. To finish up with, 
 he is rather too clever at undoing locks. All 
 these traits go to make up the disquieting 
 character, not merely for the boarders, but also 
 for the reader, by inducing him to suspect a 
 freebooter, which is just what the author 
 wants. For the moment the portrait is com-
 
 108 BALZAC 
 
 plete ; thenceforward we have the idea of a 
 man at once energetic and clever, resolute and 
 cunning, self-controlled, self-assured, without 
 prejudices or foibles, who can hardly be any- 
 thing else than a criminal or a detective. This 
 portrait in subdued colour, drawn with broad 
 lines both skilful and deep, is surprisingly 
 fine. 
 
 A miser in his own room : ' Would you have 
 a clear notion of that pale leaden-hued face 
 (which I would term moonlike if only the 
 Academy would allow l ) ? It looked like tar- 
 nished silver-gilt. The hair of my miser was 
 straight, nicely combed, and of an ashy grey 
 colour. His features, impassive as those of 
 Talleyrand, seemed as though they had been 
 cast in bronze. His small eyes, yellow as those 
 of a weasel, had scarcely any lashes, and light 
 hurt them ; but the peak of an old cap screened 
 them from it. His pointed nose was so pitted 
 at the end with smallpox that you might have 
 likened it to a gimlet. He had thin lips like 
 those of the alchemists and small old men 
 painted by Rembrandt or Metzu. He spoke 
 
 1 False note. I understand quite well that Balzac calls it moonlike 
 because it is pale and leaden-hued ; but a moonlike face must always 
 bring to mind a round and beaming one, whereas the face of a 
 miser (as that of Balzac's here) is just the reverse.
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 109 
 
 in a low, mild voice, and never lost his temper. 
 His age was problematical : it was impossible 
 to know whether he had grown old before his 
 time or whether he had spared his youth so 
 that it might always prove useful to him. 
 Everything was neat and shabby in his bed- 
 room, which, from the green tablecloth on the 
 writing-desk down to the carpet near the bed, 
 looked like the chill sanctuary of those poor 
 spinsters who spend their lives in polishing 
 their furniture. In winter the logs on his 
 hearth, for ever buried under a heap of ashes, 
 smouldered without ever blazing up. All his 
 movements, from the very hour of his getting 
 up to his fits of coughing at night, were as 
 regular as the ticking of a clock. . . . Touch 
 a wood-louse when it is running across a piece 
 of paper, and it stops and pretends to be dead. 
 In the same way he would stop short in his 
 speech and say nothing when a carriage rattled 
 by, so as not to strain his voice. Just as 
 Fontenelle, he was sparing of vital activity, 
 and concentrated every human feeling on his 
 own self. And his life slipped by, producing 
 no more stir than the sand in an ancient hour- 
 glass. It would sometimes happen that his 
 victims made a great deal of fuss and browbeat
 
 110 BALZAC 
 
 him ; but subsequently everything would re- 
 lapse into silence, like a kitchen after the 
 killing of a duck. Towards evening this human 
 bank-note became an ordinary man, and his 
 coins became a human heart. Were he well 
 satisfied with his day's work, he would rub his 
 hands, letting off all through the crinkled lines 
 of his face a sort of cheery perspiration, for it 
 is impossible otherwise to express the silent 
 play of his muscles which gave outward seem- 
 ing to a sensation comparable to the empty 
 laugh of Bas de cuir. Lastly, even in his 
 most joyous transports his conversation re- 
 mained monosyllabic and his expression of face 
 entirely null.' 
 
 The main feature of that wonderful portrait 
 lies in the power of silence. Gobseck keeps 
 silent ; that is the first and chiefest indication 
 of his strength. Gobseck keeps silent ; his 
 thin and close-drawn lips keep silent, his very 
 words are silent, for monosyllables make silence 
 much more marked than uttered sounds ; his 
 laugh is silent, his steps and movements must 
 be so as well, and in the gravest ordeals, when 
 the victim is brought to bay and stands cowed, 
 silence in both victim and executioner seems 
 to cleave the air like a blade. This room is the
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 111 
 
 dwelling not exactly of the silence of death, 
 but of deadly silence. 
 
 Notice the difference between him and 
 Grandet. Gobseck and Grandet are undoubt- 
 edly of the same kindred. Now Grandet 
 talks and stammers and stutters, but still he 
 talks, and a good deal too. Gobseck does not. 
 Why is this so ? Because Grandet is a miser, 
 and, when needs be, a usurer, but he is above all 
 a greedy speculator : he drives bargains, nay 
 he spends all his life in doing nothing but that, 
 and a bargain- driver must talk without ever 
 even tiring, and at the same time in an arti- 
 ficially difficult way so as to perplex and weary 
 his adversary. Gobseck drives no bargains. 
 He lends money at such and such a rate. This 
 being settled, he has only got to fight and carry 
 the day by obstinacy, unconquerable obstinacy 
 and chilly silence, by his yes, no, if, and what I 
 said, by the impassiveness of his features and 
 his impenetrable mask, all of which are the 
 very shapes of irresistible stubbornness. Just 
 as Grandet must speak, so Gobseck must be 
 silent. 
 
 Now see the physical likenesses of the same 
 woman at various ages following on events 
 which have modified her. Cousin Bette when
 
 112 BALZAC 
 
 she was twenty-five : ' At first when she fos- 
 tered hopes, the secret of which she never 
 shared with a soul, she made up her mind to 
 wear corsets, to follow the fashion, and she 
 became for a time so smart that the baron 
 thought her marriageable. Lisbeth was then 
 the " attractive brunette " of the old-fashioned 
 French novel. Her piercing eyes, her olive- 
 hued complexion, her reed-like waist could 
 tempt a major on half-pay ; but she used to 
 say with a laugh that her own admiration was 
 quite enough for her. . . .' 
 
 When she was forty-five : 4 In course of 
 time she had fallen into queer old-maidish 
 ways. For instance, instead of bowing to 
 fashion, she would have it suit her own foibles 
 and comply with her own obsolete fads. If 
 the baroness gave her a pretty new hat, or any 
 dress of fashionable cut, Cousin Bette would 
 at once pull it to pieces and spoil it by making 
 it into something which partook both of the 
 Imperial style and the olden Lorrain costumes. 
 . . . She held herself as upright as a stick. 
 Now an ungraceful woman goes for nothing at 
 Paris. And then that dark hair, those beauti- 
 ful stern eyes, the rigid lines of her face, that 
 Calabrian dryness of complexion gave Cousin
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 113 
 
 Bette the appearance of one of Giotto's por- 
 traits (and all these things a true Parisienne 
 would have turned to good account) ; her bear- 
 ing above all made her look so odd that she 
 sometimes resembled those monkeys dressed 
 like women which the little Savoyard urchins 
 carry about with them.' 
 
 At both ages the central, the outstanding 
 characteristic is her dryness, stiffness, and lack 
 of grace. At both ages we are concerned with 
 some one who has never known the milk of 
 human kindness ; although by lapse of time 
 her dryness has become more marked, her 
 stiffness more unyielding, her piercing look has 
 turned into the beautiful stern glance, and the 
 olive-hued complexion into the Calabrian ochre ; 
 if you add to this the eccentricity of her dress, 
 which bespeaks a restive and stubborn char- 
 acter, the portrait of the ' old goat ' first 
 sketched as the young kid is seen to be com- 
 plete. 
 
 Then there is Monsieur Goriot at sixty-two, 
 rich and happy and glad to be alive ; and Old 
 Goriot at sixty-five or six, ruined, broken down, 
 and worn away with grief. 
 
 First of all Monsieur Goriot : c Goriot 
 arrived, provided with a well-furnished ward- 
 
 H
 
 114 BALZAC 
 
 robe, the magnificent outfit proper to a mer- 
 chant who need stint himself of nothing on 
 retiring from business. Madame Vauquer had 
 admired the dozen and a half fine Holland 
 linen shirts, whose fineness was the more notice- 
 able from the fact that the manufacturer of 
 vermicelli wore on his shirt-front two diamond- 
 studded pins joined together by a little chain. 
 Habitually dressed in bottle-blue clothes, he 
 had every day a new white quilted waistcoat 
 under which his pear-shaped and prominent 
 stomach fluctuated, swaying to and fro a 
 massive gold chain hung with trinkets. His 
 snuff-box, likewise of gold, had a locket of 
 hair inset, and this gave him the air of being 
 an amorous adventurer. When his hostess 
 accused him of being a dandy, he let the happy 
 smile of the bourgeois whose vanity has been 
 flattered hover on his lips.' 
 
 He stands for the well-to-do and vulgar 
 bourgeois. He was, and is still, very fond of 
 fine linen, of the dress of the upper Parisian 
 classes, what is worn on the boulevards and in 
 the Bois, white waistcoats, since, requiring to 
 be changed every day, they denote a certain 
 affluence and lack of care for economy ; and 
 what the true dandy forbids himself, namely,
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 115 
 
 jewellery, which is synonymous with vain 
 ostentation, and which are like signs put out 
 to attract attention and respect. He has them 
 all : the heavy, gold chain, the trinkets, the 
 diamond scarf-pins, the golden snuff-box with 
 the locket. He carries on his own person this 
 small fortune which lets all the world know 
 that he is the owner of a much larger one. It 
 is done a little for people to know about it, and 
 still more for himself to be reminded of it. 
 He regards his trinkets or snuff-box much as 
 he would a looking-glass. Everything about 
 him says, ' I am rich and always afraid of 
 letting go opportunities of being reminded of 
 it.' Moreover, though abstemious at this 
 time, he is already stout, 4 as healthy as your 
 eye,' says a friend of Mme. Vauquer, ' a man 
 who bears his years wonderfully well, and whom 
 a woman may still find very agreable ' ; and 
 again, ' his conspicuous fleshy calf as well as 
 his long flat nose, gave a hint of moral qualities 
 which the widow was loath to let go, and this 
 impression was strengthened by the moon-like 
 ingenuous face of the good man. Every morn- 
 ing the barber from the Polytechnic School 
 used to come to trim and powder his hair.' 
 This was the middle-class bourgeois under
 
 116 BALZAC 
 
 Louis Philippe, who aimed at being of the upper 
 classes and aped their ways. 
 
 Now let us see Old Goriot : ' Three years 
 afterwards Old Goriot appeared one day with- 
 out his powder ; an exclamation of surprise 
 slipped from his landlady on seeing the colour 
 of his hair : it was a dirty greenish grey. His 
 physiognomy, which secret griefs had insensibly 
 saddened day by day, seemed the most desolate 
 of all those that lined her table. . . . When 
 his underclothing was worn out, he bought 
 calico at sevenpence the ell to replace his fine 
 linen. His diamonds, his gold snuff-box, his 
 jewels disappeared one by one. He had left 
 off his bright blue clothes and all his rich 
 apparel to wear summer and winter alike a 
 frock-coat of coarse brown cloth, a suit of goat's 
 hair, and grey sheepskin trousers. He grew 
 gradually thinner ; his calves fell in, his face 
 swollen with a good middle-class content, 
 became unduly wrinkled, his forehead furrowed, 
 and the outlines of his jaw sharpened. He 
 no longer looked like himself. The honest 
 manufacturer of vermicelli who at sixty-two 
 did not look forty, the big stout tradesman 
 brimming over with nonsensical banter, whose 
 sprightly bearing rejoiced the passers-by, who
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 117 
 
 had something youthful in his smile this man 
 seemed to have suddenly become a dull faded 
 tottering septuagenarian. His blue eyes, once 
 so vivacious, assumed lifeless iron-grey tints, 
 they had grown dim, they no longer watered, 
 and their red rims seemed to weep blood. He 
 was an object of horror to some, of pity to 
 others. Young medical students, noticing the 
 depression of his lower lip and measuring the 
 apex of his facial angle, declared him affected 
 with idiocy, after having worried him a long 
 time without getting anything out of him. . . .' 
 All the features of this latter portrait, in 
 direct opposition to the former, aim at showing 
 physiological misery as effect and sign of its 
 moral counterpart. Emaciation, wrinkling of 
 the forehead, of the cheeks, of the flesh on the 
 jaws ; face turned leathery ; instead of the 
 fleshy and plump calf which implies a firm 
 step, the tottering gait of M. Poiret. There is 
 no feature directly indicating disease properly 
 so called, none that suggests the idea of a deep 
 moral affection gnawing and slowly devastat- 
 ing. The last word is nothing but the exaggera- 
 tion of a perfectly accurate bit of observation 
 and sums up the whole piece. The young 
 students declare Goriot affected with idiocy
 
 118 BALZAC 
 
 because he really is so concerning one of those 
 fixed ideas which, though not leading to idiocy, 
 have all the appearance of doing so. 
 
 Note well the first word : Goriot without his 
 powder. This before all the rest ; first because 
 suppressing powder was one of the earliest 
 retrenchments, one of the earliest sacrifices 
 Goriot imposed on himself; then, and above 
 all, because this change was the only one that 
 was abrupt and sudden, the only one which 
 caught the attention of his fellow-boarders 
 among all those others which had gone by 
 almost unnoticed, so that they now said, 4 It 's 
 sure enough; these last three years he has 
 certainly altered a good deal, he has grown 
 thinner, and lost his colour, and shrivelled up,' 
 and so on to the same effect. 
 
 As to his effect on those who surround him 
 which makes the portrait complete, for one is 
 what one can be, but to the reader the impres- 
 sion made by a being on those about him is a 
 most precious, even a most precise piece of 
 information as to his effect upon the people 
 around him, it reads as follows : ' He had fallen 
 into a brooding state which those who observed 
 him superficially mistook for senile sluggish- 
 ness. Everybody in the boarding-house had
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 119 
 
 fixed ideas about the poor old man. He never 
 had either wife or daughter. Over-indulgence 
 in pleasure had made a snail of him, an anthro- 
 pomorphous mollusc worthy of being entered 
 among the cap-bearers, as one of the museum 
 attendants used to say. Poiret was an eagle, 
 a gentleman when compared with Goriot. 
 Poiret spoke, argued, answered, though he 
 meant nothing as he spoke, argued, or answered, 
 for he would repeat in different words what the 
 others had been saying ; still he took part in 
 the conversation ; he was alive, he seemed to 
 be sensitive ; whilst Old Goriot again as the 
 museum attendant used to say was for ever 
 zero by the thermometer. 5 
 
 In one word and to make use of the pithy 
 and perfectly apt popular phrase Goriot is 
 absorbed. Something draws him inward and 
 forbids all expansion, all motion outward, how- 
 ever slight it may be. He is no longer ' sen- 
 sible ' of external influences ; neither does he 
 seem to be alive. He is beyond genuine and 
 recognised imbecility. For an imbecile is 
 passive ; when one strikes him, he reverber- 
 ates ; when one speaks to him, he answers back 
 like an echo ; he is passive and no more. 
 Goriot is not even passive ; he is no longer in
 
 120 BALZAC 
 
 contact with external objects ; all communica- 
 tion between the world and himself is, as it 
 were, cut off. Why is this so ? The boarders 
 at Vauquer's answer each in their own way; 
 the reader wonders about it most anxiously, 
 and that is why the portrait is both very 
 curious in itself and extremely clever as an 
 introduction to the novel and an invitation to 
 read it. 
 
 After Balzac had seen his character, he loved 
 to label him with a characteristic name. He 
 was very keen about it, thought of it a long 
 time beforehand, consulting sign-boards on the 
 shops, and we know how happy he felt when 
 he found precisely on a sign- board the name of 
 Z. Marcas, and when he at once imagined a 
 deformed, suffering, unhappy being, ill-starred 
 in all his undertakings. ' "How! " said Mme. 
 de Listonniere to him. . . . Here the historian 
 would be well within his rights in sketching the 
 portrait of this lady ; but he thought that those 
 who were ignorant of Sterne's cognosmological 
 system could hardly pronounce those three 
 words, Mme. de Listonniere, without picturing 
 the woman to themselves as being aristocratic, 
 dignified, and tempering the rigour of piety 
 with elegant old monarchical and classical
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 121 
 
 habits and polite manners ; kind, though a 
 little stiff, with a slightly nasal twang ; allow- 
 ing herself the weakness of reading la Nouvelle 
 Heloise ; fond of theatre-going and yet doing 
 her hair like a girl.' How much in three words ! 
 What fine nonsensical language ! 
 
 But, seriously, these surnames of his are 
 nearly always well chosen. What is especi- 
 ally admirable is the combination of surname 
 and Christian name and the effect which both 
 together produce on the reader : Eugenie 
 Grandet, an effect of a tender gentleness and 
 the sensation of a dull, monotonous life ; a 
 pearl-grey name ; Vrsule Mirouet, the same 
 effect with something a shade more ecclesi- 
 astical; Philippe Brideau, a wonderful name 
 for an old soldier, and Joseph Brideau, an 
 excellent name for a sweet-tempered artist, so 
 calm and homely ; Colonel Chabert, a magnifi- 
 cent name for a leader of dragoons ; Baron 
 Hulot, an admirable name for an officer under 
 the first Empire, which reminds the reader ever 
 and again, amidst the frightful undermining of 
 his character, of what he was once, and conse- 
 quently of the tragic depth of his degradation ; 
 I will say nothing about Gobseck, so character- 
 istic as to tend towards caricature. Is not
 
 122 BALZAC 
 
 Lucien de Rubempre the name of a charming, 
 graceful, and weak-kneed fellow, and Eugene 
 de Rastignac that of a daring, ardent, resolute, 
 masterful, and unscrupulous one, whose victory 
 is assured by the very name which he bears ? 
 What of the duchesses called Manfrigueuse 
 and the middle-class courtesans who are called 
 Valerie Marneffe (a name that to me, however, 
 seems more befitting a procuress ; still, she will 
 turn her hand to that later on) ? What of the 
 journalist Lousteau and the caricaturist Bixiou, 
 and the doctors Bianchon and Crevel, bursting 
 with vanity and self-importance ? I find none 
 save Mme. de Mortsauf whose name seems 
 inapt, it being rather that of a haughty great 
 lady, even perhaps of a courtesan, rather than 
 that of a tender-hearted, pure, querulous, and 
 broken-down creature. The truth is that it 
 belongs to her husband. But he is a self- 
 supposed invalid, and the name suits him no 
 better. 
 
 But such misfits are rare. As a rule Balzac 
 is infallible in this part of his art, which is by 
 no means a negligible one. George Sand, too, 
 was generally very happy in her choice of sur- 
 names. 
 
 The character being seen and named, Balzac
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 123 
 
 busied himself with his dwelling-place, being 
 convinced (and rightly) that surroundings have 
 a tremendous influence on temperament, and 
 also that we choose our surroundings according 
 to our temperament, and that we model and 
 adapt our homes according to its bent, all of 
 which furnishes ample reason for the close con- 
 nection between our dwellings and ourselves. 
 I said that Balzac rather overworks this idea, 
 and that he often describes for the mere sake 
 of doing so, with an artistic passion, poring 
 over a country or a Paris house as devotedly 
 as an archaeologist might do over a figured 
 monument to Eleusis. I said that to my mind 
 he sees them too much, he is too strongly and 
 too often taken up with them ; but still and 
 this is oftenest it is in order to explain the 
 man and make us understand him thoroughly 
 that he minutely describes what, continually 
 surrounding him, moulds him and is moulded 
 by him in return, modifies and is modified in 
 a certain way. 
 
 Take the miser's house. It is his house that 
 Balzac insists on showing us before we are 
 introduced to the miser himself. The shell 
 accounts for the tortoise. ' You may find in 
 certain country towns, houses the mere sight
 
 124 BALZAC 
 
 of which inspires you with a melancholy equal 
 to that induced by the most sombre cloisters, 
 the most desolate wastes, or the saddest ruins. 
 Such houses may shelter at once the silence of 
 a cloister, the barrenness of a wilderness, and 
 the strewn limbs of a ruin ; life and movement 
 are so still inside that a stranger would think 
 they were tenantless did he not all at once catch 
 sight of the pale and chilly look of a motion- 
 less figure whose half-monastic face peeps out 
 over the window-sill at the sound of unknown 
 footsteps. These features of melancholy actu- 
 ally exist in the physiognomy of a dwelling 
 situated at Saumur at the top of the street 
 which leads uphill to the castle in the highest 
 part of the town. This street, now quite 
 deserted, stuffy in summer, cold in winter, 
 dark in some places, is notable for the reverber- 
 ance of its cobbled pavement, always dry and 
 clean, and the narrowness of its winding way, 
 and the stillness of its houses belonging to the 
 older town and overlooking the ramparts. . . . 
 After having toiled up the windings of this 
 picturesque roadway, the least unevenness of 
 which calls up memories and of which the 
 general impression induces a kind of involun- 
 tary reverie, you perceive a fairly dark recess
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 125 
 
 in the midst of which is hidden the door- 
 way of old Grandet's house.' This out-of- 
 the-way street, this house set back from the 
 main road which seems to be hidden from 
 sight, this cloister-like, tomb-like, stern-looking 
 house, where there sometimes appeared at 
 the window the monastic face uneasy at the 
 sound of unknown footsteps (so much has he 
 got used to recognising the sound of customary 
 ones), is the marvellous dwelling of everlasting 
 suspicion, and, of course, of avarice. 
 
 The house of the wise man (which he did not 
 build, scarcely modified, but which he picked 
 out, so giving a sign of his turn of mind), the 
 house of a not at all eccentric sage, with quite 
 an ordinary, but pure, gentle, and sincere heart : 
 4 The Loing meanders through the town, lined 
 with terraced gardens and neat-looking houses 
 the aspect of which tempts you to suppose that 
 happiness must dwell there rather than any- 
 where else. When they turned from the High 
 Street into the Rue des Bourgeois, Minoret- 
 Levrault pointed out the property of M. 
 Levrault, the rich Parisian iron-merchant who, 
 as he said, had just allowed himself to die : 
 " Look here, uncle, here 's a fine house for sale ; 
 it has a lovely garden by the river." " Let us
 
 126 BALZAC 
 
 go in," said the doctor, seeing at the end of a 
 small paved courtyard a house squeezed be- 
 tween the walls of two neighbouring houses 
 concealed by clumps of trees and creepers. 
 " There are cellars," said the doctor, going up 
 a steep flight of steps which was ornamented 
 with white and blue crockery ware in which 
 some geraniums were blossoming. Cut across, 
 as most country houses are, by a passage leading 
 from the yard on to the garden, the house had 
 nothing on the right but a drawing-room 
 lighted by four windows, two of them looking 
 out on to the yard and two on to the garden ; 
 but Levrault-Levrault had appropriated one 
 of them as an entry to a long greenhouse built 
 up with bricks which led from the drawing- 
 room to the river, ending there in an ugly 
 Chinese summer-house. " Good ! With a 
 roof put over that greenhouse, and with board- 
 ing put down," said old Minoret, " I shall be 
 able to arrange my library in here, and make 
 that queer piece of architecture into a nice 
 study." On the other side of the passage 
 looking out on to the garden was a dining-room 
 decorated in imitation black lacquer with 
 green and gold flowers, and separated from 
 the kitchen by the staircase. A small pantry
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 127 
 
 had been let into the back of the staircase 
 leading to the kitchen, the iron-barred windows 
 of which looked out on to the yard. There 
 were two rooms on the first floor and above 
 them some quite inhabitable attics. After 
 having made a rapid survey of this house 
 covered with green trellis-work from top to 
 bottom, both back and front, and ending on 
 the river-side in a wide terrace laden with delft 
 vases . . .' 
 
 It is in just such a middle-class house, 
 commonplace, but comely and cheerful, that 
 you can fancy Doctor Minoret playing endless 
 games of backgammon with the parish priest, 
 and the retired colonel, and his niece falling in 
 love with M. de Portenduin on seeing him 
 gracefully shaving on the other side of the 
 street. 
 
 A poor doctor's flat. The reception-room 
 for patients was meanly furnished with the 
 common-looking mahogany sofa, trimmed with 
 yellow-flowered Utrecht velvet, four armchairs, 
 six chairs, a console, and a tea-table. . . . 
 The clock for ever under its glass-globe between 
 two Egyptian candlesticks was shaped like a 
 lyre. You wondered how the curtains hanging 
 at the windows had been able to hold together
 
 128 BALZAC 
 
 so long ; for they were yellow calico painted 
 with red roses, from the factory at Jouy. . . . 
 The other room served as dining-room. The 
 decent penury that reigned here in this room 
 that was deserted for half the day, was obvious 
 as soon as you set foot in it, at sight of the small 
 red muslin curtains lining the window which 
 looked out on to the yard. The cupboards 
 obviously hid remains of mouldy pies, chipped 
 plates, everlasting corks, and serviettes dirty 
 from a whole week's usage.' 
 
 Having seen, named, and lodged his char- 
 acters, and given them their proper setting, he 
 endows them with life. How ? It is just there 
 that criticism stops short, almost quite at a 
 loss. How can any one define the gift of a 
 Homer, an ^Eschylus, a Sophocles, a Euripides 
 (though to a lesser degree), a Shakespeare, a 
 Corneille, a Racine, a Moliere, a La Bruyere 
 now and then, a Goethe at times, an Augier 
 and a Dumas the younger at times again, an 
 Ibsen often. When their creations are not 
 only true, accurate, precise, and great, but just 
 as spirited and to the full as living as we know 
 that our neighbours or our own kindred actu- 
 ally are ; a Ulysses, an Electra, an Antigone, 
 an Iphigenia, an Othello, a Pauline, a Phedre,
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 129 
 
 and a Joad, a Tartuffe, a Giton, a Werther, 
 a M. Poirier, a Mme. Guichard, a Nora, and a 
 Borckmann ? No one knows ; for it is not 
 the secret of art, it is that of physiological 
 instinct and power which consists in transform- 
 ing ourselves into another being and leading 
 inside that other the same life as our own self 
 does following the same passionate impulses 
 and obeying the same logic which overrules 
 feelings and passions. Now, that is a gift 
 which is beyond analysis. 
 
 Massillon used to say : 4 Where do I study 
 the passions which I describe ? Why, in my 
 own self.' Flaubert said : ' Who is Mme. 
 Bovary ? She is myself.' It is certain that 
 you cannot bestow life ; you are alive, that is 
 all ; and when a character of your creation 
 has life it is yourself who have endowed him 
 with your own. But how can, and how is that 
 done in fact ? That is just what the life-giver 
 himself would be at a loss to explain, and 
 that is yet another reason and a stronger why 
 it is futile for criticism to attempt it. 
 
 For criticism, at the most, can only detect 
 a few ways, a few habits, a few processes which 
 reveal a part only of that strange work, but 
 which are, if I may say so, but outward and 
 
 i
 
 130 BALZAC 
 
 superficial as regards it, and such as when 
 detected do not reach down to the depths 
 from which they come. 
 
 Such, for example, is the striking word that, 
 all of a sudden, flashes a full light on the 
 depths of a character. 
 
 When Colonel Chabert, after years spent 
 sunk in misery, receives two louis from the 
 solicitor, his first word is, ' Now at last I shall 
 be able to smoke cigars.' 
 
 Some one says to Rubempre : ' If you keep 
 on being eclectic no one will support you, either 
 Liberal or Royalist. You must choose ; on 
 which side will you stand ? ' ' Which is the 
 stronger ? ' says Rubempre quite bluntly, so 
 bluntly in fact that his questioner is not at all 
 astonished, and dreams of nothing but explain- 
 ing to him which is the stronger side. 
 
 Grandet to his nephew : ' Your father is 
 dead.' Desperate cry from the nephew 
 Grandet : ' . . . But that 's nothing ; he went 
 bankrupt and you haven't a penny.' 
 
 Mme. Marneff to Crevel : ' You don't love 
 me this morning.' ' Don't I though, Valerie,' 
 says Crevel. ' Why, I love you like a million ! ' 
 
 From a courtesan : ' Come on ! Let us be 
 gay, old boy ! Life is like clothes. When they
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 131 
 
 are dirty we brush them up, when they get 
 worn through we mend them ; but clothed 
 we remain as long as we can.' 
 
 With fine words such as these Balzac 
 abounds, and we must acknowledge that they 
 give us the very impress of living truth. Yet 
 do we not feel that, strictly speaking, logic 
 alone would suffice for their finding that, 
 strictly speaking, an abstract idea might utter 
 them just as well ? 
 
 Another process, or rather another manner, 
 for an author who has succeeded in living 
 inside another character, is to give that person- 
 age such and such habits of body, gesture, 
 speech, or facial appearance as recur repeatedly 
 in the same outward mannerisms or nearly so, 
 thus marking (the only stumbling-block to be 
 avoided being monotony) the secret connections 
 which bind together body and soul, our move- 
 ments and our instincts, our behaviour and our 
 ordinary tasks, our familiar gestures and our 
 customary thoughts. And to do so is to give 
 the character a life continually in concert, in 
 harmony with himself, and consequently to 
 render him continuously in keeping with like- 
 lihood, and his behaviour easily predicable, 
 so that he resembles the people whom we
 
 132 BALZAC 
 
 actually see alive about us. Herein Balzac 
 excells. He sees in full detail both the habit 
 and the habitat which derive from a man's 
 profession, origin, education, relationships, 
 and his fixed or predominating ideas. He 
 knows the characteristic obsession or kink 
 which a man acquires little by little in his 
 workshop, his office, his study, or his shop, and 
 which he can never get rid of. He knows the 
 deeper furrow or to use the word of Sainte- 
 Beuve the crack which the fixed and pre- 
 dominating idea stamps on the face, and, so 
 to say, on the whole person of the man pos- 
 sessed by it. And he never loses sight of that 
 crack, that furrow ; it is ever present to his 
 mind ; he brings us back to it time and again, 
 with a truly wonderful art in varying its ex- 
 pression so as not to weary us by its recurrence, 
 and he is very ingenious in repeating what is 
 sometimes necessary without ever saying over 
 again what would be tiresome. 
 
 This art of recurrent gesture and of the 
 concordance of all gestures, applies, if properly 
 understood, much more to people of the middle 
 and lower classes than to those of higher class 
 and culture. People of the lower and middle 
 classes are, in a way, nearer things, and seem
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 133 
 
 more than others to be shaped by them. The 
 men and women of the upper classes, too, 
 certainly bear the stamp of the world in which 
 they move and of the series of phenomena by 
 which they are bound, but modified by more 
 numerous influences, yielding to more various 
 forms of pressure, the effects of more complex 
 causes, they elude this method somewhat, or 
 would only be amenable to it were it more 
 comprehensive and more supple. And it is 
 quite certain that Balzac paints men who are 
 neighbours of and closely allied to things 
 wonderfully well just because he sets about 
 painting them much in the same way and with 
 the same insight that he bestows on the descrip- 
 tion of things. But here his instinctive method 
 is excellent, and they are his own property, 
 his game, his very substance, all these common 
 middle-class people : tradesmen, lawyers, 
 students, independent people, small owners, 
 county law-clerks, commercial travellers, 
 journalists, smaller artists (Pierre Grassou ; 
 the bigger men not being so well seen), actors 
 and actresses, half boors, half bourgeois, half 
 aristocrats ; for their habitual mannerisms are 
 almost sufficient to characterise them and to 
 give them visible substance.
 
 134 BALZAC 
 
 Another way of giving life to a character is 
 to make him either attractive or the contrary. 
 Those whom we neither like nor dislike hardly 
 strike us as being alive ; they seem to be life- 
 less because we do not make them alive by 
 our feelings towards them ; they seem to us, 
 if alive at all, to be so merely in a very hazy 
 kind of way because we do not live in them. 
 So true is this that even inanimate objects 
 become alive for us when we love them and 
 when we hate them, and Lamartine's lines 
 are quite right : 
 
 Inanimate objects, have you then a soul 
 Which clings to ours and makes us render love ? 
 
 And yet this too would sound just as true : 
 
 Inanimate objects, have you then a soul 
 
 Which flouts our own and makes us render hatred ? 
 
 That inexhaustible saying of Amiel, ' A 
 landscape is a state of mind,' implies that 
 scenery is at one time sweetness, kindness, 
 cordiality, serenity, welcome ; at another 
 horror, hostility, frenzy, convulsion, and de- 
 spair ; and such objects, according to circum- 
 stances, we like or hate ; but we always, and 
 because of that, think of them as living. The
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 135 
 
 whole of antique mythology is based on that, 
 and antique mythology is eternal. 
 
 However, I will not say with greater reason, 
 human beings are only alive for us in so far 
 as we either love or hate them ; and as for the 
 indifferent ones we are very uncertain as to 
 whether they be alive or not. An excellent 
 article by Brunetiere on the ' attractive char- 
 acter ' might, with but little garbling, be 
 summed up as follows : the attractive char- 
 acter may be either sympathetic to us, or the 
 contrary, provided only that he be strongly 
 one or the other. 
 
 Well, no one better than Balzac can make a 
 human being either minutely attractive or 
 minutely repulsive. His usual hallucination 
 serves here : just as he believes his char- 
 acters to be alive and real, just as he speaks 
 about them as though they were real and 
 living persons, so he himself either loves or 
 detests them (just as he loves Gautier and 
 detests Sainte-Beuve), and it is therefore not 
 difficult for him to render the one very attrac- 
 tive and the other very odious, and conse- 
 quently to render them both alive for the 
 reader. Therein we have a singular contra- 
 diction which genius solves quite uncon-
 
 136 BALZAC 
 
 sciously. The man of genius lives inside his 
 characters, otherwise he could not make them 
 living, and moreover, so well does he material- 
 ise these different ' selves ' that he detests some 
 and loves others. He resembles Nature, which 
 is a wolf inside a wolf, a lamb inside a lamb, 
 a stag inside a stag ; but, in addition, if we 
 suppose Nature to hate the wolf and to feel 
 very kindly towards the lamb, we have then 
 the position of the great artist. 
 
 We always feel Balzac's hatred for journal- 
 ists, fortune hunters, quacks, business sharpers, 
 and misers which helps him to make them live 
 intensely, for he gathers together in them, with 
 a sort of wrath, as of electric waves, all the 
 power of evil consistent with their characters 
 which he can possibly imagine. 
 
 And we always feel Balzac's love for the 
 country doctor, the village priest, the honest 
 pious woman, the young girl in love, for artists, 
 disinterested men of letters and idealists, great 
 soldiers of the Empire ; and all that helps him 
 to give them the right tone, colouring, relief, and 
 depth. 
 
 Attractive and repulsive characters are alike 
 powerfully alive for a good many reasons, but 
 particularly in proportion to the sympathy or
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 137 
 
 the antipathy the author bears them. I am 
 quite sure that the friend of Shakespeare is 
 Hamlet, and that his enemy is lago, and that 
 he passionately (though with different passions) 
 searched and dived deep into both, so as to 
 make them athrob both inwardly and out- 
 wardly with complete life. 
 
 But still the revealing word, the persistent 
 mannerism and according behaviour, even 
 sympathy or antipathy giving to the char- 
 acter something outstanding and vehement 
 which sets him off most powerfully all that 
 is but the process or half -process, the apparent 
 work of the artist which can be detected 
 because of its appearance, and we feel that it 
 is neither the heart of the secret nor the very 
 gift. The gift itself of endowing with life 
 is a faculty in the artist which remains mysteri- 
 ous and irreducible by any analysis. 
 
 Let us see at least these characters which 
 he created because he was a creator, how he 
 leads them through their lives, what kind of 
 evolution he makes them pass through, and in 
 what sort of progression he shows them to us. 
 
 The way of going to work here is more palp- 
 able and the artistic method more obvious. 
 His characters are oftenest quite simple ; they
 
 138 BALZAC 
 
 have not that complexity of which we arc- so 
 fond because of its likeness to life, and because 
 we get so much pleasure from threading 
 labyrinths, a delight which Shakespeare evi- 
 dently shared, which Moliere knew and even 
 insisted on, which Tolstoi and Ibsen endea- 
 voured, perhaps unwisely, to give their 
 heroes. You do not often meet with a complex 
 character in Balzac. You have him in Ras- 
 tignac junior, in Rubempre, in Colonel Chabert, 
 who is violent, tenacious, and weak, and in a 
 few others who, as a rule, are only secondary 
 characters. Generally speaking the complex 
 character is unknown to Balzac ; it is foreign 
 to his art, and even to that very art of his of 
 which we have just been treating, and of which 
 we shall complete the definition. And in that 
 much Balzac is classical. The classical man 
 loves clearness before all things, and com- 
 plexity is not always very clear ; we feel it 
 has truth in it, and still we hesitate over the 
 degree of its truth and over the proportions 
 in which it is true. The classic mind is always 
 afraid that complexity may be no more than 
 mere incoherence flaunting under another 
 name. 
 
 And indeed it is not altogether wrong, for
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 139 
 
 if those be right who say that Nature is 
 complex, those too are right who say that 
 she is likewise simple, who say that a man has 
 several passions indeed, but that one of them 
 predominates, one which is master ending at 
 last, and that soon enough, in overruling his 
 whole character. 
 
 Is there such a man as the miser, the prodigal, 
 the libertine, the generous man ? ask the parti- 
 sans of the complex. Are such indeed any- 
 thing but pure abstractions ? And must art, 
 that follower of Nature, proceed by abstrac- 
 tions ? ' O ! ' answer the partisans of the 
 simple, * it is true that there is not perhaps one 
 single miser who is only a miser ; but, speaking 
 generally, a miser whatever he be, is that to 
 such a degree, that all the veins of his other 
 passions have been sucked dry by the main 
 duct, so that it needs but a very slight modifica- 
 tion to introduce him to us as an out-and-out 
 miser ; it merely means the avoidance of 
 trivial and unilluminating detail. The ruling 
 passion is at first a large part of a man, then 
 nearly all the man, and finishes by domin- 
 ating the whole man. Thus it is right in de- 
 scription (e.g. La Bruyere) to depict only that 
 one passion when making the portrait of a
 
 140 BALZAC 
 
 man, since the whole man is referable to it ; 
 and in narrative it is right to show that passion, 
 first when it begins to sway, then when it 
 becomes overbearing, and finally when it 
 predominates the whole mind. Now, we shall 
 find that this is just how Balzac went to work. 
 
 In that he is of the great classical school 
 which derives from Homer, through -ZEschylus, 
 Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare even, Cor- 
 neille and Racine and Moliere down to Balzac 
 himself. 
 
 So much is this so that it is his turn of mind, 
 his deliberate choice and his system. Sainte- 
 Beuve affirms that 4 Balzac did not admit that 
 Pascal had any right to ask great men's souls 
 the proper poise and equal exercise of opposing 
 virtues, or of extreme and contrasting qualities 
 of mind.' Whereupon Sainte-Beuve gets 
 rather angry. Now is it not, in truth, Balzac 
 who, first and last, and above all from the 
 standpoint of literary art, is in the right ? 
 What does Pascal say ? 4 1 do not look on 
 the excess of a virtue as being of much worth 
 unless I find at the same time the excess of its 
 contrary, as in Epaminondas, who was both 
 valorous and kind ; for otherwise it is an abase- 
 ment rather than an uplifting. Greatness is
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 141 
 
 not shown by standing near one extreme, but 
 rather by touching both at once and fulfilling 
 all that lies between them. It may be that 
 this is only a sudden movement from one 
 extreme to the other and that greatness only 
 exists in one place at a time, like a brand [when 
 it is moved to and fro]. Be it so ; but that at 
 least shows the nimbleness of the soul, if not 
 its scope.' 
 
 Of what is Pascal thinking ? Not of what is, 
 but rather of what ought to be. He does not 
 (morally speaking) admire beings who are 
 extreme and incomplete, nor does he admire 
 in Bossuet's phrase ' inhuman heroes J ; he 
 does not admire an Ajax, an Alexander, nor 
 perhaps a Caesar ; he admires (morally speak- 
 ing) men who have contrary and apparently 
 irreconcilable qualities, those who cover, as it 
 were, the whole span of human feeling, and what 
 he needs is an Epaminondas, a Marcus Aurelius, 
 or a Saint Louis. 
 
 Morally speaking, he is quite right ; but does 
 he say that these great men are humanly true ? 
 He knows perfectly well that they are extra- 
 ordinary exceptions, and just for that reason 
 he admires them so much. 
 
 So much as to truth.
 
 142 BALZAC 
 
 As for what concerns art, he does not at all 
 admire them as an artist, but as a moralist and 
 a virtuous man. Had any one asked him 
 whether these personages were likely to be 
 met with, even though they were true, he would 
 no doubt have answered ' No.' Had any one 
 asked him whether they were artistic, he would 
 have said ' Yes ' ; for everything is artistic, 
 but they are not so according to the ordinary 
 proceedings of art, it being an imitation of 
 Nature, and Nature being ' weak and limited ' 
 and humanity composed of beings who fail 
 exactly in ' spanning extremes,' and who 
 comprise neither qualities nor their contrast- 
 ing defects, 4 genuine good ' being no more 
 within us than ' genuine truth,' since men 
 4 have but truth and good in a mingled measure 
 along with evil and falsehood.' 
 
 Hence it is not because of their being true, 
 but, on the contrary, because of their being 
 exceptional that Pascal admires those men 
 who 4 span the extremes ' ; and it is not from 
 the standpoint of aesthetics but rather of ethics 
 that he admires them ; and the man who 
 prides himself on his painting of humanity, 
 must in nowise be anxious or preoccupied about 
 Pascal's dictum. It does not in the least con-
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 143 
 
 cern him whether he consider it from the 
 point of view of truth or of art. Possibly 
 some one quoted the phrase to Balzac, and 
 immediately he thinking as an artist (for how 
 should he have thought otherwise ?) mistook 
 it for an artistic precept, and so at once replied 
 and not without reason : ' It is wrong ! Men 
 are not at all like that, and I must and will 
 draw men as I find them. As for those who, 
 by a fabulous freak, happen to be so [and 
 Pascal himself admits that it is perhaps an 
 illusion], or might be so, they would not be 
 subject-matter for art, for they would be per- 
 fection ; they would be God Himself, and per- 
 fection cannot be drawn, and God is beyond 
 the utmost skill of any artist, even supposing 
 any one should attempt His likeness. Your 
 Pascal does not know what he is talking about.' 
 
 Perhaps he would have understood nothing 
 whatever had he been treating of art ; but he 
 never considered it from that point of view. 
 
 We see then that Balzac, following the 
 example of all the classics, deliberately turned 
 a cold shoulder on complex characters. The 
 exclusiveness, it must be admitted, implies 
 a few shortcomings from which Balzac was 
 hardly free, and great as was his genius, it
 
 144 BALZAC 
 
 could do no more than succeed in veiling 
 them. First he forbade himself, with his 
 philosophy of the passions, the drawing of 
 any save the generality of men. A passion, 
 to fill a man completely, must be very great 
 indeed. We may admit the likelihood of a 
 man's being wholly ambitious, for ambition is 
 a very tyrannical passion, and there are men 
 indeed who at least seem to be, from top to 
 toe, simply a mass of ambition. And it is 
 very easy indeed to understand though it 
 be quite true that such and such a man is 
 merely an animated craze for tulips or birds or 
 even the collecting of buttons that a lesser 
 passion or hobby, however deeply you may 
 study it, will never convey the impression of 
 a whole man. And so Balzac is obliged to 
 restrict himself almost always to the draw- 
 ing of great characters, as they were called in 
 the seventeenth century, universal types of 
 humanity : the good liver, the ambitious man, 
 the miser, the dupe of his own vanity, the en- 
 vious man or woman. He is Moliere over 
 again, as he has a perfect right to be. General 
 types are never worn out, for they change their 
 aspect and even their turn of mind, if not their 
 whole constitution, from one generation to
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 145 
 
 another. Tartuffe may be written over again 
 every half -century (the best proof of it being 
 Balzac's own repetition of VAvare), on con- 
 dition that the author has genius ; and Balzac 
 in creating Grandet showed well enough that 
 he had it. 
 
 And still we must acknowledge that we 
 nowadays, after so many general portraits, 
 rather like to study private character, just as 
 after so many histories we have taken a liking 
 for memoirs, the study of rather curious and 
 unusual people, of complex temperaments, 
 probed and analysed in their fine shades, their 
 half-shades, even down to their apparent 
 contradictions. Often in Balzac the absence 
 of a Carmen, an Adolphe, or merely a Lucienne 
 (Confession of a Young Woman) is to be felt. 
 We often think, for instance, of those English 
 novels in which the ridiculous characters are 
 singularly attractive, though we know quite 
 well why they are at once both ridiculous and 
 attractive, why we love them and yet laugh 
 at them, and why in quite unexpected fashion 
 the SaKpvoev yeXacracra fits them so perfectly. 
 M. Albert Guinon has well said : 4 They make 
 work easy for the playwrights (and novel- 
 writers too) who draw simple characters.
 
 146 BALZAC 
 
 Their higher merit consists in representing in 
 a simple manner characters who are in reality 
 by no means so.' 
 
 What is at the bottom of the pleasure we 
 derive from complex characters is our liking 
 for the mysterious. There is no mystery 
 whatever in Balzac's work. We feel rather 
 too surely that we are going straight ahead. 
 We feel rather too surely that, once the under- 
 lying motives of his novel are known, we could 
 construct it ourselves. He does it so much 
 better than we could, that is all. 
 
 But though that is a good way of explaining 
 things (and it is merely as an explanation that 
 I use it), let us not take undue advantage of 
 the critical method which consists of drawing 
 hard and fast lines, and asking of an author 
 the kind of talent to which he cannot lay 
 claim. Balzac only cared about simple char- 
 acters and looked on complex ones as untrue. 
 Let us limit ourselves to that statement. 
 
 And as to these simple characters, we must 
 ask how he led them through their lives, how 
 (if modern terminology be preferred) did he 
 make them evolve ? Always in a straight- 
 ahead fashion, without any retrogression or 
 roundabout turning. He looks on every one
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 147 
 
 as being continually driven by a single ruling 
 passion which is, as it were, always at high 
 pressure, and increases in impetus with the 
 lapse of time. Do you remember those heroes 
 of George Sand who become modified, their 
 minds insensibly altering as the narrative 
 proceeds, who on page 250 are no longer what 
 they were on page 75, whom you always think 
 of labelling with that tag from Plautus, 
 Naturam vortit Eudio, and who, thanks to the 
 supple talent of their author, seem nonetheless 
 quite true to life ? Picture to your mind the 
 exact contrary or the excessive contrary, and 
 you have Balzac's usual way of going to work. 
 It must have been he who gave Taine the 
 idea of his famous axiom : 4 Man is a walk- 
 ing theorem.' A man to Balzac stands for a 
 passion served by intelligence and organs and 
 thwarted by circumstances ; nothing more 
 than that, unless it be that it increases and 
 gathers strength as time goes on, reacting 
 against all obstacles or hindrances, and vires 
 acquirit eundo. 
 
 He set forth in a very original and explicit 
 way the whole theory of this way of looking 
 at things in one of Vautrin's conversations : 
 4 Those people put on an idea and will not
 
 148 BALZAC 
 
 leave go. [The style is Vautrin's ; he is not 
 bound, as was Gautier, to use only coherent 
 metaphors.] They are athirst only for one 
 special water drawn up from a special well, 
 and it is so often stagnant ; but, for a drink 
 from it, they would barter away their wives 
 and children, nay their very souls, to the devil. 
 For some the well is gambling or the Stock 
 Exchange, or collecting pictures or insects or 
 music ; for others it is a woman who knows 
 how to cook sweetmeats, and one who doesn't 
 care a fig for them, or uses them ill. . . . Well, 
 these funny fellows never grow weary, and 
 would take their last blanket to the pawnshop 
 so that she might have their last half-crown. 
 Old Goriot is like that. . . .' 
 
 Old Goriot is like that, and so are nearly the 
 whole of Balzac's characters. They all have 
 a passion which is not only dominant, but in 
 their very constitution. Crevel's is vanity ; 
 Rastignac's (from a certain moment) is am- 
 bition ; Baron Hulot's is luxury ; Cousin 
 Bette's (though with her it is rather complex, 
 for she is capable of an old maid's love for a 
 blond youth) is envy ; Grandet's is avarice ; 
 Goriot' s is paternal love ; Mme. Hulot's is 
 conjugal love which will never tire, which will
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 149 
 
 kill her without ever having given way, or 
 been driven to despair by the direst ill-treat- 
 ment and ingratitude, and Mme. Hulot is to 
 her husband what Goriot is to his daughters ; 
 Philippe Brideau's is the instinct of an un- 
 scrupulous plunderer, the huge greed of a 
 Verres. 1 
 
 The advantages of this way of looking on 
 characters are obvious. The chief advantage 
 which serves to bring out real beauties, dazzling 
 beauties, is the fact that the character so 
 depicted stands out in striking relief. He has 
 no shade ; his brilliance is blinding. He 
 remains for ever in the mind. George Sand's 
 novels are delightful to read, but hazy in 
 remembrance, except a few (Mauprat, Mont- 
 Leveche, Petite Fadette, Mare au Diabk). With 
 Balzac it is just the other way about ; I often 
 find Balzac hard to read, but I now actually 
 see Goriot as though he were one of my friends, 
 and much more clearly, for none of them has 
 a character of such bare simplicity. 
 
 Another attraction is a certain impression 
 of strength which we get from characters built 
 up in this way. We instinctively love strength, 
 and passion thus presented is, as it were, an 
 
 1 The Roman proconsul against whom Cicero declaimed. TR.
 
 150 BALZAC 
 
 element in Nature, a huge mass of waters or 
 a fiery furnace which stretches out, increases, 
 expands, overflows, rushes, burns down and 
 devours all ; unconquerable and unavoidable, 
 with an incalculable show of magnificent energy 
 which we regard with dread. It is a very great 
 enjoyment, a sort of dramatic enjoyment, one 
 of the mainsprings of drama being terror. 
 
 Stendhal was in ecstasies before a crime, 
 and, calling energy the inability of a man to 
 resist his passion, would exclaim on beholding 
 a murderer : ' What energy ! There are still 
 men who have energy.' We are not all quite 
 so silly as Stendhal ; but still there is a shade 
 of Stendhal in us all, and, if we neither admire 
 nor worship the criminal (and herein lies the 
 difference), and if we simply call him the im- 
 pulsive, nevertheless when it is prolonged, 
 tenacious, and ' of a raging steadiness,' as 
 Saint-Simon puts it, we admire his passion. 
 In what way ? As a strange and startling 
 force of nature, just as the pagans when they 
 worshipped a wicked god with a kind of 
 religious tremor and holy horror. And yet 
 again why ? Because we know or we feel 
 that it is these active forces which created 
 society, and that these passionate forces when
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 151 
 
 they are beneficent have most beautiful, most 
 excellent, and most salutary effects, and for 
 that reason we admire a great passion what- 
 ever it may be as a cause, when as a cause it 
 produces bad effects instead of good ones, since 
 it remains in any case a cause, which is to say 
 a god. 
 
 Balzac, be it through Hulot, Grandet, or the 
 country doctor, produces just such an impres- 
 sion on the mind. 
 
 Given that force, Balzac says to it : t Go 
 forth ! ' and forth it goes straight ahead, in- 
 creasing its power and gathering momentum. 
 In that again he is classical in the same way 
 as the dramatic poets of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, except that he is much more so, simplify- 
 ing to the extreme, for he would have admitted 
 neither the clemency of August nor the hesita- 
 tions of Nero, and would not have made a lover 
 of Harpagon ; for he conceives all his char- 
 acters in the mould of the younger Horace, of 
 Narcissus, or Tartuffe ; whilst truth, true 
 realism on the contrary, would consist rather 
 in never admitting that a man should hold only 
 a single passion incorporate in him, and goading 
 him straight on, it being rather haphazard, 
 and oftentimes a see-saw between opposing
 
 152 BALZAC 
 
 passions, each one of which requires describing 
 according to its relative worth and that, I 
 own, is none too easy. 
 
 Notice that his own manner is not over easy 
 either, and that, in order to paint things thus, 
 he must have double intensity of observation 
 and double power of imagination. Luckily 
 he had both to the full. If his men are not 
 beings whom we can ' see all round,' they have 
 at least so penetrating a light cast on them 
 that on that side of their personality which is 
 shown to us we see every detail with miraculous 
 clearness. His observation is so exact and so 
 powerful that we do not need to see the whole 
 man in order to get a picture which seems 
 complete, so rich is it. His imagination alike 
 follows the straight line traced on his plan 
 without ever swerving, though we could almost 
 wish that it would do so ; but it again is so 
 powerful that it needs no freedom. For ever 
 working on the same trait of character, the 
 same passion, instinct, or craze, it will yet always 
 find new words and new deeds which will 
 express more and more strongly and strikingly 
 that single bent. You enjoy it even while you 
 regard it critically. You say : ' It is only 
 half the book ; the passion he describes is
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 153 
 
 already altogether known to me, and I am con- 
 fident that this character will go unswervingly 
 onward to the very end ; what new traits of 
 its energy can he possibly find ? ' And he 
 always finds them, and forces you into shouts 
 of surprise and admiration. 
 
 He is like a man who stakes all again and 
 again, and wins every time. There is Philippe 
 Brideau who robs his aunt and brother, who 
 despoils his mother, stretches his inevitable 
 hands over a legacy ever so well guarded, and 
 then lays his claws deep on to the State treasury, 
 rips open its hoard like a beast of prey, which 
 seems to grow bigger, its spread of wing ever 
 widening, its claws ever sharper and more 
 penetrating. 
 
 There is Grandet who terrorises his servant, 
 his wife, and his daughter, alarms and sets 
 nearly all his small town quaking when, find- 
 ing himself confronted by a passion as strong 
 as his own, the love of his daughter for her 
 cousin, from a tyrannical father he becomes 
 an unnatural one, locks up and imprisons his 
 daughter, kills his wife with grief, and sows 
 round him, all for the sake of money, misery, 
 sorrow and death. Gold here stands for a 
 furious divinity which has its agent in a man
 
 154 BALZAC 
 
 through whom it strikes all that is around 
 him with ever-increasing, hastening, and over- 
 whelming blows. It is Plutus clinging body 
 and soul to his prey. 
 
 There is Goriot consumed by his love for his 
 daughters as if by a hopeless and increasingly 
 virulent disease, still a little in love with him- 
 self at the beginning, then forgetting himself 
 gradually until he reaches to the self-abnega- 
 tion of the fakir, depriving himself of every- 
 thing for them, disgracing himself for them, 
 envying and loving their lovers, begging, be- 
 seeching a look from them, ' some shameful 
 little enjoyment,' or the mere favour of peep- 
 ing at them ; thus falling lower and lower 
 into the uttermost social, moral, and 
 physical misery, like a lover for his mis- 
 tress, like a gambler over his cards, like an 
 ambitious man in his old age for a seat on 
 the parish council, like a worn-out man of 
 letters still begging the favour of appear- 
 ing in print in a sub-prefecture newspaper ; 
 it has been very truly observed that the 
 very best and most beautiful passions are 
 susceptible from their excess, or rather from 
 lack of their inhibition, of degenerating into 
 baleful, mad, and shameful ones, for every
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 155 
 
 passion, whatever it may be, is an incipient 
 madness. 
 
 There is Baron Hulot who, for the sake of 
 women, ruins first his wife and then his 
 daughter, launches into shady speculations, 
 becomes a robber, is destitute, is called ' Jean 
 Foutre ' by his companions in arms, becomes 
 the debtor of a courtesan, goes into hiding, 
 goes under an alias, turns public scrivener, 
 takes for mistress a little faubourg girl, or 
 rather a young savage of fifteen ; who, when 
 his wife comes to fetch him, asks, ' Shall I 
 bring the girl too ? ' and at last goes courting 
 a hideous kitchenmaid, and says, c Should 
 my wife die, you might become a baroness,' 
 which remark, overheard by the Baroness, ends 
 in killing her, just as Grandet's avarice killed 
 his wife. 
 
 The fatality of passion, as in Racine and in 
 the Greeks for their divine fatality is but a 
 symbol that conceals the fatality of human 
 crimes the fatality of passions leading men 
 along a sunken, narrow, straight and ever 
 steeper way, through sorrow and shame, on to 
 folly and death, such is the awful and sinister 
 soul of Balzac's work. 
 
 At times he happened on something else,
 
 156 BALZAC 
 
 and it is this that, granting that passion as a 
 rule drives you on to madness, it may also 
 happen to give you genius. You must, of 
 course, have it to start with ; yes, always on 
 condition that you have a little of it, were you 
 inept . . . but passion transfigures ever so 
 slight a talent into a kind of genius. The 
 craving for gold taught Grandet his genius for 
 business, just as the hunter's passion taught 
 him skill in hunting. Grandet is like a general 
 who throws a quick glance over the chessboard 
 of business dealing, foresees everything, has 
 the vigilance, the inspiration, the cleverness 
 that leaves nothing to chance that might be 
 taken from him by reckoning or foresight ; he 
 has the loftiness of deliberation, the over- 
 whelming rapidity of decision of a great 
 general on the chessboard of the field of battle. 
 Balzac, whose strong point was not modesty, 
 used to say : ' Moliere made a miser, but I 
 have made avarice.' I would venture to say 
 quite pleasantly in the words of Cydias : ' By 
 your leave, it is just the other way about, and 
 after all that is paying you no slight com- 
 pliment. Moliere made avarice. There is still 
 in VAvare much abstraction, much that is 
 abstract. No doubt Harpagon is alive ; but
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 157 
 
 he is still and above all a collection of all the 
 traits of classical avarice gathered together 
 quite ingeniously into a single man, who 
 after all has his three dimensions. You made 
 a miser, that is to say a most living creature, 
 more alive than is Moliere's, fully detailed, 
 leading a most minutely realised life, living 
 all the time on every page, and one who is 
 not, who is never, any other miser save himself 
 alone. 9 
 
 ' And, moreover, you endowed him with the 
 genius of his passion, the right genius befitting 
 his passion which can be sustained by nothing 
 save its own self. And that is a trait at once 
 deep and admirable.' 
 
 In the same way Philippe Brideau, goaded 
 on by his passion for plunder, finds out at 
 Issoudun that he has some gifts as a psycholo- 
 gist and a diplomatist, by no means unrivalled 
 ones, and yet quite remarkable. Even Baron 
 Hulot invents the cleverest breaches of trust 
 in the administration of Algeria, which might 
 just as well have succeeded instead of failing, 
 though it would not have altered the novel, 
 for after lucky thefts Hulot would certainly 
 have gone on to commit one that would have 
 brought about his downfall, and the only
 
 158 BALZAC 
 
 important thing here is to show passion giving 
 genius to the impassioned man. 
 
 Now, that is true. Some one has spoken of 
 4 inventive necessity,' and passion, being a 
 necessity for those whom it dominates, calls 
 forth all the inventiveness of which he is cap- 
 able, and of which he would be wholly unsus- 
 pecting and unconscious were it not brought 
 out by that passion. I think it is Descartes 
 who said that the passions fix and make definite 
 the ideas to which they cling, and in which 
 they are interested, such ideas as, without 
 their impulsion, would pass by without being 
 in any way held or defined. The passions 
 make an idea sink into the mind, and give it 
 strength by bringing to bear on it the entire 
 weight which is theirs. If genius be ' an in- 
 finite capacity for taking pains,' passion con- 
 fers that just by keeping the mind for ever 
 fixed on an idea or group of ideas which con- 
 duce to its fulfilment, and consequently it 
 gives genius. Just as Newton discovers the 
 law of gravity ' by continually thinking about 
 it,' so passion makes Grandet find fortune by 
 obliging him to keep thinking of it, and never 
 allowing him one single moment of his days or 
 nights to think of anything else.
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 159 
 
 That is Balzac's special discovery ; for I 
 do not find that any of his predecessors were 
 aware of it. 
 
 This way of conceiving and carrying out 
 character has disadvantages which are readily 
 foreseen and which I have in part already 
 pointed out. Lofty or delicate - minded 
 characters are nearly always a failure. They 
 could, indeed, hardly be otherwise. If a man 
 be a single passion fatally devolving like 
 a force of Nature, he cannot help being a 
 maniac or a kind of monster : a maniac if his 
 passion be vulgar or trivial, such as over- 
 eating or a craze for collecting ; a monster if 
 his passion be mighty and enormous, such as 
 ambition or avarice. 
 
 But what if it be a noble passion ? 
 
 It does not matter so long as it too acts like 
 a fatal force, if nothing holds it bridled in the 
 heart of its possessor. The man will be a 
 virtuous maniac and nothing more ; a monster 
 of fatherhood like Goriot. What makes a 
 character lofty so far as art is concerned is 
 not a beautiful passion ; it is a beautiful 
 passion triumphing over meaner ones ; it is 
 not the organic growth, so to speak, the mere 
 vegetation of good instinct in the heart, it is
 
 160 BALZAC 
 
 the triumph of that good instinct : Achilles 
 is beautiful when he yields to Priam, only 
 because he feels an impulse to strangle him. 
 Now, where there is no conflict there can be 
 no victory. But Balzac has no belief in the 
 conflict, since he holds to the omnipresence of a 
 single passion in a heart. That is the reason 
 why even these virtuous men are not great souls. 
 I have nothing to say here concerning free-will 
 from the philosophical point of view ; but 
 were it ever laid aside as a doctrine, it would 
 still remain indispensable to all artistic works 
 in which humanity provides the protagonists. 
 As soon as man becomes a thing, things are 
 more interesting than he. 
 
 Do you want an example of how powerless 
 Balzac is in describing a complex character, 
 and especially in showing the conflict of 
 passions in a man's heart ? There are two 
 dramas running parallel and they are indeed 
 wonderfully well ordered and linked together 
 in le Pere Goriot. There is Goriot's story, and 
 Rastignac's story of his start in life. Goriot's 
 story is the typical tale a la Balzac, the paint- 
 ing of a fatal passion ending in madness and 
 death. The story of Rastignac's starting out 
 is of quite a different order : there Balzac
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 161 
 
 wanted to describe a soul still wavering be- 
 tween the ruling passion that is beginning to 
 get the better of him ambition and the 
 scruples of honesty due to his upbringing. 
 ' You have still a few swaddling clothes soiled 
 with virtue,' as Vautrin says to him. It is 
 obvious that herein there is drama, curious, 
 alluring, disquieting drama in real truth. 
 Well, it is the most bloodless part of the 
 whole book. Old Goriot, with his love of 
 self-sacrifice and his wild fury of devoted 
 attachment, throws everything else into the 
 shade. Rastignac's internal conflict, however 
 careful Balzac may be in describing it, what- 
 ever may be the material place he gives it, is 
 hardly noticeable at all. You might even say 
 that I was wrong just now hi calling Rastignac 
 a complex character, for he is just like the 
 others, has but one passion, it being in his case 
 to get on by hook or by crook and per fas aut 
 nefas, even when in le Pere Goriot as Balzac 
 depicts him he merely represents ambition 
 in the bud, with still a few scruples due to 
 heredity and upbringing, one who is bored by 
 them rather than at war with them ; and this way 
 of looking at things is plausible enough. 
 
 There still remains the relative complexity
 
 162 BALZAC 
 
 of young Rastignac, and the conflict, slight 
 though it be, between his ambitious instincts 
 and his childish virtues, which Balzac describes 
 but weakly; having but little understanding 
 of such things, he could not illuminate them 
 effectively. His genius was brought to a 
 standstill, or at least stood hesitating. He was 
 really no more than a powerful painter of 
 primitive forces. 
 
 Hence his superiority in the painting of 
 middle or lower-class humanity, in his minute 
 descriptions of commonplace things. In his 
 most questionable works, he is saved by his 
 fine portraiture of maniacs, as, for instance, 
 that of the tyrannical self-supposed invalid, 
 M. de Mortsauf , in le Lys dans la Vallee. Hence 
 his inferiority in the few studies of upper-class 
 men and women which he attempted. Hence 
 his almost complete failure in his portraits of 
 young girls. In young girls' characters an 
 author may put almost anything he likes ; 
 they are so very complex that hardly anything 
 will go beyond the limits of likelihood. Un- 
 doubtedly ; but what is most unlike life is 
 to make them quite devoid of complexity. 
 Balzac's are all simple, dull, insipid, and a 
 little silly Eugenie Grandet, Ursule Mirouet,
 
 HIS CHARACTERS 163 
 
 Modeste Mignon with the bare possible ex- 
 ception of Rosalie de Watteville in Albert 
 Savarus. When you compare them with the 
 least country lass of George Sand's, with 
 Fadette, Jeanne, or La Brulette, or to the 
 young bourgeoises of the same author in Mont- 
 Reveche, in Mile. Merquem, or in la Confession 
 d'une jeune Fille, you at once feel all the differ- 
 ence. 
 
 Balzac was an energetic and robust man ; 
 he described well those human beings whose 
 passions resemble spring-tides or volcanoes, 
 and whose actions are like earthquakes. Some 
 people are like that, and, under the apparent 
 tranquillity imposed by social uniformity, they 
 are much more numerous than we suppose ; 
 but we must not forget that there are others.
 
 164 BALZAC 
 
 IF we go into the details of his narratives, his 
 descriptions, his dissertations, his dialogues, in 
 short into details of his craftsmanship, the first 
 impression we get is one of prodigious uneven- 
 ness. And that is due first of all to the fact 
 that, in common with some other writers, he 
 had not genius all the time ; and secondly it 
 comes of there being in him a romantic, a 
 true realist, and a base realist, and from the 
 fact that he would mix up his romanticism, 
 true realism, and base realism all pell-mell 
 whereas Flaubert would put his realism into 
 one book and his romanticism into the next, 
 indiscriminately, without discretion or dis- 
 cernment, and without being in the least 
 shocked or deterred by irrelevance or impro- 
 priety. 
 
 In a word, he was lacking in taste. He 
 lacked it in a most extraordinary way, in such 
 a way indeed as to teach it, and that wonder-
 
 HIS TASTE 165 
 
 fully well, by the example of its contrary ; and 
 in that he proved himself singularly useful. 
 
 He was a romantic of the decadence, of the 
 declining later period. What was called 
 romanticism, that is to say, the literature of 
 sensibility and imagination of imagination 
 above all had met the fate of all literary 
 schools. It had become formal, a mould for 
 unintelligent copyists, and it had a ridiculous 
 rear -guard. Its extraordinary heroes had 
 either become bandits or turned into bur- 
 lesque and wholly incredible swashbucklers. 
 Its weak and querulous women, its Ophelias, 
 its Doloridas, and its Elviras, had become 
 airy and intangible creatures, ' tenues sine 
 corpore vitce, volitantes cava sub imagine for mce,' 
 its religious effusions had evaporated in a hazy 
 mysticism, its strange adventures had degener- 
 ated into incredible tangles of fantastical 
 events ; its elegiac poetry had degenerated 
 into ballad songs like that of Loisa Puget, 1 
 ' When you shall see the dead leaves fall.' 
 All this base romanticism for it seems diffi- 
 cult to give it a more definite or more honour- 
 able name Balzac welcomed and enjoyed, 
 he a man of genius, unless it be indeed that he 
 
 1 A popular composer of ballads (1810-89). TR.
 
 166 BALZAC 
 
 exploited it through knowing and despising his 
 public ; and he gave it a huge place in his work. 
 There is something of a Eugene Sue in him, a 
 Soulie, or a bad pupil of Ballanche, 1 if indeed 
 Ballanche may be said to have had any good 
 ones. He told lurid stories of strange con- 
 victs who underwent fantastical transforma- 
 tions (Derniere Incarnation de Vautriri), of 
 mysterious and criminal associations (Histoire 
 des Treize), novels of the police-courts (Une 
 tenebreuse Affaire), in which we find observa- 
 tion and a certain historical sense, though they 
 remind you, above all, of Gaboriau. He wasted 
 half his life in doing that, and I will add once 
 more that it would have been all one to me 
 had it not happened, as it almost always does, 
 that in some of his other works, and those 
 among the most serious, the wild extravagance 
 of the circulating library novelist breaks out 
 all at once, both upsetting and spoiling the 
 character of the story. We were feeling true 
 reality, well observed and well drawn, and all 
 at once a quick and unaccountable stroke of 
 luck happens to some one, an unexpected 
 change of scene or a leap into the romanesque 
 shocks us and nullifies all our pleasure. Vulgar 
 
 1 Mystic writer (1776-1847) and friend of Mme. Re'camier. Tn.
 
 HIS TASTE 167 
 
 and facile imagination the student's or the 
 grisette's imagination has carried the day. 
 
 Such is the sudden transition of M. de Mort- 
 sauf (le Lys dans la Vallee] from penury to 
 great wealth ; such is Philippe Brideau's rapid 
 and inexplicable metamorphosis from a swind- 
 ling old soldier, under police supervision, into 
 an officer general, high dignitary, duke and 
 peer of France, or next door to it. Are we 
 reading a novel or the Grande Duchesse de 
 Gerolstein ? * 
 
 The Illusions perdues is a good realistic novel 
 in which there is much talent. But look 
 closely into the life that Rubempre leads when 
 afloat in journalism. Look at the account of 
 one of his days, either of pleasure or of toil. 
 I defy you to find in it the greatest power of 
 work being supposed and sleep quite left out 
 of account less than forty or forty-five hours. 
 Pantagruel's day's work with Ponocrates seems 
 mere idleness compared to it. Remember 
 likewise the no less gigantic wonders as regards 
 work and economy in Albert Savarus and la 
 Peau de Chagrin. We are in the midst of 
 phantasmagoria. It spoils and weakens what 
 is beside it, makes you distrustful, and takes 
 
 1 The opera-bouffe of Offenbach. TR.
 
 168 BALZAC 
 
 away, so to speak, from the authority of his 
 observation as a painter of manners. 
 
 Nothing could be queerer, as a conception, 
 as an imagination utterly freed from reality, 
 than Petits Bourgeois and Derniere Incarnation 
 de Vautrin ; but in Illusions perdues, that is 
 itself so sensible a novel, that false cardinal 
 who meets on a road a young man he has never 
 seen before, and who kisses him after ten 
 minutes' talk, and that Rubempre who allows 
 the former to do so without the least marvel- 
 ling, are at least very unusual people. In a 
 story full of characters ever so real, a single 
 false and conventional being is enough to set 
 us all at sixes and sevens. In la Cousine Bette 
 we come across that little Atala of the Fau- 
 bourg Saint- Antoine, a tiny girl who is physic- 
 ally depraved and yet perfectly innocent, 
 since she is quite ignorant of everything, not 
 only of the difference between good and evil, 
 but of the civil institutions as well marriage, 
 town hall, church, the difference between a 
 legal wife and one who is not so ; and it seems 
 that she has never seen a wedding pass along 
 her suburban streets. Call it lack of con- 
 science if you will ; but, as for ignorance of 
 social conditions and acts in a little Parisian
 
 HIS TASTE 169 
 
 girl why, it is simply fantastic. It is a young 
 savage, and not a suburban girl that you are 
 introduced to. And this is the more so as she 
 is far from being stupid ; she is clever and 
 sharp, and seems to have read the newspapers, 
 for she has quite caught the style of them : 
 4 Father wanted it ... but mother did not 
 approve ' * I can't say why, but I was the cause 
 of continual bickering between my parents.' 
 Such are the irreconcilable elements which 
 proclaim the glaring improbability. Such an 
 Atala does not exist. 
 
 Femme de trente Ans was, in its first drafting, 
 a plain tale, precise and interesting in its 
 truth, and Sainte-Beuve was quite right in 
 advising us to read it in its first shape. When 
 Balzac had embellished it, this is what he 
 turned it into : When twenty-five, Mme. 
 d'Aiglemont, who had married a booby of 
 whom she had once been fond, but of whom she 
 had grown weary, took a lover and was soon 
 the involuntary cause of his death. When 
 thirty she took another. Her daughter 
 Helene, who is the child of her husband, cannot 
 stand her little brother, who is the first lover's 
 son, and his mother's favourite. During a 
 walk in the suburbs she pushes him over a
 
 170 BALZAC 
 
 steep embankment into the Bievre, and he is 
 drowned. She grows up. She is now eigh- 
 teen. One evening, fairly late, there is a 
 double knock at the door of M. and Mme. 
 d'Aiglemont's mansion. It is a man who has 
 just committed murder, and who is pursued 
 by mounted gendarmes. Without vouch- 
 safing to tell them his name or anything else, 
 he demands their hospitality for two hours, 
 and M. d'Aiglemont grants it him, and, while he 
 goes out to talk to the gendarmes, who in turn 
 have been knocking at the door, Helene goes 
 up to the bedroom in which her father has 
 hidden the strange visitor, contemplates him, 
 exchanges a few words, and comes down again. 
 She is soon followed by the murderer, who 
 breaks in upon the family circle. ' A murderer 
 here ! ' cries M. d'Aiglemont. Then comes the 
 thunderbolt. As for Helene, that word seemed 
 to decide her life for her, and her face betrayed 
 not the least sign of astonishment. It was as 
 though she had been expecting this man. Her 
 so vast thoughts had not been without their 
 meaning. The punishment which God had 
 prepared for her sins was revealed. Deeming 
 herself as much a criminal as he, the girl looked 
 on him with an untroubled eye ; she was his
 
 HIS TASTE 171 
 
 mate, his sister. For her, God's will was mani- 
 fest in this strange event. A few years later 
 and reason would have righted her remorse ; 
 but at that moment it maddened her. The 
 stranger remained motionless and cold. A 
 disdainful smile hovered over his face and his 
 thick red lips. ' Murder an old man ! ' said 
 M. d'Aiglemont to the stranger, * ... have you 
 never had any family then ? . . . Away with 
 you. . . .' The murderer withdraws ; but 
 Helene goes after him, and declares that she 
 will follow him wherever he goes. She will not 
 go back on that resolution. ' But his hands 
 are stained with blood,' says her father. ' I 
 will wipe it off,' replies his daughter. ' But 
 how do you know that he wants you ? ' * I 
 believe in him,' says Helene. ' But you can't 
 realise all the sufferings that you will have to 
 go through.' ' I think of his.' Finally she sets 
 out with the murderer, who is quite willing to 
 take her. 4 Madam,' says M. d'Aiglemont to 
 his wife, ' I think I must be dreaming ; this 
 adventure conceals some mystery ; you must 
 know something about it.' 
 
 The murderer turns pirate ; M. d'Aiglemont 
 meets him during a voyage, the pirate captur- 
 ing the vessel on which he is a passenger, and
 
 172 BALZAC 
 
 slaughtering its crew. He was just on the 
 point of throwing M. d'Aiglemont himself into 
 the water when their eyes met ; * the father 
 and the son-in-law recognised each other in 
 a flash.' Thereupon the son-in-law is merci- 
 ful and throws his father-in-law into his 
 daughter's arms : ' Helene ! ' ' My father ! ' 
 . . . ' And are you happy ? ' 'I am the 
 happiest of women.' ' And your conscience ? ' 
 4 He is my conscience.' The generous pirate 
 gives M. d'Aiglemont a huge bundle of bank- 
 notes and puts him ashore on the French coast. 
 M. d'Aiglemont dies shortly afterwards. 
 
 Some years later Mme. d'Aiglemont, at a 
 small village hostelry in the Pyrenees where 
 she has come to drink the waters, meets a 
 young woman who is dying. It is Helene, 
 who dies, repentant, in her mother's arms. 
 
 The latter had a younger daughter, Mo'ina, 
 left. She married, and had a lover who was 
 the son of the very man last favoured by her 
 mother. Mme. d'Aiglemont lectures her about 
 it. ' Well, mother, I did not suppose you would 
 be jealous of any one but the father.' ' My 
 child,' answered Mme. d'Aiglemont, in an 
 altered voice, ' you have just been more pitiless 
 towards your mother than was ever the man
 
 HIS TASTE 173 
 
 whom she offended, more pitiless than God 
 Himself perchance will be.' And she dies the 
 same day. 
 
 That is what Balzac looked upon, and quite 
 seriously perhaps, as a novel of manners. 
 
 All the same his mysticism, so perfectly 
 unlike his nature, smacks of the romantic. 
 There is something about it that is tender, 
 strained, and deliberately sought for. Not 
 only are Louis Lambert and Seraphita (in spite 
 of its rather beautiful lyrical ending) tedious 
 and badly linked day-dreams, but they do not 
 even ring true. They seem to be, like George 
 Sand's les Sept Cordes de la Lyre, the effect of a 
 kind of desperate resolve to produce something 
 in keeping with the prevailing taste. ' They 
 make monsters, let us make monsters too,' 
 said George Sand. ' They also make clouds,' 
 Balzac seems to say, ' let us therefore be as 
 cloudy as any of them.' 
 
 It was his ambition to rewrite Sainte-Beuve's 
 Volupte, which he considered false, to write 
 the novel of chaste love, of pure virtue, and 
 exalted delicacy ; and he carried out his 
 intention in le Lys dans la Vallee. That book, 
 very much admired when it was first brought 
 out, is perhaps, except for a few details, the
 
 174 BALZAC 
 
 very worst novel that I know of. Because 
 Mme. de Mortsauf keeps her chastity and makes 
 speeches of such abysmal pedantry as far out- 
 do la Nouvelle Helotse, about virtue, abnega- 
 tion, renunciation, and self-sacrifice, Balzac 
 thinks he has described the honest woman. 
 It is true that this honest woman spends all 
 her evenings in a park explaining virtue to a 
 young man whom she loves. It seems even 
 that she would lose nothing on the score of 
 honesty by talking less about it. All the more 
 so an account of her style, which is thus : ' Did 
 not my confession show you the three children 
 for whose sake I must not transgress, on whom 
 I must weep my healing dew, and let my soul 
 irradiate them without pollution of its slightest 
 particle ? Do not embitter a mother's milk ! ' 
 The young man is just as upright, and has the 
 same simple way of expressing himself. It is 
 he who relates a pathetic scene in which he 
 played a very beautiful part : ' Madame is 
 right, I said, beginning to speak in a tremulous 
 voice which vibrated in those two hearts into 
 which I threw my hopes lost for ever, and 
 which I calmed by the expression of the loftiest 
 of all grief, the dull cry of which quenched 
 that dispute, just as everything is hushed when
 
 HIS TASTE 175 
 
 the lion roars. Yea, the supremest boon 
 which reason can confer on us is to ascribe our 
 virtues to the beings whose happiness is our 
 work, and to whom we give happiness not by 
 calculating, nor by duty, but by an inexhaust- 
 ible and voluntary affection.' Balzac evi- 
 dently took pains. The thing was to set really 
 elect souls thinking and speaking. He under- 
 stood well enough that high moral distinction 
 consists in expressing the thoughts of Joseph 
 Prudhomme in the style of M. d'Arlincourt. 
 
 Then there was in Balzac a mock romantic, 
 a popular romantic, a trashy romantic, who 
 plays havoc with the realistic writer ; there was 
 the true realistic writer whom we have already 
 closely examined and admired ; and then, 
 at the other end of the scale, there was a rather 
 low realistic writer, a little unkindly, who gives 
 us a foretaste of what was for some time called 
 4 Naturalism. 5 
 
 This low realism consists in seeking truth 
 and reality among the lowest and most repug- 
 nant parts of real life, as though they were the 
 whole of it. Antiquity with its Apuleius and 
 Petronius knew of it, the sixteenth century with 
 its Beroald de Verville and the eighteenth cen- 
 tury with its Restif also knew of it. Realism,
 
 176 BALZAC 
 
 true realism, slips easily into this degeneracy 
 of itself. It is necessary to understand, also, 
 that if realism be a solid basis of art, nothing 
 is nevertheless more difficult than to be truly 
 realistic without overstepping the mark. Real- 
 istic art consists in seeing things and men 
 exactly and dispassionately, and in describing 
 them in the same way. It should therefore 
 have, for method not to throw at random all 
 reality into its work of art, for that is materi- 
 ally impossible, and if realism meant no more 
 than that, the art of realism would consist of 
 walking up and down the street but rather to 
 choose without passion, with no other taste 
 but for the truth, the most significant among 
 the thousand details of reality, and to arrange 
 them hi order, so as to give us the very impress 
 of reality itself, only even more vividly. 
 
 It seems easy enough though it is most 
 difficult, all question of genius being put aside. 
 The fact is that when an artist writes he does 
 so as every one does everything, impelled there- 
 to by some sort of passion. There is always, in 
 spite of himself, some ulterior motive, some 
 secret hankering to prove, convince, touch, 
 convert, or win over the reader ; to pour into 
 his work something of his own thoughts, hopes,
 
 HIS TASTE 177 
 
 regrets, or desires. Here, on the other hand, 
 there must be nothing of all that ; realistic 
 art must be as impersonal as is possible. It 
 must reveal nothing of the author's own feel- 
 ings. And why not ? 
 
 Because we are concerned merely with the 
 description of reality, and as soon as I catch 
 sight of the author's own feelings, or even of 
 his leanings, I at once suspect him of having 
 arranged his reality and given it a twist to suit 
 his own predilections. From that moment the 
 illusion of reality is no more. It has failed. 
 We are dealing with quite another art which, 
 I am fully aware, may be quite admirable ; 
 but it is no longer realism. 
 
 If this be true, it will be readily seen how 
 very intricate things become. It is very 
 difficult for a writer to write without being 
 moved thereto by his feelings, and as soon as 
 his feelings stir him in writing he ceases to 
 be a realist. For exactly as something ceases 
 to be realism, so it becomes not merely some- 
 thing different, but its very contrary. 
 
 And this degeneration of realism into things 
 which are the very negation of it happens con- 
 stantly in the history of the art. Racine is a 
 realist with a passion for truth, as well as for a
 
 178 BALZAC 
 
 certain conventional nobleness which rarely 
 makes you lose sight of reality ; La Bruyere is 
 a wonderfully exact realist, but with a certain 
 misanthropical bitterness ; the English realists 
 of the nineteenth century, with a penetrating 
 insight and an incomparable sense of reality, 
 take good care to move the reader over human 
 misery, and have effusions of sensibility, as in 
 Dickens, or have a bent for moralising and a 
 certain preachiness, as in George Eliot and 
 these things are most acceptable and often 
 touching in themselves, but they already lead 
 us a little astray from that art which claims 
 to be no more than ' the sworn testimony of a 
 witness on oath.' 1 
 
 It even comes about, according to the special 
 feeling which happens to prompt the author, 
 that realism leads to the most divergent ways 
 in describing the same people. Flaubert and 
 Tolstoi have both a real passion for middle- 
 class men of less than average intellect. Only 
 Flaubert describes them and that wonder- 
 fully well with truly savage irony, banter, and 
 sarcasm, nudging us every moment most 
 ungraciously, as who should say, ' Are they 
 
 1 George Eliot's own expression in Adam Bede. Compare 
 le Roman Naturatiste of Brunetiere.
 
 HIS TASTE 179 
 
 ludicrous enough ? ' while Tolstoi describes, 
 with wonderful fidelity, but with a kind of 
 veneration and tenderness, seeming as though 
 at every line he actually exclaimed, c What 
 real grandeur ! ' And I do not know which 
 of the two is the less pleasing. 
 
 In France it is, as a rule, to the side of 
 sarcasm oftenest implicit that our realistic 
 writers tend. Scarron, Furetiere (the author 
 of Caquets de rAccouchee), La Bruyere hardly 
 described true, common, middle-class life save 
 to mock at it. Realism, in the classical period, 
 is generally considered only fit subject-matter 
 for comic work. 
 
 Balzac's originality is just in his understand- 
 ing that it might be supremely tragical. Only 
 if it is on this side that he scored, it is also the 
 side on which he overreached himself. That is 
 where his passion leads him, that is where he 
 becomes systematic, and that is where he goes 
 astray from true realism. Realism becomes 
 with him a form of pessimism. He was un- 
 deniably fond of looking at the ugly side of 
 things and of men. He would storm in private 
 conversation against 'the hypocrisy of the 
 beautiful.' He loved to push to extremes, 
 beyond the limits of truth, at least beyond
 
 180 BALZAC 
 
 the limits of ordinary and average truth (and 
 ordinary and average truth is the proper 
 quarry for true realism) the horror of his 
 situations, the villainy, the treachery, and the 
 meanness of men ; in short, he opened up the 
 way for that ' brutal literature ' which Weiss so 
 happily named. He loved subjects that were 
 more than a little shameful, sinister, or shocking, 
 as may be seen in Splendeurs et Miseres des 
 Courtisanes, la Fille aux Yeux (For, and Une 
 Passion dans le Desert. He loved what was 
 violent and brutal. 
 
 It is neither brutality nor violence that I 
 pretend to root out of art's domain ; it is brutal- 
 ity and violence when they are manifestly 
 false, and by false I mean most exceptional, 
 outside average truth, and when they ruin the 
 impression of reality which the work made at 
 its outset. That Rubempre should be reduced 
 to spending a night by the corpse of his mistress, 
 that he should be forced to rhyme drinking 
 songs and obscenity to pay for its burial that 
 I find tragic, and I am moved, for it may very 
 well be true. But that Vautrin, hidden at 
 the Vauquer boarding-house, with all the 
 appearance of an honest and jovial bourgeois, 
 should suddenly launch out into a dissertation
 
 HIS TASTE 181 
 
 (wonderful indeed in itself) on Paris considered 
 as a cut-throat, seems to me no more than a 
 useless and cynical outburst ; it is not Vautrin 
 who speaks he is far too clever for that 
 it is Balzac himself who here obtrudes with 
 his own pessimistic profession of faith. In 
 making Mme. Marneffe in her death-bed 
 repentance say in ignoble language such as was 
 never hers in life ' I must make up God,' I 
 see only too well that Balzac falsifies the 
 character, stretches it to the very limit and 
 beyond, outrages truth so as to glut his whim 
 for shocking the honest reader by an exhibition 
 of coarseness. 
 
 I formerly exaggerated the extent of brutal 
 literature in Balzac's work. All things con- 
 sidered, it is not very considerable, and if the 
 thing be to assess it, which seems a little 
 pedantic, though it be no more than critical 
 honesty, the extent in Balzac's work of shoddy 
 romanticism is much more important than that 
 of low realism. Still, that too is sufficiently 
 important, and if in regard to it Balzac hardly 
 went the length of his contemptible successors, 
 who have ended in rehabilitating him, he still 
 went much farther than his predecessors of the 
 nineteenth century, if he may be said to have
 
 182 BALZAC 
 
 had any. And if the inheritors of that part of 
 his legacy cause him to appear innocent when 
 compared with them, it is still true that they 
 put the responsibility on their forerunner, since 
 they march under his flag, as indeed they 
 have considerable reason for doing. A whole 
 literature grew up out of Balzac's cesspools. 
 A good many writers saw or wished to see 
 nothing but that in him and imitated nothing 
 else. He is responsible for all the easy-going 
 and damnable audacity of all those novel- 
 writers who pretended to believe that realism 
 lies in the study of sinister or shameful abnor- 
 mality; who, under the cloak of reality, only 
 made a show of loathsome horror, and who, 
 I very much regret to say, ended by turning 
 the word ' realism ' into a current synonym for 
 4 infamous writings. 5 
 
 Ready-made romanticism, coarse realism are 
 the two things which spoil Balzac's work, the 
 former very much and the latter a little. 
 What spoils nearly the whole of it is the 
 vulgarity that was inherent in the man's 
 nature and crept into nearly everything he did. 
 Sainte-Beuve, in a short admonishment ad- 
 dressed to Taine but intended especially for 
 Balzac (and we know how fond he was of these
 
 HIS TASTE 183 
 
 underhand and indirect ways), pointed out very 
 neatly this almost inherent vulgarity: 'In 
 speaking of la Princesse de Cleves, you cite one 
 of Balzac's novels le Lys dans la Vallee, and you 
 own that people find it " coarse and medical " 
 when compared with the other. Let me tell 
 you that you suppose rather too easily that 
 those quite modern novels, those parts of the 
 dialogue quoted by you, are accepted or have 
 been accepted when they were first brought 
 out as types of present-day delicacy. For my 
 part I confess I lived in my youth only with 
 people who were shocked by them, though 
 indeed they did justice to their authors in 
 other parts of their talent. I can assure you 
 that those passages that seem to you coarse 
 only when compared with la Princesse de 
 Cleves seemed in my time and to most readers 
 quite coarse in themselves. Our scales, even 
 in that nineteenth century so different from 
 the others, were less clumsy than you suppose. 
 It is true that fair criticism, sincere and vera- 
 cious, was, as it perhaps still is, only made in 
 talking ; people write only to praise. That 
 would merely prove that you must discount 
 much that is written, and that when it is said 
 and repeated that literature is the expression
 
 184 BALZAC 
 
 of society, it is advisable to accept the dictum 
 only with considerable caution and reserve ' 
 (1864). 
 
 Yes, it is perfectly true that Balzac's work is 
 marred by much trivial coarseness which can 
 never be looked on as anything else, whatever 
 be the age. He is vulgar, for instance, when- 
 ever he tries to be witty, for he had no real wit 
 whatever. He is wonderful in the conversa- 
 tion which he puts into the mouths of 'the 
 wittiest men in Paris.' They are stupid ; his 
 Parisian humorists carry on like merry-making 
 wagoners ; his dukes indulge in puns, in a 
 pen pres, and in queues de mots. He himself, 
 when witty on his own account, talks as 
 follows : 4 Instead of those heaps of stuffed 
 game fated never to be cooked, instead of those 
 fantastic fishes that justify the sally of the 
 mountebank, " I saw a beautiful carp, I hope 
 to buy it in a week," instead of those first-fruits 
 (which ought rather to be called last-fruits) 
 deceitfully displayed in shop-windows for the 
 delight of corporals and their sweethearts, 
 honest Flicoteaux set out salad-bowls adorned 
 with many mends in which heaps of stewed 
 prunes cheered the eyes of the guests, sure that 
 the word dessert, so wasted on most bills, was
 
 HIS TASTE 185 
 
 not a mere title-deed. . . . The food is but 
 little varied. Potatoes last eternally here ; 
 were there not a single potato left in Ireland, 
 nor anywhere else, you would still find some at 
 Flicoteaux's. They have appeared there for 
 the last thirty years under that fair colour of 
 which Titian was so fond, sprinkled over with 
 chopped pot herbs, and enjoying a privilege 
 much envied by the ladies that of looking in 
 1814 just as they will appear in 1840. . . . The 
 female of the ox predominates, and her son 
 abounds under a variety of most ingenious 
 aspects. An old slander, once again repeated 
 at the time of Lucien's coming, consisted in 
 attributing the appearance of beef-steak to 
 some mortality among horses. . . . The guests 
 there have a gravity which hardly ever thaws, 
 perhaps owing to the catholicity of the wine 
 which forbids all expansion. . . .' And so on. 
 What may seem astonishing at first, though 
 it ought not to surprise us when we remember 
 that the ' thing seen ' is always a thing seen 
 through a temperament he saw something 
 of the world, and so true is it that mere obser- 
 vation is not enough and that our own feelings, 
 at least in part, are compromised in the impres- 
 sion which things make on us, that his high life
 
 186 BALZAC 
 
 reminds you of a door-keeper's lodge in the 
 poorer districts. A lady questioning a vis- 
 count says, ' Do you really mean it, my pet ? ' 
 A duchess exclaims 4 Hein ? ' And Eugene 
 understood that hein which need not perhaps 
 astonish us when we remember his extraordin- 
 ary behaviour, for two hours on end, at Mme. 
 Restaud's. A viscountess says to a baron at 
 their second meeting, ' You are a darling man,' 
 and Eugene (for once again it is he) says to 
 himself, ' She is charming ! ' He is really an 
 astonishing fellow is Eugene. 
 
 It all becomes very amusing, without Balzac 
 in the least meaning it, by reason of its absurd- 
 ity. You might take it to be a parody. These 
 are great ladies, and there is even a young girl : 
 4 Hortense's first word [she is the young girl] 
 on addressing her aunt had been, " How 's 
 your lover ? . . . I should like to meet him." 
 " So as to see what sort of a looking man it is 
 that can love an old nanny-goat ? " " He 
 must be a monstrous old clerk with a billy-goat's 
 beard," said Hortense. " I have borne him in 
 my heart these four years. ..." " You don't 
 know what it is to love." " We all know that 
 business the minute we are born. ..." 
 And so on.
 
 HIS TASTE 187 
 
 A baroness is obliged to seek an interview 
 with an actress, and Balzac warns us that she 
 finds her calm and sedate, noble, simple, and 
 with a bearing that pays homage to the virtuous 
 wife. Whereupon the actress summons her 
 domestic, and has with him, the baroness 
 making a third party, a back-parlour conversa- 
 tion : ' Madam's embroideress is married.' 
 ' An irregular union ? ' asked Josepha. And 
 then to the baroness herself : ' We '11 soon find 
 your husband for you, and, if he is down in 
 the mud, well, he can wash himself again. For 
 well-brought-up people it is only a question of 
 clothes. . . . Damme ! The poor man 's fond 
 of women. Well, look here, if you 'd only got 
 a little of our spice about you you 'd never 
 have let him go running loose ; for you would 
 have been what we know how to be all women 
 for one man. The government ought really to 
 start a training-school for honest women. But 
 governments are so strait-laced ! People we lead 
 lead them. As for me, I pity the people. . . .' 
 That is Balzac's notion of fine breeding. 
 
 He can say of Hulot, the prey of Mme. Mar- 
 neffe : 4 He had not yet known the charms of 
 virtue that withstands, and Valerie made him 
 taste them, as the song goes, all along the river.
 
 188 BALZAC 
 
 " Don't begin by dishonouring the woman whom 
 you pretend to love," Valerie would say, 
 " otherwise I shall not believe you, and I like 
 to believe you," she added with an ogling 
 glance, like Saint Theresa squinting at the 
 sky.' 
 
 In the admirable Menage de Gargon, one-third 
 of the whole book is devoted to relating the 
 silly tricks of the Chevaliers de la Desceuvrance 
 without their being in the least degree useful 
 to the development of the story, nor even con- 
 nected with the novel in any way whatever, 
 so convinced was the author that these smart 
 tricks were interesting in themselves. 
 
 Here again is the Marchioness d'Espard, who 
 says to Rubempre, on seeing him, I believe, 
 for the first time, '. . . You treat these ideas 
 as visionary or merely trifling ; but we have 
 seen a little of life and we know how much 
 stability there is in the title of count for 
 an elegant and handsome young man.' And 
 Lucien has not a word nor a gesture to offer by 
 way of protest ; he finds it quite natural that 
 a marchioness should say that to him point- 
 blank. Balzac too. ' Lucien thought it was 
 a prodigy like the one whom he met at his 
 first soiree at the Dramatic Panorama.' And
 
 HIS TASTE 189 
 
 Balzac himself shows no sensible difference 
 between the soiree at the Dramatic Panorama 
 and that spent at Mme. de Montcornet's. 
 
 In la Femme abandonnee Balzac meant to 
 paint a woman of the highest rank in the stern 
 and sad dignity of her abandonment, her 
 solitude, and her despair. This is how she 
 receives a young gentleman whom she has 
 never seen, and who has forced his way into 
 her house by means of a trick, though a harm- 
 less one : ' At the corner of the mantelpiece 
 he saw a young woman sitting in a modern 
 easy-chair, the low seat of which allowed her 
 to tilt her head at various angles, all of them 
 full of grace and elegance ; to bow, to bend, 
 to hold it up languidly as if it were a heavy 
 burden ; then to cross her feet[?], to show or 
 to hide them under the long folds of a black 
 dress. The viscountess was about to lay down 
 on a small round table the book she had been 
 reading ; when, having at the same time 
 turned her head towards M. de Nueil, the book 
 being badly put [this book that turns its head 
 towards M. de Nueil is very curious], she 
 stumbled into the gap which was between the 
 table and the easy-chair. Without seeming in 
 the least upset by the incident, she rose and
 
 190 BALZAC 
 
 returned the young man's bow, but in a 
 scarcely perceptible way, hardly rising from 
 the seat in which her body remained sunken. 
 She bent forward, quickly poked the fire, and 
 then, stooping down, picked up her glove, 
 which she negligently put on her left hand, 
 looking about for the other with a glance which 
 she promptly repressed ; for with her right 
 hand, so white, ringless, delicate, with tapering 
 fingers, the pink nails forming perfect ovals, 
 she indicated a chair as though bidding Gaston 
 to sit down. When her unknown guest was 
 seated, she turned her head towards him with 
 an interrogatory and coquettish movement, 
 the fineness of which cannot be described ; 
 it was compact of those benevolent intentions, 
 those gestures at once gracious and defined, 
 which early upbringing and constant familiarity 
 with tasteful things can alone bestow. These 
 manifold movements succeeded one another 
 rapidly in one moment, in perfect suavity devoid 
 of all haste, and charmed Gaston by that 
 mingling of carefulness and easy frankness 
 which a beautiful woman adds to the aristo- 
 cratic bearing of high rank.' 
 
 All of which means no more than that Gaston 
 has been taken in by the pretty looks and
 
 HIS TASTE 191 
 
 gestures and the affected behaviour of a 
 provincial actress playing le Caprice. 
 
 A few moments later, Mme. de Beauseant 
 having shown him the door (and with very 
 good reason), Gaston, after having gone as far 
 as the vestibule, comes back quietly and says 
 to her : ' " Jacques lighted the way for me." 
 And his smile, imbued with a half melancholy 
 grace, robbed the phrase of all that was jocular, 
 and the tone in which he uttered it was enough 
 to move the soul. Mme. de Beauseant was 
 disarmed.' 
 
 Well, she was very easily overcome then. 
 
 4 " Madam," cried Gaston softly, " you know 
 my fault, but you are ignorant of my crimes ; 
 if you only knew what happiness I ..." 
 " Ah ! beware," she said, lifting up one of her 
 fingers with a mysterious air to the level of her 
 nose which she skimmed, while with the other 
 hand she made a gesture as though to reach for 
 the bell-pull. . . .' 
 
 A little farther on : '. . . The viscountess 
 raised her beautiful eyes to the cornice, to 
 which she no doubt confided everything that 
 a stranger may not hear. A cornice is quite 
 the gentlest, the most submissive, and the 
 kindest confidante a woman can find on occa-
 
 192 BALZAC 
 
 sions when she dare not look at her inter- 
 locutor. The boudoir cornice is an institution. 
 Is it not a confessional without the priest ? 
 At this moment Mme. de Beauseant was full 
 of eloquence and beauty. . . .' 
 
 Balzac's ineffable ineptitude in describing 
 society women has been denied. Brunetiere, 
 in his otherwise admirable book entitled 
 Honore de Balzac, wrote as follows, very 
 evidently aiming a shaft at myself : ' I do not 
 agree with the statement [that he is coarse and 
 vulgar] in describing upper-class people, great 
 lords and ladies. Sainte-Beuve, who lived at 
 the same time and moved in the same circles, 
 vouches for their truth to life : " Who," says 
 he, " better than Balzac has more delightfully 
 painted the veterans and the beauties of the 
 Empire ? Who especially more delightfully 
 touched in the duchesses and the viscountesses of 
 the latter restoration ?" I prefer the testimony of 
 Sainte-Beuve, who knew in their decline some 
 of those " viscountesses " and " duchesses," 
 such as Mme. de Beauseant or Mme. de Lan- 
 geais, to the opinion of some honest university 
 people 1 who do not recognise in those ladies 
 their ideal as regards elegance, distinction, and 
 
 1 M. Faguet being professor at the Sorbonne. TR.
 
 HIS TASTE 193 
 
 aristocracy. . . .' Sainte-Beuve is surely a 
 very bourgeois surety, and I would point out 
 that the duchesses and viscountesses at the end 
 of the Restoration were known neither to 
 Sainte-Beuve nor to Balzac, the former only 
 having begun to frequent aristocratic drawing- 
 rooms in 1840, and Balzac, in spite of his very 
 short liaison with Mme. de Castries, having 
 become a regular attendant only a few months 
 before that date. Nay, Sainte-Beuve himself 
 has told us that the Faubourg Saint-Germain 
 was absolutely closed to men of letters before 1830, 
 and since it had to spend a few years getting 
 used to their admittance, we must conclude 
 that Sainte-Beuve's testimony is not valid as 
 regards the great ladies of the Restoration, 
 even at the end of it. 
 
 And I would point out above all that Sainte- 
 Beuve being himself rather ' vulgar ' where 
 women were concerned, to say the least of it, 
 his is hardly the testimony that should be 
 sought on such a point ; and he may very 
 well have seen the Faubourg Saint-Germain 
 under Louis Philippe exactly as Balzac did, 
 without that proving that either of them saw 
 it as it really was. 
 
 But I admit that it makes us a little uneasy
 
 194 BALZAC 
 
 as to what this noble neighbourhood was like 
 toward 1840, that Balzac should have seen it 
 as he has painted, and that Sainte-Beuve 
 should deem him to have seen them rightly 
 and to have c touched them in delightfully.' 
 And yet, from the little I saw of that world, 
 I have still a doubt, in judging from their 
 grandchildren, of the Tightness of the vision 
 of those two observers of their grandmothers. 
 No, I do not think that the dukes and duch- 
 esses of Balzac's time were, as regards speech 
 and gesture, quite such unusual persons as we 
 have seen him setting before us.
 
 HIS STYLE 195 
 
 VII 
 
 HIS STYLE 
 
 EVERYBODY agrees that Balzac wrote badly. 
 There is no need to rectify opinion on that 
 point. He wrote badly. 
 
 But it sometimes happens, indeed often 
 enough, that this passes unnoticed, and that 
 in three cases. 
 
 First of all in his portraits. Not only did 
 Balzac make portraits, above all physical 
 portraits, wonderfully well, with a sure selec- 
 tion of significant traits ; but when he made 
 them, his style itself, his skill, and his language 
 too, could hardly be bettered. I would refer 
 to the portraits quoted in the middle of this 
 book. The reader will no doubt consider that 
 even there the sentence concerning M. Poiret's 
 overcoat c . . . the faded lappets of his over- 
 coat floating loose and ill concealing almost 
 empty breeches and blue-hosed spindle-shanks 
 that shook like a drunkard's, and showing his 
 dingy white waistcoat and his coarse crumpled
 
 196 BALZAC 
 
 muslin shirt-frill that matched but ill with the 
 black tie round his scraggy turkey neck ' is a 
 dreadfully tangled sentence which has this sole 
 excuse against which, however, much may be 
 urged that it gives an idea of the good man's 
 careless get-up, and you will no doubt find it 
 to be so ; but read once again all the other 
 portraits quoted, and you will see that the 
 sharpness of the style corresponds exactly to 
 the clearness of the author's vision. Balzac's 
 portraits are as a rule very well written, and 
 they are those moreover of a master-hand. 
 
 He also writes very well when he neither 
 thinks of it nor takes any pains to do so. It 
 sometimes happens that Balzac, spurred on 
 no doubt by his interest in his subject, goes 
 straight ahead without troubling his head about 
 the Academic Frangaise, and merely thinking 
 of the facts he is relating. In that case he 
 has neither qualities nor defects. He makes 
 himself understood, he is readable, that is all. 
 He does not think of writing well, nor do we 
 dream of asking him to do so. Nobody ever 
 thinks of giving careful examination to a col- 
 lection of fails divers. He ought always to 
 have written like that. There is an example 
 of this neutral style in which, while being all
 
 HIS STYLE 197 
 
 that I have said, he still allows himself a little 
 furtive elegance : 4 Exchanging a few words 
 with his cousin on the brink of the well, remain- 
 ing seated on the bench in the little garden 
 until sundown, busy telling each other their 
 soaring dreams or musing amidst the calm that 
 reigned between the rampart and the house, 
 just as one might under the vaulted roofing of 
 a church, Charles realised all the holiness of 
 love ; for his great lady, his beloved Annette, 
 had taught him nothing but stormy unrest. 
 He was not getting rid of his coquettish, vain, 
 and blazing Parisian passion, and giving place 
 to pure and true love. He loved this house 
 of which the customs no longer seemed to him 
 quite so ridiculous. He came down early in 
 order to steal a few minutes' talk with Eugenie, 
 before old Grandet came to dole out the pro- 
 visions, and when the old man's footsteps 
 echoed on the stairs, he would sneak off into 
 the garden. The slight guiltiness of that early 
 meeting, kept secret even from Eugenie's 
 mother, and of which Nanon pretended to be 
 unaware, gave to the most innocent love in 
 the world the attraction of a forbidden pleasure. 
 And then, breakfast being over, and old Grandet 
 gone to make the round of his estate and farm-
 
 198 BALZAC 
 
 land, Charles remained between the mother and 
 daughter, experiencing unknown delights in 
 lending his hands for unwinding the skein, in 
 watching them at work, in listening to their 
 babble. The simplicity of that cloistral life, 
 revealing to him the beauty of those souls to 
 whom the outside world was unknown, touched 
 him deeply. . . .' 
 
 Here is another example, this time a land- 
 scape ; and landscapes are very rare in Balzac. 
 You see plainly that, along with Stendhal, 
 what he kept a look-out for on his journeys 
 was houses and men. But in 1831, the date 
 when he wrote the first part of la Femme de 
 trente Ans, writers had ' to sketch in landscapes,' 
 under pain of passing for nothing as men of 
 letters. Balzac sketches in the following one, 
 simple, sober enough, and most accurate (for 
 it was the description of places he had seen a 
 hundred times), and which he makes the reader 
 see quite plainly, written in quite a praise- 
 worthy style : ' From Vouvray to Tours the 
 amazing sinuosities of this jagged slope are 
 inhabited by a population of vine-growers. 
 In many places there are three ledges of houses 
 one above the other, hewn out of the rock, and 
 linked together by dangerous steps cut in the
 
 HIS STYLE 199 
 
 stone itself ; on the level with a roof a young 
 girl with a red skirt runs out to her garden. 
 The smoke of a chimney ascends between the 
 shoots and leafage of the vine. Farmers are 
 busy ploughing perpendicular fields. An old 
 woman, quietly seated on a fragment of fallen 
 boulder, turns her spinning-wheel under the 
 almond-blossom and watches the travellers 
 below her with amusement at their fright. 
 She worries no more about the fissures in the 
 ground than about the impending downfall of 
 an old wall the layers of which are now hardly 
 held together by the tortuous roots of ivy that 
 spreads like a live carpet over the disjointed 
 stones of the ancient rampart. The cooper's 
 hammer makes the vaults of the lofty caves 
 resound. The ground is tilled and teeming 
 everywhere, even where Nature has refused 
 soil for human industry. The threefold 
 picture of this scene of which we have hardly 
 indicated the aspect brought to the soul one 
 of those sights that remain for ever engraved 
 on the memory ; and when a poet had enjoyed 
 it, his dream came back again and again to rear 
 anew its romantic effects in his mind. At the 
 moment when the carriage reached the bridge 
 over the Cisse, several white sails surged up
 
 200 BALZAC 
 
 between the islets of the Loire, and gave an 
 added harmony to that harmonious scene. 
 The redolence of the willow-trees that lined the 
 stream added its penetrating scent to those of 
 the humid breeze ; the birds warbled in amor- 
 ous concert, the monotonous song of the goat- 
 herd joined in with its wild melancholy, whilst 
 the shouts of the bargemen told of distant 
 traffic astir. Soft mists capriciously hovering 
 over the scattered trees in that vast landscape 
 gave it a final grace. It was Touraine in all 
 its glory, springtide in all its splendour. That 
 part of France, the only one which foreign 
 armies were not to disturb, was at that moment 
 the only one to be quiet, and it seemed as though 
 it defied invasion.' 
 
 And last of all, he happens to set a care- 
 taker or a tinker talking. Then he is wonder- 
 ful. I am not now joking. He is wonderful 
 as regards faithfulness, accuracy, and truth. 
 You may think M. Pons' caretaker's chatter 
 too long ; but you must own that it is reality 
 itself. It is not a parody, it is not an equival- 
 ent ; it is simple truth ; it is just a vulgar Paris 
 woman whom you hear. 
 
 These are the three cases in which by happy 
 accident Balzac happens to write well. Every-
 
 HIS STYLE 201 
 
 where else his style is painful. I suppose I have 
 said quite enough of the way in which he makes 
 his upper-class people talk. I only refer to it 
 to point out that if they seem to us so false, it 
 is at least the author's fault quite as much as 
 the reader's. Having the same feelings, but 
 expressing them in language proper to their 
 condition, they would seem to be men of 
 fashion hardly worthy of their status, but still 
 men of fashion. Yet it must be remembered 
 that men of this class are so readily and surely 
 recognised by their way of talking, that a fault of 
 style implies a flaw in the manners as a whole. 
 When he speaks on his own account, in his 
 narratives, reflections, dissertations, analyses, 
 even very often in his descriptions, it is diffi- 
 cult to say how bad he is. He talks like a 
 mischievous wag bent on aping the romantic. 
 He can write : ' A thing worthy of notice is 
 the power of infusion which the feelings 
 possess. . . .' He will indulge in the vulgar 
 and affected metaphors of provincial wits : 
 4 The next morning the post poured into two 
 hearts the poison of two anonymous letters.' 
 4 The benefactress dipped the bread of the 
 exile into the absinthe of reproach.' 'If 
 the season during which a woman struggles
 
 202 BALZAC 
 
 against love's onset offered to Rastignac the 
 spoil of its first-fruits, they became to him as 
 costly as they were green, acrid, and delicious 
 of savour.' 
 
 His metaphors are bewildering : ' Such is 
 Algeria as regards victualling. A hash 
 flavoured with the ink-bottle of all rising 
 administrations . ' 
 
 He makes most enigmatic distinctions be- 
 tween the meanings of words : ' Julie listened 
 to her aunt with as much astonishment as 
 stupefaction. . . .' You wonder why he 
 seems to consider astonishment and stupe- 
 faction as different feelings ; it is because he 
 fancies stupefaction means dread : ' . . . sur- 
 prised at hearing words the wisdom of which 
 was rather foreboded than understood by her, 
 and startled on hearing once more uttered by a 
 relative the sentence already passed on Victor 
 by her father.' 
 
 The very meaning of words often escapes 
 him and makes him utter unheard-of things. 
 Why is the love of a woman of thirty more 
 flattering to a young man than that of a young 
 girl ? Because 4 whereas one may be led on 
 by curiosity or by seductions other than those 
 of real love, the other obeys a conscientious
 
 HIS STYLE 203 
 
 feeling.' He meant to say conscious ; and the 
 thing he says instead is the most comical in 
 the world. 
 
 In the same way Baron Hulot, who belongs 
 to the class that knows how to speak cor- 
 rectly, says to a young artist, ' Come along, 
 sir, life may turn out well for you. You 
 will soon discover that no one can stay long 
 in Paris with impunity if he has talent.' He 
 meant to say unrewarded, and says just the 
 opposite. 
 
 ' After having espoused for a time a life 
 similar to that of a squirrel spinning round in 
 its cage, he felt the lack of opposition[?] in a 
 life where everything was fore-ordained. . . .' 
 
 ' You must have climbed up all the chimeras 
 with their double white wings who offer their 
 feminine backs to glowing imaginations in 
 order to understand the torture which preyed 
 on Gaston de Nueil.' 
 
 4 The humanity of a courtesan in love begets 
 such magnificence as might put even the angels 
 to shame.' 
 
 4 The public admires the witty work of this 
 handful of men and sees no harm in it ; it does 
 not realise that the sharp blade of cutting 
 words athirst for vengeance dabbles in self-
 
 204 BALZAC 
 
 love skilfully probed, and bleeding from a 
 thousand thrusts.' 
 
 4 Providence has also doubtlessly strongly 
 protected the families of employees and the 
 lower classes for whom these hindrances are 
 at least doubled by the environment in which 
 they accomplish their evolution.' 
 
 4 To win the favours of Mme. Marneffe was 
 for him not merely the eagerness of his chimera, 
 but also a matter of money.' 
 
 The very parts which we must admit are 
 best written in his work abound in those 
 faults which are characteristic of all de- 
 cline : profusion, superabundance, tinsel, 
 varnish, false similes and metaphors, things 
 claiming to be things seen which have no 
 precision. 
 
 ' ... At the bottom of the wide-necked china 
 vase fancy to yourself a wide margin composed 
 wholly of those white tufts peculiar to the 
 sedum of the Touraine vines : vague images 
 of desired forms, surging up like those of an 
 obedient slave. From this ledge come forth 
 spirals of the bindweed with its white bells, 
 sprays of the pink rest-harrow mixed with 
 fronds of fern, a few oak twigs with magnifi- 
 cently tinted and glossy leaves, all of them
 
 HIS STYLE 205 
 
 sweeping in prostrate obeisance like weeping 
 willows, shy and suppliant like prayers. Above 
 them behold loosened fibrils, all flowery and 
 incessantly athrill, of the purple quaking-grass, 
 which pours down a flood of yellowy anthers ; 
 snowy pyramids of the meadow and pond 
 grasses, the green hair of the barren bent-grass, 
 the ruffled plumes of that wild grass known as 
 wind's-eye, violet-tinted as the hopes that 
 crown our early dreams, standing out against 
 the flaxen-grey background where the light 
 radiates all about these flowering herbs. But 
 higher still are a few Bengal roses scattered 
 among the wild fringes of the daucus, the tufts 
 of the toad-flax, the plumy wand of the 
 meadowsweet, the umbels of the wild chervil, 
 the fair locks of the clematis in seed, the tiny 
 cressets of the milk-white stitch wort, the 
 clusters of the milfoil, the diffuse stems of the 
 fumitory with its pink and black flowers, the 
 tangled twigs of the honeysuckle ; in short 
 all that these simple beings have of the utmost 
 wildness and dishevelling, of flames and of 
 triple darts, of ribbed leaves or of dentate ones, 
 or of stems twisted about like vague desires 
 entwined in the depth of the soul. From the 
 heart of that over-brimming torrent of love
 
 206 BALZAC 
 
 there surges a magnificent double red poppy 
 with its pods all ready to burst open, scattering 
 the sparks of its fire above the starry jasmine, 
 and towering over the ceaseless rain of pollen 
 dust, a lovely mist which twinkles in the air, 
 reflecting the daylight in a myriad shining 
 particles. What woman intoxicated by the 
 aphrodite-like redolence hidden in all this forage 
 could fail to feel this luxury of yielding ideas, 
 this white tenderness stirred by unbridled 
 movements and this red desire of love which 
 longs for a happiness denied in those onsets, 
 a hundred times renewed, of a passion still 
 unspent, indefatigable, and eternal ? Was not 
 everything that can be offered up to God offered 
 up to love in this poem of luminous flowers 
 that wooed the heart with its unceasing 
 melody, fondling its secret voluptuousness, its 
 unspoken yearnings, its illusions that were 
 kindled or waned out like gossamer threads on 
 a warm night ? ' 
 
 No doubt that is a very brilliant piece of 
 composition. But still, it is the description of 
 a handful of flowers. Now where is the wide- 
 necked vase, the huge jar that could hold such 
 a crowd, such a multitude of stems as compose 
 it ? It is not a bouquet, it is a forest ; it is
 
 HIS STYLE 207 
 
 not a bouquet, it is a Paradon. 1 Moreover 
 (and partly for that reason, though for others 
 as well), it cannot be seen ; it is terribly con- 
 fused : between the margin of white tufts and 
 the double red poppy (this being quite clear 
 and of some value) it cannot be seen at all. 
 You hear all about it. You hear a clatter of 
 strange and unusual names (in the style of 
 Victor Hugo) that tickle the ear ; but that is 
 not what is wanted ; you want to see it. If 
 you look closely into it you find some most 
 singular things. For example, whom have 
 ferns or oak leaves ever impressed as being 
 prostrate, or like weeping willows, or humble 
 prayers ? I should rather think the impression 
 made is quite the contrary. * Violet-tinted as 
 the hopes that crown our early dreams,' though 
 rather affected, seems to me quite right ; but 
 in what he enumerates read it again where 
 does that flaxen-grey background come in, 
 that background against which the bent-grass 
 stands out, and how can light, if it exist at all, 
 irradiate it instead of softening ? I defy a 
 painter with his brush. ' Stems twisted about 
 like vague desires entwined in the depth 
 of the soul ' is, in my opinion, excellent ; but 
 
 1 Paradon = a paradise of flowers. Cf. Daudet's Tartarin. TH.
 
 208 BALZAC 
 
 above flowers gathered up into a posy and stand- 
 ing still, and far from the breeze, pollen does 
 not hover at all ; and I know not how it comes 
 about that gossamer threads take fire and die 
 out in turn on a warm night. The effect as a 
 whole is chaotic, and half of it is wrong. 
 
 It is well worthy of attention, as it is one of 
 the few cases in which Balzac (who as a rule 
 writes all the worse whenever he makes an 
 effort to write well) did not fail, all things con- 
 sidered, in spite of his taking pains ; but it 
 deserves only guarded approval. 
 
 And notice how infectious is impropriety of 
 style ; for Taine, who admired this passage, 
 says that in reading it 4 all the voluptuousness 
 of summer penetrates the senses and the heart 
 like a tumultuous swarm of motley butterflies,' 
 when the swarm of butterflies is never tumultu- 
 ous (even laying aside the suggestion of noise 
 which the word conveys), and it always con- 
 veys something of soft and harmonious sinu- 
 -osity. At bottom this page of Balzac, which 
 is famous, and after all deserves to be so, is 
 not wholly balderdash, though it has a good 
 deal of it. 
 
 And nearly the whole of le Lys dans la 
 Vallee likewise is a prodigy of bombast and
 
 HIS STYLE 209 
 
 bathos, just as though written by some one 
 who was straining himself to write as badly as 
 possible. And the worst of it is that its bad- 
 ness is so obviously the outcome of high-flown 
 style. This is how he starts out when he 
 wants to speak with the tongue of Chateau- 
 briand : ' To what talent nourished on tears 
 shall we some day owe the most touching elegy, 
 the drawing of torments borne in silence by 
 souls whose roots, still tender, strike only 
 against hard stones in the domestic soil, whose 
 first shy buds are torn off by malignant hands, 
 whose flowers are nipped by the frost just as 
 they are about to unfold ? What poet will 
 render for us articulate the sufferings of a 
 child whose lips suck at a bitter breast, and 
 whose smiles wither in the scorching glances 
 of a stern eye. . . .' And throughout the 
 whole book, just as though he were busied with 
 the painting of religious souls, there is a pro- 
 fusion of biblical metaphors, of ' perfumes of 
 Magdalen,' of ' stars of the Magi,' of ' Isaiah's 
 burning coal,' which often borders on the 
 burlesque. I know of two parodies of this 
 turgid and chilly emphatic style, and they are 
 the travel impressions of the avalanche man 
 in Topffer's Mont Saint-Bernard, and the con- 
 
 o
 
 210 BALZAC 
 
 versation of Rodolphe and Mme. Bovary 
 during the solemnity of the agricultural board 
 meeting. Both are inferior to their model. 
 
 He himself needed a model in order to write 
 properly, but a model in keeping with his 
 nature which was neither fine nor distinguished. 
 He was very apt at copying (as I have already 
 pointed out) the language of common people, 
 and he imitated happily enough, though 
 uneasily, the style of the jolly story-tellers of 
 the sixteenth century. Though I am well 
 aware of how much a philological student of 
 that period could point out as to the a peu pres 
 in the Contes drolatiques, still the general effect 
 of the whole is good, and as far as that goes, 
 the patchwork imitation is most successful. 
 The vulgar scenes and the Contes drolatiques 
 are the only parts of his work which, after all 
 reckoning has been made, are really worth 
 much considered as style. 
 
 He said : ' There are only Victor Hugo, 
 Gautier, and myself who know the language 
 thoroughly.' Unfortunately there is one name 
 too many in the list, for even as regards material 
 accuracy Balzac is often at fault. It is not 
 that he does not know a great deal of the 
 language, and that of the best. Notice his
 
 HIS STYLE 211 
 
 excellent archaisms. He can say ' arraisonner 
 quelqu'un ' ; he can say ' emboiter quelqu'un ' 
 (to hoodwink him by coaxing) ; he can say 
 4 se battre de la chape a 1'eveque ' (to fight for 
 something which is not yours) ; and I might 
 multiply these examples ; but, side by side 
 with all this, he falls into the most common- 
 place and vulgar blunders. 
 
 He can say 4 un petit office,' and, to be sure, 
 it is what ought to be said ; but still it is a good 
 many hundred years since anybody said it. 
 He can say ' II n'est pas de femme qui . . . 
 ne con9oive une de ces reflexions.' Or again, 
 4 En accordant a un etranger le droit d'entrer 
 dans le sanctuaire du menage, n'est-ce pas se 
 mettre a sa merci ? ' is a sentence of which 
 the syntax is absolutely impossible. c Elle 
 conduisait [for gouvernait, but that may pass] 
 les ouvriers et jouissait ainsi dans 1'atelier d'une 
 espece de suprematie qui la sortait un pen de 
 la classe des grisettes.' ' M. Portel ceint d'un 
 tablier de preparateur, une cornue a la main, 
 examinait un produit chimique tout en rejetant 
 Vceil sur sa boutique. . . .' * L'imprimeur 
 jugea sans doute ces graves paroles necessaires, 
 1'influence de Mme. de Bargeton ne 1'epouvan- 
 tant pas moins que la funeste mobilite de carac-
 
 212 BALZAC 
 
 tere qui pouvait tout aussi bien Jeter Lucien 
 dans une mauvaise comme dans une bonne 
 voie.' '. . . Car alors nous ne nous quitterons 
 pas aujourd'hui, repondit-il avec la finesse du 
 pretre qui voit sa malice reussie? ' Ce nouvel 
 Art d'aimer consomme enormement de paroles 
 evangeliques a 1'oeuvre du Diable.' ' Sous la 
 Restoration la noblesse s'est tou jours sou- 
 venue d'avoir ete battue, aussi, mettant a part 
 deux ou trois exceptions, est-elle devenue eco- 
 nome. . . .' Do you understand this nobility 
 that puts aside two or three exceptions ? He 
 means to say, c So, apart from some excep- 
 tions. . . .' c Une vraie courtisane . . . porte 
 dans la franchise de sa situation un avertisse- 
 ment aussi lumineux que la lanterne rouge de 
 la prostitution ou que les quinquets des trente 
 et quarante. Un homme sait alors qu'il s'en 
 va la de sa mine,' and so on. I have picked 
 out these instances of material inaccuracy from 
 three books only. 
 
 This style singularly astonished and seemed 
 to upset Sainte-Beuve. In his memorial article, 
 dated 2nd September 1850 (and let us not 
 forget that it is the sort of article in which the 
 tendency is to judge as favourably as may be, 
 nor that Sainte-Beuve did his best to judge
 
 HIS STYLE 213 
 
 fairly and without spite), he says : * What I 
 like in his style, in its delicate parts, is its 
 efflorescence (I do not know where to find a 
 better word), by which he gives everything 
 the feeling of life, and sets the very page 
 athrill. But I cannot welcome, under the 
 cloak of physiology, the continual abuse of 
 this quality, this style so often chatouilleux 
 and melting, enervated, roseate, and shot 
 through with every tint, this style of delicious 
 and quite Asiatic corruption, as our masters 
 used to say, more broken in places and more 
 flabby than the body of an antique mummer. 1 
 Does not Petronius, amidst the scenes which he 
 describes, regret somewhere or other what he 
 
 * I crave the reader's pardon, though it will hardly be accorded 
 me, but I cannot forbear remarking in smaller type, that is to say 
 half aloud, how often the best of the nineteenth-century stylists 
 indulge in haphazard expressions that are ambiguous and often 
 either of questionable fitness or wholly out of place. An 
 efflorescence is ring-worm, or a rudimentary and imperfect blossom- 
 ing, and it is just the contrary of what Balzac meant to say, and 
 he ought to have said floraison. Balzac with his efflorescence gives 
 everything the feeling of life? Well, no ! Either he gives every- 
 thing feeling or he gives everything life, or he gives everything 
 feeling and life ; but he cannot give them the feeling of life, for 
 you give things either feeling or life ; but you can only give the 
 feeling of life to persons. Chatouilleux means what is sensitive to 
 tickling, and we cannot conceive a style of such susceptibility, and 
 chatouillant was the right word. I admit that, save for these three 
 slips, the whole passage is that of a master-hand.
 
 214 BALZAC 
 
 calls oratio pudica, the bashful style, which 
 does not yield to the fluidity of every gesture ? ' 
 This portrait of Balzac's style, for a portrait 
 it is, is very curious, and it is difficult to recog- 
 nise in that too supple mummer the square- 
 built weight of Balzac and his style, and (as 
 I believe Brunetiere has remarked) this very 
 pretty description would more fitly describe 
 the style of Sainte-Beuve himself. But, all 
 things considered, it is praise, grudging praise, 
 but still praise, since the impression we get 
 from it is that Balzac has a style similar to 
 that of Jean Jacques Rousseau in his romantic 
 or confidential works ; it is, in short, praise. 
 
 But, as you expect with Sainte-Beuve, who 
 proceeds by continual touching and retouching, 
 taking back with one hand what the other has 
 just granted, six pages later he retraces his 
 steps, and coming back to the question of style, 
 as though he had said nothing about it, he says : 
 ' As for the style, it is fine, subtle, fluent, pictur- 
 esque, without the least analogy with tradition. 
 [Quite right.] I have sometimes wondered 
 what effect one of M. de Balzac's books would 
 produce on an honest mind, hitherto nourished 
 on good French prose in all its frugality, on a 
 mind such as exists no longer, trained up on
 
 HIS STYLE 215 
 
 readings from Nicole and Bourdaloue, 1 on that 
 simple, steady, and scrupulous style which goes 
 far, as La Bruyere puts it. Such a mind would 
 feel giddy for a whole month afterwards.' I 
 do not know, but it seems to me that M. Sainte- 
 Beuve actually here throws out a straight hint 
 that M. de Balzac wrote balderdash. And later 
 on (Causeries du Lundi (vol. iv.), Histoire de la 
 Restauration), returning once more, most fur- 
 tively, to this topic, see how Sainte-Beuve, 
 under pretence of talking about Lamartine's 
 style, points out that Balzac's is compact of 
 over-strained, exaggerated, and incoherent meta- 
 phors. ' M. de Lamartine yielded rather too 
 much to his new prose style, in which Balzac 
 goes for a great deal more than Tacitus. " The 
 Empire had grown old before its time : satis- 
 fied ambition, satiated pride, the delights of 
 the palate, exquisite feeding, soft beds, young 
 wives, indulgent mistresses, late hours, sleep- 
 less nights divided between work and festivity, 
 constant riding on horseback which allowed 
 him to put on flesh, [all this for Tacitus] had 
 thickened his limbs and dulled his senses. . . . 
 His strong and bony chin bore well the base of 
 
 1 Seventeenth-century moralists, who were foremost as writers 
 of the classical school. TR.
 
 216 BALZAC 
 
 his features. His nose was but a thin and 
 transparent line. . . . His look was searching, 
 wavering like a restless flame, like care. His 
 forehead seemed to have grown broader beneath 
 the bareness of his long, flat, black hair, half 
 fallen under the moisture of sustained thought 
 [here Tacitus has given way to Balzac] ; it 
 seemed as if his head, by nature small, had grown 
 larger in order to let roll more freely between his 
 temples the cog-wheels and the combinations of a 
 soul whose every thought was a whole empire. 
 The chart of the globe seemed to be incrusted on 
 the world-map of that head." How can I trust 
 such a portrait when I see to what an extent 
 the rhetorician, the writer, is carried away by 
 his love of metaphor and redundancy ? Thus 
 does Sainte-Beuve indirectly hold up Balzac's 
 style as an example of what should be avoided. 
 The reader whom Sainte-Beuve imagined 
 even while asserting that he no longer existed, 
 was actually alive and close to him ; he was 
 called Nisard, 1 and wrote only two lines on 
 Balzac, of which one is more than half wrong, 
 and the other wholly right. * I should less fear 
 a return of vogue for Balzac's good novels were 
 
 1 Desire Nisard (1806-88) wrote a famous Histoire de la Litterature 
 franfaise, and for long withstood the romantics. TR.
 
 HIS STYLE 217 
 
 their manners less anecdotic and their language 
 more natural.' Nisard is not at all wrong in 
 esteeming that the manners of Balzac's works 
 are ' anecdotic,' that is to say, exceptional, and 
 fit only to be regarded as something freakish. 
 Only he forgets the better Balzac, who created 
 typical characters, who, as I trust I have shown, 
 is precisely a great classic, and has to a point 
 the same turn of mind as Moliere and La 
 Bruyere and Bourdaloue. As for his judg- 
 ment on his style it is quite right, and what 
 Balzac lacked most was just naturalness. I 
 hold to what I have already said, that, save 
 for the pasticcio of the Conies drolatiques, the 
 portraits, the conversations between vulgar 
 people, and a few parts where he forgot to be 
 careful about his writing, and in which he was 
 happy except for these, and that means nearly 
 all along, Balzac was a very bad writer. I am 
 hardly affected by that consideration of Brune- 
 tiere's (which he seems to have set much store 
 by, since he applies it to Moliere as well as to 
 Balzac), that to write badly is a ' condition for 
 the representation of life.' It seems to me that 
 if you be a playwright or a novelist, you must 
 make your characters talk according to their 
 origins and their condition in life ; but when
 
 218 BALZAC 
 
 you yourself talk, or when you set characters 
 of the middle class or of middling education 
 talking, it seems to me that your duty of repre- 
 senting life does not oblige you to write ' une 
 ame genereuse a des regals peu chers,' nor l de 
 quoique 1'on vous somme,' nor ' consciemment ' 
 in place of ' conscient,' nor yet again ' sortir 
 son chien.'
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 219 
 
 VIII 
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 
 
 APART from Montaigne, Voltaire, and Rousseau, 
 I know of no other French writer who has had 
 such a moral and literary influence as that of 
 Balzac. To begin with the former, it is known 
 that already during his lifetime, in Russia, at 
 Venice, and doubtlessly elsewhere as well in 
 polite circles, there were groups of men and 
 women who played the game, which was 
 unfortunately perhaps something more than a 
 mere game, of performing in reality Balzac's 
 world of man, sharing among themselves the 
 parts of Rubempre, Rastignac, Lousteau, 
 Bianchon, Manfrigueuse, Beauseant, Langeais, 
 and perhaps Vautrin. The thing had never 
 been seen since VAstree, 1 though it has cer- 
 tainly been of frequent occurrence, though not 
 signal enough for literary history to have 
 handed it down to us. 
 
 1 A novel by the celebrated precieuse Madeleine Scudery (1607- 
 1701)._TR.
 
 220 BALZAC 
 
 But that is a mere episode. Since Balzac's 
 death it has needed but a pair of eyes to see 
 that life as Balzac described it that is to say, 
 the rage to rise to dignities and wealth, Varri- 
 visme as it has been called has become, now 
 more than ever before, the normal way of 
 life for a very great number of French people, 
 and their normal way of feeling and thinking. 
 By the rapid fortunes which he made some of 
 his unscrupulous characters achieve, and above 
 all, or at least quite as much, by the artistic 
 beauty which he bestowed on them, Balzac 
 very probably (for in such a case positive 
 assertion is not possible), increased the number 
 of such men and women. He increased the 
 number not exactly of scoundrels, but of the 
 kind of folk of whom it may be said, as honest 
 Michel Chrestien says to Rubempre, ' There is 
 in you a devilish spirit which justifies in your 
 own eyes whatever is most contrary to our 
 principles : instead of being a sophist in ideas 
 you will be a sophist in action.' The expression 
 is of Balzac's own coining, and it is excellent : 
 he increased the number of sophists in action ; 
 and if any one should tell me that it is hardly 
 necessary to fight shy of using the word scoun- 
 drel in order to go hunting after another which
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 221 
 
 implies quite as much, if not more, in describ- 
 ing the conscious rogue who compounds with 
 his conscience, I must admit that I have little 
 to say in defence. So incomparably is example 
 stronger than precept, that of the two men, 
 Stendhal, the cynic, and Balzac, who is quite 
 other than cynical both in his own person and 
 in his own speech, but who brings on the scene 
 and in full light the most cynical characters, sur- 
 rounds them with a certain halo, and gives them 
 a certain prestige, it is certainly the moralising 
 Balzac who was the more demoralising. 
 
 Edmond About, who moreover wrote to 
 Flaubert concerning Madame Bovary, ' I 
 thought I was reading a novel by Balzac, 
 better written, more passionate, cleaner, and 
 freer from those two sickening odours which 
 sometimes take hold of me in the middle of the 
 writings of the Touraine man, the odour of a 
 sink and the odour of the sacristy ' Ed- 
 mond About well characterised this sort of 
 influence in one of his novels. Two young 
 people are busy chatting, he a charming young 
 man and she a delightful young lady ; the 
 young man believes the young lady to be 
 worth a million of money, and the young lady 
 believes him to be both rich and titled, each
 
 222 BALZAC 
 
 being the dupe of the other. * And do you like 
 Hermann and Dorothea ? ' said the young man. 
 4 Oh ! an insipid idyll ! Oh, no ! Have you 
 read Balzac ? He 's the man for me.' It is 
 two young Balzacians who, without suspecting 
 it, are thus talking together. 
 
 And I need not say, for omnia sana sanis, 
 that the influence of Balzac over a man may 
 happen to be excellent. I once knew a pure 
 hero of Balzac's, alive and breathing, who was 
 neither a Russian nor a Venetian. 1 When he 
 was studying rhetoric, and far from the top of 
 his class, he used to say to his master when 
 questioned by him as to his vocation, ' I will 
 be editor-in-chief of the Revue des Deuce Mondes 
 and a professor at the College de France.' He 
 was a professor in schools that train lads for 
 their baccalaureat ; he was editor of the Revue 
 des Deux Mondes at twenty-five ; he became 
 its director ; he became the foremost literary 
 critic of France ; he became a professor at the 
 Ecole Normale, where he had failed to enter 
 when twenty years old ; he became a great 
 orator, a kind of apostle (he became a father- 
 confessor of minds and consciences); he used 
 to work fourteen hours a day (and he really 
 
 1 This is an allusion to Taine. TR.
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 223 
 
 did so, and not merely according to a for- 
 mula) ; and he was the most honest of men and 
 the kindest, and his last book was in praise of 
 Balzac, whom he had always admired. He was 
 a Balzacian, but he had derived from Balzac 
 only the lesson of determination, of tenacity, 
 of unalterable self-confidence, of stubborn hard 
 work, and of arrivisme by any means, save such 
 as were shameful. That kind of Balzacism 
 must exist, since I met with a revered example 
 of it ; only I think it must be exceptional. 
 
 His literary influence was, as near as such a 
 thing may be reckoned, quite as important as 
 his moral influence. This man who funda- 
 mentally (though what is fundamentally ?) was 
 a romantic, who was at least half romantic 
 and half realist, who according to many was 
 more of a romantic than a realist, created 
 realism, or rather made it live again, and buried 
 romanticism for fifty years. He said to men 
 of letters, by the example given in the best 
 part of his work, ' Above all things, use your 
 eyes well ; nothing in the world has so great a 
 value as the thing seen.' Truth to tell, he was 
 helped by the force of circumstances, by the 
 fact that romanticism had lasted for half a 
 century, and that something else therefore was
 
 224 BALZAC 
 
 due to arrive. It is a law in literature, in fact 
 the only one of which I am quite sure, that 
 after a period of sensibility and imagination 
 comes a period of observation, and that a 
 period of observation is followed by one of 
 imagination and sensibility. But still, in the 
 overtaking of an outworn genre, what is the real 
 use of those who are introducing the new one ? 
 To set everything loose with a vigorous blow ; 
 to steer literature on to a road where it would 
 have gone by itself, though hesitating and slow ; 
 to prevent and this is an inestimable boon 
 the style which is going out of fashion from 
 having, for lack of opponents of high standing, 
 a poor and lamentable retinue, a train of copy- 
 ists who work by rule of thumb, without either 
 originality or merit. Had La Chaussee 1 had 
 any genius at all, he would have prevented 
 people from writing right down to 1800, and 
 even on to 1820, tragedies like those of Cre- 
 billon. 2 Men of genius who introduce a new 
 style spare the old one the shame of dying by 
 slow dilution ; they do it the service of allowing 
 it to die in the fulness of its beauty. 
 
 1 Pierre-Claude Nivelle de la Chaussee (1092-1754) the first to 
 exploit the comedy of tears. TR. 
 
 2 Prosper Crebillon (1674-1762), a playwright who specialised 
 in horror. TB.
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 225 
 
 That is just what Balzac did for romanticism, 
 which after all he adored. In spite of a very 
 great deal that is freakish and improbable, he 
 was greatly devoted to truth, and had for it 
 one of those passions which may indulge an 
 occasional infidelity, since even that revives 
 them ; and thus it came about that he was, 
 unconsciously and half involuntarily, the re- 
 storer of realism to French literature. Good 
 and bad, true and false, he founded it all alike 
 somewhat at random ; but still the fact re- 
 mains that he founded it, and it cannot be 
 denied that it was high time. He owed his 
 great success perhaps rather more to what was 
 bad in that novelty than to what was good in 
 it. We may own before foreigners, since they 
 are well aware of it, that there are not very 
 many of us in France who are fond of stark 
 realism, of a passionless and unsystematic 
 description of mankind surprised in all the 
 complicated and trivial details of his moral life. 
 But we have a shameful hankering for the 
 literature of brutality. We are fond of violence, 
 daring, and coarseness in our writers, just be- 
 cause we are the most forbearing of men, and 
 we delight in reading tales of stormy passion 
 because we are accustomed to placid ones.
 
 226 BALZAC 
 
 And our authors, who know us, play on this 
 weakness for their own profit ; though it 
 is but fair to add that we grant the writers 
 who do so but little enduring success. If that 
 of Balzac lasted longer and may be considered 
 as permanent, it is because a considerable part 
 of his work contains, as we have already seen 
 well enough, earnest, conscientious, and pro- 
 found realism, and because he was the first, in 
 face of the still triumphant romantic literature, 
 to give vigorous characteristics to the new or 
 renewed art. 
 
 For both the good and the evil part of a 
 writer's influence and its effect on posterity 
 must be taken into account. A writer has 
 indeed an influence on posterity, a far-reach- 
 ing and general influence, a popular influence 
 through what is worst in him; and you must 
 not cry out, 4 There will be a but.' Lucretius 
 owes the fact of his being unknown save 
 to a handful of scholars to the fact that he 
 spoke the worst ill of the religious feelings ; 
 Rabelais owes his popularity to his being 
 filthy ; Montaigne his to his being sceptical ; 
 neither Ronsard nor Malherbe enjoys any ; 
 Moliere owes it to his being anti-clerical and 
 sometimes coarse ; Racine has none, nor has
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 227 
 
 Montesquieu ; Voltaire owes it to his having 
 been anti-religious ; Rousseau to what is anti- 
 social in le Contrat social, or voluptuous and 
 shameful in les Confessions. Glory too is 
 founded on folly, and fools being in a majority, 
 I should like to know how it could be otherwise. 
 Balzac pleased people, even after his death, 
 by all those vulgarities, trivialities, and brutal- 
 ities with which we have already reproached 
 him. He pleased by his bad style, most readers 
 being unable to stand the style of a Merimee 
 or a Gautier, being as it were put out of 
 countenance by it, while they are not in the 
 least bewildered by that of a Stendhal or a 
 Balzac, which is their very own. On this point 
 Sainte-Beuve remarks : ' Balzac, whom I do 
 not pretend to belittle on the ground of the 
 manners of his day [frightful style, but let that 
 pass], and of certain manners in particular, 
 of which he understands everything and has 
 a masterly grip, nevertheless gets carried away 
 and continually oversteps the limits of good 
 taste ; he gets intoxicated on the very wine 
 that he himself pours out, and loses his self- 
 control ; the fumes get into his head and he 
 gets bemused ; he is altogether an accomplice 
 and a fellow-toper in what he offers us and in
 
 228 BALZAC 
 
 what he depicts. It is a great advantage, I 
 know, for any one who wants to pass for a man 
 of genius with vulgar people altogether to lack 
 good sense in practical life and the management 
 of their talent. Balzac enjoyed that advan- 
 tage. . . .' Will you consider, in passing, a 
 small example of this ? I had, in an article, 
 as I have done in this book, pointed out the 
 Hein ? which Balzac puts into the mouth of a 
 great lady, though indeed I should have pointed 
 it out all the same had he put it into the mouth 
 of a well-bred, middle-class young lady instead. 
 A university professor made cruel fun of me 
 on this account. The Hein ? seemed to him 
 quite natural, and maybe he would have recog- 
 nised the great lady in society from it ; and 
 no doubt, if any lady avoided using it, it would 
 have seemed to him to be the mere primness 
 of affectation. The vulgar, coarse, and brutal 
 expressions of Balzac, in matter as in manner, 
 had a great deal to do with his popularity. 
 
 But, if it be true that writers win success 
 through their faults, they win it through them 
 only on condition that they accompany great 
 qualities. If Lucretius, Moliere, Voltaire, and 
 M. Anatole France had nothing better to give 
 us than their horror of religion ; if Montaigne
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 229 
 
 had nothing but his scepticism, and Rousseau 
 no more than his political radicalism and 
 erotic temperament, they would be utterly 
 unknown. Qualities impose on readers, and 
 failings hold them ; qualities make people 
 admire a writer, and failings make them love 
 him ; qualities inspire veneration, and defects 
 establish and maintain intimacy. Now Balzac, 
 perhaps more than any of those whom I have 
 just mentioned, had just the genius necessary 
 to impose itself, in good earnest, on connois- 
 seurs, rather vaguely upon the general reader ; 
 while he has just enough faults to make himself 
 beloved by the mob : and that is how glory is 
 founded, and I would say, if I may, how is 
 cast that glory that is always of Corinthian 
 metal ; to which must be added in fairness : 
 nee licet omnibus adire Corinthum. 
 
 Balzac's influence was almost immediate, 
 that is to say from about 1850 onward. He 
 had immediate successors even while he was 
 still living, such as the highly estimable Charles 
 de Bernard, whose masterpiece was out in 1838, 
 or Champfleury, who reached notoriety about 
 1855. This simple-hearted man in love with 
 poetry, as Baudelaire depicts him and the 
 portrait may be true enough in substance
 
 230 BALZAC 
 
 does not deserve the contempt that Brune- 
 tiere shows for him. From Balzac he took 
 neither the great nor the trivial nor the base ; 
 he took only what was minute. Narrow in out- 
 look, but very clear-sighted, utterly devoid of 
 imagination, but a slow and diligent observer, 
 he described minutely and accurately the 
 hobbies, the mechanical gestures, the tics, 
 ever so significant, which reveal commonplace 
 minds. He might have modelled Poiret and 
 Mile. Michonneau, and was almost capable of 
 chiselling the features of Charles Bovary. He 
 helped Balzac a great deal by introducing him, 
 so to say, in his lesser aspects. He gave entry 
 to the Balzac mansion by a back door. 
 
 Duranty (who produced nothing or almost 
 nothing), just before the appearance of Flau- 
 bert, whom by the way he did not understand, 
 founded his review Le Realisme, and if he be 
 not the inventor of the word, he most certainly 
 is the man who launched it on to the great 
 current of conversation, critical study, and the 
 language. 
 
 About the same time Hippolyte Taine pub- 
 lished that famous article which, if I may say 
 so, allowed university people, and the very 
 considerable world that gravitates round them,
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 231 
 
 to admire Balzac. Brunetiere puts it very well : 
 4 In France, for the last hundred years, the 
 adoption of a writer by university critics is as 
 a rule his consecration, and, in any case, it is 
 that which puts him in a fair way of becoming 
 a classic. 5 And that may be readily under- 
 stood ; university critics, from prudence and 
 circumspection I will not say for other reasons 
 being always a generation behind the times, 
 that is to say, some twenty-five or thirty years, 
 consequently adopt none but writers who 
 are well on in years. Be that as it may, 
 Taine was both the most brilliant and the most 
 serious of all the students of the Ecole Normale 
 in 1848. He was brought up, speaking from 
 the literary point of view alone, by that strange 
 man Jacquinet, thoroughly classical, quite in- 
 sensible to the prestige of romanticism, but 
 who at the same time, being very intelligent, 
 was wonderful in recognising what was classical 
 in the writers of his own tune, and who revealed 
 Stendhal and Balzac to his pupils as being 
 classics at bottom, just as Racine, Moliere, and 
 La Bruyere were that is to say, as careful 
 observers of the wheel-work of the human 
 machine. Taine's article, with which I do not 
 wholly agree, as may have been easily noticed,
 
 232 BALZAC 
 
 was premeditated, systematic, and lyrical ; he 
 likened social history to natural history, which 
 is at once an apology and (much against the 
 author's will) a half condemnation of Balzac ; 
 he mustered into line, in a magisterial way, the 
 leading characters, the monsters of Balzac, 
 deliberately leaving on one side those characters 
 in the description of whom he failed, and finally 
 claimed for his author the right of writing ill 
 under the pretence that the way of writing 
 must vary according to the readers whom you 
 are addressing just as much as according to the 
 age, and proved that Balzac wrote as well as 
 could be. And, in short, after having quoted 
 the description of the feast in le Lys dans la 
 Vallee, concluded as follows : ' Whatever may 
 have been said or done, it is obvious that such 
 a man knew his mother tongue, and knew it as 
 well as any one ; only he plied it in his own 
 style.' I would add : and without style. 
 
 That article, wonderfully fine after all, 
 ample, wide in scope, and brilliant, was just 
 the thing to spur admiration for Balzac ; he 
 was certainly made to be relished by the most 
 delicate taste, but it was meant, above all, for 
 the crowd, for it was all quite plainly set forth, 
 and tended entirely to the glorification of
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 233 
 
 Balzac. Sainte-Beuve's article, much truer 
 precisely because truth exists in fine shades, 
 was written with an eye on the public at large, 
 so that they should wonder whether Balzac 
 had genius, whether he was genuine, whether 
 he wrote well, and how much he had of genius 
 and to what extent he was genuine, and to 
 what extent he was really a good writer. It 
 was a bad article of strife and of conquest. It 
 is true that Sainte-Beuve thought neither of 
 striving nor of conquering, and merely took 
 for his motto ' The truth alone.' 
 
 It is likely enough that Balzac at least 
 helped to temper and amend George Sand, and 
 was for something in her breaking away from 
 the literature of pure imagination and in her 
 return to the simple and natural, which was 
 indeed no more than a return to her natural 
 self. George Sand, who set out on the full 
 tide of romanticism by saying, ' They make 
 monsters, let us make monsters too, 5 must 
 have been brought (amongst other motives), 
 through Balzac's ascendency over her, that 
 Balzac whom she personally liked, to observing, 
 if not patiently, at least carefully, the things 
 about her, the peasantry, the middle-class 
 people, the lesser independent gentlemen, the
 
 234 BALZAC 
 
 artists; and it was while working in that new 
 vein that she brought out those amiable books 
 of her third manner, quite true, mark you, in 
 spite of their romantic aspect, and these are, 
 I think, decidedly the ones that posterity will 
 most cherish among all that came from her 
 hand. 
 
 And mark well that up to 1848 George Sand 
 was above all an ideologist, extremely in love 
 with abstract ideas, though she often under- 
 stood nothing of them ; and from 1848 on- 
 ward she set herself (except in her polemical 
 novel Mademoiselle de la Quintinie) only to 
 paint such characters as had some basis in 
 reality, stylises in their shaping and made 
 to follow the evolutions of sentiment. This 
 was a transformation which George Sand 
 herself very surely brought about, and yet 
 there is nothing hazardous in attributing it 
 at least in part to the influence of her great 
 rival and friend. 
 
 As regards the stage, Balzac's influence was 
 no less important, even granting that it was 
 not still more so. Augier and Dumas suc- 
 ceeded Scribe, and it will be agreed that both 
 were very probably led by Balzac's example, 
 and above all by his success, to pour into their
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 235 
 
 dramatic work a greater amount of realism 
 than the stage had ever known since Molire ; 
 and most certainly, with the first appearances 
 of Augier and the younger Dumas, people might 
 have said : 
 
 And now we must no longer stray 
 From Nature's path one step away 
 
 as La Fontaine did when Moliere burst upon 
 the world. 
 
 Augier, while observing on his own account, 
 and very well too, borrowed from Balzac his 
 overbearingly vain bourgeois, and no doubt 
 old Poirier passed from Balzac to Augier 
 through Jules Sandeau, himself a pupil of 
 Balzac's ; but it seems difficult not to recognise 
 in him old Crevel, just as Maitre Guerin has an 
 obvious likeness to Baron Hulot ; he borrowed 
 from him his courtesans and his hatred (which 
 I have no thought of blaming) of courtesans; 
 he borrowed from him his journalists and 
 his aversion (which I am not sufficiently 
 disinterested to praise) for journalists. His 
 other hatred, that for clericals, does not at all 
 link him with Balzac, but rather with Eugene 
 Sue ; but, all things considered, he derives from 
 Balzac more than from any one else.
 
 236 BALZAC 
 
 The younger Dumas confined himself almost 
 entirely to the study of love passions because 
 it was his special bent, and because it is the 
 surest way to the heart. But even la Dame 
 aux Camillas herself derives to some extent 
 from Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, 
 while on the other hand la Question tf Argent 
 is just like the stage version of a novel by 
 Balzac, with more mots, traits, and wit than 
 Balzac could have brought out ; but that, 
 
 / after all, is a secondary matter. 
 
 / Finally came Flaubert, who as a creative 
 genius is very little below Balzac, and who, 
 as artist and writer, is in my opinion incom- 
 parably his superior. Flaubert filtered Balzac. 
 A romantic to his finger-tips, more so even than 
 Balzac, and like him devoured by the demon 
 of observation, his own being more patient, 
 more obstinate, and more minute than Balzac's, 
 he made up his mind (because he was the most 
 c conscious ' and the most deliberate artist in 
 the world) to satisfy both his passion as a 
 romantic and his passion as a realist, but 
 never to pour both these elements into the 
 same novel. It was quite a discovery at the 
 time that he wrote, for it meant the remem- 
 bering of a law of literary art which had been
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 237 
 
 for long forgotten or ill understood. It meant 
 remembering that the reader, unconsciously, 
 though as imperiously as possible, at all times 
 requires of a work, I do not say unity of tone, 
 for that means monotony, but unity as regards 
 the general impression, and that the mixing 
 up of romantic art for instance with realistic 
 art bewilders him, disconcerts him, and shocks 
 him just as much as would an anachronism or 
 the mixing up of different epochs. 
 
 Therein he is quite right, for just as there is 
 an historical epoch proper to romanticism, so 
 there is one proper to realism, and the author 
 who mingles or entangles both in the same book 
 behaves as though he made men of 1765 con- 
 verse with men of 1830, as though Corneille 
 should make Polyeucte converse with Panurge ; 
 and the mingling of strict observation with 
 unbridled imagination is like a confusion of 
 dates. 
 
 Balzac too often behaved in this way, whilst 
 Flaubert never did so. To the romantic that 
 throbbed inside him he yielded Salammbo 
 and la Tentation de Saint Antoine and la 
 Legende de Saint Jean VHospitalier and Herodi- 
 ade ; to the realist in him, that was eager for 
 slow and careful observation of his fellows and
 
 238 BALZAC 
 
 even of himself which is worth noticing he 
 yielded Madame Bovary, ^Education senti- 
 mentale, and Un Cceur simple. And that is 
 what I call filtering Balzac, which does not 
 at all account for Flaubert's genius, but merely 
 accounts for his method and the nature of his 
 connection with Balzac. 
 
 Moreover, as I think I have already pointed 
 out, Flaubert filtered Balzac again inasmuch 
 as he thought of Balzac's personal intrusions, 
 his dissertations, digressions, and prologues, and 
 saw how much they hindered his work and 
 spoilt its effect, condemning them outright, and 
 ruthlessly ousting them from any place in his 
 own work. He who was teeming with ideas 
 (confused, indeed, though it is not with that 
 that we have now to deal), with feeling, with 
 passion, with indignation, with anger, and with 
 eloquence for expressing it all, firmly made up 
 his mind never to put any of these things into 
 a novel, not even into a novel of imagination, 
 exoticism, and antiquity. It seems likely 
 enough that it was his reading and study of 
 Balzac's novels that inspired Flaubert with 
 his j whole doctrine of ' impersonal art,' that 
 truly' classical doctrine which was respected by 
 Homer, by Pindar (though he was a lyrical
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 289 
 
 poet), by Virgil, by Lucan (not at all by 
 Lucretius, for the good reason that he was 
 didactic), by all the epic poets of the Middle 
 Ages, by the poor epic poets of the seventeenth 
 century, by Le Sage, by Marivaux, by Voltaire 
 in his Contes, and indeed even by Scarron 
 himself. 
 
 Flaubert is a more artistic Balzac, more 
 scrupulous, more orderly, and more careful of 
 proper arrangement, and an infinitely better 
 writer. And yet, in spite of Frederic Moreau, 
 Bovary, Mme. Bovary, and Homais, he created 
 fewer types, fewer characters endowed with 
 enduring life, and consequently he cannot be 
 put on the same level of admiration as his 
 great forerunner. 
 
 After him came his pupils (who are just as 
 much Balzac's as his), all those who called 
 themselves ' naturalists,' using a very equi- 
 vocal term and one very ill-made (since naturist 
 would be the right one), a term which was 
 invented only because ' realist J seemed worn 
 out. With them are all those who made use 
 of the 4 experiment novels ' (a term equally 
 inapt, for we cannot make experiments on 
 the manners and the characters of men, but 
 merely observations), all of those in short who
 
 240 BALZAC 
 
 prided themselves on having no other art than 
 that of seizing the truth and setting it down. 
 
 Alphonse Daudet, the Goncourts, Emile 
 Zola, and Maupassant are of Balzac's direct 
 progeny, but they have every one of them their 
 own originality and, as it were, their character- 
 istic personal mark. 
 
 Alphonse Daudet, who is an excellent ob- 
 server, answers well to the pretty definition of 
 Nisard (which the latter applied to Balzac) ; 
 he is the painter of c anecdotic manners.' As 
 often happens with Balzac, he makes a novel 
 out of a bit of Parisian gossip, or an anecdote 
 to the bottom of which he knows how to probe, 
 and in which he sees clearly all that it implies. 
 It is certainly an excellent way of setting 
 about giving the likeness of life to your story 
 of life detailed and familiar which you almost 
 imagine you have yourself known. But that 
 hardly helps, though there is no reason why 
 it should not do so, in the creation of types ; 
 it narrows the horizon a little, but it does 
 not accustom you to faire de Vhumain, as a 
 literary man would say. That is to say, it 
 in nowise helps you in the making of characters 
 who are at once typical and full of individual 
 life, and that is the supreme summit of art, and
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 241 
 
 a summit to which Balzac often attained. 
 Daudet drew a few wonderful portraits, but 
 he created no types. For capital, he had 
 sensibility and a capacity for emotion (the 
 Dickens part of him, as some one has said), and 
 these two things Balzac was practically without, 
 or he refused to capitulate to them. 
 
 The Goncourts went farther in that direc- 
 tion than Daudet himself, and they delighted 
 not only in anecdotic manners, but also in 
 exceptional manners and characters. Balzac 
 did not leave that out either, for there is no 
 territory which he left unsurveyed ; but with 
 him the nearness of characters recognised at 
 first sight by the reader as being true war- 
 rants and renders genuine, if I may say so, 
 the exceptional characters and psychological 
 rarities which he introduces. In the Gon- 
 courts, all or nearly all the characters being 
 exceptional, we hesitate to accept them as 
 true, and it would really be necessary for the 
 authors to give us their word of honour that 
 they were so ; and then each of them would 
 become as valuable as an historical document, 
 a singularly interesting document of 4 lesser 
 history.' At bottom it is exactly that ; and it 
 is obvious that the Goncourts had but little
 
 242 BALZAC 
 
 imagination, and that they found their char- 
 acters in the slice of real life which surrounded 
 them ; and they must be read in that con- 
 viction. There remains the fact that this 
 kind of art, most ingenious and scrupulous 
 though it be, hardly satisfies at all our hanker- 
 ing to find in our novelists what we ourselves 
 have seen still better seen by them, more 
 strongly drawn, better set off, and more 
 highly coloured, assuming vaster proportions 
 and depths which we had but vaguely sus- 
 pected. 
 
 There is no doubt that it was the reading of 
 Balzac, and of Taine's article on him, as well as 
 the other works of that critic that revealed to 
 Emile Zola his literary vocation. In detesting 
 Zola, Taine was quite as ungrateful as Chateau- 
 briand when he detested romanticism. Taine 
 had very rightly observed that Balzac treated 
 the social world just as he might have done 
 a zoological one, and wrote a natural history 
 of humankind. Such was Emile Zola's art 
 formula. He determined to look on men 
 merely as animals, and human society as an 
 animal one. It must be noted that this is not 
 altogether wrong it is a half-truth ; for animal- 
 ism has indeed a huge share in all of us, and
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 243 
 
 Baron Hulot, Philippe Brideau, and Old Goriot, 
 whom we feel to be so life-like, are nothing else 
 than big super-animals. And that shows that 
 very fine things may be done, with proper 
 talent, working from this simple conception. 
 But it is obvious that he who neither rises 
 above it nor gets beyond it can achieve nothing 
 more than 4 the epic poem of human animalism,' 
 as M. Lemaitre has said. Zola, either from 
 incapacity or purposely, forbade himself all 
 psychology, and said proudly, ' I have no need 
 of psychology.' And in so doing he showed 
 himself very different from Balzac, who is 
 oftentimes the most penetrating psychologist 
 in the world. 
 
 And still he did resemble him. Like him 
 deeply romantic (as he himself confessed), and 
 like Flaubert in his striving to ' get rid of the 
 romantic virus,' without ever succeeding ; like 
 him in love, only still more so, with great 
 ensembles, and able to set crowds in motion 
 like the waves of a vast sea ; like him (though 
 not more so) most eager to seize the external 
 aspect of things, of a house, a street, a market- 
 place, a corner of a town, a whole town, or a 
 province, and succeeding rather well, in spite 
 of a useless symbolism and sort of mytholo-
 
 244 BALZAC 
 
 gism, in rendering them and making them 
 impressive, he is still in my opinion the one 
 successor among all the immediate followers 
 of Balzac who most resembles the great master. 
 His faults, which are enormous, derive partly 
 from Balzac, or can at least be considered as 
 being due to his tradition ; his vulgarity, his 
 triviality, his liking for dirtiness (since Boileau 
 uses that word, why should it be forbidden me ?), 
 his sordisme if you like that better, make us 
 think rather of Restif de la Bretonne l than of 
 Balzac no doubt ; still we cannot hide from 
 ourselves the fact that these elements are to 
 be found in Balzac, and perhaps oftener than 
 we could wish. Zola was a coarser and a more 
 vulgar Balzac, authorised, as it were, by what 
 was gross and coarse in Balzac himself. No one 
 perhaps ever had more than he the advantage 
 which lack of fineness gives in appealing to the 
 public at large, and it must be acknowledged 
 that Balzac too enjoyed this precious privilege 
 in considerable measure. An excellent man 
 moreover for we feel bound to say it when 
 we have been treating him so ill, even though 
 
 1 Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806), the author of very unequal 
 and licentious noYels, apparently the outcome of his personal ill- 
 living. TB.
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 245 
 
 it has no connection with the matter we are 
 now dealing with a man of generous feelings, 
 in spite of his extraordinary irritability and 
 pride ; a man who did credit to himself by his 
 later works, however bad they may be ; a man 
 of whom we may say that he began with fine 
 books that were bad deeds, and ended with 
 good deeds that were bad books. 
 
 Maupassant, a direct pupil of Flaubert, 
 learnt from him that ' impersonal art ' which 
 he put into practice so strictly, even more 
 strictly than Flaubert himself. He owes, after 
 all, little enough to Balzac. He is impersonal ; 
 he is no longer a romantic nor a ' low realist,' 
 nor a creator of types ; he has neither Balzac's 
 defects nor his outstanding qualities. Still 
 the frankness of narrative, the robust shaping 
 of exposition, the absence of all affectation in 
 writing, the something calm and strong that 
 makes an author seem like a natural power, 
 is his in common with Balzac. The same 
 fundamental pessimism, too, is to be found in 
 both. The language and the style as well, 
 though better than those of Balzac, or if you 
 prefer, less unequal, remind you of him at his 
 best, by their naturalness, their spontaneity, 
 their genuineness, their lack of pose ; by the
 
 246 BALZAC 
 
 fact that they give the impression that before 
 setting about writing, and in order to do so, 
 the author did not put himself in 4 a literary 
 frame of mind.' We know well enough that 
 Balzac had too often just these defects, though 
 I recognised too that he had often these same 
 qualities in a high degree. 
 
 M. Bourget, though indisputably Balzac's 
 inferior, as he would be himself the first not 
 only to admit but to proclaim, is the contempor- 
 ary novelist who most resembles him, whom he 
 has evidently passionately read over and over 
 again. To tell the truth, he has nothing of the 
 romantic about him, he will have nothing to do 
 with low realism, and I would even say that he 
 abhors it. But (here is my opinion as to his 
 defects) in spite of the examples and lessons set 
 him by Flaubert, he deliberately turned his back 
 on 4 impersonal art ' and relapsed on disserta- 
 tions, prologues, and almost continuous com- 
 mentary. He seems to be holding his char- 
 acters by the hand, even suspending at times 
 their actions, so that he may say to us : 
 c Just see what they are about ; they think in 
 this way or in that way or hi that other way. 
 And that is easily explicable, for it is quite 
 natural for the human heart to. , Please
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 247 
 
 notice in short . . .' And this commentary 
 is much cleverer and much less out of place 
 than in Balzac, and I do not think that he 
 ever degenerates into mere digressions. But it 
 is almost perpetual; it hinders action, takes 
 from the reader the pleasure of himself making 
 reflections which the author makes for him, 
 irritates his pride, which thinks, ' I could easily 
 explain these things for myself without his 
 doing it for me so complacently,' and gives 
 the work the hybrid character of a narrative 
 mixed up with a series of lectures. 
 
 Another resemblance to Balzac, fortuitous 
 perhaps, pertaining perhaps to something which 
 may be common to both, is the fact that M. 
 Bourget, like Balzac, has a very unequal style, 
 excellent at times, as in the philosophical, 
 psychological, and moral formulce ; at other 
 times painful, obscure, difficult, and incorrect. 
 
 And like Balzac, as regards his merits, M. 
 Bourget aims at creating types, and he often 
 more than half succeeds, as in the type of a 
 genuinely democratic professor imbued with 
 the spirit of 1848 as with a religion ; the type 
 of the French aristocrat inwardly self-exiled, 
 who banishes himself from the nation as from 
 a foreign body; the type of the egoist, self-
 
 248 BALZAC 
 
 centred and strengthened in his egoism by 
 scientific doctrines and a scientific education 
 wanting in ballast, etc. 
 
 M. Bourget is fond of the novel of ideas, and 
 even of the problem novel, and herein he much 
 resembles Balzac, and yet with a good deal of 
 difference too, for Balzac scatters the ideas he 
 treasures all through his novel, whilst M. 
 Bourget incorporates them in his, makes of one 
 of them the very soul of his work, and in such 
 a way that thesis and action mingle, or rather 
 fuse together, so that the novel from beginning 
 to end moves onward both to its unravelling 
 and to its conclusion. 
 
 Like Balzac, M. Bourget is very psychological, 
 but with this difference, that Balzac is more 
 of a moralist, an observer of manners than 
 a psychologist, while M. Bourget, though he 
 observes well, is more of a psychologist than 
 a moralist, just as Stendhal was ; he delights 
 somewhat less in studying and noting the 
 diverse ways of men than a character being 
 given in dogging, watching, spying, and prob- 
 ing into its secret details, and in all their 
 delicate play, into the fine and subtle springs 
 of action. 
 
 Add to this, what is less important, that M.
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 249 
 
 Bourget, like Balzac very often, though by no 
 means invariably, is fond of slipping into his 
 novel a dramatic scene, an intrigue, unex- 
 pected and pathetic incidents, a whole drama 
 in short. Finally and it is a claim than which 
 none could be worthier M. Bourget is the 
 best, the most thorough-going pupil of Balzac's 
 who has revealed himself since 1870, without 
 being in the least an imitator. 
 
 The direct influence of Balzac is at an end. 
 He is neither copied any longer, nor is his 
 general turn of mind to be seen in the works 
 produced since 1900. Contemporary novels 
 remind us rather of George Sand, or Sandeau 
 or Octave Feuillet than of him. People be- 
 come classic ; they do not imitate the classics ; 
 they do not even get their inspiration from 
 them ; they are merely part of the mental 
 development, which is, after all, a highly im- 
 portant thing ; but still there is not in 1912 
 (any more than there was in 1770) a school of 
 Corneille, of Racine, or of Moliere, nor is there 
 any longer a school of Balzac. Balzac is 
 henceforward, like all the great classics, 
 like Chateaubriand, for instance, or Victor 
 Hugo, according to whichever metaphor you 
 choose, set above all schools like a quicken-
 
 250 BALZAC 
 
 ing star, or beneath them all like a fertilising 
 soil. 
 
 In order to fix Balzac's place in the nine- 
 teenth century, and to complete his character- 
 isation, an attempt has been made to find out 
 every one with whom he might possibly be 
 compared, and thus it comes about that a very 
 great critic has compared him to Sainte-Beuve, 
 solely from the point of view, it is true, of 
 method, considering that he studied men just 
 in the same way as Balzac, quite unhampered 
 by any a priori or metaphysics, like true 
 naturalists. Even when reduced to this point 
 of view, the parallel is quite baseless. Sainte- 
 Beuve invented nothing, nor did he wish to. 
 Balzac invents at least as much as he observes, 
 and in my opinion a great deal more, a fact 
 for which moreover I bear him no grudge. 
 Sainte-Beuve knows of nothing but investiga- 
 tion, and wishes to know of nothing else ; 
 Balzac trusts, and quite rightly, to his intuition, 
 and follows it to such lengths indeed that it 
 ceases to be, even for him, a safe guide ; Sainte- 
 Beuve has no a priori whatever, and Balzac 
 has an a priori, or (if you prefer the term) a 
 general idea which dominates and overhangs 
 observation, and that is the enormous a priori
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 251 
 
 due to his fundamental pessimism and essential 
 misanthropy. There exists between Balzac 
 and Sainte-Beuve absolutely no common bond, 
 and there are no two natures which, not only 
 from the point of view of taste and of tastes, 
 but in everything else, could be more widely 
 sundered. 
 
 Balzac can only be compared to some pur- 
 pose, and to finish defining him to George Sand 
 and Flaubert in his own century, and to Le 
 Sage and La Bruyere in the rest of French 
 literature. George Sand has far less than he 
 the power of creating types, and the almost 
 material proof is in the fact that though we 
 say commonly, ' He is a Grandet all over, or 
 a Goriot, or a Philippe Brideau,' we never say, 
 ' He is a Villemer or a Merquem.' Hardly 
 ever; though it must not be forgotten that 
 people will say, ' Here is a Mauprat or a 
 Lelia.' But George Sand had a better style 
 than Balzac, as he himself recognised ; and 
 instead of following a rigid plan, she followed a 
 pliant and a supple one, in itself a good way of 
 achieving resemblance to real life ; and she 
 had grace, she possessed the molle atque face- 
 turn which Balzac was utterly without ; and, 
 finally, in truth of detail, in her subservient
 
 252 BALZAC 
 
 and incidental characters, in the smooth 
 current of ordinary everyday happenings, I 
 cannot too often repeat how clearly this 
 idealistic and imaginative woman saw every- 
 thing, and had the genuine and simple sense 
 without bias, save towards indulgence of 
 reality, actual reality, which is a thing so far 
 removed from ' realism.' Whatever may have 
 been said about it, people will get nearer to 
 the true history of average daily life in the 
 nineteenth century when reading George Sand 
 than when reading Balzac. 
 
 Flaubert, that unbridled romantic who had 
 such matchless gifts as a realist, and who was 
 therefore a thoroughly equipped artist ; Flau- 
 bert, who dreamt only of oriental tales vast 
 as the frescoes of a cathedral, streaming with 
 colour and set with dazzling stones, who 
 studied a Normandy village with the keen eye 
 and the dissecting scalpel of his father ; Flau- 
 bert, who, in spite of somewhat faulty language, 
 had a wonderful gift for style and for all kinds 
 of it ; Flaubert was better endowed than 
 Balzac in truth, since he too knew how to 
 create types, and since Mme. Bovary, M. 
 Bovary, Homais, and Frederic Moreau may be 
 looked on as imperishable. But I must con-
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 253 
 
 fess too that fecundity is also a great gift, and 
 that Flaubert, though he had to an incredible 
 degree the faculty of creating types, and did 
 indeed produce some astonishing ones, created 
 after all very few, for he thrust into the living 
 world no more than the four whom I have 
 just mentioned ; for however devoutly and 
 ingeniously the matter be put, I can hardly 
 admit at the moment of writing that Mme. 
 Arnoux and Salammbo are truly alive. The 
 immense superiority of c creating a world ' (to 
 fall in for once with the exaggerated formulae 
 of ecstatic criticism) remains most indisputably 
 with Balzac, though, as an artist, Flaubert 
 must no doubt be preferred to him. 
 
 Le Sage wrote in the most beautiful classical 
 language ever known and related things wonder- 
 fully well, better even than Voltaire, and that 
 is saying a good deal. He wrote in a style 
 that is neither too fast nor too slow, that 
 neither drags nor leaps along, that is not 
 monotonous, a style so perfectly obedient to 
 the will, that we do not notice in reading him 
 what is the very acme of art how well he 
 tells a story, and become aware of it only in 
 retrospect. As far as that is concerned, he is 
 undoubtedly above Balzac. As a realist he
 
 254 BALZAC 
 
 has an excellent sense of truth, of likelihood, 
 of the average, that is neither overstrained in 
 one direction nor in the other, of man as he 
 really is, without any artistic deformation, 
 without any refraction from the author's mind. 
 And if it be true, in accordance with a defini- 
 tion which seems to me to be not of the worst, 
 that art is truth seen through a temperament, 
 it would seem as though Le Sage had no 
 temperament at all ; and, therefore, Le Sage 
 is the very model of what a realist should be. 
 No one ever answered better than he to Sten- 
 dhal's so happy and picturesque definition ' A 
 novel is like a looking-glass dawdling along a 
 road. 5 He excelled in silhouettes : a thousand 
 tiny people whom he comes across on his ' road ' 
 are set down in astounding perfection, and they 
 are quite alive. But to him too, even more 
 than to Flaubert, the gift of creating types was 
 granted in but niggardly measure. He has 
 only one such, Gil Bias himself, most extra- 
 ordinary, imperishable, brimful of life, of 
 several diverse lives which are not incoherent 
 nor ill-assorted, but harmonious ; so com- 
 pletely does he seem, as he indeed is, the por- 
 trait of the civilised man, of the modern social 
 man with his qualities and faults, in all his
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 255 
 
 complex truth and yet with a great simplicity 
 in his main features. But he stands alone, 
 although surrounded by the thousand interest- 
 ing silhouettes just mentioned ; he is the only 
 one that is a great portrait, the full-length 
 canvas of a master. 
 
 La Bruyere, as a painter of manners and 
 characters, is very great. Too much has been 
 made of his abstract quality, of his being an 
 inimitable artist who drew abstract pictures. 
 He is often that, after the manner of his age ; 
 but he is far from being always so. He ' made 
 things live ' much oftener than is believed. I 
 have already cited in the course of these pages 
 the rich man and the poor man ; there are 
 plenty of others : Cydias, who besides being 
 a portrait is recognised by the reader as being 
 an actor on the stage or a man of letters in 
 the world, the two things being in effect just 
 the same ; there is Onuphre dressing himself, the 
 way he walks, how he behaves in church, the 
 air he puts on when he wants to get something 
 out of somebody and wants to be asked in- 
 stead, thus transforming the seeker for favour 
 into its conferrer ; how he looks when he 
 is running somebody down, and how, while 
 smiling or sighing, he slanders and calumniates
 
 256 BALZAC 
 
 by his very silence : I see all that ever so 
 clearly, his face only being unknown to me ; 
 but that is in truth because I have no need of 
 it. In the same way I see Arsene, who from 
 his lofty mind looks down on men, and who, 
 seeing them so far off, is as it were frightened 
 by their smallness ; and no physical feature 
 could give me a better idea of his haughtiness, 
 the turn of his head, his ' distant ' look, his 
 inward glance and a sort of sacred mystery in 
 which his whole being is wrapped. And I 
 might quote many another. A good many 
 portraits of La Bruyere are living and concrete, 
 some because they are deliberately and ex- 
 plicitly so, others because, though psychical 
 portraits, they necessarily suggest, and with- 
 out the reader contributing thereto, a physical 
 effigy ; and these are not the least picturesque. 
 The greatest painter of the men of his age, of 
 the multitude of men of his age, is La Bruyere. 
 We may add, if you will, that, as some one has 
 said with good reason, Balzac is prophetic and 
 painted men who were to live between 1850 
 and 1900. In the same way La Bruyere fore- 
 told the habits of life under the Regency, set 
 forth how a pious man is one who, under an 
 atheistic king, will turn a theist, guessed the
 
 BALZAC AFTER HIS DEATH 257 
 
 enormous importance that was to devolve on 
 men of wealth and influence, and often pro- 
 ceeded by the most magisterial anticipations. 
 
 It is to La Bruyere that we must compare 
 Balzac, setting aside the fact that they had 
 both of them, in common with all men who 
 watch things very closely, a heavy substratum 
 of misanthropy. But I must admit that there 
 is not in all La Bruyere a giant like Grandet, 
 Hulot, or Philippe Brideau. Every time Bal- 
 zac shows forth his great monsters we always 
 feel bound to say to him, ' In spite of all your 
 faults, and though it is very hard to put up 
 with you, yet there was indeed inside you such 
 a force of nature as must even have surprised 
 itself a little.' 
 
 It seems as though Balzac had set out to 
 prove that Buffon, when he said that well- 
 written works were the only ones that could 
 reach posterity, did not know what he was 
 talking about. It seems as though he were 
 determined to give him the lie. And it is true 
 that Buffon is wrong ; and it is true that pos- 
 terity and rightly so welcomes with almost 
 equal favour the great artist in language and 
 the great inventor of ideas who has no style at 
 all (Auguste Comte), and the great creator of
 
 258 BALZAC 
 
 living things who has no style, or rather one 
 that is generally tedious. Posterity prefers to 
 welcome, it welcomes far more willingly, a 
 great stylist ; for posterity is artistic, let us 
 be quite sure of that, and never forget it ; but 
 it does not drive away others a priori, and 
 gives them as good lodging as they deserve. 
 For the question is enrichment by beauty, by 
 thought, by life, of the inheritance, the ever 
 needy inheritance, of mankind. 
 
 And yet young men are requested not to 
 get it into their heads, as they may very well 
 feel encouraged to do, that it is enough to 
 write badly in order to become a second Balzac.
 
 INDEX 
 
 ABOUT, EDMOND, quotations 
 
 from, 221, 222. 
 Abrantes, Duchess <T, 13. 
 ^schylus, 128, 140. 
 Albert Savarus, 1 , 68, 163, 167. 
 Amiel, 93, 134. 
 Andrieux, 8. 
 Apuleius, 175. 
 Arlincourt, M. d', 175. 
 Augier, 128 ; Balzac's influence 
 
 on, 234, 235. 
 Avare, I', 145, 156. 
 
 BAGRATION, MADAME DE, 12. 
 Ballanche, 23, 166 and n. 
 Balssa, Franois (see Balzac, 
 
 Franois). 
 
 Balzac, Francois, 1-3, 5-7. 
 Madame, 1-3, 5, 6, 11, 15, 
 
 16, 23. 
 
 Honore de, origin and 
 
 early years, 1-6 ; literary am- 
 bitions, 6-8 ; relations with 
 Madame de Berny, 8-11, 16, 
 17 ; early publications, 9, 10 ; 
 failures in business, 10, 11, 17 ; 
 entry into society, 12 ; literary 
 friends of, 12, 13 ; relations 
 with Madame de Castries, 13, 
 14,193; relations with Madame 
 Hanska, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 25; 
 influences of provincial France 
 on, 15 ; influences of occult- 
 ism on, 16, 64 ; dramatic work 
 of, 17, 18, 20 ; illness of, 20- 
 23 ; marriage to Madame Han- 
 
 ska, 23; death of, 23; con- 
 nection with French Academy, 
 23, 24 ; appearance and char- 
 acter of, 24-32, 182 ; political 
 opinions of, 28, 36-44 ; friends 
 of, 28 ; Lamartine's opinion 
 of, 29, 30 ; methods of work- 
 ing, 30-32; philosophy and 
 religion of, 34-36; criticisms 
 of contemporary writers, 44, 
 45, 74 ; defects as a thinker, 
 48 ; views on life, 49-73 ; 
 powers of psychology, 56, 57. 
 Work of. Lack of intellec- 
 tual culture in, 33 ; import- 
 ance of money and ambition in, 
 57-61, 66 ; originality and ob- 
 servation in, 62, 63, 86, 92-96, 
 152 ; views of press in, 63 ; 
 poetical realism in, 64, 65 ; 
 comparison of with Tolstoi, 
 65 ; views of love in, 66, 67 ; 
 knowledge of life in, 68, 69 ; 
 knowledge of Paris and Pari- 
 siens shown in, 69-72 ; Saint- 
 Beuve's criticism of, 73, 213- 
 216, 227, 228, 233 ; faults of 
 construction in, 74 ; garrulity 
 of description in, 75, 76 ; irre- 
 levant dissertations in, 77-84, 
 89-91 ; comparison of with 
 George Sand, 77, 149, 163, 
 251, 252 ; methods and ex- 
 amples of character creation 
 in, 98-102 ; aptness of nomen- 
 clature in, 120-122 ; lodging 
 
 259
 
 260 
 
 BALZAC 
 
 of characters in, 123-128 ; 
 genius for character-drawing 
 in, 128-137, 195, 196 ; simpli- 
 city of character studies in, 
 137-140, 143 ; addiction to 
 general types of character in, 
 44; absence of complex types of 
 character in, 145 ; evolution 
 of characters ill, 146-162 ; 
 failure of complex characters 
 in, 160-162 ; true and base 
 realism in, 164-173, 175, 182 ; 
 mysticism in, 173-175 ; trashy 
 romanticism in, 175, 182 ; 
 realism in, 179 ; brutality in, 
 180-182 ; vulgarity in, 182- 
 185; high life in, 185-194, 
 201 ; occasional excellencies of 
 style in, 196-200, 217 ; usual 
 execrable style in, 201-209, 
 217 ; apt copying in, 210 ; 
 Nisard's criticism of, 216, 217 ; 
 moral influences and effects of, 
 219-223 ; criticism of by Ed- 
 mond About, 221 ; influence of 
 on literature, 223; influence of 
 upon romanticism and realism, 
 225; popularity of, 225, 227- 
 229 ; immediate effects of on 
 literary successors, 229, 230 ; 
 article on by Taine, 230-233 ; 
 influence of on George Sand, 
 233, 234 ; influence of on 
 drama, 234-236 ; debt of 
 Flaubert to, 236-239; com- 
 parison of with Alphonse 
 Daudet, 240, 241 ; with Gon- 
 court brothers, 241, 242 ; with 
 Emile Zola, 242-245 ; with de 
 Maupassant, 245, 246 ; with 
 M. Bourget, 246-249; with 
 Saint-Beuve, 250, 251 ; with 
 Flaubert, 252, 253 ; with Le 
 Sage, 253-255 ; with La Bru- 
 yere, 255-257 ; extracts from 
 letters, 7, 13 ; quotations 
 from, 35, 36, 38-48, 54, 55, 60, 
 
 61, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 76, 79- 
 84, 100, 101, 102-106, 108, 
 110,112-118,123-127,130,131, 
 184-192, 195-207, 209-212. 
 
 Balzac, Laure (see Surville, Ma- 
 dame). 
 
 Laurence (nee Montzaigle, 
 Madame). 
 
 Baudelaire, 229. 
 
 Beranger, 28. 
 
 Bernard, Charles de, 229. 
 
 Berny, Gabriel de, 8. 
 
 Madame de, early life of, 8 ; 
 
 relations with Balzac, 8-12 ; 
 influences over Balzac, 9 ; her 
 separation from her husband, 
 16 ; her death, and its effect 
 on Balzac, 17. 
 
 Blondet, 37. 
 
 Boileau, 90. 
 
 Bossuet, 141. 
 
 Bourdaloue, 215 and n., 217. 
 
 Bourget, M., compared with 
 Balzac, 246-249. 
 
 Brunetiere, criticisms of Balzac, 
 68 and n., 192, 193 ; le Roman 
 Naturaliste, 178 n.; quotation 
 from Honore de Balsac, 192, 
 193 ; critical opinions of, 214, 
 217, 230, 231. 
 
 Buffon, 257. 
 
 CANORA, 83. 
 
 Castries, La Duchesse de, 13, 
 14, 15, 193. 
 Due de, 14. 
 
 Chabert, le Colonel, 74. 
 Champfleury, criticism of, 229, 
 
 230. 
 Chateaubriand, 24, 26, 209, 242, 
 
 249. 
 
 Chouans, les, 11, 12. 
 Colombes, Michael, 83. 
 Comedie Humaine, la, 97. 
 Comte, Auguste, 257. 
 Contes drolatiques, criticism of, 
 
 210, 217.
 
 INDEX 
 
 261 
 
 Corneille, 2, 95, 128, 140, 237, 
 249. 
 
 Cousine Bette, la, portrait of 
 Madame Francois Balzac in, 
 3 ; rapid writing of, 31 ; heroic 
 veterans of, 53 ; criticism of 
 Atala in, 168, 169 ; quota- 
 tions from, 60, 61, 82-84, 168. 
 
 Cousin Pans, le, 74. 
 
 Cure de Villaye, 89. 
 
 DANTE, 83. 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse, Tartarin, j 
 207 ; criticism of and com- i 
 parison with Balzac, 240, 241. ! 
 
 Derniere Incarnation de Vautrin, \ 
 166, 168. 
 
 Descartes, 158. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 178, 241. 
 
 Dumas, Alexander, 23. 
 
 (the younger), genius of, 
 
 128 ; Balzac's influence on, 
 234-236. 
 
 Duranty, 230. 
 
 Diirer, Albert, 83. 
 
 Ecole des Menages, I', 17- 
 Eliot, George, 178 and n. 
 Employes, les, 68. 
 Epaminondas, 140, 141. 
 Essarts, M. Fabre des, Hiero- 
 
 phantes, 16. 
 
 Eugenie Grandet, 59, 74. 
 Euripides, 128, 140. 
 
 FAGUET, M., 192 n. 
 Feinmeubandonnee, /a,criticism of 
 
 and quotations from, 189-192. 
 Femme de trente Ans, criticism 
 
 of and quotations from, 169- 
 
 173, 198-200. 
 Feuillet, Octave, 249. 
 Filles aux Yeux d'or, la, 180. 
 Fitz-James, Duke of, 14. 
 Flaubert, Gustave, his theory of 
 
 art, 89, 129; superiority of 
 
 taste compared with Balzac, 
 
 164 ; criticisms of, 178, 179 ; 
 further comparisons with Bal- 
 zac, 210, 236-239, 252, 253 ; 
 attitude to romanticism, 243 ; 
 influence on Maupassant, 245 ; 
 criticism of Madame Bovary 
 by Edmond About, 221. 
 
 Fontenelle, 2 and n., 27. 
 
 France, Anatole, 86, 228. 
 
 Furetiere, 179. 
 
 GABORIAU, 166. 
 
 Gautier, his friendship for Bal- 
 zac, 28 ; Balzac's love for, 
 135 ; his style, 148, 210, 227- 
 
 Gay, Sophie, 12 and n. 
 
 Delphine (see Girardin, 
 
 Madame de). 
 
 Giotto, 113. 
 
 Girardin, Madame de, 12 and n., 
 28, 29. 
 
 Goethe, 128. 
 
 Goncourt brothers, debt to Bal- 
 zac, 240 ; compared with 
 Balzac, 241, 242. 
 
 Goujon, Jean, 83. 
 
 Gozlan, Leon, 28. 
 
 Grenadiere, la, 69. 
 
 Guinon, M. Albert, quotation 
 from, 145, 146. 
 
 Guyonnet-Merville, M., 6. 
 
 HANSKA, M., 16, 18. 
 
 Madame, meeting with 
 
 Balzac, 16 ; relations with 
 Balzac, 16-23 ; extracts from 
 a letter to her daughter, 21, 
 22 ; Balzac's fidelity to, 25. 
 
 ' Heredia,' quotation from, 58. 
 
 Histoire des Treixe, 166. 
 
 Homer, 84, 90, 92, 94, 128, 140, 
 238. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 17, 23, 28, 31, 
 32, 95, 207, 210, 249. 
 
 IBSEN, 128.
 
 262 
 
 BALZAC 
 
 Illusions perdues, portraits of 
 journalists in, 18, 53 ; criti- 
 cisms of, 66, 89, 167, 168. 
 
 Innocent m., 47. 
 
 Intermediate des Chercheurs et 
 Curieux, 21. 
 
 JACQUINET, 231. 
 
 Junot, Madame (see Abrantes, 
 Duchess d'). 
 
 KNOTHE, M., 22. 
 
 LA BRUYERE, quotation from, 
 57 ; compared as a genius 
 with Balzac, 61, 92, 98, 217, 
 251, 257 ; qualities as a realist 
 and observer criticised, 178, 
 179, 231, 255, 256. 
 
 La Chausse'e, 224. 
 
 Lafontaine, 235. 
 
 Lamartine, quotation from de- 
 scribing Balzac, 29, 30 ; 
 quotation from, 134 ; Sainte- 
 Beuve's criticism of, 215, 
 216. 
 
 La Touche, 12, 17. 
 
 Laurent, M., 11. 
 
 Lemaitre, Frederic, 17, 18, 243. 
 
 Lepitre, M., 5. 
 
 Le Poitivin, 9, 10. 
 
 Le Sage, 61, 239 ; compared 
 with Balzac, 251, 253-255. 
 
 Louis Lambert, 5, 173. 
 
 Louis Philippe, 16, 17, 60, 69, 
 193. 
 
 Saint, 141. 
 
 Loyson, 25, 26. 
 
 Lucan, 239. 
 
 Lucretius, 226, 228. 
 
 Lys dans la Vallee, le, description 
 of schooldays in, 4, 5 ; quota- 
 tions from, "78, 174, 175, 209 ; 
 criticisms of, 162, 167, 173, 
 174, 183, 208, 209, 232. 
 
 MALHERBE, 226. 
 
 Mardtre, la, 20. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 141. 
 
 Marie Antoinette, 8. 
 
 Marivaux, 61, 239. 
 
 Massillon, 129. 
 
 Maupassant, Guy de, literary 
 
 theory of, 89 ; debt to Balzac, 
 
 240, 245 ; compared with 
 
 Balzac, 245, 246. 
 Medecin de Campagne, 2, 89. 
 Menage de Garcon, criticism of, 
 
 188. 
 
 Me'ny, 28. 
 
 Mercadet le Faiseur, 20. 
 Merimee, 227. 
 Metzu, 108. 
 Milton, 83. 
 Mirabeau, 30. 
 Mniszech, Count, 19. 
 Madame de, 21. 
 
 Moliere, 84, 92, 94, 97, 98, 128, 
 140, 144, 156, 157, 217, 226, 
 228, 231, 235, 249. 
 
 Monnier, Henri, 12, 28. 
 
 Montaigne, 219, 226, 228. 
 
 Montesquieu, 42 and n., 227. 
 
 Montzaigle, M. de, 4. 
 
 Madame de, 4. 
 
 NAPOLEON i. , 13. 
 
 Newton, 158. 
 
 Nicole, 215 and n. 
 
 Nisard, Desire, quotation criti- 
 cising Balzac from Histoire de 
 la Litterature franfaise, 216 
 and n., 217, 240. 
 
 OFFENBACH, Grande Dnchesse de 
 Gerolstein, 167 and n. 
 
 PAGANINI, 84. 
 
 Pamela Giraud, 18. 
 
 Pascal, Balzac's opinion of, 140, 
 
 143 ; quotations from, 140, 
 
 141, 142. 
 
 Passion dans le Desert, une, 180. 
 Peau de Chagrin, la, pictures of
 
 INDEX 
 
 263 
 
 Balzac's early life in, 6, 7 ; 
 
 criticism of, 167. 
 Pere Goriot, criticisms of, 75, 
 
 76, 160-162 ; quotations from, 
 
 76, 78-80, 161. 
 Peter the Great, 47. 
 Petits Bourgeois, 168. 
 Petronius, 175, 213. 
 Phidias, 83. 
 
 Physiologic du Mariage, la, 12. 
 Pierre Grassou, 133. 
 Pindar, 238. 
 Plautus, 147. 
 Polycletus, 83. 
 Pomereul, M. de, 11. 
 Pongerville, M. de, 23. 
 Praxiteles, 83. 
 Prudhomme, Joseph, 175. 
 Puget, Loi'sa, 165. 
 Pujet, 83. 
 
 RABELAIS, 226. 
 
 Racine, 128, 140, 155, 177, 178, 
 
 226, 231, 249. 
 Raphael, 81. 
 
 Re'camier, Madame, 166 n. 
 Rembrandt, 108. 
 Ressources de Qninola, les, 18. 
 Restif, 175, 244 and n. 
 Revue Parisienne, 17. 
 Rezvuszka, Mile, (see Hanska, 
 
 Madame). 
 Ronsard, 226. 
 Rostand, 58. 
 Rousseau, 36, 60, 214, 219, 227, 
 
 229. 
 
 SAINTE - BEUVE, 13, 17, 23 ; 
 article on Loyson, 25 ; Balzac's 
 criticism of, 26, 44, 45, 173 ; 
 his criticisms of Balzac, 26, 
 73, 140, 169, 183, 184, 192, 
 194, 212-215, 227, 228, 233; 
 Balzac's dislike of, 135 ; ex- 
 tract from an admonishment 
 to Taine, 183, 184; extract 
 from memorial article on 
 
 Balzac, 213-215 ; his criticism 
 of Lamartine, 215, 216 ; extract 
 from Causerietf du Lundi (vol. 
 iv.), Histoire de la Restaura- 
 tion, 215-216 ; compared with 
 Balzac, 250, 251. 
 
 Saint-Simon, 150. 
 
 Sallambier, Laure (see Balzac, 
 Madame). 
 
 Sand, George, interest of in 
 Balzac, 12, 28 ; Balzac's criti- 
 cisms of, 44, 45, 74 ; her work 
 compared with that of Balzac, 
 69, 77, 122, 149, 163, 173, 
 251, 252; literary methods of, 
 147 ; influence of Balzac on, 
 233, 234; influence of on 
 present-day novelists, 249. 
 
 Sandeau, Jules, 25, 27 and n., 
 235, 249. 
 
 Scarron, 179, 239. 
 
 Scenes de la Vie de Province, 15. 
 
 Scott, Walter, 34. 
 
 Scribe, 234. 
 
 Scude'ry, Madeleine, fAstrce, 
 219 and n. 
 
 Seraphita, 16, 64, 173. 
 
 Shakespeare, 83, 92, 94, 97, 128, 
 137, 140. 
 
 Sophocles, 128, 140. 
 
 Soulie', Fre'de'ric, 27 and //., 
 166. 
 
 Splendeurs et Miscres des Cour- 
 tisanes, 180. 
 
 Stendhal, Memoires d'un Tourigtt, 
 75 ; attitude towardscrimiuals, 
 150 ; compared with Balzac, 
 198, 221, 227,248; Jacquinet's 
 opinion of, 231. 
 
 Sue, Eugene, 17, 166, 235. 
 
 Surville, M., 4, 8. 
 
 M. (the elder), 8. 
 
 Madame, 4, 7. 
 
 Swedenborg, 64. 
 
 TACITUS, 215. 
 
 Taine, on Balzac's birthplace,
 
 264 
 
 BALZAC 
 
 2, 3 ; admonishment from 
 Sainte-Beuve to, 182 ; quota- 
 tion from in praise of Balzac, 
 208 ; appreciation of, 222, 
 223 ; article of on Balzac, 2-30- 
 232 ; quotations from, 232, 
 242. 
 
 Tasso, 84. 
 
 Tenebreuse Affaire, line, 166. 
 
 Thiers, 17. 
 
 Tolstoi, 65, 178, 179. 
 
 T opffer, Mont Saint - Bernard, 
 209. 
 
 Troubert, 48. 
 
 Ursule Mirouet, 16, 56, 64, 74. 
 
 VATOUT, 24. 
 Vautrin, 17. 
 
 Vendome, College of, 4. 
 Verres, 149 and n. 
 Verville, Beroald de, 175. 
 Villele, M. de, 38. 
 Virgil, 83, 89, 239. 
 Voltaire, 36, 37, 219, 227, 228, 
 253. 
 
 ZOLA, EMILE, compared with 
 Balzac, 240, 242-245. 
 
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