LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 \ 
 
 5
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 BY 
 
 W. H. HELM 
 
 AUTHOR OF "STUDIES IN STYLE," ETC. 
 
 LONDON 
 EVELEIGH NASH 
 
 1905
 
 The greater part of this book 
 is reprinted, by ptrmission, 
 from the EMPIRE REVIEW
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE METHODS OF BALZAC i 
 
 WOMEN OF THE " HUMAN COMEDY " . .29 
 
 MEN OF THE "HUMAN COMEDY". ... 67 
 BALZAC'S " COMEDIE ANGLAISE " . . . .93 
 
 BALZAC AND DICKENS 121 
 
 LITERARY REFERENCES IN BALZAC . . .151 
 THE HUMOUR OF BALZAC 179
 
 THE METHODS OF BALZAC 
 
 SOME of his critics would have said that 
 to talk of " the Methods of Balzac " was to 
 offer a contradiction in terms, since Balzac 
 and method were incompatible. They 
 might have found much to support their 
 objection. The novelist himself held that 
 a man should fling himself headlong into 
 his work, as Curtius plunged into the gulf. 
 Perhaps the most pregnant saying in the 
 general preface of 1842, wherein the 
 scheme of the " Comedie " is set out, one 
 fully borne out by the novels themselves, 
 is that " La passion est toute I'humanite. 
 Sans elle, la religion, 1'histoire, le roman, 
 1'art, seraient inutiles." This phrase is the 
 keynote to the vast harmony which Balzac 
 composed. The love of man for woman 
 and woman for man is, of course, "la
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 passion " in particular, and it is more abun- 
 dantly displayed in Balzac's novels than in 
 those of any other writer, quite as abun- 
 dantly as mere lust is shown in the work of 
 Zola or Maupassant. Such loves as those 
 of Montauran and Marie de Verneuil, of 
 Montriveau and the Duchesse de Langeais, 
 of Felix de Vandenesse and Henriette de 
 Mortsauf, are indeed of the influences that 
 move the world. Yet passion takes other 
 strong forms in the " Comedie Humaine." 
 The passion of power as seen in Jacques 
 Collin the criminal, and Eugene de Ras- 
 tignac the conqueror of society, of the 
 artist as in "Le Chef-d'CEuvre Inconnu,"of 
 the miser as shown by old Grandet, even 
 the craving for gold for the mere love of 
 that particular metal as by Facino Cane, 
 and the rarer passion of the alchemist seen 
 in " La Recherche de 1'Absolu " all are 
 very fully analysed and exhibited. The 
 callous and savage lust also of the enemy 
 of the race, of the man or woman who 
 preys upon other men and women as a 
 crafty beast on its fellow-creatures, is pre-
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 sented with amazing force in such portraits 
 as those of Philippe Bridau, Maxime de 
 Trailles, and Valerie Marneffe. 
 
 There are, however, among the essential 
 factors of the "Comedie" personalities to 
 whom the word passion is hardly appli- 
 cable. Nucingen, who stands for ever the 
 crystallisation of the astute financier, whose 
 only restriction is the law, to whom con- 
 science is only of account in considering 
 its effect on the conduct of other men, is 
 never passionate. Cool and far-seeing in 
 his finance, cool and far-seeing in his rela- 
 tions with" his wife, and with his allies in 
 exacting tribute from the world, he is driven 
 to recognise that money cannot buy affec- 
 tion either from wife or mistress ; but the 
 infidelity of the one he turns to account in 
 his schemes, and the costliness of the 
 other only troubles him because he obtains 
 so small a return for his expenditure. 
 
 If passion is the dominant note in 
 
 Balzac's conception of life, it is also one of 
 
 the most powerful influences on his method. 
 
 Buffon distinguished between the genius 
 
 3
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 which touches the heart through the in- 
 telligence, and the talent of expression 
 which is accorded to all individuals of 
 strong passions and quick imagination. 
 Balzac possessed both the genius and the 
 talent. The driving power of this rare 
 combination was such that he could toil 
 for days without rest, and with very little 
 food, producing in one week what would, 
 in mere writing, be a month's work for 
 many an industrious author. When he 
 had finished his book or his chapter, he 
 would send it off to the printer, and when 
 he received the proofs, first, second, or 
 third revises, he would chop them about, 
 rewrite here, cut out a little there, and 
 add a great deal in this place or that until 
 there was perhaps as much again as before, 
 and the corrections in the end cost as 
 much as the first setting. All this, how- 
 ever, was not concerned with the great 
 and essential tasks of building the body, 
 of giving life to its organs, and intelligence 
 to its wits ; but with the refining of that 
 body, the quickening of that life, and the 
 
 4
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 sharpening of those wits. Sometimes, 
 indeed, he even took life out of his work, 
 as, in the opinion of Sainte-Beuve, hap- 
 pened when he rewrote " La Femme de 
 Trente Ans." 
 
 No writer to whom style was of the first 
 importance would dream of using Balzac's 
 method of introducing his characters to his 
 readers. It is a commonplace of criticism 
 that the characters should show themselves 
 by their actions, and conversation, and 
 recorded thoughts as the story proceeds ; 
 but Balzac requires far more than this. 
 He will devote fifteen or twenty pages 
 more on occasion to the topography of a 
 district, and we know our way about for 
 the rest of the book. He will give as 
 much attention to a description of every 
 external and internal characteristic of a 
 man or a woman, their physical peculiari- 
 ties, beauties and blemishes, their tricks 
 of expression and gesture, their clothing, 
 even to the shoelaces and the quality of the 
 silk of which the stockings are made, and, 
 when he has finished the portraits, we 
 5
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 know their subjects so well that, if we saw 
 them stepping out of their houses or step- 
 ping into their baths, we could hardly ever 
 fail to recognise them. 
 
 Mr. Froude, in a notable passage of 
 "Oceana," touches on the affinities and 
 differences of the real and the ideal, and 
 asks the question, " Has not a character 
 which has acquired a place in the minds 
 of mankind as real an existence, even 
 though a creature of imagination merely, 
 as if the person in question had been 
 born with a material body and had lived 
 a fixed number of years, and had worn 
 clothes and taken his regular meals, and, 
 in course of time, had died?" He 
 goes on to answer his own question. 
 " Ulysses, Hamlet, Julius Caesar are real 
 persons. Each of them stands with a 
 clear and fixed form before the minds of 
 all of us." 
 
 To those who have lived long in the 
 
 society of Balzac's people and met them 
 
 again and again, now in this company, 
 
 now in that, they are as real as any his- 
 
 6
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 torical character can be. Indeed, so great 
 was the novelist's power of combining ob- 
 servation and intuitive knowledge in the 
 presentation of his crowd of individual 
 types, that we do actually meet many of 
 them in the flesh, differently dressed no 
 doubt, to avoid being hooted in the streets, 
 with their curling locks cut short and their 
 jewellery less abundant. Who that knows 
 his " Comedie Humaine " has not met 
 Crevel and Matifat and Gaudissart a score 
 of times, has not watched the dainty steps 
 of Valerie as she passed to keep an assig- 
 nation, or the slow and weary walk of 
 Agathe Bridau, borne down with the 
 misery of outraged maternity and unre- 
 quited devotion ? 
 
 Balzac tried continually in youth, and 
 occasionally in the later years of his short 
 life, to attain a fine style. But he knew 
 before he was thirty that he could never 
 achieve his desire in that direction. He 
 found his power in the representation of 
 human character, and in that he knew that 
 he was above rivalry. His first and 
 7
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 strongest motive is the determination to 
 make his scenes and characters stand 
 clearly out. He will write a hundred 
 pages of introduction if necessary before 
 he begins to develop his story, and we are 
 called upon to listen to lengthy expositions 
 of historical or geographical or social con- 
 ditions in order that we may be prepared 
 to understand the relations of the characters 
 to one another and the milieu in which they 
 move. We may find that these immense 
 preparations weary us sometimes ; but if we 
 go steadily through with them they do, in 
 almost every instance, achieve their object. 
 He demands that we shall recognise "the 
 necessity of those preparations didactiques 
 against which some ignorant and voracious 
 people protest, seeking for emotions with- 
 out wishing to hear of les principes genera- 
 teurs" desiring " la fleur sans la graine, 
 F enfant sans la gestation. Is art, then, 
 stronger than nature ? " Allow him these 
 liberties and he will usually achieve his 
 object to his own and our satisfaction. He 
 was fully aware that, had it been possible, 
 8
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 it would have been better to be less dis- 
 cursive. 
 
 In any fair attempt to estimate Bal- 
 zac's success as a novelist, we must never 
 allow ourselves to forget that his main 
 object was not to write literature, but 
 history, the history of the manners and 
 morals of a particular period. On rare 
 occasions, as in " L' Enfant Maudit " and 
 " Maitre Cornelius," he laid his scenes in 
 the far distant past, and of course the 
 " Contes Drolatiques," which are classified 
 as part of the " Comedie Humaine," deal 
 with the Heptameronicor Rabelaisian age. 
 But the " Contes" are given at the tail of 
 the list, and are rather in the nature of those 
 final jollifications named in old theatrical 
 programmes at the end of a sentence which 
 says, " the whole to conclude with the 
 
 diverting extravaganza ." " L'Enfant 
 
 Maudit " and " Maitre Cornelius " are mere 
 episodes, and are really as far from the main 
 intention of the " Human Comedy " as 
 " Sur Catherine de Medicis," which is only 
 dragged in to allow the whole of Balzac's 
 9
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 avowed works in fiction to be grouped in 
 the one huge achievement, or " Seraphita," 
 a wonderful study of mysticism, which 
 stands quite outside the general plan. 
 The time of the " Comedy " proper is from 
 1799, when the brave and honourable 
 Hulot leads the soldiers of the Republic 
 against the Breton royalists, as described 
 in " Les Chouans," to 1846, when his scan- 
 dalous brother, at eighty years of age or 
 thereabouts, marries his Norman cook, 
 at the end of " La Cousine Bette." In 
 other words, the period of the novels is 
 practically coterminous with the author's 
 life, Balzac having been born in 1799, and 
 having died in 1850. 
 
 He paints, then, the conditions of social 
 life, manners, thought, conversation, love- 
 making, dress and affectations during the 
 half-century which followed the overthrow 
 of the Directory and the rise of Napo- 
 leon's star on the i8th Brumaire, and ended 
 with the flickering out of the Bourbon star 
 over the head of that " king of grocers and 
 linendrapers " w r ho is the subject of many 
 
 10
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 contemptuous allusions in Balzac's novels. 
 His object was to provide a permanent 
 picture of a period which he saw to be the 
 end of an epoch. When he wrote " Les 
 Chouans " in 1827, railways were already 
 " in the air," and when, in 1842, he wrote 
 <{ Un Debut dans la Vie," he commenced 
 with a reference to the changes which the 
 introduction of railways would bring about, 
 and a prophecy that his description of cer- 
 tain scenes of contemporary life would 
 speedily possess the merits of an archaeo- 
 logical treatise. " Will not our nephews 
 be enchanted to know the truth concerning 
 the social life of an epoch which they will 
 call ' the old times ' ? " he adds. There lies 
 a large part of the charm possessed by the 
 " Comedie Humaine." With a great deal 
 of highly concentrated observation, and 
 more of highly-expanded imagination, 
 founded on an intuition which was Balzac's 
 greatest gift, he was able to construct 
 dramas, comedies and tragedies that were 
 essentially true to life, just as Cuvier, as 
 Balzac himself often reminds us, could 
 ii
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 reconstruct an entire animal from the pre- 
 sence of a single bone or tooth. 
 
 That he frequently " drops into " flowery 
 verbiage, more often than not with rather 
 unfortunate results, as contemporary critics 
 were ever ready to point out, and that he 
 justly regarded himself as a "poet" in the 
 broad acceptation wherein the French em- 
 ploy the word, must not be allowed to 
 obscure the fact that his real genius lay in 
 the conception of his plots and scenes and 
 characters, and the vividness of their pre- 
 sentation, apart from any question of the 
 ornaments of literature. 
 
 Having finished his descriptions, Balzac 
 was free to develop the picture of what- 
 ever phase of life served as the theme of 
 the work in hand. In that wonderfully 
 vivid representation of a government office 
 and the various officials and clerks and 
 officials' wives and relations, " Les Em- 
 ployes," the novelist's power of realising 
 types is seen at its height. Rabourdin, 
 the too clever and industrious official, 
 Baudoyer, his silly and successful rival, 
 
 12
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Bixiou, the witty cynic, Poiret, who cannot 
 see the points of Bixiou's remarks, the 
 Minister, the intriguing wives of Rabourdin 
 and Baudoyer, the priests, the money- 
 lenders, the servants, are drawn with a 
 precision and effect that render the book 
 the most vivid of its kind. The author, 
 without forcing his "situations," conveys 
 the story of the particular affair, always on 
 the whole going steadily forward, until the 
 culmination in the downfall of Rabourdin's 
 hopes of preferment and his retirement to 
 what will probably be a happier existence. 
 It is so with the affairs of the heart, which, 
 to speak more Hibernico, form the back- 
 bones of most of the novels. There may 
 as a rule be no wedding bells to satisfy 
 the English idea of a " happy ending," no 
 suicide to gratify the tastes of the problem- 
 atic-realistic class of reader, though sui- 
 cides and wedding bells do occur at the 
 ends of some of the stories ; but Balzac 
 almost invariably stops at the point where 
 the interest culminates, or, as in " Une 
 Double Famille," adds a few lines of 
 13
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 sequel which suggest far more than they 
 state. In such touches, as in the "asides" 
 which abound in his novels, Balzac has 
 concentrated much of his deepest know- 
 ledge of human tendencies. 
 
 The occasional difficulty of clearly ap- 
 preciating Balzac's precise intention is 
 partly due to the fact that his French is 
 notoriously difficult, a fact which, more 
 than anything else, has militated against 
 his popularity in this country. Popular in 
 the field where success is weighed by the 
 tonnage of the paper he never would be, 
 if every one could read easy French and 
 his French had been as easy as that of 
 " Paul et Virginie " or " Le Roi des 
 Montagnes." To apprehend Balzac it is 
 necessary to think occasionally, as well as 
 to read, to remember as well as to think. 
 The conduct of his men and women is so 
 finely studied, the lights and shades of 
 their souls so delicately expressed, that you 
 lose three parts of the sense if you hurry 
 over the pages as you would over the 
 latest "railway" novel. So little does 
 14
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Balzac appeal to the reader of the ordinary 
 sensational fiction that he rarely " piles up 
 the agony " where it does not pile itself up 
 in the natural course of the story. When 
 one thinks what opportunities for curdling 
 the blood a " popular " novelist of our own 
 day would have found in writing " Les 
 Chouans," " Le Cure de Village," or " La 
 Femme de Trente Ans," and how little 
 the author does actually dwell on the more 
 lurid incidents of those stirring books, the 
 width of the gulf which separates him, in 
 method as well as in intellect and power, 
 from the most successful purveyors of 
 sensation in fiction begins to be appre- 
 ciated. Moreover, the "situations" in 
 Balzac are not introduced at measured 
 distances. For " serial " purposes his plan 
 is deplorable, and seeing also that the 
 too economical publisher who cut out the 
 chapter headings and printed most of the 
 books without a break from end to end 
 set a fashion which it seems impossible to 
 overthrow where Balzac is concerned, the 
 chance of the " Comedie Humaine"ever 
 15
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 being widely enjoyed in this country, even 
 if all the public elementary schools were 
 to teach French instead of arithmetic, is 
 scarcely problematical. 
 
 Mr. Henry James, in that notable essay 
 on Balzac which introduces "Two Young 
 Brides " (Mr. Heinemann's English edition 
 of " Memoires de deux jeunes Mariees"), 
 dwells on the double personality in which 
 the author is revealed in the " Comedie 
 Humaine." In one suggestive passage 
 Mr. James writes : 
 
 " Of imagination, on one side, all compact, 
 he was on the other an insatiable reporter of 
 the immediate, the material, the current 
 combination, perpetually moved by the his- 
 torian's impulse to fix them, preserve them, 
 explain them. One asks one's self as one 
 reads him what concern the poet has with 
 so much arithmetic and so much criticism ; 
 so many statistics and documents, what 
 concern the critic and economist have with 
 so many passions, characters, and adven- 
 tures. The contradiction is always before 
 us ; it springs from the inordinate scale of 
 16
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 the author's two faces ; it explains more 
 than anything else his eccentricities and 
 difficulties. It accounts for his want of 
 grace, his want of the lightness associated 
 with an amusing literary form, his bristling 
 surface, his closeness of texture, so sugges- 
 tive, yet at the same time so akin to the 
 crowded air we have in mind when we speak 
 of not being able to see the wood for the 
 trees." 
 
 The criticism is wholly just. To the ap- 
 preciation and enjoyment of the "Com^die 
 Humaine " two personal qualities in the 
 reader are essential patience and reflec- 
 tion. The sentence would sound like a 
 sentence of death if uttered concerning a 
 novelist of the common type. The neces- 
 sity of "working up " the plot step by step 
 to the sensational or sentimental denouement 
 is not exemplified at all in most of Balzac's 
 novels. It is not that Balzac ignores the 
 full possibilities of sensational effects any 
 more than he is indifferent to the allure- 
 ments of " fine writing." As to the sensa- 
 tion, " La Grande Breteche " is assuredly 
 17 B
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 one of the most appalling tales we have, 
 and the " execution " of the informer in 
 " Les Chouans " is hardly less horrible than 
 the somewhat similar scene of the " execu- 
 tion" of the spy in Zola's " La Debacle." 
 
 The cynical, but not altogether heartless, 
 caricaturist Jean-Jacques Bixiou, in the 
 course of that vivid and acid narrative 
 wherein he lays bare the roots of Rastignac's 
 immense fortune, makes several remarks on 
 literary style. Having described Isaure 
 d'Aldrigger, with her " fair hair gushing in 
 bubbling cascades over a little head frank 
 and fresh as that of a na'iad who had put 
 her nose against the crystal window of her 
 fountain to see the flowers of spring," he 
 interjects : " that is our new style, made up 
 of phrases which are spun out like the 
 macaroni we were eating at dinner." There 
 is a good deal of this sort of floral decora- 
 tion in the " Comedie " itself, especially in 
 the matter of similes. 
 
 Balzac, indeed, indulged to an inor- 
 dinate degree in rather far-fetched similes, 
 and has had many disciples in this branch 
 18
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 of learning. The popular English novelist 
 who recently described a lady in curl-papers 
 as resembling the figure-head of a ship with 
 barnacles sticking to it, was not more in- 
 temperate in his fancy than the French 
 novelist on a hundred or a thousand occa- 
 sions. Balzac tells us, for instance, that 
 " la plaisanterie frangaise est une dentelle 
 dont les femmes savent embellir la joie 
 qu'elles donnent, et les querelles qu'elles 
 inventent ; c'est une parure morale, gra- 
 cieuse comme leur toilette. Mais la plai- 
 santerie anglaise est un acide qui corrode si 
 bien les etres sur lesquels il tombe qu'il en 
 fait des squelettes laves et brossds." 
 
 Of Valerie, on a very special occasion 
 when she was looking her best, both as to 
 herself and her costume, we are told that 
 " Elle ressemblait a ces beaux fruits coquet- 
 tement arranges dans une belle assiette et 
 qui donnent des demangeaisons a 1'acier du 
 couteau." Hortense, when she had seen 
 her husband's model of his " Samson and 
 Dalila," for the female figure of which 
 that same fascinating Valerie had sat, was 
 19
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 so affected, we hear, that " mille soup9ons 
 pousserent dans son ame comme poussent, 
 dans les Indes, ces vegetations, grandes et 
 touffues, du jour au lendemain." 
 
 If Balzac was often a little too free in his 
 similes, he was also rather careless as to 
 precise consistency of dates, in sequence of 
 events and in the ages of his characters, 
 and his arithmetical calculations are some- 
 times rather below the standard required 
 even in the entrance examinations for secon- 
 dary schools. It is rather remarkable that, 
 after so many editions, the most obvious 
 errors of this sort should be so carefully 
 repeated. If a misspelling is corrected, 
 why should it be greater sacrilege to correct 
 a numeral ? 
 
 For instance, Balzac tells us, in 
 " Beatrix," that the pretty Miss Fanny 
 O'Brien was twenty-one in 1813, and then 
 in 1836 she was forty-two ; while her man- 
 servant, who was fifteen when he entered 
 the house in 1813, was also forty-two in 
 1836. Errors of memory of an unusual 
 kind also occur, as when, in " Autre Etude 
 
 20
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 de Femme," Balzac makes Horace Bian- 
 chon the narrator on one page, and on the 
 next page has forgotten this fact, and de- 
 clares that "a un geste du complaisant 
 docteur [Bianchon] le silence re"gna." A 
 similar disregard of his own plan is seen 
 when, in " La Femme de Trente Ans," the 
 author suddenly " par une matinee de prin- 
 temps," turns the story into a " first per- 
 son" narrative, with many a "je" and 
 " moi." 
 
 In sampling the more tangible errors of 
 the " Comedie Humaine," one must not 
 forget the repetitions which often aggra- 
 vate the ear of the mind. Such sentences 
 as " Elle effraye par son silence et par ce 
 regard profond d'une profonde fixit6 ; " or 
 " pendant une annee entiere, il avait soigne" 
 la marquise avec le denouement le plus 
 entier," are trivial blemishes, if blemishes 
 at all ; but when we read of " gravures 
 d'Audran encadre"es dans des cadres en 
 acajou," and " tapisseries des Gobelins, 
 encadres des plus merveilleux cadres 
 sculpt6s," the effect is far more unpleasing. 
 
 21
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 The spitefully hostile reviewer, in fact, 
 had an easy time with Balzac, and could 
 fill a column with errors of style judiciously 
 selected. How easy it is to laugh at the 
 taste of a novelist who actually makes a 
 cultured nobleman say that his valet 
 " m'avait apport quelques affaires, que je 
 voulus placer dans ma chambre," and to 
 underline " affaires " in the quotation. 
 
 Let us come back from such evident 
 weaknesses of literary craftsmanship to 
 the contemplation of Balzac's actual 
 achievement. His subject was society, 
 his leading character woman, in a hundred 
 forms. Woman, as he perceived, is not 
 merely the counterpart of man, " When 
 Buffon painted the lion, he sketched the 
 lioness in a few sentences ; whilst, in 
 human society, the woman is not always 
 the female of the male." The history he 
 projected ought to have " a triple form " ; 
 it would not deal merely with men and 
 things, but with men, women and things. 
 Human society, indeed, has as many 
 different creatures as there are varieties 
 
 22
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 in zoology. The differences between a 
 soldier, a workman, a government official, 
 a barrister, a loafer, a savant, a statesman, 
 a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a pauper, a 
 priest, are, although more difficult to 
 appreciate, as considerable as those which 
 distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the 
 crow, the shark, the seal, and the sheep. 
 
 Every one of the human types here 
 mentioned has its representatives among 
 the prominent characters of the " Human 
 Comedy," and in most of these "vocations" 
 the obverse and reverse are shown. We 
 have Hulot the noble soldier, and Philippe 
 Bridau the scoundrel ; Bourgeat the noble 
 workman, and Cerizet who sells his master ; 
 Rabourdin the honest if over-zealous 
 official, and Corentin the heartless and 
 cunning spy ; Popinot the charitable 
 lawyer, and Delbecq the astute engineer 
 of gross injustice ; Bixiou the witty and 
 entertaining idler, and Maxence Gilet who 
 sponges on his mistress ; Desplein the 
 successful surgeon, and Balthazar Claes 
 who ruins his family by his search for the 
 23
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 philosopher's stone ; Serizy, the admirable 
 Minister, and Baron Hulot who robs the 
 State ; Portenduere, the gallant sailor, and 
 the pirate captain of the Othello ; while 
 as for merchants, poets, paupers, and 
 priests, there are enough varieties of each 
 class to provide for every demand. 
 
 Nearly all these people are alive. It is 
 very rarely that Balzac fails to endow his 
 creatures with a large share of vital force, 
 even if they are mere " supers " at the 
 back of a scene. He worked from the 
 life, and he reproduced his originals, partly 
 because he had observed them so well, but 
 mainly because his power of induction, 
 where human character was in question, 
 was nothing less than inspiration. 
 
 When Hilarius, in the delightful comic 
 opera " La Poupee," finds the " doll " talk- 
 ing and singing so perfectly, he has no 
 suspicion of the truth, and, bursting with 
 conceit, cries, "My work" every time it 
 moves or speaks. Balzac was immensely, 
 and justly, proud of the figures he had 
 constructed, and, as has so often been told, 
 24
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 would talk to his sister and friends about 
 the forthcoming marriage of Mademoiselle 
 de Granville, or the appointment obtained 
 for Mademoiselle Mirouet's fiance, with 
 greater concern than of the happenings in 
 his own family circle. Sainte-Beuve recalls 
 how, during a whole season at Venice, one 
 saw nothing but Rastignacs, Duchesses de 
 Langeais and de Maufrigneuse, and how 
 several actors and actresses of that comedy 
 of society are said to have carried out their 
 assumed characters with literal exactitude. 
 The same serious game was played with 
 less completeness in Russia, Poland, and 
 Hungary. 
 
 " Not only mankind," writes Balzac, 
 " but the notable events of existence are 
 faithfully represented by types. There are 
 situations, typical phases, which reappear 
 in every life, and one of my chief objects 
 has been to describe them faithfully." He 
 went beyond the typical experiences of 
 humanity in such works as "Seraphita" 
 and " Louis Lambert," where the influence 
 of mysticism is so strongly exhibited, but 
 25
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 with that aspect of his work we are not 
 here concerned, Assuredly not devoid of 
 " romantic " tendencies, he was far more 
 " realistic," and we may regard him as the 
 strongest link between the two schools of 
 fiction. 
 
 It was, primarily, to paint " la bete 
 humaine " in every phase of its life, but 
 especially in its more luxurious lairs, that 
 he set out, first in the field to attempt the 
 work. Sympathy with the failings of man, 
 recognition of the resistless power of fate, 
 of heredity, of environment, are clear in 
 every novel from 4iis pen. It is in his 
 belief in the determinism of human actions 
 that he stands, in his treatment of character 
 and consequences, the most apart from 
 other great novelists. If he was one of 
 the first to liken a hero to a Greek god, 
 he was also one of the most effective ex- 
 ponents of the fatalistic creed expressed in 
 the Greek Tragedy, now so commonly 
 exploited in fiction. He essayed the most 
 stupendous task that any writer has ever 
 undertaken, a task before which that of 
 26
 
 Herbert Spencer seems comparatively 
 small. Only we must remember that while 
 Spencer completed the task he had set 
 himself, Balzac died in the midst of his 
 work. Yet he lived to achieve immeasur- 
 ably more than any other student or painter 
 of social life has achieved. With the 
 present temper and tendencies of fiction, 
 the likelihood that Balzac's life-work will 
 be equalled in the future seems about as 
 great as that communication will be opened 
 up with the Martians, or women in general 
 become indifferent to the fashioning of 
 their clothes. 
 
 27
 
 WOMEN OF THE "HUMAN 
 COMEDY." 
 
 A LADY whose reading is not wholly 
 confined to the novels of the hour was 
 heard to dismiss Balzac with the remark, 
 uttered with evident belief in its absolute 
 veracity, "There are no good women in 
 his books." One knows this easy species 
 of criticism too well. " Dickens never 
 drew a gentleman," " All Thackeray's 
 modest women are namby-pamby," are 
 phrases which are repeated with as much 
 assurance as the statements that "there 
 are no snakes in Ireland," " no owls in 
 Iceland," and "no cats mentioned in the 
 Bible." With the propounders of sweeping 
 literary generalisations it is certainly not 
 worth while to enter upon any discussion 
 during a casual meeting at a dinner table 
 29
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 or a garden-party, where most of the 
 company care no more about the characters 
 of the women in Balzac's novels than they 
 care whether the fisher of the murex made 
 a fortune by his fishing, or John Keats by 
 his poems. To begin with, one would 
 have to arrive at a mutual understanding 
 of the qualities of goodness. This much 
 may be conceded without any undue favour, 
 that, with rare exceptions, the most admir- 
 able creations of Balzac, whether women 
 or men, are persons whom Dr. Portman 
 would not have considered suitable com- 
 panions for Arthur Pendennis, and whose 
 conventional ideas would have appeared 
 quite dreadful to the worthy inhabitants 
 of Cranford. 
 
 Perhaps there is no surer evidence of 
 inferiority in a work of the imagination, 
 novel, play, or poem, than the unwritten 
 suggestion to the reader to divide the 
 characters into two distinct classes, the 
 "good" people and the "bad." In any 
 case, the game would be so difficult for 
 the reader of Balzac's novels that it would 
 30
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 cease to be amusing long before any 
 noticeable result was achieved. The 
 better and the worse might be sorted out, 
 more or less unfairly, but the " black" and 
 the " white " could not be classified without 
 allowing a large appearance of grey on 
 either side. 
 
 It is well to get over this question of 
 commonplace "criticism," nearly all the 
 women whose characters are most admir- 
 ably imagined and presented in the 
 " Comedie Humaine" being, in the very 
 English sense of the word, frail. Here 
 and there we have an Eve Chardon, an 
 Ursule Mirouet, an Honorine, pure as a 
 Sophia Western or a Lady Castlewood ; 
 but we must recognise the fact that it is a 
 darker side of social existence which, on the 
 whole, is presented tousinwhatmightalmost 
 as aptly have been called the " Human 
 Tragedy." For the partial reassurance 
 of anxious readers who know not Balzac 
 and may have seen some of his novels in 
 the hands of "young persons" it must be 
 added that vice in the " Comedie Humaine " 
 31
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 almost invariably leads to misery. The 
 endings of " La Rabouilleuse," Valerie 
 Marneffe, the "fille aux yeux d'or," and 
 Julie d'Aiglemont, for examples, might 
 satisfy the sternest Puritans, and indeed it 
 may be doubted whether any novelist has 
 shown the earthly penalty of sin in a more 
 terrible light. 
 
 In the analysis of the workings of the 
 human heart, and of whatever organ may 
 take its place in heartless people, of whom 
 there are many in his novels, Balzac toiled 
 more assiduously than any novelist before 
 or since. Nowadays we talk more of the 
 soul than the heart. It is the " psychology" 
 of M. Bourget, for instance, that we discuss, 
 not the " kerology," or whatever the correct 
 dog-Greek may be. There is no doubt a 
 very real distinction, the women of Balzac's 
 imagination being for the most part moved 
 by instincts almost as near to the animal as 
 to the spiritual, in spite of the fine words 
 in which their feelings are expressed. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve declared that he was in- 
 clined to call Balzac the lover of his 
 32
 
 marquises ; and Mr. Henry James, in his 
 remarkable introduction to " Two Young 
 Brides," to which reference has already 
 been made, has said of the " great ladies " 
 of the " Comdie Humaine " that " it is as 
 surrounded by them, even as some magni- 
 ficent, indulgent Pasha by his overflowing 
 seraglio, that Balzac sits most at his ease." 
 Whether we agree or not depends on indi- 
 vidual impressions and not on matters of 
 proof. Often Balzac appears quite as much 
 at his ease with Madame Birotteau and 
 Cesarine, with Madame Grandet and Eu- 
 genie, with poor old Madame Desroches 
 and Agathe Bridau, with the unhappy 
 little Pierrette or the fortunate little Ursule 
 as with any of the luxurious and generally 
 passion-troubled marquises of " the Fau- 
 bourg." To one of the semi-great ladies 
 the provincial queens of the " Comedie," 
 by the way, Mr. Henry James is not 
 entirely just. He tells his readers that 
 " The whole episode of Madame de Barge- 
 ton's ' chucking ' Lucien de Rubempre, on 
 reaching Paris with him, under pressure of 
 33 c
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Madame d'Espard's shockability as to his 
 coat and trousers, and other such matters, 
 is either a magnificent lurid document or 
 the baseless fabric of a vision. The great 
 wonder is that, as I rejoice to put it, we can 
 never really discover which, and that we 
 feel, as we read, that we can't, and that we 
 suffer at the hands of no other author this 
 particular helplessness of immersion." 
 
 The fact is, however, that not only did 
 Lucien " chuck " Nais quite as much as she 
 "chucked" him, but that the mutual disil- 
 lusionment came before Madame de Barge- 
 ton had seen her cousin Madame d'Espard, 
 after the flight to Paris. At the Vaudeville, 
 during the first visit to the theatre, we are 
 told of Lucien that " the presence of many 
 pretty women, beautifully dressed in the 
 very latest fashions, forced him to remark 
 the out-of-date toilette of Madame de 
 Bargeton. Although it was tolerably ambi- 
 tious, the materials, colours, and style were 
 alike old-fashioned. The coiffure also, 
 which had so charmed him at Angouleme, 
 now appeared in shocking taste compared 
 34
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 with the delicate devices exhibited by the 
 other women present." Similar thoughts 
 were troubling the pretty if ridiculously 
 adorned head of Nai's herself. 
 
 " II se preparait chez Madame de Barge- 
 ton et chez Lucien un d^senchantement sur 
 eux-memes dont la cause etait Paris. La 
 vie s'y agrandissait aux yeux du poete, 
 comme la societe prenait une force nouvelle 
 aux yeux de Louise." 
 
 It is not entirely gallant, therefore, to lay 
 upon Madame de Bargeton and Madame 
 d'Espard's " shockability " the entire re- 
 sponsibility for the breaking-up of the 
 Angouleme romance. 
 
 In the same lively and enthusiastic essay 
 to which I have referred, and which con- 
 tains one of the most obviously sincere and 
 understanding tributes to Balzac in the 
 English language, Mr. James has a strik- 
 ing passage on the particular question of 
 Balzac's representation of women. " He 
 gets (says the American critic), for further 
 intensity, into the very skin of his jeunes 
 marines into each alternately as they are
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 different enough ; so that any other mode 
 of representing women, or of representing 
 anybody, becomes, in juxtaposition, a thing 
 so void of the active contortions of truth 
 as to be comparatively wooden. He bears 
 children with Madame de 1'Estorade, knows 
 intimately how she suffers for them, and 
 not less intimately how her correspondent 
 suffers, as well as enjoys, without them. 
 Big as he is, he makes himself small to be 
 handled by her with young maternal pas- 
 sion, and positively to handle her in turn 
 with infantile innocence." 
 
 The expression of a belief in Balzac's 
 imaginative power could scarcely go further 
 than that "positively," but the extraordi- 
 nary force of Balzac's analysis of mental 
 workings must impress every careful 
 reader, and justifies, more than any of 
 his elaborate pictures of material objects, 
 his place among the High -Priests of 
 " realism." 
 
 " Women (declares the abominable 
 Colonel Philippe Bridau) are naughty chil- 
 dren ; they are animals inferior to man, and 
 36
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 we must make them fear us, for the worst 
 thing that can happen to us is to be ruled 
 by such creatures." 
 
 The opinion thus given by the biggest 
 blackguard that Balzac has invented or 
 presented is but a coarse and brutal ex- 
 pression of the idea uttered by the angry 
 hero of <( Locksley Hall." 
 
 Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a 
 
 moulder'd string ? 
 I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so 
 
 slight a thing. 
 
 Weakness to be wroth with weakness ! woman's 
 
 pleasure, woman's pain 
 Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a 
 
 shallower brain. 
 
 Balzac's own presentation of the 
 " woman " question, not formulated, but to 
 be gathered from his analysis of emotions 
 and "mental processes," is that women are 
 rather a distinct variety of the race than a 
 higher or lower form. 
 
 Among the women whose characters are 
 most clearly drawn in the novels are Hen- 
 riette de Mortsauf, the heroine of " Le Lys 
 37
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 dans la Vallee," Julie d'Aiglemont in "La 
 Femme de Trente Ans," the Duchesse de 
 Langeais in the " Histoire des Treize," 
 Coralie in " Illusions Perdues,"and Valerie 
 MarnefFe in "Cousine Bette." These five 
 cover between them a great part of the 
 picture of woman's dealings with man in 
 the " Human Comedy." Henriette quite 
 openly prefers the romantic Felix de Van- 
 denesse to her hypochondriacal husband, 
 who allows her ample freedom, having 
 almost perfect confidence in her fidelity. 
 She remains virtuous, never allowing Felix 
 more than an occasional kiss on her hair 
 or her hand, and for ever urging upon him 
 the enormous superiority of a union of 
 souls over any physical sympathy. She 
 dies at length of jealousy and virtue com- 
 bined, the novelist leaving us in doubt- 
 though hardly in doubt after all as to 
 whether all the time this unhappy wife had 
 not been just as anxious to throw her bon- 
 net over the nearest windmill as her lover 
 to see her do it. Antoinette de Langeais, 
 more bound by matrimony than Henriette, 
 38
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 in spite of, or rather because of, the fact 
 that she is separated from her husband, 
 also remains " virtuous"- technically till 
 she dies. She dies, indeed, on the very 
 day that her lover comes to carry her off, 
 aided by the secret society to which he 
 belongs, from the convent in which she 
 had sought oblivion after her discovery of 
 the terrible truth that surrender may come 
 too late to be effective. Both these ex- 
 amples may suggest that the novelist be- 
 lieved in the proverb, "everything comes 
 to him who waits," if death does not come 
 first and what an if! Only, in the case 
 of Armand de Montriveau and Antoinette 
 de Langeais, when the gift so long sought 
 came to him at last he would not have it, 
 and when the gift she had so tardily sought 
 came to her she was no longer " in being." 
 Julie d'Aiglemont we become so fami- 
 liar with duchesses, marchionesses, and 
 countesses in Balzac's novels that we talk 
 about them by their Christian names as 
 readily as if they were mere Hetty Sorels 
 or Dolly Vardens appears in two charac- 
 39
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 ters. The man who, loving her from a 
 mere peep through a carriage window, 
 literally devotes his life to her and for her, 
 dying of pneumonia after hanging on the 
 sill of her window throughout a cold night 
 "to save her honour," makes no impres- 
 sion on her virtuous resolves, unless to 
 strengthen them. Yet Julie, like a name- 
 sake of hers on the other side of the 
 Pyrenees, 
 
 Whispering " I will ne'er consent " consented, 
 
 but Donna Julia consented with the lover 
 to whom she whispered, whereas in Julie's 
 case it was with another one. 
 
 Coralie, the piquant actress who takes 
 Lucien's worthless heart by storm, and 
 loves him so devotedly, is one of the least 
 selfish of the swarming amoureuses drawn 
 by Balzac. Frail, of course, she is, but 
 compared with the poet for whose love she 
 is happy to die in misery she is an angel 
 of light. 
 
 We come then to the last of the five 
 types that were named together Madame 
 40
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Marneffe. If Philippe Bridau is, as I 
 hold, the worst man drawn by Balzac, 
 Valerie Marneffe may take her place at 
 the other end of the chimney-piece. Their 
 figures in bronze would make a perfect 
 pair of ornaments for the drawing-room 
 of a wealthy blackmailer married to a 
 woman who had destroyed her first hus- 
 band. Valerie, linked by marriage to an 
 odious man, selling her beauty to two men 
 at once, giving it to a third, and promising 
 the reversion to a fourth who has pos- 
 sessed it before any of the rest, and been 
 deceived in his absence, is not merely im- 
 moral and false, she is a wicked mother 
 who neglects her only child, a swindler 
 who trades as much upon the better in- 
 stincts rare enough of her lovers as 
 upon her own shame. To sketch this 
 fascinating and horrible creature in few 
 words would be impossible. She is the 
 very incarnation of the evil wrought by 
 physical beauty, bright intellect, and 
 entire lack of principle combined. Her 
 horrible end, so utterly horrible as almost 
 41
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 to pass into the ridiculous, and thus to 
 prove the possibility of extremes meeting, 
 is but one among scores of instances of 
 the frequent appearance of that "poetic" 
 justice, that lex talionis, one may almost 
 call it, in the " Comedie Humaine," where- 
 by men who ruin others are ruined at the 
 last themselves, and women whose attrac- 
 tions are the curse of men are brought to 
 misery at the last by men with whose 
 affections they have played. 
 
 Balzac's ideal of woman is seen in 
 Madame de Camps, whose character he 
 presents with unusual economy of space, 
 perhaps by leaving her defects, " if that 
 angel had a fault," without mention ; 
 though he does tell us that she made her- 
 self out to be three years younger than she 
 actually was. Whatever her years, she 
 was charming in mind and in person, and 
 she was certainly under thirty, the age of 
 feminine perfection according to the Bal- 
 zacian philosophy. 
 
 " Have you, for your happiness, met a 
 woman whose harmonious voice lent to her 
 42
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 speech a charm equally diffused by her 
 manners, who knows when to speak, and 
 when to hold her tongue, who treats you 
 with delicacy, whose words are happily 
 chosen, whose language is refined ? Her 
 raillery caresses, and her criticism does not 
 wound ; she neither harangues nor argues, 
 but is pleased to conduct a discussion, and 
 puts an end to it at the right moment. 
 Her manner is affable and cheerful, her 
 politeness has nothing forced about it, her 
 attentions are not servile ; respect is with 
 her no more than une ombre do^lce ; she 
 never wearies you, and she leaves you 
 pleased with her and with yourself. Her 
 character is expressed in the things around 
 her. In her rooms, everything pleases 
 the eyes, and you breathe, as it were, 
 the air of a home. That woman is 
 natural. There is no sign of effort, she 
 does not advertise her attractions or her 
 feelings. Her opinions are simply ex- 
 pressed, because they are genuine. Per- 
 fectly frank, she avoids offending any one's 
 self-esteem ; she accepts men as God has 
 43
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 made them, pitying the bad, pardoning 
 faults and absurdities, appreciating the 
 differences of age, and never allowing 
 herself to be put out by anything, because 
 she has the tact to foresee everything. 
 Gentle and lively at the same time, she 
 assists before offering consolation. You 
 like her so much, that, if that angel does 
 wrong, you feel yourself ready to justify 
 her." The detail that this charming woman 
 married her second husband at Gretna 
 Green may be brought to the notice of 
 English readers. 
 
 No novelist has ever devoted more 
 space and attention to the personal 
 appearance of his characters than Balzac, 
 who, more than any other, seeks in the 
 physical form for the expression of the 
 spiritual or intellectual nature. As a re- 
 sult, we see many curious-looking people. 
 The personal appearance of Eugenie 
 Grandet, for instance, who, in popular 
 esteem, was once and may still be 
 quite the " leading lady " of the " Human 
 Comedy," is not at all of a kind that an 
 
 44
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 ordinary novelist would consider suitable 
 for a heroine. She ' ' belonged to that type 
 of girl, strongly built, that one sees in the 
 lower middle class, and whose charms 
 appear rather commonplace ; but if she 
 resembled the Venus of Milo, her figure 
 was dignified by that sweetness of Chris- 
 tian sentiment which purifies a woman 
 and lends her a distinction unknown to 
 the sculptors of antiquity. She had an 
 enormous head, with the forehead, 
 masculine yet delicate, of the Jupiter of 
 Phidias, and grey eyes on which her 
 chaste existence, en sy portant tout entiere, 
 iniprimait une lumiere jaillissante. (How 
 can one translate such phrases with 
 any hope of success ?) The traits of her 
 round face, formerly fresh and rosy, had 
 been affected by a small-pox clement 
 enough to leave no markings, but which 
 had destroyed the bloom of a skin that, 
 nevertheless, was still so soft and fine that 
 the pure kiss of her mother left for the 
 moment a red mark upon it. Her nose 
 was rather too big, but it was in harmony 
 45
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 with a mouth the colour of red lead 
 (minium], of which the lips a mille rates 
 were full of affection and kindness. Her 
 neck was of a perfect roundness. Her 
 rounded bosom, carefully veiled, attracted 
 the regard et faisait rfoer ; it lacked, no 
 doubt, a little of that grace which can be 
 acquired, but, for connoisseurs, the inflex- 
 ibility of that haute faille would have 
 been charming. Eugenie, tall and strongly- 
 built, offered then nothing of that pretti- 
 ness which pleases the world at large, but 
 she was beautiful with that beauty so easily 
 overlooked, and by which artists alone are 
 captivated." 
 
 A painter, seeking a model such as 
 Raphael found for his Madonnas, might 
 have seen in Eugenie, under her unruffled 
 brow, we are told, " a world of love, and 
 in her eyes the/ ne sais quoi divine. Her 
 features, the contour of her head, which 
 passion had not impaired or worn, resem- 
 bled the horizontal lines so softly traced in 
 the background of some placid lake. That 
 tranquil countenance, tinted, bordered with 
 46
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 light like a pretty opening flower, gave 
 rest to one's soul, and conveyed the charm 
 of the conscience which was reflected there, 
 and which redemandait le regard"' 
 
 One is tempted to give up as hopeless 
 as indeed it is the attempt to convey 
 Balzac's descriptions of women, in their 
 full significance, in another language than 
 the French in which they were written. 
 Balzac's French is in many ways peculiar 
 to himself. His adverse critics, at the 
 time when his novels were appearing, 
 found it easy, as I have shown elsewhere 
 in these pages, to make sport of his adjec- 
 tives and his similes and metaphors. Let 
 us glance at another of his leading ladies, 
 Mademoiselle Felicite des Touches, as 
 charming to the eye at forty as at one- 
 and-twenty, like many other of Balzac's 
 beauties, yet whose charms, as described 
 in imitation of some phrases of Gautier's 
 by Balzac, might seem ridiculous if one took 
 every word in its literal sense. She is less 
 than five feet high, she has high cheek 
 bones, rather straight hips, a neck which 
 47
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 shows "des plis d'une magnificence 
 athletique," and a shoulder-joint which 
 " semble appartenir a une femme colossale," 
 while the tip of her nose possesses "a sort 
 of mobility which does wonders in those 
 moments when she is indignant, angry, or 
 antagonistic." 
 
 The truth or part of it at any rate is 
 that Balzac does not always mean exactly 
 what he says. If we heard of an English 
 girl that she had " une tete enorme," 
 referring to her actual head and not to her 
 coiffure or that "1'attache des bras," 
 " semble appartenir a une femme colossale," 
 we should expect to see, when we made 
 her acquaintance, a young woman whose 
 size of head and of shoulders was a 
 deformity seriously detracting from her 
 personal charms. Yet in the cases of 
 Eugenie and Felicite there is no sugges- 
 tion that their creator regarded them 
 as inviting pity for any defects in their 
 beauty. One of the pitfalls for trans- 
 lators is in those many words which, 
 in ordinary parlance, are " the same in 
 48
 
 both languages." There are dozens of 
 instances in Balzac where horrible and 
 terrible no more mean " horrible " and 
 " terrible " than en effet means " in effect," 
 than vicaire means " vicar," curb " curate," 
 libraire "librarian," or editeitr ''editor," 
 or, to come nearer home, than "terrible' 1 
 means anything dreadful when a Kentish 
 farmer declares it is "a terrible good year 
 for hops." The French are accustomed to 
 use adjectives that are stronger than the 
 facts seem to us to justify, and for them- 
 selves the proper shade of meaning is 
 readily appreciable. To translate enorme 
 by "large" or colossale by "big," would 
 perhaps be nearer the truth in the above 
 quotations. 
 
 Balzac, as his readers soon discover, is 
 a great " generaliser." His Bretons and 
 Normans, for example, will always be true 
 to their racial characteristics, and so great 
 is Balzac's belief in race that a blonde or 
 a brunette, as the case may be, will have 
 certain tendencies, and will behave in 
 given circumstances in a certain way. 
 49 *>
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Some of his physical generalisations so to 
 speak may appear overdrawn to many. 
 
 For example, he tells us of Julie d'Aigle- 
 mont, that, " In common with nearly all 
 the women who have very long hair, she 
 was perfectly white. Her skin, of a 
 wonderful delicacy, a symptom that rarely 
 deceives, announced a true sensitiveness, 
 evidenced also by the type of her features, 
 which had that marvellous finish that 
 Chinese artists give to their fantastic 
 paintings. Her neck was perhaps a little 
 long, but that sort of neck is the most 
 graceful, and lends to a woman's head a 
 vague affinity with the magnetic undula- 
 tions of a snake. Even without a single 
 one of the thousand signs by which the 
 most hypocritical natures are revealed to 
 the observer, one would be able to discern 
 a woman's character by attentively watch- 
 ing the movements of the head and the 
 bendings of the neck, so varied, and so 
 expressive." 
 
 There is no more finished portrait of a 
 woman in the "Human Comedy" than 
 5
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 that of the Princesse de Cadignan. As 
 Duchesse de Maufrigneuse she has flitted 
 about the novels, but it is only when we 
 spend our time with her during her suc- 
 cessful courtship of Daniel d'Arthez, one 
 of the most high-principled men invented 
 by Balzac, that we have the whole charac- 
 ter of this accomplished woman displayed 
 before us. She is a creature after the 
 author's (literary) heart. He was never 
 more vigorous than in depicting men or 
 women in whom selfishness and dissimula- 
 tion are so closely interwoven with admira- 
 tion and fondness for others, usually of the 
 other sex, that they themselves do not 
 know when they cease to be genuine. 
 This admixture, of course, is a common 
 characteristic of men and women, but few 
 have illustrated it, even here and there, so 
 finely as Balzac over and over again. 
 
 The Princess is not far off forty, and has 
 never been more beautiful. She has spent 
 all her fortune ; her husband, for whom she 
 cares nothing at all, is in exile with his 
 Bourbon master, her past is so populous
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 that, in order to reassure the parents of the 
 rich heiress whom she seeks for her son 
 of nineteen, she is compelled to affect the 
 seclusion of a nun, depending for her 
 income on allowances from her family, and 
 for the very fiowers in her little garden in 
 Paris on her dear friend of the same age, 
 Madame d'Espard. Why Na'is d'Espard 
 is so devoted to Diane de Cadignan no one 
 can make out, though every one knows 
 simple affection cannot be the reason, that 
 exalted lady having never yet been known 
 to do anything from unselfish motives. 
 
 Both women are sighing for the ideal 
 love which they have not yet found. Each 
 wants to be adored by some ardent genius 
 who will throw his intellect and his heart at 
 her elegantly covered feet. The Princess 
 has, it seems, been adored by an enthusiast 
 to whom she has never spoken, and who is 
 now dead. Discovering that he was the 
 bosom friend of d'Arthez (the two men 
 were members of that dnacle which tried 
 to save Lucien from perdition) she makes 
 love to that genius under pretence that she 
 5 2
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 regards him as the twin-soul of her lost 
 adorer. 
 
 The manner in which she leads Daniel 
 on, works up his passion, repulses him at 
 critical moments, and makes him regard 
 her as a very goddess of beauty and love, 
 as in fact she deserves to be called, since 
 Venus was a goddess, is described by the 
 novelist with a verve and effect never 
 equalled, so far as I know, save in his 
 own account of the love-making of the 
 Duchesse de Langeais. But the Duchess 
 wore out her lover by her refusal to 
 accept him or reject him definitely, while 
 the Princess, like Madame de Beauseant in 
 " La Femme abandonnee," carries off her 
 lover to Switzerland and lives happily for 
 a good bit of " ever after." All the little 
 tricks of coquetry, the subtle allurements 
 of hair and toilette, the movements of the 
 head and hands, the raising or lowering of 
 the eyes, are touched in with admirable 
 effect, while the conversation of this 
 gifted amateur in the art of the stage 
 which she never trod, whose mise en scene 
 53
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 is in her own boudoir, is imagined and set 
 down with an intuition and vivacity not 
 surpassed even in "La Cousine Bette," 
 where woman's wiles are so wonderfully 
 depicted. When she is telling the brilliant 
 tissue of lies by which she persuades 
 Daniel that she is a much-injured woman 
 of virgin soul, she artistically breaks off, 
 as if for shame, at the point where the 
 deepest secrets of her sufferings are 
 reached. No extract torn from the con- 
 text can ever give the full force of a scene ; 
 but a passage from the description of the 
 interview wherein Diane plays her best 
 cards and wins all the tricks as honestly 
 as Bret Harte's Chinee, may at least 
 suggest to those who have not read the 
 story the desirability of reading it. Of 
 course it loses much of its spirit in transla- 
 tion, but that is another reason for going 
 to the book itself. Diane has reached the 
 vital point in her mendacious narrative, and 
 having stopped, has fallen, or pretended 
 to fall, into a reverie. 
 
 54
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 ' " Well ? " said Daniel in a soft and calm 
 voice. Diane looked up at him ; then she 
 lowered her eyes slowly, closing her eye- 
 lids by a movement which revealed the 
 finest modesty. Only a monster could 
 have been capable of suspecting hypocrisy 
 in the graceful undulation by which the 
 cunning Princess lifted her pretty little 
 head to plunge yet another regard in the 
 hungry eyes of that great man. 
 
 " Can I tell you ? Ought I ? " she said, 
 in allowing a gesture of hesitation to escape 
 whilst she looked at d'Arthez with a sublime 
 expression of dreamy tenderness. " Men 
 have such little faith in this sort of confi- 
 dence ! They believe themselves so little 
 bound to discretion ! " 
 
 " Ah ! " cried d'Arthez, " if you mistrust 
 me, why am I here ? " 
 
 " Eh ! my friend," she replied, giving to 
 her exclamation the appearance of an in- 
 voluntary avowal, " when a woman attaches 
 herself to any one for life, does she calcu- 
 late? It is not a question of my refusal 
 (what can I refuse to you ?), but of the 
 55
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 opinion you will have of me if I tell you 
 all. I will indeed confide to you the strange 
 position in which, at my age, I am placed ; 
 but what would you think of a woman who 
 could reveal the hidden sorrows of her 
 married life, who could betray the secrets 
 of another ? Turenne kept his word to 
 the robbers ; do I not owe to my torturers 
 the loyalty of Turenne ? " 
 
 " Have you given your word to some 
 one ? " asked Daniel. 
 
 " M. de Cadignan has not thought it 
 necessary to bind me to secrecy. You 
 ask then more than my soul ? Tyrant ! 
 You wish me to bury my probity in 
 you ? " she said, throwing upon d'Arthez 
 a look by which she gave a higher price 
 to tha t false confidence than to all her 
 person.' 
 
 And so the scene progresses, till, " the 
 hour having arrived," Diane binds the poor 
 " great man" "in the inextricable meshes 
 of a carefully prepared romance, to which he 
 listened as a neophyte of the early days of 
 56
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Christianity listened to the words of an 
 apostle." 
 
 For the end of this remarkable scene, as 
 the reviewers say when they feel they have 
 told us as much of the story as is fair to 
 the author, "we must refer the reader to 
 the book itself." 
 
 Leaving the particular instance of the 
 fascinating Diane de Cadignan for the 
 general question of Balzac's womankind, 
 it must be noted that several of the most 
 spirituels of his men proffer their own 
 analyses of women of various types. What 
 Philippe Bridau professed to think of 
 woman in the abstract we have already 
 heard. Of the women a la mode Horace 
 Bianchon declares that he holds them in 
 horror, for the negative reason that "no 
 woman whose soul is elevated, whose taste 
 is pure, whose intelligence is bright, whose 
 heart is full of feeling, and who leads a 
 simple life, has the slightest chance of 
 being a la mode." From a Bixiou or a 
 Rastignac such an opinion would have 
 covered a bitter irony. From the doctor 
 57
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 who knows so much of human suffering it 
 comes through Balzac's imagination as 
 a genuine expression of opinion concerning 
 the Parisian women of his time. 
 
 Then there is Emile Blondet, who ana- 
 lyses the woman comme il faut, a creature 
 whose difference from the woman a la mode 
 is not necessarily small, the comme il faut 
 type being on the whole a finer one than 
 the merely a la mode. 
 
 "You cannot talk for half an hour with 
 a bourgeoise^ says M. Blondet, "without 
 her bringing her husband into the conver- 
 sation ; but as for a woman comme il faut, 
 if you know that she is married, she has 
 the delicacy to conceal the fact from you so 
 well that it has been a work of Christopher 
 Columbus to discover her husband. The 
 wit of the woman comme il faut, when she 
 has any, consists in leaving everything in 
 doubt, as that of the bourgeoise urges her 
 to tell everything. There lies the great 
 difference between these two women ; the 
 bourgeoise certainly possesses virtue, the 
 58
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 woman comme il faut does not know if she 
 has got it still, or if she will always have it ; 
 she hesitates and resists where the other 
 refuses point-blank pour tomber a plat. 
 That hesitation in everything is one of the 
 last graces left to her by our horrible 
 epoch." 
 
 No more horrible act is perpetrated by 
 any woman in the " Human Comedy " than 
 that of the young girl Rosalie de Watte- 
 ville, who wrecks the happiness of Albert 
 Savarus and the Duchesse d'Argaiolo by 
 forging letters which convince the Italian 
 lady that her Belgian lover is false, and 
 this at the very time when the death of the 
 old Duke d'Argaiolo, so patiently awaited, 
 gives Savarus the right todemand the reward 
 of his long fidelity. This " little Rosalie " 
 (who is terribly punished by Fate) offers in 
 the earlier pages of the novel a piquant illus- 
 tration of the hopelessness of the attempt to 
 bring up &jeune fille in complete ignorance 
 of everythingthather teachers do not impart 
 to her. She is so artful that she persuades 
 59
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 her parents to build a kiosk in the garden, 
 they being quite unconscious that their dear 
 child knows that, from the upper storey of 
 this summer-house, she will be able to see 
 into Albert's rooms ; and she encourages 
 clandestine meetings in this same kiosk 
 between her mother's maid and Albert's 
 valet, in order that the valet may show his 
 gratitude by bringing his master's letters to 
 her before they are despatched or delivered, 
 as the case may be. This is the sweet 
 little girl of eighteen who has read nothing 
 but the " Lettres edifiantes" and some 
 works upon the science of heraldry. Even 
 in the study of heraldry there are dangers 
 lurking, and Rosalie's remark on the 
 escutcheon of Savarus, made at a small 
 dinner-party in her own house, " No doubt 
 the bar is a sign of bastardy, but the bastard 
 of a Comte de Savarus is noble," while it 
 disconcerts her mother, leads her hen- 
 pecked father to remark, " You wished her 
 to learn heraldry, and she knows it well ! " 
 Another of Balzac's marked feminine 
 "types" is Juana de Mancini, who, after 
 60
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 her marriage to Diard, when she was 
 "struggling at every moment against her 
 nature, half Spanish and half Italian, 
 having dried up the fountain of her tears 
 by secret weeping, was one of those 
 typical creations destined to represent 
 feminine unhappiness in its largest ex- 
 pression ; sorrow incessantly active, and 
 the depicting of which would require ob- 
 servations so minute that, for people avid 
 of dramatic emotions, they would become 
 insipid. Such an analysis, where every 
 wife could find some of her own sufferings 
 described, would, if it were to comprise 
 them all, fill an entire book." 
 
 One of the two provincial predeuses 
 of the "Human Comedy" is Madame de 
 Barge ton, for whom " marriage and the 
 world were a nunnery. She lived on 
 poetry, as a nun lives on religion." The 
 other is Dinah de la Baudraye, who makes 
 such a fool of herself with Lousteau, the 
 unprincipled journalist. In the days before 
 she met that most unromantic of lovers 
 her provincial salon was very "select" 
 61
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 indeed, and very "cultured." "Desirous 
 of maintaining her intelligence at the level 
 of the mouvement parisien, Madame de la 
 Baudraye would not suffer from any one 
 empty remarks, nor worn-out compliments, 
 nor phrases without point ; she declined 
 to listen to that babbling of gossip, that 
 back-stairs tittle-tattle which is the chief 
 component of provincial conversation." 
 
 " By the best company," says Hazlitt 
 of some commonplace critic, " of which he 
 is perpetually talking, he means persons 
 who live on their own estates and other 
 people's ideas." That was not Dinah's 
 reading of the term. The bavardage to 
 which she refused a hearing was just 
 that "endless chatter and blast" of which 
 Emerson writes as one of the gravest 
 calamities that can come upon a house. 
 
 Mademoiselle des Touches, more, per- 
 haps, than any other woman of Balzac, 
 was accustomed to entertain what was 
 really "the best " company, so far as con- 
 versation is concerned. When, on a 
 notable occasion, the " Paron " de Nucin- 
 62
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 gen and his wife were present at one of 
 her most select "second parties," it was, 
 we may fancy, merely in order to allow the 
 Alsatian financier to make his remark, 
 containing more of esprit than he realised 
 " Gomme on oupliei" 
 
 The hostess of that occasion no doubt 
 had some affinities with George Sand, 
 Felicite, declares the cure" to the anxious 
 mother of Calyste, the handsome young 
 man who spends all his evenings in the 
 society of the celebrated woman-writer, is 
 " an amphibious being who is neither man 
 nor woman, who smokes like a hussar, and 
 writes like a journalist." 
 
 Among the comparatively few notable 
 women of Balzac's novels who are neither 
 wives nor lovers, Mademoiselle Zephirine 
 de Gu^nic stands out very clearly against 
 the light. This proud and devoted old 
 lady, so careful of the property of her 
 brother which she has safeguarded 
 through all the years of his exile under 
 the Revolution and the First Empire 
 that she will not spend twenty pounds for 
 63
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 the removal of the cataract which has 
 blinded her, watches over the little house- 
 hold almost as carefully without eyes as 
 with them. "Her attention not being dis- 
 tracted, she knew, without mounting there, 
 the size of the heap of walnuts in the 
 granary, and how much corn there was in 
 the box in the stable, without plunging 
 there her vigorous arm. She had, at the 
 end of a cord attached to her waistband, a 
 boatswain's whistle, with which she called 
 the cook by blowing once, and the man- 
 servant by blowing twice." 
 
 The most romantic of all Balzac's 
 heroines, and in some respects the most 
 heroic, is Marie de Verneuil in " Les 
 Chouans." She was, in fact, the first of 
 his heroines to receive any warm welcome 
 from the reading public, and she deserved 
 her success. This beautiful spy of the Re- 
 publican Government, who falls passion- 
 ately in love with the Royalist chief whom 
 she is sent to betray, and marries him with 
 the almost certain knowledge that both 
 will die within twenty-four hours of the 
 64
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 wedding, is as finely-imagined a character 
 as any in the whole series of novels. In 
 her case the working of the feminine brain, 
 so subtly analysed in almost every work of 
 Balzac's as in the instances of Madame de 
 Beauseant en >-etraite, of Madame Claes 
 in despair, of Madame Hulot in despera- 
 tion, of Beatrix in breaking hearts, and of 
 Lisbeth Fischer in devilish jealousy is 
 for the first time studied and illustrated 
 with the assurance and clearness of an 
 entomologist describing the functions of 
 the ganglia in a wasp or a beetle, combined 
 with the sympathy of the true artist for 
 the subject that he strives to present. 
 
 If these reminiscences of some typical 
 women of Balzac's novels seem to touch 
 more on frailty than fidelity, the excuse has 
 already been offered. One's justification, 
 in any case, could be suggested by the 
 single fact that he would not allow his own 
 nieces to read the majority of his books, 
 and that he wrote " Ursule Mirouet," 
 wherein no woman " goes wrong," ex- 
 pressly for them and for other 'jeunes filles 
 65 E
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 to enjoy. That it is one of the most de- 
 lightful of the whole series of novels proves 
 conclusively, if any proof were required, 
 that it was not because his strength was in 
 the depicting of "easy virtue" that the 
 virtue of most of his heroines is so easy on 
 occasion. 
 
 66
 
 
 MEN OF "THE HUMAN 
 COMEDY." 
 
 IT has been held by some highly compe- 
 tent judges that Balzac realised women 
 better than men. It is, at any rate, true 
 that there is no man in the novels so ex- 
 haustively studied as Diane de Cadignan, 
 Julie d'Aiglemont, Valerie Marneffe. The 
 men are, in most instances, just as much 
 alive as their wives or mistresses, but we 
 do not see so much of the working of their 
 inner consciences. We see them in action 
 more frequently than the women, but their 
 "mental processes " are not dissected and 
 explained with the same elaboration. 
 
 This difference may be accounted for, in 
 
 some degree, by the fact that Balzac had 
 
 studied the feminine character more closely 
 
 than the masculine, even if his studies were 
 
 67
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 carried out for the most part within the 
 confines of his own brain. But another 
 reason undoubtedly lies in the novelist's 
 theory "of love. He shared the opinion 
 expressed in some burning lines placed by 
 his favourite poet, Byron, in the mouth of 
 the Spanish cousin of Balzac's own Julie 
 d'Aiglemont, that 
 
 Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 
 
 'Tis woman's whole existence ; man may range 
 
 The court, camp, church, the vessel and the mart ; 
 
 Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange 
 
 Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart, 
 
 And few there are whom these cannot estrange ; 
 
 Men have all these resources, we but one, 
 
 To love again, and be again undone. 
 
 In those days there was, at any rate, more 
 truth in this view of amorous affection than 
 there would be in the France of to-day, 
 save in the case of the convent-bred jeunes 
 filles, who are still guarded until marriage 
 with a care that would be intolerable to 
 the majority of girls of the corresponding 
 classes in this country. In England, of 
 68
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 course, with its ladies' clubs (where Felicite 
 des Touches, who shocked the Cure of 
 Guerande by her "mannish" behaviour, 
 could smoke her hookah without reproof), 
 and its swarm of " authoresses," women 
 are no longer driven by the absence of 
 alternatives to find " their whole existence " 
 in love. They have as many outlets for 
 their intellectual energies as they can want, 
 barring politics. 
 
 Some few of the women of Balzac's 
 novels were hard workers, with little time 
 to bother their heads or their hearts about 
 men ; but the leading ladies of the 
 " Comedie " are mostly under no necessity 
 to work, and are chiefly devoted to their 
 affaires du cceur. Passion being the prime 
 factor in Balzac's novels, and women being 
 more deeply affected by passion than men, 
 it is the women's minds that are chiefly 
 analysed. There is no man in the whole 
 " Human Comedy," not even the abnormal 
 Louis Lambert, with his imbecile exterior 
 and angelic intelligence, of whose thoughts 
 we know as much as we do of the thoughts 
 69
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 of the Princesse de Cadignan or of Madame 
 Graslin. 
 
 So far as frequency of appearance may 
 decide the point, the principal men of the 
 " Human Comedy " are Eugene Rastignac, 
 Henri de Marsay, Jean-Jacques Bixiou, and 
 Horace Bianchon. We are always meet- 
 ing one or another of the quartette at parties, 
 or at the theatre, in a squalid garret or a 
 silk-hung drawing-room. 
 
 Rastignac, the son of a provincial 
 nobleman who is far too poor to provide 
 for him in a becoming manner, starts his 
 Paris life in a fourth-rate boarding-house, 
 but speedily climbs into comparative 
 affluence by making successful love to the 
 neglectful daughter of his fellow-boarder 
 Pere Goriot, and indifferent wife of the 
 wealthy Alsacian Jew, peer of France, com- 
 pany promoter and financier, Frederic de 
 Nucingen. Originally a rather kindly and 
 conscientious young man, Rastignac, though 
 he never becomes a wholly unprincipled 
 scoundrel like Maxime de Trailles, the lover 
 of Goriot's other daughter (who, as old 
 70
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Gobseck says, "has nothing but mud in 
 his veins "), is so hardened by his early 
 experiences of the heartlessness of men 
 and women in Paris that he deliberately 
 sets out to conquer the world with its own 
 weapons, and succeeds so well that he 
 becomes a prominent statesman, and a mil- 
 lionaire d la mode de France. He is the 
 type of man, not at all unfamiliar in his- 
 tory, who, having succeeded in making the 
 path of love run smoothly, uses it as an 
 easy road to fortune. His intellect is 
 strong, but his conversation is not usually 
 brilliant. His aims are clearly defined, and 
 nothing is allowed to stand in his way. He 
 is the "pushful" man, who means to be 
 rich and powerful, and achieves his object 
 while still in the prime of life. The poor 
 youth whom we first meet, cursing his lot, 
 and tending his dying neighbour inMadame 
 Vauquer's nauseous pension, comes out 
 from the Chamber of Deputies he is now 
 a Minister into the garden to talk to us, 
 looking young still, in spite of his forty- 
 eight years, "dressed in black, without any 
 7'
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 decoration," laughing consumedly at the 
 things that are going on in the " House." 
 Leon de Lora asks him what he is so 
 tickled by. 
 
 " My dear fellow," replies Rastignac, 
 " in order to prove the sincerity of the 
 Constitutional Government, we are obliged 
 to tell the most awful lies with an in- 
 credible assurance. As for me, I am 
 variable. If there are some days when I 
 can lie like a programme, there are others 
 when I cannot be serious. To-day is one 
 of my laughing days. Well, at this 
 moment, the Prime Minister, called upon 
 by the opposition to reveal some of the 
 secrets of diplomacy, though it would 
 refuse to disclose them if it was in office 
 itself, is about to do his exercises in the 
 tribune ; and, being an honest man who 
 does not lie for his own pleasure, he whis- 
 pered in my ear before mounting to the 
 assault: 'I don't know what to tell them!' 
 In seeing him in the tribune, I have been 
 unable to control my laughter, and have 
 72
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 come out, for one cannot laugh on the 
 Ministerial bench, where my youth some- 
 times returns to me unseasonably." 
 
 The Comte de Marsay is a bigger 
 success in the world even than the Comte 
 de Rastignac, coming to be the Prime 
 Minister of Louis Philippe, after having 
 been the Adonis of half the grandes dames 
 of the " Comedie Humaine." He is one of 
 the " finest gentlemen " and most utter 
 cads in fiction, and we have no doubt that 
 Balzac knew him through and through. 
 The son of a great English nobleman 
 by an unprincipled French girl, Henri de 
 Marsay was educated by a worldly abbe, 
 who taught him so well that when this 
 worthy man died a bishop, in 1812, he 
 had "the satisfaction of leaving on earth 
 a youth of sixteen, whose heart and soul 
 were so well fashioned that he could get 
 over a man of forty. Who would expect 
 to encounter a heart of bronze, an alcohol- 
 ised brain, under the most seductive ex- 
 terior that the old painters, those nai've 
 73
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 artists, gave to the serpent in the Garden 
 of Eden ? That is yet nothing. The 
 good devil in violet had provided for his 
 favourite some acquaintances in the high 
 society of Paris who were worth many 
 thousands a year to the young man." He 
 was so handsome at twenty-two that no 
 woman could see him without emotion ; he 
 was "as brave as a lion," he was an 
 accomplished musician, with an exquisite 
 voice. " But, alas ! all his fine qualities, 
 his elegant faults were stained by a ter- 
 rible vice : he believed neither in men 
 nor in women, neither in God nor the 
 devil." 
 
 As we learn a little later in his history, 
 he had another dreadful characteristic, he 
 was incapable of forgiving. " The fero- 
 city of the Northmen, with which the 
 English blood is rather strongly coloured, 
 had been transmitted to him by his father. 
 He was resolute alike in his good feelings 
 and his bad," which were certainly in the 
 majority. 
 
 Henri de Marsay's nature and principles 
 74
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 are clearly shown in the horrible story of 
 his adventure with Paquita of the golden 
 eyes. He is perfectly selfish then, as at 
 all stages of his prosperous existence. 
 
 Jean-Jacques Bixiou, who combines his 
 work in the Civil Service with the practice 
 of caricature, is the leading fumiste, or 
 hoaxer, of the Comedy. He cannot be 
 wholly serious, and whether he is fooling 
 some thick-headed clerk in his office, some 
 rich manufacturer from the provinces, or 
 some confiding tradesman, his mouth is 
 always half-full of cynical remarks which 
 must find an outlet. He is not altogether 
 heartless, and if he makes others suffer he 
 knows how to bear misfortune for himself. 
 He, by the way, is responsible for one of 
 the two drawings which appear in the 
 unillustrated editions of Balzac's novels. 
 This caricature of Rabourdin killing the 
 incompetent officials in his bureau did a 
 great deal of harm to the object of its wit, 
 but Bixiou claimed too much for his powers 
 when he asserted, years afterwards, that 
 it "killed" Rabourdin, whose official fate 
 75
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 was sealed before the drawing was in cir- 
 culation. 
 
 The last of the four prominent men 
 named together is Horace Bianchon. 
 When we look round over the crowd of 
 characters in the "Comedie Humaine"- 
 there are said to be over two thousand, 
 and, without counting them, one can easily 
 accept the statement none stands out in 
 a finer light than this general practitioner. 
 He appears as often as anybody ; indeed, 
 few are encountered half so frequently in 
 Balzac society. Now we meet him at a 
 very " select " evening party, now at a 
 supper of journalists and actresses. We 
 see him one day at the deathbed of the 
 dying Goriot in a dirty garret of the Latin 
 quarter, and on another day at the death- 
 bed of a duchess in a splendid hotel of the 
 Faubourg St. Germain. He is at home in 
 all classes. He has friends who are dust- 
 men and friends who are peers of France, 
 struggling tradesmen and members of 
 "the high finance." He has no more or 
 
 o 
 
 less religion, in the ecclesiastical sense, 
 76
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 than his master Despleix, who attends a 
 mass once a year for a reason so excellent 
 that one dare not call him a hypocrite ; 
 but of that religion which consists in visit- 
 ing the fatherless and the widow and 
 charging them nothing for his services 
 he has far more than most of his acquaint- 
 ances who live "dans les bras de 1'Eglise.'' 
 In many of his works of true charity he is 
 the partner of his uncle, Judge Popinot. 
 The uncle finds out the poor sufferers and 
 the money for their assistance as to food 
 and clothing, while the nephew gives up to 
 the relief of their sickness hours when he 
 might be freely pocketing whatever was 
 the Parisian equivalent in those times for 
 the doctor's guineas in Mayfair of to-day. 
 Position and title are nothing to him ; he 
 takes men as he sees them, and is rarely 
 imposed upon, but he does not expect to 
 find perfection in any class, and looks with 
 indulgence upon the errors of a rich mar- 
 chioness or of a poor fleuriste, though 
 possibly he might be less severe on the 
 fleuriste on account of the hardness of her 
 77
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 lot. Horace Bianchon himself makes no 
 pretence to moral impeccability. His most 
 serious fault is his conduct towards Rosalie, 
 the maid of the inn at Vendome. It is 
 true that if he had not trifled with her 
 affections we should never, as it seems, 
 have known the truth about the " Grande 
 Breteche," and thus have missed the most 
 thrilling tragedy in the whole " comedy," 
 more thrilling even than the deaths of 
 Marie de Verneuil or Paquita ; more terri- 
 ble than the deaths of Adeline Hulot or 
 her abominable rival Valerie. Yet, though 
 he made love to satisfy his curiosity, it 
 does not appear that he made any false 
 promises of constancy to the pretty girl, 
 who, indeed, was only waiting for her 
 bricklayer fianct to return from abroad to 
 be married and enjoy the fortune that was 
 the price of silence. Horace did, however, 
 promise to keep her secret " with the 
 probity of a thief, the most loyal that 
 exists " ; and yet, many years after, he 
 told the whole story to the favoured com- 
 pany at the table of Camille Maupin. 
 78
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 No figure stands out more prominently 
 in the " Comedie Humaine" than Jacques 
 Collin, though he does not appear in many 
 of the novels. He is the great criminal 
 great alike in resource, in courage, in auda- 
 city, and in achievement. Most readers of 
 Balzac make Collin's acquaintance in the 
 Maison Vauquer, where, under the name of 
 Vautrin, he dominates the place, awakens 
 thoughts of re-marriage in the ample bosom 
 of the landlady, and is sold to the police 
 who ''want" him very particularly, by the 
 soured Mademoiselle Michonneau. His 
 arrest is the subject of one of the most 
 powerful passages in Balzac. No extract 
 can give a fair idea of it. We see the wild 
 beast at bay, a beast that does not merely 
 roar and snap. The higher qualities of a 
 strong mind, as well as the lower quali- 
 ties wherein such crimes as Collin's germi- 
 nate, are laid bare to our sight. When he 
 turns to the mean, trembling woman who 
 has been the instrument of his betrayal, 
 and says, probably quite truly, "In uttering 
 two words I could have your throat cut 
 79
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 within a week, but I pardon you ; I am 
 Christian ; " and when he turns to the 
 staring boarders and asks, " Have you 
 never seen a convict before ? A convict 
 such as I am is a man less cowardly than 
 the rest, who protests against the hypo- 
 crisy of the social contract, as says Rous- 
 seau, whose disciple I am proud to call 
 myself," the man has such an air of force 
 in reserve that we sympathise with the 
 cook, Sylvie, who, looking round on the 
 astonished boarders, says, " Eh bien, c'etait 
 un homme tout de meme," just as the 
 courtesan Josepha had declared to Baron 
 Hulot, " On est une canaille, mais on a 
 du cceur." We meet Jacques Collin next 
 when Lucien de Rubempr, after the 
 failure of his attempt to capture Paris with 
 his pen, and the cruel, though uninten- 
 tional, irony of his reception at Angou- 
 leme as a "great poet," is walking along 
 the high road, thinking of suicide. A 
 Spanish ecclesiastic, who has dismounted 
 from his travelling-carriage and is walking 
 up a hill, gets into conversation with the 
 80
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 wretched poet, and, being as astute as any 
 criminal lawyer, soon finds out all about 
 the beautiful young man, and presently 
 persuades him to become his secretary 
 and make another start in life. This 
 philosophical priest is the terrific criminal 
 Collin, alias Vautrin, in one of his great 
 " incarnations." Lucien is persuaded, and 
 we see neither man again until we find 
 them, in another novel, living together, 
 Lucien as the tool of the genius an evil 
 genius, but still a genius who finds in 
 the poet's passion for the lovely Esther 
 Gobseck a means of obtaining money in 
 abundance. All goes well in crime, if very 
 ill in morality, until the assaults of Collin 
 on the fortune of Nucingen, the Alsatian 
 Jew, end in disaster, and both the work- 
 man and his tool are consigned to the 
 care of the police. The disgrace of Lucien 
 is complete for a young man with some 
 sensibility left, and he hangs himself in 
 prison. Collin saves himself by placing 
 his immense knowledge of crime and 
 criminals at the service of the police, and 
 81 F
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 enters upon his last " incarnation." He 
 is one of Balzac's strongest creations, 
 largely made up, no doubt, from the his- 
 torical records of the French convict sys- 
 tem, but endowed by the author with a 
 mental vigour equalled by few of the 
 heroes of the <c Human Comedy." 
 
 Much less prominently presented than 
 " Trompe-la-Mort," as Collin's fellows in 
 crime called him, is the Breton rebel, 
 " Marche-a-Terre," whose sinister influ- 
 ence and animal ferocity count for so much 
 in the romance of the beautiful spy, Marie 
 de Verneuil, as related in " Les Chouans." 
 This sullen peasant, whose very love is 
 half brutality, is as distinctly a type as any 
 man drawn by Balzac, and supplements 
 the studies of Breton characters given in 
 the earlier portion of " Beatrix." 
 
 Avarice plays a large part in the 
 " Com6die Humaine" how otherwise 
 could the picture have been so largely 
 true? Grandet, of Saumur, Hochon, of 
 Issoudun, Graslin, of Limoges, and Gob- 
 seek, of Paris, are the most notable misers 
 82
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 of the novels, and their natures are finely 
 differentiated. Grandet is the successful 
 wine-grower and landed proprietor, who 
 puts his money by in sums of fifty thousand 
 francs at a time. Hochon is less wealthy, 
 somewhat less devoid of humanity, and far 
 less interesting. 
 
 The Saumur miser is fully developed by 
 Balzac, and is admirably presented in the 
 opening pages of the novel in which he 
 lives. Having been Mayor of Saumur 
 under the Directory, he had, "in the in- 
 terests of the town," made excellent roads 
 which reached to his several estates in the 
 neighbourhood, and the rateable value of 
 his possessions had been " very advanta- 
 geously fixed." When Napoleon, who had 
 no love for Republicans, came into power, 
 Grandet left his municipal honours without 
 regret, having got all he wanted out of 
 them. " Providence desired, no doubt, to 
 console him for the loss of his official posi- 
 tion," for, in the very year of his dismissal, 
 he inherited fortunes from his wife's mother 
 and grandfather, and his own maternal 
 83
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 grandmother, three old people whose 
 avarice was so intense that they had kept 
 their money at home, so that they might 
 contemplate it secretly, " receiving higher 
 interest from the sight of their gold than 
 from the profits of investment. . . . There 
 was no one in Saumur who did not believe 
 that Grandet himself had a private hoard, 
 and gave himself nightly the ineffable de- 
 lights that the sight of a great heap of gold 
 procures. The avaricious people were 
 almost certain of it, merely from seeing 
 Grandet's eyes, to which the yellow metal 
 seemed to have lent its tints. . . . Finan- 
 cially speaking, Monsieur Grandet was a 
 mixture of the tiger and the boa-constric- 
 tor. He knew how to lie in wait, hidden 
 from sight, to watch his prey, to leap upon 
 it ; then he opened the mouth of his purse, 
 filled it with money, and lay down quietly, 
 like the 'snake which digests its food, im- 
 passive, cold, methodical. No one could 
 see him pass without feeling a sentiment 
 of admiration, of mingled terror and 
 respect." 
 
 8 4
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 The avarice of Graslin is mixed with 
 an appreciation of luxury, rarely indulged, 
 but strongly exhibited on occasion. In 
 this he stands apart from the Grandet and 
 Hochon types. His parsimony and heart- 
 lessness may be summed up together in 
 the single statement that he left the birds 
 in his aviary to starve, in order to save the 
 expense of feeding them. 
 
 Gobseck is much the most picturesque 
 and least unpleasing of Balzac's misers. 
 A cabin-boy, sailor, and even pirate in his 
 earlier days, this astute philosopher has 
 arrived at a knowledge of men equal to 
 that of any detective in fiction or probably 
 in fact. He sometimes charges two hun- 
 dred per cent, for a loan, but he is 
 strictly correct in his financial dealings. 
 His pleasures are studying human charac- 
 ters and playing dominoes with other 
 usurers at a favourite cafe. Among the 
 minor works of Balzac the portrait of 
 Gobseck is one of the most finished. 
 
 Maitre Cornelius, the fifteenth-century 
 miser, who sends his apprentices to the 
 85
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 gallows for taking money which he himself 
 has buried in his sleep, hardly comes 
 within the " Comedy " proper. It may be 
 noted that his nocturnal walks are dis- 
 covered by Louis XL, who sprinkles 
 flour on the floor, and sees the marks of 
 the miser's shoes the next morning. 
 
 If there are not many "good" women 
 in Balzac's novels, neither are there many 
 " good " men. Doctor Benassis is a very 
 Providence during his later life, thereby 
 atoning for his abominable treatment of a 
 loving and trusting woman in his earlier 
 years. The Curd of Montegnac is an 
 admirable example of the devoted village 
 priest. The Marquis d'Espard is of 
 stainless honour, and performs a noble act 
 of renunciation, but we do not see much of 
 him, nor of Bourgeat the water-carrier, 
 who is one of the most beautiful characters 
 of all. 
 
 This poor man from Auvergne, who by 
 
 hard work and privation has saved enough 
 
 money to buy a horse and dray, his life's 
 
 ambition, finding that his fellow-lodger, a 
 
 86
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 medical student of higher social origin, 
 cannot afford the fees for his examinations, 
 spends the money in helping the lad, and 
 does not cease helping him, in money and 
 personal service, until the medical student 
 has become a doctor. His devotion costs 
 him his life. To gain the money for the 
 student's needs, Bourgeat has exceeded 
 his physical powers. The young doctor 
 watches over him, and provides for all his 
 wants, but it is too late. The water-carrier 
 dies in the arms of the man who owes his 
 success to him. As told by Balzac, it is the 
 most beautiful story in the whole " Human 
 Comedy." 
 
 Among other characters in whom the 
 better side of our nature is strikingly ex- 
 hibited is the elder Hulot, the ill-educated 
 but distinguished soldier, the fearless officer 
 of stainless honour, who dies of shame on 
 the discovery of his brother's frauds. The 
 scene between this noble veteran and his 
 old friend and comrade, the Prince de Wis- 
 sembourg, when the certainty of Baron 
 Hulot d'Ervy's guilt is demonstrated by the 
 87
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Prince, is as impressive as any drawn by 
 Balzac. 
 
 Joseph Bridau, the artist who cares more 
 for his art than for making money, and 
 is so long in recognising the utter villany 
 of his brother's nature, is a fine character 
 of a lighter type. These two pairs of 
 brothers, the Hulots and the Bridaus, are 
 most effectively contrasted in the novels 
 in which they are respectively displayed 
 together, " La Cousine Bette " and " Un 
 Manage de Carbon." The elder Hulot 
 appears without the younger, as a prin- 
 cipal figure in " Les Chouans," where he 
 distinguishes himself as the commanding 
 officer of the " Blues," or infantry of the 
 Republican army, in 1799. Philippe 
 Bridau, as already said, is the worst 
 scoundrel of the " Comedie Humaine." 
 No doubt Jacques Collin is a worse offender 
 against the laws, and the thirteen con- 
 federates of the " Histoirede Treize" may 
 be guilty of more crimes. But in meanness 
 and selfishness there is none so perfect as 
 this vile creature, spoilt no doubt by his 
 88
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 doting mother, to whom he is ready to 
 refuse bread in her hour of need, who 
 breaks ner heart at last when he disowns 
 her, as an obstacle to his social advance- 
 ment. Maxence Gilet, the unprincipled 
 lover of " La Rabouilleuse," is bad enough, 
 with no moral principles that are dis- 
 coverable, but when he is killed in the 
 duel by Colonel Philippe Bridau, there 
 can be few readers who do not reflect that 
 the better man is the one who has lost his 
 life. 
 
 One of the most distinctly realised of 
 Balzac's men is Raoul Nathan, the erratic 
 man of letters and journalist, for whose 
 dishevelled hair and caustic humour the 
 pretty wife of Felix de Vandenesse so 
 nearly loses her reputation. " This Byron 
 badly combed, badly made," whose hands 
 "are unacquainted with the cares of the 
 nail-brush," deliberately aims at untidiness. 
 " He habitually holds one of his hands in 
 his open waistcoat, in a pose rendered 
 famous by Girodet's portrait of Chateau- 
 briand ; but he takes it less to be like 
 89
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Chateaubriand (he does not want to be 
 like any one) than to rumple the folds of 
 his shirt-front." 
 
 Nathan, who " bears some resemblance 
 to a genius," is a perfect egoist, who 
 allows a woman to whom he is faithless to 
 sell her property in order to find money 
 for his schemes. " Superlatively idle, he 
 has never done anything unless pricked by 
 the halberds of necessity. . . . The ban- 
 ality of his heart, the shamelessness of his 
 handshake, which grasps every vice, every 
 unhappiness, every treason, every opinion, 
 have rendered him as inviolable as a 
 constitutional monarch." This contemp- 
 tible creature is the idol of the gently 
 nurtured Marie de Vandenesse, who is 
 saved from her impending performance in 
 a version of "Beauty and the Beast" 
 wherein the Beast will not turn into a 
 Prince, by the affection and prudence of 
 her husband. The Flix who annoys us 
 by his vapouring in " Le Lys dans la 
 Vall6e " has become a very sensible hus- 
 band, after his rather severe lessons in 
 90
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 self-respect and conduct from Lady 
 Dudley and the Comtesse Natalie de 
 Manerville. 
 
 One could call up figure after figure that 
 stands out in the " Human Comedy " until 
 there was no space to consider any other 
 subject. Such men as Crevel, the ridi- 
 culous perfumer-captain, who is always 
 posing in Byronic attitudes ; Minoret, the 
 dabbler in psychology, whose " reconcilia- 
 tion " with the Church causes such conster- 
 nation to his relations ; Paz, who, to pre- 
 vent the woman he loves from loving him, 
 declares that he is the lover of a circus- 
 girl, and then goes off to buy the acqui- 
 escence of the circus-girl in the lie ; du 
 Tillet, the shopman, become a wealthy 
 financier, having ability and unscrupulous- 
 ness ; Gaudisssart, the commercial-travel- 
 ler, whose insinuating blarney is so ludi- 
 crously beaten by the babble of a lunatic ; 
 the Abbe Birotteau, whose saintly nature 
 is no match for the selfishness of his fel- 
 low-priest at Tours these men, and 
 scores of others, are drawn for us by 
 91
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 an artist who, whatever his defects his 
 want of delicacy or of sense of propor- 
 tion, his superstitions or his affectations 
 has never been excelled as an exponent 
 of character.
 
 BALZAC'S "COMEDIE 
 ANGLAISE." 
 
 VOLTAIRE wrote from Ferney, in 1769, to 
 the Due de Richelieu : " I begin to think 
 that we are becoming too English, and 
 that it would be better for us to be French." 
 The words may remind English readers of 
 what is often forgotten, that there have 
 been several periods in French history when 
 English ways were much more affected in 
 France than they are in these days of 
 " 1'Entente Cordiale." Without going back 
 to the centuries when a large part of France 
 was under the same sovereign as England, 
 with the natural result of a similarity in 
 most things wherein the fashions are set 
 by Courts, we may remember that in the 
 years before the French Revolution, of 
 which Voltaire is speaking, and again 
 93
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 under the Restoration which followed the 
 downfall of Napoleon, not only were 
 English visitors abundant in Paris, but 
 many English people resided there. There 
 has probably never been since the Revo- 
 lution so large an admixture of Englishmen 
 in the social life of Paris as in the days of 
 which Voltaire speaks, unless it was in the 
 period of which Balzac writes, which pre- 
 ceded the general introduction into France 
 of railways things very rarely mentioned, 
 and still more rarely used, by the people of 
 the " Human Comedy." It is that very 
 introduction of railways that is responsible 
 for the decline of the relative number of 
 English people who really know Paris and 
 influence the Parisians. 
 
 Now that cheap Saturday to Monday 
 tickets are available, a thousand English 
 visitors might go to Paris for every one 
 who went in the days when the sea passage 
 was three times as long, or more, and the 
 land journeys were done by coach. But 
 the one, in the days of Sterne, or of 
 Walpole, or of Young, stayed in the 
 94
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 town and learned something of its people ; 
 whereas the typical "tripper" of to-day 
 comes back with an impression that the 
 boundaries of Paris are marked on the 
 north by the Palais Royal, on the south by 
 the Luxembourg, on the east by the Hotel 
 de Ville, and on the west by the Eiffel 
 Tower and the Captive Balloon, and that 
 the inhabitants are mainly waiters, police- 
 men, cab-drivers, and painted ladies. 
 
 Balzac, perhaps, was not in a position to 
 write a history of English manners, but he 
 saw enough of the English to add many 
 touches of actuality to the knowledge he 
 had gained from Richardson's novels and 
 Byron's poetry, and his references to Eng- 
 land and its people are frequent. 
 
 If he knew only from the accounts of 
 others, and from his meetings with English 
 visitors to the Continent, of what went on 
 across the Channel in the land of fogs, wife 
 markets, and sirloins of beef, no one can 
 read many of his novels without discover- 
 ing that he was greatly interested by the 
 English and their idiosyncrasies. The 
 95
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 first play that he wrote, in his early days, 
 was on a subject chosen from English 
 history. It was the defunct "Cromwell," 
 wherein the experiences of Charles I. and 
 Henrietta Maria, after the triumph of the 
 Parliamentary forces, were treated with 
 very great freedom, among the characters 
 being the sons of Strafford and of Crom- 
 well. Of one scene Balzac wrote to his 
 sister: " The magnanimity of Charles re- 
 storing his sons to Cromwell is finer than 
 that of Augustus pardoning Cinna." The 
 play was received by the author's family 
 and friends with extreme coldness, and 
 speedily relegated to well-merited oblivion. 
 At any rate, the fact that he chose such a 
 subject shows that even then he had read 
 and thought a good deal of the people who 
 lived on the northern side of the Channel. 
 French writers on England, as a rule, 
 make ludicrous mistakes, and no doubt the 
 error is mutual. English novelists make 
 French characters do strange things 
 stranger than anything that Balzac sup- 
 poses English men and women to perpe- 
 96
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 trate, at home or abroad. Lapse of time 
 and increased facilities for travel seem to 
 have little effect in making the two nations 
 understand each other's peculiarities ; and 
 it is unlikely that many English who have 
 not long resided in France, and outside 
 their own colonies in French towns, know 
 our exuberant neighbours much better 
 than they were known by Arthur Young 
 or Lawrence Sterne. That Balzac never 
 lived in England is no reason why he should 
 not be better acquainted with English 
 ideas than are a large proportion of Eng- 
 lish settlers in France with the ideas of the 
 French. Our retired colonels in Normandy 
 frequently seem to regard the natives very 
 much as most Anglo-Indians regard the 
 people of Hindostan. Yet one can hardly 
 admit that the English character was 
 clearly appreciated in the " Comedie Hu- 
 maine." 
 
 Pride, reserve, aloofness, love of* ease, 
 
 good taste in material surroundings, are, in 
 
 Balzac's novels, prominent features of that 
 
 English character. "The English," he 
 
 97 G
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 himself declares, "make it a matter of 
 pride not to open their mouths in public 
 conveyances," a charge still frequently 
 made against us, not without foundation, 
 much as might be said in defence of this 
 reserve in strange company. " You know 
 the peculiar personality of the English," 
 says Flix, in " Le Lys dans laValle'e": 
 " humanity seems to be a nest of ants upon 
 which they tread ; they are acquainted with 
 none of their species outside their own 
 social circle ; they do not so much as un- 
 derstand the language of the rest, who, for 
 them, are as if they had no existence." And 
 he goes on to regard the manners of the 
 English as presenting "an image of their 
 own island, where law governs all things, 
 all is uniform in every class, and where the 
 practice of virtue resembles the movements 
 of machinery which is started at regular 
 times. That people has put everything in 
 the form." That this was an idea of Eng- 
 lish ways very commonly held in the days 
 of the French Restoration is clear from 
 other sources. It was not denied that our 
 98
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 grandfathers and grandmothers came of 
 like passions with their Parisian or Tour- 
 angean contemporaries ; but it was be- 
 lieved that the English were trained, from 
 childhood upwards, to bottle up every feel- 
 ing that possessed them, save that of in- 
 difference to the existence of any person 
 outside their own sphere. The English 
 lady was surrounded, in Balzac's eyes, by 
 " fortifications of polished steel," and was 
 encaged in her home by golden wires. But 
 this very worship of formality and restric- 
 tion of liberty were the causes, as he held, 
 of the special charm of English women, of 
 " that exaltation of a sensibility wherein, 
 for them, life is necessarily summed up, of 
 the exaggeration of their carefulness of 
 themselves, of the delicacy of their love, so 
 charmingly depicted in those famous scenes 
 of Romeo and Juliet, wherein the genius of 
 Shakespeare has, with one touch, expressed 
 the English feminine type." 
 
 If, however, the great French painter 
 of human life looked upon cold reserve as 
 characteristic of our race, he also fancied 
 99
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 that it was very easy to see through us, 
 or, at any rate, through our grandmothers. 
 "These fair sirens," he writes, " appa- 
 rently impenetrable, yet so soon under- 
 stood, think that they can live upon love, 
 and spoil their enjoyments by never vary- 
 ing them." How could they vary them, 
 if they were not allowed enough liberty 
 to choose their own amusements? " The 
 seclusion which used to be compulsory for 
 the women of Greece, a seclusion now 
 becoming the mode in England," we are 
 told in " la Femme de Trente Ans," " is the 
 only safeguard of domestic morality ; but, 
 under the empire of that system, the 
 courtesies of life disappear, society, polite- 
 ness, and elegant manners being no longer 
 possible. The nations must make their 
 choice." Without insisting that such re- 
 marks necessarily reflect Balzac's personal 
 opinion, it must be tolerably clear to his 
 readers that Englishwomen, in his mind, 
 were divided into two great classes, those of 
 cloistral purity, and those whose conduct 
 was only ordered, if ordered at all, by fear 
 
 IOO
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 of social punishments. " These girls, 
 made of milk, with golden hair, whose 
 curls are twisted by the fingers of angels," 
 girls " who are only born in the British 
 Isles," developed into such innocent, 
 simple-minded creatures as Fanny O'Brien 
 who was an Irishwoman by the way 
 or such dare-devil scorners of the seventh 
 and some other commandments as Ara- 
 belle, Lady Dudley. 
 
 To the credit of the English Balzac 
 places those milk-and-rose and golden- 
 haired beauties, that cleanliness which 
 distinguishes " all the English, even those 
 of the lowest classes," and the secret of 
 being comfortable. Bixiou thinks comfort 
 is " the only good thing they have in 
 England." We can accept the pretty 
 blondes and the " confort Anglais " as 
 facts ; but is it possible that, three-quarters 
 of a century ago, " the lowest classes " in 
 this country were remarkable for their 
 cleanliness ? Perhaps they were, cleanli- 
 ness, like most other qualities, being 
 relative, and Balzac having had many 
 
 101
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 opportunities of observing the lower strata 
 of Parisian life during his years of im- 
 pecuniosity. Washing is more general on 
 both sides of the Channel than in Balzac's 
 days. His worldly old Chevalier de 
 Valois, in "La Vieille Fille," was remark- 
 able in Alen9on society for the cleanness 
 of his linen, due to the fact that he lodged 
 over a laundry, and was a great favourite 
 with the blanchisseuses. 
 
 Balzac credits our manners also with 
 such a powerful influence on the French 
 professional classes of his own time that 
 he describes Baron Hulot's son, who is a 
 barrister, as one of those " walking coffins 
 containing what was once a Frenchman ; 
 the Frenchman stirs at times, and knocks 
 against his English case, but ambition 
 restrains him, and he consents to be stifled 
 therein." We may hold it also for a 
 compliment, even if we take second rank, 
 when Balzac asserts that " long before 
 English customs had made a woman's 
 bedroom sacred, that of a Flemish woman 
 was impenetrable." 
 
 102
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Some of the most complimentary remarks 
 about England are placed in the mouth of 
 Gerard, the highly intelligent engineer who 
 comes from Paris to superintend Madame 
 Graslin's expiatory plans for the improve- 
 ment of her property. During a discussion 
 on the evil results of the French law of 
 succession, Gerard remarks. "With the 
 breaking up of its landed estates England 
 would no longer exist. The great land- 
 owners there control the social machine. 
 Their fleet, under the nose of Europe, 
 seizes whole plots of the globe to satisfy 
 the needs of their commerce, to send there 
 the unfortunate and discontented. Instead 
 of making war against capable men, crush- 
 ing them, misunderstanding them, the 
 English ruling class seeks them, rewards 
 them, and assimilates them constantly. 
 With the English all is prompt in what 
 concerns the action of the Government, in 
 the choice of men and of things." On the 
 whole, however, English influences are not 
 considered from a kindly point of view, or 
 with much evidence of respect, in the 
 103
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 " Human Comedy " ; and apart from the 
 general agreement of the many persons 
 therein who mention the English, it is 
 pretty evident that Balzac himself did 
 not regard us as having a generally good 
 influence on the world. Desroches justly 
 describes Maxime de Trailles as being 
 "without faith or law," but adds that 
 " his private policy has been directed 
 by the principles which govern that of 
 the English Cabinet." Our Government 
 might be " prompt," but it was unprin- 
 cipled. 
 
 Lousteau declares that " blackmailing is 
 an invention of the English press, recently 
 imported into France," though he forgets 
 this statement a moment later, and asserts 
 that "the inventor of blackmailing is 
 Aretin." 
 
 De Marsay deplores the fact that his 
 countrymen on the mother's side, and he 
 derived little, save arrogance, from his 
 English father were copying so many 
 things from the English that the French 
 
 " might become hypocrites and prudes like 
 104
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 them." If a hypocrite or prude, the Eng- 
 lishwoman, according to the clever shop- 
 keeper in "Gaudissart the Second," is so 
 keen at bargaining that she is his " battle 
 of Waterloo," victory being, however, 
 usually on the side of the shopkeeper, 
 whose guile and wiles are so divertingly 
 described. 
 
 Bixiou, whose opinion of English com- 
 fort has been noted above, explains at con- 
 siderable length, and with his usual liveli- 
 ness of illustration, " the great law of the 
 improper " which reigns in England, declar- 
 ing that through the action of this " law, 
 London and its inhabitants will one day be 
 turned to stone." Cruellest of all, perhaps, 
 is a remark made about a certain type of 
 Frenchwoman : "She mistrusts her servants 
 as if she were an Englishwoman, who has 
 always a process for criminal conversation 
 in perspective." 
 
 Perhaps the most striking specimen of 
 the unsecluded and unshackled variety of 
 Englishwoman actually introduced into the 
 " Comedie Humaine " is Arabella, a great
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 lady of loose morals, whose position is so 
 well established, her prestige so immense, 
 and her impudence so unassailable, that she 
 is able to behave with an effrontery that 
 would have meant social ruin to one of less 
 influence or less indifference to the opinion 
 of others. She is the unplatonic mistress 
 of Felix de Vandenesse, whose conquest 
 of that passionate young man broke the 
 heart of his platonic mistress, the tanta- 
 lising and unhappy "Lys dans la Valise," 
 Henriette de Mortsauf. Arabella is a 
 very dashing young woman, who rides 
 frisky horses, and has a superabundance 
 of health and animal spirits. She is also 
 about the age thirty to thirty-three 
 that Balzac regarded as the time of per- 
 fection for woman. It is no wonder that 
 Felix, sickening under the constant refusals 
 of Henriette to allow him more than an 
 occasional kiss upon her hand when he had 
 been particularly nice and good, should have 
 fallen before the direct onslaught of the 
 brilliant foreigner who offered so marked 
 an exception to the usual reserve of her 
 1 06
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 countrywomen, throwing down steel forti- 
 fications and bursting wires of gold with 
 supreme disregard for conventionalities. 
 Even in her case, exceptional as he feels 
 her to be, Balzac finds occasion for another 
 touch on his picture of Albion. " She 
 wanted," says Flix, "hot spices for her 
 heart to feed on, just as the English desire 
 fiery pickles to sharpen their appetites." 
 She assuredly managed to find the condi- 
 ments she needed. 
 
 Arabella was, for the most part, an excep- 
 tion in Balzac's imaginings of her country- 
 women. On one young Englishwoman, at 
 any rate, Balzac himself made a strong 
 if may be a temporary impression, accord- 
 ing to his friend Gozlan, as recorded in the 
 entertaining " Balzac en Pantoufles." Goz- 
 lan met the novelist one afternoon on the 
 boulevards, hungry for d'ejeimer. Balzac 
 took him into an English confectioner's in 
 the Rue Royale. Having ordered some 
 macaroni pdtts, he laid down on the table 
 some volumes he was carrying. " Do you 
 know what that book is ? " he asked Gozlan. 
 107
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 " No, my dear Balzac ! " 
 
 Hearing Balzac's name, the English girl 
 behind the counter started as if fascinated 
 by it. Balzac did not notice her, but said : 
 "It is the 'Pathfinder' of Fenimore 
 Cooper." And he poured out an enthu- 
 siastic appreciation of the American 
 novelist, forgetting his hunger, forgetting 
 where he was, and everything but his 
 subject. 
 
 " But you are not eating," said Gozlan. 
 
 " True," replied Balzac ; and in three or 
 four gargantuan mouthfuls, eating, laugh- 
 ing, and praising Cooper at the same time, 
 while he walked up and down the shop, he 
 gobbled up four macaroni pdtts, to the im- 
 mense astonishment of the girl, who was 
 amazed that a man who, as she had thought, 
 would feed upon flowers, air, and perfumes, 
 should eat so greedily. 
 
 "What do I owe you, mademoiselle?" 
 said Balzac, at length satisfied. 
 
 "Nothing, Monsieur de Balzac!" an- 
 swered the girl, in a tone which admitted 
 no contradiction. 
 
 108
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Balzac looked at his friend, hardly know- 
 ing how to reply to this delicate attention. 
 And then, after a moment's pause, he 
 presented her with Cooper's romance, 
 saying : 
 
 " I have never so much regretted, 
 mademoiselle, that I am not the author 
 of it." 
 
 We do not know whether Balzac ever 
 saw the girl again. He was not of the 
 nature of Sterne. This incident reminds 
 one of the buffet scene in the first act of 
 " Cyrano de Bergerac," with this one im- 
 mense difference, that Cyrano refused to 
 accept more than a grape and a macaroon, 
 while Balzac intending to pay, however 
 had eaten his fill. 
 
 Balzac had an immense admiration for 
 Cooper, whom, in an article of the 'Revue 
 Parisienne, he compared with Scott. He 
 greatly admired Scott ; but he criticised 
 "Quentin Durward" rather severely, be- 
 cause he held and others were, and are, 
 of the same opinion that the portrait of 
 Louis XI. was far from faithful. He 
 109
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 afterwards drew his own picture of Louis 
 in " Maitre Cornelius." 
 
 Balzac gathered many of his ideas of 
 England, perhaps most of them, from 
 Richardson's novel, "Clarissa Harlowe," 
 which undoubtedly had considerable in- 
 fluence on the <( Human Comedy." 
 
 " True passion," says Raphael (the 
 hero, if one may call him so, of " La Peau 
 de Chagrin"), "expresses itself by cries, 
 by sighs that would weary a man of a cold 
 nature. It is necessary to love sincerely 
 oneself to appreciate the raptures of Love- 
 lace, when one reads ' Clarissa Har- 
 lowe.' " 
 
 I may note in passing that in one of 
 his references to Richardson's voluminous 
 book, Balzac shows a certain obtuseness, 
 possibly conscious, to some of his own 
 peculiarities as a novelist. "If one wished," 
 he says of the " Salon Rogron" in " Pier- 
 rette," " to describe the circumlocutions, 
 the oratorical devices, the long conversa- 
 tions wherein the wit purposely obscured 
 the meaning, and the honeyed words 
 no
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 diluted the venom of certain intentions, 
 that would be to attempt a book as long 
 as the magnificent poem that is called 
 'Clarissa Harlowe." I do not wish to 
 suggest that Balzac indulged overmuch in 
 circumlocutions or "precautions oratoires," 
 that his wit was ever allowed to shut out 
 the light, or that he mingled honey and gall 
 in his intentions. But assuredly some of 
 the interminable descriptions of the external 
 appearance of the principal characters in 
 many of his novels have more than a dis- 
 tant relationship with the longueurs of the 
 author of the " magnificent poem " referred 
 to above. Balzac, indeed, comes back 
 again and again to this matter of the 
 length of Richardson's work. In the won- 
 derful picture of the wheels within wheels 
 of bankruptcy presented in " Cesar Birot- 
 teau," he says, concerning the intrigues, 
 tricks, inventions, and deceptions of frau- 
 dulent bankrupts and their allies, " there is 
 no failure where enough of such things is 
 not engendered to furnish material for the 
 fourteen volumes of ' Clarissa Harlowe ' 
 in
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 to any author who cared to undertake the 
 work." 
 
 We have seen something of Balzac's 
 conception of English women. In his 
 description of the mysterious and diaboli- 
 cally invested Melmoth suggested by 
 Maturin's once well-known novel, wherein, 
 by the way, the satanic personage was an 
 Irishman he gives us the means of know- 
 ing what he imagined an Englishman to 
 be like : " The oblong shape of the 
 stranger's face, the bulging contours of his 
 forehead, the livid hue of his complexion, 
 announced, as did also the cut of his 
 clothes, an Englishman. The man simply 
 smelt of England. At the sight of his 
 top-coat with its cape, his puffed-out neck- 
 cloth upon his frilled shirt-front, the white- 
 ness of which made his impassive face 
 more livid by contrast, a face whose red, 
 cold lips seemed like those of a vampire, 
 one divined the black gaiters buttoned 
 above the knees, and the half- puritan 
 costume of a rich Englishman who goes 
 out for a walk." It is not a pleasing 
 
 112
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 picture, nor does it strike one as particu- 
 larly true. 
 
 The typical Englishman, rich or poor, 
 surely does not suggest the vampire ; 
 while, as for the frilled shirt, the cravate 
 bouffante, and the overcoat, they were 
 common enough in Paris in the first thirty 
 years of the nineteenth century, if pictures 
 and prints are to be believed. Rich 
 Englishmen were sometimes present in 
 Balzac's mind in quite another connection. 
 In his days of struggle, when every penny 
 he earned was owed in advance for the 
 necessaries of life, he used to dream of a 
 millionaire who would be his patron, and 
 offer to finance him. " Humanity," he 
 was convinced, " has here and there its 
 good impulses ; and there are people who, 
 without being English, are capable of such 
 eccentricities." This was one of the 
 highest compliments, perhaps, that he ever 
 paid to our nationality. 
 
 Balzac was at one time a millionaire (in 
 francs) himself according to the gossip 
 of tout Paris, " Every one says you have 
 113 H
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 got a million francs, and are hiding them," 
 said a friend one day. 
 
 "Oh!" replied Balzac, turning his 
 piercing eyes on his visitor, " I've got a 
 million, have I ? And where do I hide 
 that million ? " And then he added, "In 
 a butter jar," pointing at the particular jar 
 wherein he declared he had placed his 
 savings. 
 
 As to English greed for money to put 
 in the "butter-jars" of this country, 
 the romancing lawyer's clerk in " Un 
 Dbut dans la Vie " not only charges 
 English traders with selling munitions of 
 war to all the world without discrimination, 
 but adds, " They would sell them to the 
 devil, if he had any money." 
 
 The " Peau de Chagrin " offers several 
 effective illustrations of Balzac's notions of 
 English ideas and peculiarities. When 
 Raphael left the gaming table in the 
 Palais Royal, for instance, "he affected 
 the air of an Englishman for whom life has 
 no more mysteries." It was very likely 
 the same hell where Rastignac, as described 
 114
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 in " Pere Goriot," staked the money of 
 Fifine de Nucingen with such success that 
 her obligations to her former lover were 
 discharged with the winnings. At any 
 rate, it was none other than Rastignac 
 who, when Raphael had spent almost his 
 last franc, advised him boldly to adopt the 
 " systeme anglais," and thereby obtain 
 riches. This system was mainly based 
 on the notion that if you can once, by the 
 use of borrowed money for want of other 
 means, establish a credit with your trades- 
 men, they will supply you for a long 
 period without pressing for the settlement 
 of their accounts. Rastignac declared 
 that the more one borrows, the better his 
 credit becomes. But Raphael, " not being 
 accustomed, as Rastignac was, to the 
 English system, soon found himself with- 
 out a sou." The naming of the particular 
 device in question <( systeme anglais," is 
 only another instance of the reluctance of 
 any people to admit that anything vicious 
 is indigenous among them. That the 
 method by which, as we see every day in 
 "5
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 London or Brighton, undischarged bank- 
 rupts are able to drive the best horses and 
 most costly motor cars, to dine at the 
 most expensive restaurants, and occupy 
 the choicest boxes at theatres, is no more 
 " English " than " French," is as certain 
 as that much "French coffee" is roasted 
 and ground in England, that very many 
 " confections de Paris " are made in 
 London, and that more than half the 
 " chapeaux anglais " are manufactured 
 near the banks of the Seine. If a foreign 
 name is an attraction, it is adopted ; if a 
 native name is a detraction, we adopt a 
 foreign one in its place. 
 
 However that may be, the " systeme 
 anglais " was no good to Raphael, and it was 
 only when the ownership of the wild ass's 
 hide placed him in the way of material 
 wealth and moral destruction, that he knew 
 for a brief period the convenience of having 
 a regular income. In some material affairs, 
 so far as Balzac is a trustworthy guide, 
 the English taste is or was excellent. 
 Chez Fcedora, for instance, the " femme 
 116
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 sans coeur " of Raphael, "the salons were 
 furnished with exquisite taste every 
 room, as in the houses of the wealthiest 
 English people, had its special character ; 
 and the silk hangings, the ornaments, the 
 design of the furniture, every decorative 
 effect, was in harmony with a ruling idea." 
 In the same house, apart from the beauty 
 of the furniture and decorations, all the 
 characteristics of the "confort anglais" 
 were to be discovered. 
 
 Balzac, in common with most novelists 
 of untrammelled imagination and great 
 powers, was accused of immorality by con- 
 temporary critics. 
 
 " It is," he would say to his friends, 
 " their one resource when they have no- 
 thing to say as to the literary value of a 
 man's work. Moliere was attacked by 
 them for his Tartuffe, Richardson for his 
 creation of Lovelace, that man so vicious 
 and so brilliant. What could one not say 
 upon the house to which Lovelace took 
 Clarissa ? " 
 
 From these illustrations, an idea of the 
 117
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 point of view from which an amazingly 
 fertile and imaginative writer regarded our 
 grandfathers and grandmothers, and the 
 enduring characteristics of our race, may be 
 obtained. Outwardly calm, inwardly pas- 
 sionate, indifferent to the joys or sorrows 
 of any class but their own, leisurely, of 
 good taste in material things, conventional 
 in their ideas of morality, slaves to out- 
 ward appearance, yet indifferent to morals 
 where discovery was impossible, or where 
 in the rarest cases position placed the 
 individual above the reach of calumny 
 such were the educated classes of England 
 as they showed themselves, illuminated by 
 the glowing pages of " Clarissa Harlowe " 
 and " Pamela," to the author of " Eugenie 
 Grandet " and "Pierrette." It was rather 
 a hard, mechanical picture of England that 
 Balzac saw before him, and essayed to 
 reproduce in occasional sketches, a picture 
 wanting in harmonious composition, and 
 with the Rembrandt effects overdone. 
 Yet, in essentials, it is very much in the 
 manner of the representations of English 
 118
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 ways that are presented in the French 
 novels of our own time. We are still shown 
 as an unsympathetic race, caring much 
 more for outward and visible form than 
 for "inward and spiritual grace." 
 
 119
 
 BALZAC AND DICKENS. 
 
 THERE is a danger from which many writers 
 on literary questions cannot escape, if, in- 
 deed, they do not run to meet it. It is the 
 temptation to sum up their views of one 
 author by giving him the name of another, 
 with a geographical adjective as prefix. 
 M. Maeterlinck, whose "Pell&is et Me"li- 
 sande," one is asked to believe, is really 
 very like " Romeo and Juliet," and whose 
 " Monna Vanna" has a remarkable re- 
 semblance, perhaps, to " Measure for 
 Measure," has been called " The Belgian 
 Shakespeare " times without number ; Vol- 
 taire has been ticked off as " The French 
 Swift"; Sterne as "The English Rabe- 
 lais" ; Alfred de Musset as " The French 
 Byron " ; and Balzac as " The French 
 Dickens." 
 
 121
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 It may be doubted whether any trick of 
 easy criticism is more abused than this 
 method of conveying an idea of the 
 characteristics of an unknown author by 
 representing him as a foreign imitation of 
 one who is known. I say unknown, in the 
 first case, for what would be the use of de- 
 scribing Maeterlinck as a " Shakespeare " 
 to a reader who was acquainted with the 
 work of both the Belgian and the English- 
 man, or of telling another reader who was 
 familiar with Balzac as well as with Dickens 
 that the two bore the same relation to each 
 other that the Greek Zeus bore to the 
 Roman Jupiter? It is strange that the 
 author of " Brutus " and " Artmire " and 
 "Zaire" has not often been labelled 
 "The French Shakespeare." Perhaps he 
 has, but, in any case, the title would not be 
 much more incongruous than the bracketing 
 of the authors of " Modeste Mignon " and 
 " Little Dorr it." 
 
 There are, for all that, certain points 
 apart from questions of style, with which 
 we are not here concerned on which com- 
 
 122
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 parisons, as well as contrasts may be drawn 
 between the novels of these immortals. We 
 may, as an opening, throw a glance over 
 some of the subjects which either novelist 
 selected. Certain examples may be cleared 
 out of our way at the outset. Balzac wrote 
 nothing at all akin to " Pickwick," or 
 "Great Expectations," nor did Dickens 
 produce any novels that remotely invite 
 comparison with " Seraphita," or " La Peau 
 de Chagrin." In saying this, I do not 
 suggest that there are not characters or 
 even incidents in any two of those books 
 that may afford points for comparison. 
 
 On the positive side we have the sor- 
 rows of maidenhood in humble life pre- 
 sented in "Pierrette" and "The Old 
 Curiosity Shop " ; the " grandeur and'de- 
 cadence " of a prosperous man of business 
 shopkeeper in one case, merchant in 
 the other in "Csar Birotteau " and 
 " Dombey and Son " ; the miseries of an 
 uncongenial school in " Louis Lambert " 
 and " David Copperfield " ; and something 
 of the tragedy of the French revolutionary 
 123
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 period in " Une Tenbreuse Affaire " and 
 "A Tale of Two Cities." 
 
 It is not in complete books, however, 
 that comparisons or contrasts can best be 
 drawn between " the French Dickens " 
 and "the English Balzac." It is rather in 
 pictures of life and character, individual 
 or domestic. 
 
 In nothing, perhaps, does the difference 
 of the nationality and temperament of these 
 novelists show more clearly than in their 
 presentation of the early struggles of young 
 men. Read again the pages which tell of 
 the coming of David Copperfield to town, 
 the adventures on the road of life of 
 Nicholas Nickleby and young Martin, and 
 then turn to Balzac's pictures of Rastignac, 
 Lucien de Rubempre", or Raphael de 
 Valentin. The good young man of the 
 Copperfield or Nickleby type is hardly to 
 be found, at any rate as a leading character, 
 in the novels of Balzac, while it is only 
 in some of the plainly-labelled " villains " 
 of Dickens such creations as Carker, Sir 
 John Chester, or Sir Mulberry Hawk 
 124
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 that the moral freedom of a Rastignac, 
 a F61ix de Vandenesse, or a Lucien de 
 Rubempre is even faintly suggested. 
 
 It is at this point, of course, that any 
 attempt to draw a parallel between Balzac 
 and Dickens must inevitably collapse. The 
 relations of the daughters of Goriot with 
 Maxime de Trailles and Rastignac respec- 
 tively, or even of Flix de Vandenesse 
 with Henriette, would place both women 
 and men outside the pale as "heroes" or 
 "heroines" in a novel by Dickens. The 
 relations of Lady Dedlock with the poor 
 law-writer, and of Edith Dombey with 
 Carker whatever they were are of im- 
 mense and sinister import in " Bleak 
 House " and " Dombey and Son," while 
 the relations of Dinah de la Baudraye with 
 the journalist Lousteau, and of Fifine de 
 Nucingen with Rastignac, are but the 
 natural incidents of life in "La Muse du 
 D6partement" and "Le P^re Goriot." One 
 can as easily imagine the effervescent Dinah 
 the "heroine" of a story by Dickens, as 
 one can imagine David Copperfield the 
 125
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 "hero" of a novel by Balzac. Even the 
 most unselfish woman of Balzac, Madame 
 Hulot, whose devotion to her husband and 
 children is sublime in its utter renunciation, 
 could have no possible counterpart in the 
 works of Dickens ; while, as presented by 
 his pen, the much-abused affection of old 
 Goriot would have softened the reminis- 
 cence of the excessively " business-like " 
 methods which had procured him the 
 means of spoiling his daughters, and pro- 
 viding them with husbands with whom 
 they could not be happy, and thus pre- 
 paring the way for the Maximes and 
 Eugenes to enter upon the scene. It is, 
 therefore, among the characters of Dickens 
 that are plainly unheroic, in the novel- 
 reader's sense of the term, that we must 
 seek for parallels, if any such there be, 
 with the creations of his French contem- 
 porary. Lisbeth Fischer, who is assuredly 
 far more than the titular " heroine " of " La 
 Cousine Bette," has no adequate counter- 
 part in English fiction. Yet there is at 
 least something of her unforgetting sense 
 126
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 of injury, her undying spite, in Rosa 
 Dartle. 
 
 The wonderful romances of personal 
 adventures, amatory and otherwise, told 
 by the two impostors on the carrier's cart 
 in " Un Debut dans la Vie," have a real 
 affinity with those told by Mr. Jingle on 
 the Rochester coach, and are no less 
 diverting if more elaborated. 
 
 I doubt, however, if the most deter- 
 mined seeker for a parallel between Balzac 
 and Dickens could find a much closer one 
 than is afforded by the characters of Uriah 
 Keep and Jean Goupil, the notary's clerk 
 in " Ursule Mirouet." The red-haired 
 hypocrite of Canterbury, with his splay- 
 feet, shrinking shoulders and grimaces of 
 humility, and the scandal-mongering russet- 
 haired creature of Nemours, with his 
 crooked nose, short and cranky legs, and 
 look which " seemed to belong to a hunch- 
 back whose hump was inside," have indeed 
 many things in common. The one dares 
 to cast glances of disgusting love from his 
 red-brown eyes upon the beautiful and 
 127
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 virginal Agnes, and endeavours to force 
 himself upon her by threats of evil to those 
 she loves. When David Copperfield dis- 
 covers Uriah's aspirations, he gives the 
 wretch a blow on his lank cheek with such 
 force that " my fingers tingle as if I had 
 burned them ; " and when justice has at 
 length overtaken Uriah, that cold-blooded 
 villain appears as a repentant sinner, " con- 
 scious of his past follies," to Mr. Creakle, 
 a Middlesex justice of the peace. Jean 
 Goupil, on the other hand, casts his yellow 
 goat's eyes upon the lovely and innocent 
 Ursule, nearly causes her death by his 
 horrible machinations; and when, by self- 
 interest, he confesses his evil deeds to her 
 lover Savinien, he receives from that 
 honest and devoted naval officer a blow 
 on the cheek which nearly knocks him 
 down. He also declares afterwards to a 
 juge de paix that he is "another man" 
 altogether. 
 
 It is true that while in Uriah's case 
 Copperfield 's remark that " there never 
 were greed and cunning in the world yet 
 128
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 that did not do too much and overreach 
 themselves," proves to be partly well 
 founded, Goupil, when we leave him at 
 the end of the novel, is very far from the 
 fate that he merited, and is, in fact, re- 
 garded with high respect in the town, 
 though rinding a punishment in his 
 rickety, hydrocephalous progeny. Uriah 
 was in high esteem with Mr. Creakle 
 and Mr. Creakle's supporters among the 
 visiting justices, no doubt, but he was 
 locked up in a cell for all that, while 
 Goupil was a flourishing country lawyer. 
 Yet here, it will be seen, the lover of 
 parallel instances might make out some 
 kind of a case. It would, however, be a 
 case made out by the suppression of much 
 more than was set forth. One reason why 
 I have dealt with it at some length is that 
 it illustrates rather forcibly what is, of 
 course, a fundamental difference between 
 Balzac and Dickens. Dickens never, or 
 "hardly ever," made his good people come 
 to an ill end, though they occasionally 
 die young, like Paul Dombey or Little 
 129 i
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Nell ; and his bad people, unless they do 
 really repent, never, or "hardly ever," 
 come to prosperity. His literary opti- 
 mism, so far as the fate of worthy people 
 is concerned, was as strong as that which, 
 with less reserve, Rousseau had made 
 fashionable, and which is so beautifully re- 
 duced to absurdity in " Candide." When 
 Dickens allowed Steerforth to die in the 
 storm instead of " making an honest 
 woman" of Little Em'ly, he showed an 
 unusual preference for the dramatic to the 
 sentimental rounding off of the episode. 
 The name " Little Em'ly," by the way, 
 seems to illustrate a fixed idea of Dickens 
 on the subject of titles for his characters. 
 " II faut souffrir pour etre petite" appears 
 to have been his reading of the proverb. 
 "Little Nell," " Little Dorrit," Little 
 Em'ly," what hard times they all had, 
 poor girls ! 
 
 If Balzac did not share the optimism of 
 
 Dickens, he at any rate did not work on 
 
 the lines laid down by some of the later 
 
 " realists," whose plan is to regard an 
 
 130
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 unhappy ending as " inevitable." If the 
 "lily in the valley" withers and dies, if 
 Sylvain Pons, Pierrette Lorrain, and other 
 good people, old and young, have to die at 
 the end of the books that tell their stories, 
 such novels as " Une Tenebreuse Affaire," 
 " Cousine Bette" and " Ursule Mirouet," 
 end with that mixing of the happy and the 
 sad, in varying proportions, which is near 
 to the experiences of life. It is a trite 
 observation that the note of absolute joy 
 or sorrow is almost always a false one to 
 strike at the end of a tale. Balzac does 
 not greatly believe in " poetic justice," 
 while it is a cardinal article of the Dickens 
 system. Baron Hulot is "falser than all 
 fancy fathoms" to his devoted wife, and 
 marries again at eighty-five or so after she 
 has died of grief for his last infidelity. 
 The daughters of Goriot exhaust his re- 
 sources by their extravagances (or those 
 of their lovers), and he expires in a dirty 
 garret while they dwell in palaces. But the 
 young people in " Cousine Bette," in spite 
 of the follies of Wenceslas, the husband
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 of Hortense Hulot, are left comfortably 
 settled together, and the Vicomte and 
 Vicomtesse de Portenduere, in " Ursule 
 Mirouet," enjoy the most perfect bliss to 
 be found in Balzac the novel was written, 
 I may repeat, with a special eye to the 
 jeunes filles while their enemies, always 
 excepting Goupil, are overwhelmed by 
 disaster. 
 
 One of the strongest of the few connect- 
 ing links between Dickens and Balzac is 
 that both were accused by their contem- 
 poraries of bad taste, the English writer 
 being described as vulgar and " unable to 
 draw a gentleman," and the French writer 
 as " immoral " and not knowing a gentle- 
 man when he saw one. Perhaps the 
 cruellest things said of Balzac by Sainte- 
 Beuve of whose style Balzac had said 
 some rather nasty things in his novels 
 are contained in the passage wherein 
 Merimee and Balzac are compared. Meri- 
 mee, we are there assured, " is a man 
 of taste, of tact, of exact and rigorous 
 sense, who, even when at the height of his 
 132
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 imagination, preserves a moderation and 
 discretion of manner ; who has as much of 
 the personal sense of the ridiculous as 
 Balzac has little of it, and in whom, amid 
 his clearness, vigour of touch, and pre- 
 cision of burin we only feel the want of a 
 little of that animation of which Balzac had 
 too much. It might be said of Merimee 
 that the accomplished man of the world, 
 the honnfae homme, as it used to be said, 
 held the artist in check at the right 
 moment." 
 
 It is, at any rate, clear to the reader of 
 Balzac that some of the finest " gentlemen '' 
 and "ladies" of the "Human Comedy" 
 frequently act in a way that is contrary to 
 the elementary axioms of good behaviour. 
 Many things are tolerated nowadays that 
 would have been considered ill-bred in the 
 early years of the last century, and many 
 things are bad manners in one country 
 and not in another. With all allowances 
 for temporal and geographical differences, 
 it is hard to believe that in any age or 
 clime since the idea of courtesy was evolved, 
 133
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 whispering in company was not regarded 
 as an offence against the decencies of 
 social life. Yet in the " Human Comedy" 
 the men and women of the " faubourg " 
 think less of whispering about people who 
 are sitting within a few yards of them than 
 a 'bus driver thinks of loudly remarking 
 on the size and colour of a cabman's nose. 
 "A 1'oreille " is as common an expression 
 with Balzac as " s'il est permis," and not 
 less tiresome. We do not find David 
 Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby, who are 
 among the "no gentlemen" of Dickens, 
 whispering about their companions of the 
 hour as de Marsay or Rastignac whisper ; 
 and whispering is but a detail in the bad 
 behaviour of Balzac's fine people. One 
 little picture will serve to illustrate those 
 manners and customs of the pick of Re- 
 storation society that Sainte-Beuve's com- 
 parison of Balzac with Merime, and the 
 "no gentleman" contrast drawn between 
 Dickens and Balzac, naturally bring to 
 mind. 
 
 When the lovers from Angouleme, Nai's 
 134
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 de Bargeton and Lucien " de Rubempre " 
 first appeared in Madame d'Espard's box 
 at the opera, Henri de Marsay, the future 
 Minister, a man courted in the most 
 exclusive circles, the finest flower of 
 social exquisiteness, the successful lover 
 of duchesses, countesses, and baronesses, 
 was there also. 
 
 As the provincial poet entered the 
 box, and was presented by the Marquise 
 d'Espard to her friends, "although only 
 two steps from the newcomer, de Marsay 
 took his eye-glass to look at him ; his gaze 
 passed from Lucien to Madame de Barge- 
 ton, and from Madame de Bargeton to 
 Lucien, derisively comparing them in a way 
 cruelly mortifying to both ; he examined 
 them as if they were two strange animals, 
 and he smiled." Presently, when the Baron 
 du Chatelet, Lucien's rival in Madame de 
 Bargeton's esteem, had been presented to 
 Madame d'Espard by the General de Mon- 
 triveau, and had looked at Lucien with an 
 air that seemed to say, " What the devil is 
 he doing here ? " de Marsay leant towards
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Montriveau "to say to him, a foreille, de 
 maniere d se faire entendre du baron : 'Ask 
 him who is that singular young man who 
 has the air of a wax-figure in a tailor's 
 shop ? ' ' On the other side of the house 
 Rastignac, another aristocrat and friend of 
 many ladies, was diverting the company in 
 Madame de Listomere's box with witticisms 
 which Madame d'Espard could easily see 
 were aimed at her companions, and when 
 deMarsay had been across and brought back 
 some of these jests to Madame d'Espard, 
 that great lady asked Madame de Bargeton, 
 of course "sous Fe'ventail" to tell her more 
 about Lucien. Surely in all this the natu- 
 rally uncomfortable Lucien, whatever the 
 cut of his clothes and the lack of finish in 
 his manners, was at least no more con- 
 temptible than these "cultured " and "ex- 
 clusive " persons who stared at him and 
 talked about him "aforeille" and "sous 
 leventail" It is, I think, sufficiently evident 
 that Balzac regarded these whisperings as 
 in execrable taste, and that it is because he 
 believed them proper to the scenes and the 
 136
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 characters presented that he introduced 
 them into his descriptions. 
 
 In any case, the behaviour of many of 
 the "perfect gentlemen" of Balzac may 
 strike some old-fashioned minds as being 
 not much better than that of a "puffick 
 lydy " exemplified by some of the inhabit- 
 ants of the "Faubourg de sept Cadrans." 
 To take but one other instance of many. 
 The young Baron de Gu6nic having 
 been " thrown over " by Beatrix Marquise 
 de Rochefide whom he, by the way, 
 had literally thrown over a precipice in 
 order that if he could not possess her no 
 other man should is persuaded to marry 
 the charming Sabine de Grandlieu, and 
 manages to live happily with her until the 
 Marquise appears and enthrals him again, 
 consenting, now that he himself is married, 
 to accept his proposals. He causes much 
 scandal in his world and misery in his family 
 by his infidelity to his wife, and when at 
 last Beatrix decides that her education will 
 not be complete until she has tried vice as 
 well as "love," Balzac tells us that "Le
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 lendemain, Calyste parut a Beatrix ce qu'il 
 etait, un loyal et parfait gentilhomme, mais 
 sans verve ni esprit." There is also the 
 Colonel or General Montcornet Balzac 
 does not make up his mind which to call 
 him at the time who, curious to know the 
 name and position of a woman whom he 
 sees at a ball, says to her, " d'une voix mal 
 assume," as well it might be ; " Madame is 
 without doubt married ? " and when " 1'in- 
 connue " replies, " Oui, monsieur," asks if 
 her husband is present. Then, after another 
 " Oui, monsieur," this charming officer of 
 the Cuirassiers of the Guard goes on : " and 
 why then, madame, do you stay in this 
 spot ? Is it by coquetry ? " Montcornet 
 and other fine gentlemen, civil and military, 
 point at people in drawing-rooms, if not 
 always with the forefinger, at least with a 
 movement of the head, in a way that would 
 be held in bad taste in the log-cabins of the 
 backwoods. One of the most honest gen- 
 tlemen of the " Comedy," meaning merely 
 the men who have most consideration for 
 the rights and feelings of other people, is 
 138
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 the Marquis d'Espard, who endures the 
 contempt of the world, the anger and cold- 
 ness of his wife, and even the legal accu- 
 sation of insanity, rather than possess money 
 which he believes to be, in honour, though 
 not in law, the property of others money, 
 moreover, which he had inherited and not 
 acquired. 
 
 How far a similar discussion might be 
 carried in the case of Dickens, this is not 
 the opportunity to consider. He has not 
 needed defenders from the charge of not 
 knowing how to describe a gentleman. 
 The confusion of authors with their charac- 
 ters is one of the commonest of critical 
 defects, and one of the most unjust in its 
 consequences. 
 
 After this digression which is not 
 indeed a digression, being a progression 
 along another part of the main road we 
 must get back into the centre of the high- 
 way, and to the treatment of virtue and 
 vice by the English and the French novel- 
 ists respectively. 
 
 M. Emile Boutmy, whose unflattering
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 accounts of English manners and customs 
 of action and thought lately, and not 
 unnaturally, attracted a good deal of 
 attention, describes the male natives of 
 the southern portion of this island 
 " gallant little Wales " excepted, for he 
 specially disallows the possession of 
 gallantry to the Anglo-Norman section of 
 the islanders as bestial, hypocritical, and 
 coarsely animal in their loves, yet he 
 admits that the women are remarkable for 
 their chastity. This admission by an un- 
 friendly critic might suggest that there is 
 some justification for the comparative 
 absence of marital infidelity in English 
 fiction, and that the rarity of heroines who 
 misconduct themselves is not wholly due 
 to the hypocrisy of authors, but partly also 
 to a desire to be true to life. Whatever 
 may be the truth about French morality it 
 is certain that a series of short stories, or 
 a succession of novels wherein any English 
 author made the majority of his incidents 
 turn on the infidelity of married women, 
 would be justly resented here as an exhi- 
 140
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 bition of outrageous exaggeration. Yet in 
 France such fiction, as in the case of Mau- 
 passant, is not regarded as anything out of 
 the common, so far as its leading subject is 
 in question. 
 
 If, therefore, Dickens we are now con- 
 cerned with him among English authors, 
 but he is fairly typical in this respect 
 has no Dinah de la Baudrayes or Valerie 
 MarnefTes among the people who "bulk 
 largely " the expression suggests Old 
 Weller or Old Wardle rather than these 
 spirituelles beauties, but let it pass as the 
 " absolutely right" one in his novels, the 
 fact need not be regarded as due to a mere 
 determination to respect the prejudices of 
 the English reader. The limitations, 
 whether due to personal disinclination or 
 consideration for Mrs. Grundy, of the 
 English novelist in dealing with questions 
 of morals, in the narrow usage of the 
 word, do undoubtedly exclude him from a 
 rich field of imagination. Surely a critic 
 would need to be blinded by his delicacy 
 of taste who did not regard " La Cousine 
 141
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Bette " as among the greatest of novels, in 
 spite of the fact that it mainly depends for 
 its qualities on the life-histories of one of 
 the most unprincipled and faithless young 
 women, and one of the most disgraceful 
 old men in the whole range of fiction. 
 Thackeray's Steyne is an incidental, and 
 his Becky a paragon of virtue, in com- 
 parison. A Rosa Dartle and a Ralph 
 Nickleby were no good to Balzac, their 
 delinquencies were too circumscribed. 
 
 Profound virtue and vice, as Dickens 
 paints them, mark their possessors so that 
 one might know them across the street. 
 It is often so with Balzac also. Le sieur 
 Marneffe must have appeared almost for 
 what he was to every man he met, and the 
 sweetness of Ursule Mirouet was no less 
 obvious to strangers. But one would not 
 necessarily have guessed that even Jacques 
 Collin was "a bad lot," or that Arabelle 
 was " no better than she should be." 
 Collin, the convict, escaped from many 
 prisons, the desperado and swindler who 
 was for ever " wanted " by the police 
 142
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 when he was not in their hands, was for 
 all that one of those of whom the people 
 say, " Voila im fameux gaillard." It was 
 only the specially observant who noticed 
 that his character was deep, yet even they 
 did but suppose that his life held some 
 carefully hidden mystery. To turn from 
 this man, the criminal-in-chief of the 
 " Comedie Humaine," to the "leads" 
 among the intelligent bad characters of 
 Dickens Quilp, Jonas Chuzzlewit, and 
 the rest, excluding Jingle, who might be 
 called a "fameux gaillard," perhaps, but is 
 not a criminal of the " double-dyed " type 
 is to see again the difference between 
 the artist who paints his characters after 
 the life, and the artist who paints his 
 villains as black as a Jolloff negro, and 
 gilds his best people till they shine afar 
 like the freshly-gilt ball on the dome of 
 St. Paul's. 
 
 Quilp and Chuzzlewit, and Fagin, all, as 
 Balzac would have said, give out the very 
 stench of villainy, and no prudent person 
 could have trusted them with a half-
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 sovereign. " Phiz " and some other artists 
 may be partly responsible for the exag- 
 gerated pictures of scoundreldom that we 
 see in the bad people of Dickens, but the 
 author gave the lead to the illustrators. 
 
 Another meeting-place of Balzac and 
 Dickens is in the region of boarding- 
 houses. Cheap boarding-houses are, of 
 choice or necessity, the homes of many 
 in most countries where the natives have 
 white complexions. Could one ever visit 
 " Todgers's " without thinking of the 
 " Maison Vauquer," or enter the "pension 
 bourgeoise " situated " dans le bas de la rue 
 Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve " without seeing 
 also the "Commercial Boarding- H ouse " 
 in "a kind of paved yard near the Monu- 
 ment " ? It is the odour of the place in 
 either case that first strikes the senses 
 as one enters. 
 
 At the Maison Vauquer, the very first 
 room " exhales an odour that is without a 
 name in the language, and must be called 
 ' I'odeur de pension' The place smells of 
 stuffiness, mildew, sourness ; it makes one 
 144
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 shiver and feel damp, it penetrates one's 
 clothes ; it tastes of a room where one has 
 dined " ; and so on, the rest of the descrip- 
 tion being too realistic to look nice in a 
 translation. We flit across to " Todgers's," 
 and find our nostrils assailed with hardly 
 less force by the atmosphere of that highly 
 respectable establishment. "There was 
 an odd smell in the passage, as if the 
 concentrated essence of all the dinners 
 that had been cooked in the kitchen since 
 the house was built, lingered at the top 
 of the kitchen stairs to that hour, and, 
 like the Black Friar in ' Don Juan,' 
 'wouldn't be driven away.' In particular, 
 there was a sensation of cabbage ; as if 
 all the greens that had ever been boiled 
 there were evergreens, and flourished in 
 immortal strength." That " evergreen " 
 touch is characteristic of " the English 
 Balzac," but such playfulness is only in- 
 dulged in on special occasions by " the 
 French Dickens," whose verbal quips and 
 cranks will provide material for some pages 
 all to themselves. 
 
 145 K
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Private houses are very different places 
 in France and England, and were so in the 
 great Dickens-Balzac period (about 1830 
 1850). The cheap boarding-house has its 
 common characteristics all the world over, 
 and that odour is one of them. Even the 
 ways of the landladies and their boarders 
 form a social curiosity which merited the 
 close attention given to it in " Pere Goriot " 
 and in " Martin Chuzzlewit," in which 
 English novel, we may remember, more 
 than one American boarding-establishment 
 also is described. Madame Vauquer was 
 plump, since, according to Balzac's observa- 
 tion, " embonpoint " was a natural result 
 of keeping a boarding-house, while " M. 
 Todgers " was "rather a bony and hard- 
 featured lady." There is no Vautrin at 
 Todgers's, only a Pecksniff, but he is hardly 
 less repellent, and certainly less "convinc- 
 ing " than the impressible victim of the 
 perfidy of " Fil-de-Soie." On the other 
 hand, the gcir$on, Christophe, is but a 
 shadow beside Bailey, a fact which leads 
 us at once to a region of the novelist's art 
 146
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 wherein Dickens is assuredly superior to 
 Balzac. 
 
 The boys of the English novelist may or 
 may not always be "human " boys. The 
 pathos of Jo and Oliver Twist is possibly 
 false in part, as false as the exaggerated 
 somnolence of the Joe of Dingley Dell. 
 Whatever their proportion of humanity 
 the fat boy and the boy Pip are "real." 
 Dickens was never afraid of boy-making, 
 but Balzac, whether afraid or not, very 
 rarely attempted the work. His school- 
 boys in " Louis Lambert " are but phan- 
 toms of boys, such solidity as they have 
 being, as one may most illogically say, of a 
 psychological kind. Louis himself, as de- 
 scribed towards the end of the book, when 
 a patient woman had devoted her life to 
 him, was physically more lethargic than the 
 Joe of Dingley Dell when sleepiest and 
 most replete, and even a prod in the calf 
 with a fork could not have aroused this 
 Swedenborgian youth. The characters 
 have nothing else in common. Henriette's 
 boy, again, in the " Lys dans la Vall6e," is
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 but an unfinished sketch. We never really 
 know him intimately. The Marneffes' neg- 
 lected boy (in " La Cousine Bette "), whose 
 unhappy childhood might seem to offer a 
 better chance to an imaginative writer even 
 than the childhood of the boy who fled from 
 the horrors of life under the Murdstone 
 rule, remains unknown. Regarded by his 
 parents as an encumbrance, and left entirely 
 to the care of a servant, the child of such a 
 manage suggests a dramatic figure. Balzac, 
 however, leaves him outside the wings of 
 his stage. He had to do with scenes 
 wherein the purity of infancy had no 
 chance of success. For all that, another 
 child whom nobody ever sees is the 
 subject of perhaps the most wonderful bit 
 of caustic comedy in a book that is full 
 of it. 
 
 Dickens, being a respectable English 
 author, wrote no " Cousine Bette," and 
 still less did he write any " Contes Drola- 
 tiques." The nearest approach to such 
 diversions as the "Contes" is to be seen 
 in " Pickwick " in the incidental humours 
 148
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 related by Sam Weller or Tom Smart ; the 
 manage a trots two dissenters and one 
 dissenting at the " Marquis of Granby," 
 Dorking ; the innocent affair happily set- 
 tled out of court of Pott v. Pott and 
 Winkle ; and the unfortunate " wrong bed- 
 room business " in which Miss Witherfield, 
 Mr. Pickwick, and Mr. Peter Magnus were 
 the leading characters. It is, of course, no 
 " approach " at all. 
 
 These remarks are not intended to 
 suggest a close comparison between two 
 novelists who are among the greatest 
 glories of their respective countries. Rather 
 has the intention been to offer some few 
 bits of evidence of the futility of any 
 such comparison. Balzac was French of 
 the French, and Dickens English of the 
 English, and, in spite of the very real 
 sympathy which may exist between the 
 men of letters, of art, and above all of 
 science, on- the two shores of the Channel, 
 the literary ideals of the two nations are 
 not the same, the very terms used to 
 express sentiments and ideas are often 
 149
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 unconvertible from one language into 
 another, and France has never been nearer 
 to the credit of producing a Dickens than 
 England to the credit of producing a 
 Balzac. " English Balzacs " and " French 
 Dickenses " are chimeras of fiction in 
 themselves.
 
 LITERARY REFERENCES 
 IN BALZAC 
 
 FRENCH critics of the present day are in- 
 clined to be disrespectful to Balzac's 
 literary reputation, mainly because, as they 
 declare with perfect accuracy, his style is 
 somewhat wanting in verbal elegance and 
 finesse. There is certainly little of rhyth- 
 mical preciosity in his " Comedie Hu- 
 maine " ; many of the descriptive passages 
 are tediously elaborated, and the meta- 
 phors, as his enemies had no difficulty in 
 showing, are frequently forced and occa- 
 sionally ridiculous. Indeed, one may 
 freely admit that, if " Illusions Perdues," 
 " Le Pere Goriot," and the rest were to 
 be judged from the same standpoint as 
 " Marius the Epicurean," or even as 
 " Madame Bovary," it would be easy to
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 find many excuses for doubting whether 
 Balzac was a master of letters. With the 
 question of his literary style we are not at 
 this moment concerned, save for the nega- 
 tive reason that if we disregard his literary 
 form altogether we still have in his novels 
 an amount of history, social, commercial, 
 political, literary, artistic, and general, 
 which alone would render them of enor- 
 mous value and attractiveness to those 
 who are addicted to " the proper study of 
 mankind." 
 
 If we form our opinions of Balzac's lite- 
 rary taste from his novels as we may do 
 without fear of mistake, seeing how en- 
 tirely his letters and the statements of his 
 friends bear out the evidence thus obtained 
 we find that the authors whose names 
 and works come most frequently into 
 Balzac's mind when he pauses for an illus- 
 tration are all writers of English ; they are 
 Richardson, Scott, Fenimore Cooper, 
 Sterne, and Byron. No book ever made 
 a greater impression on Balzac than 
 " Clarissa Harlowe." It crops up here, 
 152
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 there, and everywhere in the "Come'die 
 Humaine." That " magnificent poem," as 
 he calls Richardson's novel, was, indeed, 
 far more than an object of admiration to 
 the French author ; it was in several 
 respects the model from which he worked. 
 The vastness of his plan, the exhaustive 
 detail of his descriptions, the formal elabo- 
 ration of the letters which fill so large a 
 space in the "Come" die," are, one may 
 well believe, as much the result of an 
 enthusiastic study of the French transla- 
 tions of Richardson's works as of the un- 
 biassed predilections or conclusions of 
 Balzac himself. The same qualities have 
 prevented thousands of readers from ap- 
 preciating either author. Just as the 
 pages upon pages of most solid descrip- 
 tion of incidents or states of mind in 
 Richardson's work have "choked off" all 
 that enormous class of novel-lovers at 
 least nine-tenths of the whole body 
 whose motto, if they know it not, is " cut 
 the cackle, and come to the 'osses," so 
 have the interminable descriptions of
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 places and persons in the " Human 
 Comedy." 
 
 If the Frenchman was the conscious 
 follower of the Englishman in this respect, 
 the disciple surpassed his master. How 
 many well-intentioned readers have given 
 up in despair the attempt to " get on " 
 with " Sur Catherine de Medicis," for 
 example, wherein fifty solid pages of his- 
 torical explanation form as strong a defence 
 for the body of the novel as the massive 
 fortifications described in the book itself 
 formed for that famous Chateau of Blois, 
 every turret and balustrade of which is so 
 well described by the novelist ! How 
 many have quailed before the account of 
 a Sylvain Pons, or a Madame de Barge- 
 ton, wherein every garment, from shirt or 
 chemise to overcoat or mantle, every stud 
 and brooch is enumerated and described ; 
 while the cheeks, eyelashes, nostrils, lips, 
 shoulders, hips, chest, knees, fingers and 
 toes are shown and explained with all the 
 unruffled patience of a lecturer on zoology 
 describing a new species of mammal from
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 the Philippines so rich in novelties of 
 that kind. To say this is not to sneer at 
 the author. I believe that such elabora- 
 tions were, as a rule, entirely in place, and 
 that, for the general purpose, a truly great 
 one, that he had in view, the majority 
 of the frequently condemned longueurs of 
 Balzac are essential to the artistic perfect- 
 ing of his life work. 
 
 The moral, the " admirable " moral, of 
 " 1'epopee domestique intitulee ' Clarisse 
 Harlowe/" Balzac tells us in " Modeste 
 Mignon," is that " 1'amour legitime et 
 honnete de la victime la mene a sa perte, 
 parce qu'il se congoit, se developpe et se 
 poursuit malgre la famille." If the French 
 novelist followed the methods of Richard- 
 son's work, he did not follow its " admir- 
 able moral," for I cannot recall one of his 
 novels in which " 1'amour legitime " leads 
 its ''victim" to ruin for the reason given. 
 Indeed, in the very story from which the 
 above passage is quoted, the audacious 
 and impudent heroine, whose love at any 
 rate is lawful and honest, however fatu-
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 ously commenced, is "conceived, deve- 
 loped, and pursued in spite of the family," 
 and ends in " happiness ever after " for 
 the victim, though not precisely with the 
 poet she had supposed herself in love 
 with. 
 
 The charming man whom Modeste does 
 marry is himself inclined to be literary. 
 "Oh! parlez, dites un mot" (he writes 
 to Modeste), " et je vous aimerai jusqu'a 
 ce que mes yeux se ferment, comme le 
 Marquis de Pescaire aima sa femme, 
 comme Rome'o sa Juliette, et fidelement. 
 Notre vie, pour moi du moins, sera cette 
 /elicit^ sans trouble dont parle Dante 
 comme e"tant I'dement de son Paradis, 
 poeme bien superieur a son Enfer" These 
 last half-dozen words might be considered 
 ominous of future misery, since no man 
 "lawfully and honestly" in love could 
 make such a criticism in the midst of a 
 letter of imploring passion. Balzac is, 
 indeed, rather addicted to forgetting the 
 distinction between the author's narrative 
 and the words placed in the mouths or in 
 156
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 the letters of his characters ; and many of 
 his personal expressions of literary opinion 
 are introduced in such an indirect way. 
 We cannot doubt that for him the " Para- 
 diso " was superior to the " Inferno." 
 
 The novel already referred to, that 
 original and fantastic story of the "bold 
 little minx " who was inappropriately 
 named Modeste, is specially literary in 
 many of its references and descriptions, 
 the central episode being that of the young 
 girl whose mind is stuffed with romances 
 and with her own inventions, who has been 
 in imagination every kind of woman, from 
 a princess to a grisette, and who offers her 
 beauty and fortune to a poet whom she 
 has never seen except in a mezzotint en- 
 graving at three or four francs. At the 
 opening of the novel, she has suffered a 
 terrible loss. 
 
 " Overwhelmed with grief by the death 
 of her sister, Modeste had sought distrac- 
 tion in reading so continuously that her 
 mind became quite dazed at times. She
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 had been brought up to speak German 
 and French equally well, and she and her 
 sister had learnt English from (the Ameri- 
 can) Madame Dumay. Little regarded in 
 her reading by those around her, who were 
 without any literary knowledge, Modeste 
 gave for food to her soul the modern 
 masterpieces of English, German and 
 French literature Lord Byron, Goethe, 
 Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine, 
 Crabbe, Moore the great books of the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the 
 histories and essays and plays and fiction, 
 from Rabelais to Manon Lescaut, from 
 Montaigne to Diderot, from the ' Fab- 
 liaux ' to the 'Nouvelle Helo'ise." The 
 thoughts of three countries filled with 
 confused images " cette tete sublime de 
 naivete froide, de virginite contenue, d'ou 
 s'lan9a brillante, arme'e, sincere et forte, 
 une admiration absolue pour le genie." 
 For Modeste a new book was a great 
 event; "she was made extravagantly 
 happy by a chef-dceuvre; she was miserable 
 when a book did not ravage her heart." 
 158
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 The perturbation of the loving souls 
 around this book-ridden girl, they being 
 ignorant of any language but French, and 
 of the very names of most of the authors, 
 native and foreign, whose works Modeste 
 devoured, is most amusingly described. 
 For instance, the worthy Madame Latour- 
 nelle, the notary's wife one of the ladies 
 " without literary knowledge " is specially 
 distressed by the girl's incessant reading 
 and its effects. 
 
 " Modeste, she says, is a young person 
 tres-exaltee, elle se passionne for the poems 
 of this writer, and the prose of that. You 
 have no idea of the effect that ' Le Dernier 
 Jour d'un Condamn^' has produced upon 
 her, but she seemed to me wild with her 
 admiration for that M. Hugo. I don't 
 know where these people (Victor Hugo, 
 Lamartine, Byron, and the rest) get their 
 ideas from. The little one has spoken to 
 me of ' Childe Harold.' I have not wished 
 to be contradicted ; 1 have had the simpli- 
 city to read it, to be able to reason with
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 her. I don't know if it is necessary to 
 attribute that effect to the translation, but 
 my heart palpitated, my eyes were dazed, 
 and I could not go on reading. There are 
 there comparisons which howl, rocks which 
 faint away, lavas of war. Of course, as it 
 is an Englishman who travels, one ought 
 to expect some eccentricities, but that ex- 
 ceeds all licence. One believes oneself in 
 Spain, and he puts you in the clouds above 
 the Alps ; he makes the torrents and the 
 stars talk ; and then there are too many 
 maidens ! ... it is past all patience. And 
 then, after the campaigns of Napoleon, we 
 have enough of the sounding brass, of the 
 fiery cannon-balls, which roll from page to 
 page. Modeste declares that all this bom- 
 bast comes of the translator, and that one 
 must read the original. But I shall not 
 learn English for Lord Byron. ... I am 
 too much a daughter of Normandy to be 
 captivated by everything that comes from 
 abroad, and above all from England." 
 
 As for Scott, the Waverley novels are 
 160
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 never mentioned without respect in the 
 " Human Comedy." " ' Les Aventures de 
 Nigel ' du grand romancier Walter Scott," 
 " Le grand ecrivain Walter Scott, dans 
 son admirable roman, ' La Jolie Fille de 
 Perth ' " such references abound in the 
 " Comedy," with here and there touches of 
 critical appreciation, as when Balzac sagely 
 observes that "In the magnificent works 
 of Walter Scott, the character most outside 
 of the action comes, at a given moment, by 
 threads woven in the tissue of the intrigue, 
 to take its place in the denouement" One 
 Waverley novel, however, did not give 
 satisfaction to Balzac. The portrait of 
 Louis XI. drawn in " Quentin Durward " 
 was not in accord with the opinion of that 
 astute monarch formed by the author of 
 " Sur Catherine de Medicis," whose studies 
 of the history of France in the fifteenth 
 and sixteenth centuries had been con- 
 siderable, as we may see from that volu- 
 minous historical introduction to the last- 
 named book, already referred to. " Maitre 
 Cornelius," in which "Louis le Onzieme" 
 161 L
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 is introduced, was written, Madame Surville 
 has told us, to place the character of the 
 king in the light in which her brother 
 Honor regarded it. 
 
 The plethora of romances in the nine- 
 teenth century was due, in Balzac's opinion, 
 to the absence of romance, for he calls it 
 (in " L'Enfant Maudit") " un siecle ou les 
 romans s'ecrivent pr6cisement parce qu'ils 
 n'arrivent plus." It seems at first thought 
 a curious view for an author to take who 
 knew his period so well. Romance of the 
 sort with which he was chiefly concerned 
 not the axe and torture, poison and intrigue 
 romance of " Catherine de Medicis," or the 
 plot and counterplot romance of " Une 
 Tenebreuse Affaire" and " Les Chouans," 
 but the romance of passion and pathos, as 
 represented so admirably in " Le Lys 
 dans la Vallee," the diamond-cut-diamond 
 romance of " Un Menage de Gar^on," and 
 the romance of abandonment and of de- 
 votion of "Le Cousin Pons," " Pierrette," 
 and " Le Cure de Tours" was as plenti- 
 ful on every side as it is to-day, and as 
 162
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 it always will be till the curtain is rung 
 down on the last performance of the 
 " Human Comedy." What Balzac meant 
 by " romance," however, was most likely 
 " costume " romance, though by no means 
 in the slightly sarcastic sense in which we 
 generally use the term to-day. " Ivanhoe," 
 " Kenilworth," and his own " L'Enfant 
 Maudit," are types of the kind of writings 
 that he had in his mind when he penned 
 that phrase. Probably it was the absence 
 of romance of the old sword and dagger 
 and deadly intrigue kind, in the rather 
 leaden-hued period of Louis Philippe, which 
 made Balzac so keen an admirer of Feni- 
 more Cooper's tales of trappers and path- 
 finders. 
 
 Insatiable reader as he was in his Ven- 
 dome days and afterwards, Balzac had little 
 time to read other men's writings when he 
 had settled down to his struggle for life as a 
 novelist Yet he did not, it is certain, share 
 the opinions of his own creation, the ador- 
 able Massimilla Doni, on the subject of 
 books in general and French books in 
 163
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 particular. " Most of my compatriots," 
 says that tantalising Duchess to the French 
 doctor who is introduced to her in her box 
 at the opera in Venice, " read your useless 
 French productions." 
 
 " Useless ?" cries the doctor, with pat- 
 riotic astonishment. 
 
 "Yes, monsieur, useless, for what can 
 one find in a book that is better than the 
 things we have at heart ? " 
 
 And then, when the doctor remarks upon 
 her evident admiration for the despotism 
 under which Venice " groaned " in those 
 days, the Duchess asks : " And why should 
 I not love a system of government which, 
 in depriving us of books and of those 
 sickening politics, nous laisse les hommes 
 tout vntiers ? " 
 
 Balzac's views concerning the standard 
 authors of his country creep out now and 
 again. He had clearly rather a poor 
 opinion of the eighteenth-century philoso- 
 phers, as was natural in one who, whatever 
 his religious convictions, was a firm be- 
 liever in the necessity of Catholicism to 
 164
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 France, and a strong objector to Pro- 
 testantism and "heresies" of any shape. 
 Indeed, we have little doubt that at least 
 half the authors whose works were con- 
 tained in the package of books which the 
 only daughter of Cesar Birotteau gave to 
 her papa, on a certain famous occasion, 
 were held in less esteem by Balzac himself 
 than by those whose reverence for the 
 monarchical and ecclesiastical systems of 
 France was more strongly tempered by 
 reverence for " les droits de I'homme." 
 
 However that may be, we know that 
 " Cesarine, the dear child, had spent all her 
 little savings, a hundred louis, to buy books 
 as a surprise for her father ; Bossuet, 
 Racine, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, 
 Moliere, Buffon, F6nelon, Delille, Ber- 
 nardin de Saint-Pierre, La Fontaine, Cor- 
 neille, Pascal, La Harpe, in fine, that 
 regulation library which is seen every- 
 where, and which her father was never 
 likely to read." It was on seeing this 
 charmingly-meant, if for the recipient 
 unprofitable, present that the pursy M. 
 165
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Matifat, who never said " Corneille," but 
 "the sublime Corneille," or " Racine," but 
 "the sweet Racine," was moved, according 
 to his habit, to exclaim : " Voltaire is the 
 second in every field ; he has more of wit 
 than of genius, but is a genius for all 
 that." 
 
 It has been declared by some of Balzac's 
 critics, anxious for the reputation of the 
 French press and publishing trade, that the 
 vitriolic picture of" literary circles" in " Il- 
 lusions Perdues " was an exception to the 
 author's consistent and persistent practice 
 of drawing from the life, as he observed it, 
 without malice or favouritism, and that he 
 deliberately sat down to " make it hot " for 
 the people who had abused his books or 
 hindered his success. Yet from contem- 
 porary sources wholly unconnected with 
 Balzac's affairs it is clear that, whether or 
 not Dauriat, and Lousteau, and Finot, and 
 Nathan are typical of the general run of 
 publishers, authors and journalists, they 
 are not uncommon types of their period. 
 The account of Lucien Chardon's (or 
 166
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Lucien de Rubempre, as he chose to call 
 himself) first interview with the prosperous 
 publisher Dauriat is obviously drawn from 
 personal knowledge, and probably little 
 exaggerated. " A new affair ? But you 
 know I have already eleven hundred 
 manuscripts. Yes, gentlemen, eleven hun- 
 dred. I shall soon be obliged to engage a 
 staff of clerks to register the manuscripts 
 as they arrive, a staff of readers to examine 
 them. There will be committee meetings 
 to vote upon the merits of the works, and a 
 permanent secretary to present the reports 
 to me. It will be a branch of the Academy, 
 and the academicians will be better paid 
 here than at the Institute." Some one 
 says : " It is an idea." "A bad one," re- 
 plies the publisher, and he proceeds to put 
 the purely commercial view of literature as 
 it has been put, with much less force as a 
 rule, by a thousand sorrowful writers since 
 Balzac wrote his wondrous novel. 
 
 Dauriat did not want, he scornfully 
 declared, the attempts of those who took 
 up literature because they could not be 
 167
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 capitalists, or boot-makers, or soldiers, or 
 servants, or office-holders, or sheriff's offi- 
 cers. No one need come to him without an 
 established reputation. Become celebrated, 
 and you would find bucketsful of gold. 
 "But, monsieur," interjects Lucien, "if 
 every publisher talked as you talk, how could 
 anybody bring out his first book ? " " That 
 is no concern of mine," continues the pub- 
 lisher. It was not his idea of amusement 
 to risk his money on doubtful enterprises. 
 He was not there to be a stepping-stone 
 to future glories, but to make money and 
 divide it with the celebrated writers for 
 whom he published. As to the poets, he 
 would have none of them. " Les vers 
 devoreront la librairie," he cries, in one of 
 Balzac's best puns. Why, his hearers 
 probably had no idea of the harm that 
 the success of Byron, Lamartine, Victor 
 Hugo, Casimir Delavigne, and Beranger 
 had caused. Their triumph was as bad 
 as an invasion of barbarians. He had at 
 that moment in his office a thousand 
 manuscripts of verse commencing with 
 168
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 nterrupted narratives, without head or 
 tail, in imitation of "Lara" and "The 
 Corsair." 
 
 Lousteau, after he and Lucien have left 
 Dauriat's shop, continues to discuss the 
 same topic, so intensely personal for the 
 " Byron of Angouleme," as Lucien found 
 some few to regard him. " The publishers," 
 says the too experienced journalist, "will 
 sell or will not sell a book, that is for them 
 the sole question. A book, for them, re- 
 presents capital to risk. The more the 
 book is admirable the less chance it has of 
 being sold." As a comment on all the talk 
 he has drawn from memory and imagina- 
 tion combined Balzac remarks, with cha- 
 racteristic vehemence, that " outside of the 
 literary world there exists not a single 
 person who knows the horrible Odyssey by 
 which one arrives at what one must call, 
 according to his talents, vogue, mode, re- 
 putation, renown, celebrity, public favour, 
 those different ladders which lead to glory, 
 but which can never take its place." 
 
 Dauriat's contemptuous references to the 
 169
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 poets who besiege him are perhaps justi- 
 fied, from the business point of view, by 
 the experience of publishers even in our 
 own day, and they are not more galling for 
 the would-be climber of Parnassus than 
 the treatment of Lucien's " Marguerites " 
 by that other and older publisher who is 
 the first to promise at least a reading for 
 Lucien's ill-fated romance " L' Archer de 
 Charles IX." He has taken that cherished 
 MS. from its author, but hands it back 
 when Lucien has " the fatal idea " of show- 
 ing him his verses. " Ah ! " he cries, 
 " vous etes poete! Je ne veux plus de 
 votre roman. Les rimailleurs ^chouent 
 quand ils veulent faire de la prose. En 
 prose, il n'y a pas de chevilles, il faut abso- 
 lument dire quelque chose." The old man 
 was not in accordance with some of the 
 most admired modern stylists in his opinion, 
 but it held good in those days, when the 
 grandchildren of the prtcieuses were mostly 
 defunct and the mothers of the " precious " 
 novelists were mostly unborn. Balzac, at 
 any rate, if he sometimes repeated himself, 
 170
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 very rarely wrote without having some- 
 thing to say, and almost invariably suc- 
 ceeded in saying it. 
 
 Ossian (or rather Macpherson, who 
 made Ossian for us more surely than 
 Fitzgerald made Omar) is ready in Bal- 
 zac's mind when he wants an illustration. 
 The Duchesse de Langeais, according to 
 the shop assistant who sold the marabout 
 feathers to Madame Jules Desmarets on 
 an eventful day, had said that marabouts 
 gave to a woman " quelque chose de vague, 
 d'ossianique et de tres comme il faut," 
 while the author himself describes the 
 emotions of the unknown person who re- 
 vealed the secrets of "The Thirteen" as 
 analogous to those " which agitated Mac- 
 pherson when the name of Ossian, his 
 creation, inscribed itself in every lan- 
 guage." Indeed, Balzac becomes quite ex- 
 cited on the subject of Macpherson's fame. 
 " That was assuredly, for the Scottish ad- 
 vocate, one of the most vivid, or at any 
 rate the rarest sensations that man can 
 give himself. Is it not the incognito of 
 171
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 genius? To write the 'Itineraire de Paris a 
 Jerusalem,' that is to take part in the glory 
 of a century ; but to endow his country 
 with a Homer, is not that to usurp upon 
 God?" 
 
 Scott and Macpherson, the one in in- 
 numerable references and allusions, the 
 other in few, chiefly represent North 
 Britain in the "Comedie Humaine." 
 
 For England, after Richardson, who fills 
 by far the largest place, the prose writer 
 most frequently introduced by Balzac is 
 Sterne, "Tristram Shandy" supplying 
 many illustrations, especially in the persons 
 of " Mon Oncle Tobie " and Corporal Trim. 
 It is evident that the humour and pathos of 
 Toby Shandy's character and adventures, 
 amatory and otherwise, made a strong im- 
 pression on the novelist, whose own old 
 soldiers, Marshal Hulot and Colonel Cha- 
 bert, to name but two, are presented with 
 so muchfeeling,and whose faithful retainers, 
 men and women, are amongst the most 
 admirable of his minor characters. Michu, 
 indeed, in "Une Tenebreuse Affaire," who 
 172
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 dies on the scaffold rather than betray his 
 masters, is more than worthy to rank with 
 Trim as a picture of fidelity, though Trim 
 would not have quailed if it had been neces- 
 sary to mount the ladder at Tyburn for 
 Uncle Toby's sake. Sterne, of course, was 
 better known to the French than most of 
 his contemporaries in English literature. 
 His ''Sentimental Journey" itself, more than 
 once alluded to by Balzac, appealed per- 
 haps more strongly to Parisians than to 
 Londoners. 
 
 Among English novelists, in the strict 
 sense of the term, Richardson is followed 
 by Anne Radcliffe in Balzac's fancy, and 
 " Monk " Lewis is not overlooked. When 
 he looks about for something to suggest 
 what we call weirdness a word which 
 seems to have no exact equivalent in French 
 Balzac often brings in " Mistress Rad- 
 cliffe " to show the kind of thing he means, 
 and Lewis is occasionally called upon to 
 serve the turn. 
 
 There is one English poet who, though 
 not frequently brought in, as Byron is, for
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 use as a personal example of a physical 
 type, as well as for purposes of literary 
 reference, is now and again introduced as 
 an illustration of defects of character. Of 
 Lucien Chardon (de Rubempre), before his 
 fall into vice, it is said : " Poor and modest, 
 the boy was a Chatterton without self-seek- 
 ing baseness, without the ferocious hatred 
 of the rich and successful, which led the 
 English poet to write libels on his bene- 
 factors." 
 
 Byron, as has been said, is brought in 
 not only as a poet, but as a type of humanity. 
 His curly hair is cited again and again, his 
 attitudes as seen in his portraits are repro- 
 duced with exaggeration by such poseurs as 
 the absurd Crevel. He is regarded very 
 much as the embodiment of the theatrical- 
 romantic ideals of the inexperienced young 
 men and young women of his period, France 
 in this, as in her jockeys, and neckties, and 
 a hundred other matters, following English 
 fashions with a greater zeal in the first half 
 of the nineteenth century than she has ever 
 done since. It is more the other way now,
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 at any rate in literature, and on the whole 
 the Anglomania of the thirtieswas a stronger 
 force than that of recent years, though 
 then, as of late, fondness for English horses 
 and frockcoats and collars was often com- 
 patible with no great respect for English 
 characteristics. 
 
 In any case, the poetry of Byron was 
 among the chief objects of Balzac's literary 
 admiration. The most astonishing episode 
 in " La Femme de Trente Ans " was 
 almost certainly suggested by " The Cor- 
 sair" and "Lara." The private assassin 
 and pirate chieftain with whose adven- 
 turous and murderous lot the hardly-used 
 Helene d'Aiglemont links her own life 
 in such improbable circumstances, and 
 with whom she abides so happily and 
 luxuriously on that rakish clipper the 
 Othello, is Conrad come again, again to 
 leave, in Balzac's ruthless study of fickle- 
 ness and fidelity, a name 
 
 Link'd with one virtue and a thousand crimes. 
 Before ending these notes on some of
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 the literary references of the " Comedie 
 Humaine," I may recall the fact that 
 Punch's long-haired poet who, on taking 
 up a copy of his verses from the table of 
 a professedly enthusiastic admirer, sadly 
 remarked, " You might at least have cut 
 the pages," was anticipated, more or less, 
 by the young German in " Le Cousin 
 Pons." When, in her efforts to attract 
 his admiration, Cecile sees Fritz Brimner 
 take up the German grammar that she has 
 carefully "hidden," and the pretty humbug 
 exclaims, " I wish to read Goethe in the 
 original ; I have been learning German 
 for two years," Brunner replies, " The 
 grammar is then very difficult to under- 
 stand, for there are not ten leaves cut." 
 The last quotation I will give is Balzac's 
 expression, through the mouth of one of his 
 most vivid characters, of the belief of the 
 unsuccessful author that the inferiority of 
 his sales is due to the superiority of his 
 brains. "Every man of superior mind 
 raises himself above the masses, his success 
 is then in a direct ratio with the time 
 176
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 necessary for his work to be appreciated." 
 The consolation of every unappreciated 
 author, in prose or in verse, since the art 
 of writing was invented or evolved, is 
 crystallised in that one sentence. 
 
 177
 
 THE HUMOUR OF BALZAC. 
 
 FEW of Balzac's critics have devoted any 
 considerable share of their attention to his 
 wit and humour ; and most of the amusing 
 anecdotes that have been told concerning 
 his private life derive their entertaining 
 qualities rather from the ludicrous aspects 
 of some of his serious performances than 
 from any intention on his part to divert 
 his friends. We laugh over his ring, 
 " once worn by Mahomet," which the 
 Grand Mogul was to purchase for "tons 
 of gold," or his scheme for making a 
 fortune by keeping a grocer's shop to 
 which his presence behind the counter 
 would attract innumerable customers. But 
 these things were seriously regarded by 
 Balzac, while they were regarded by his 
 best friends as the toquades of a man 
 179
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 in whom the "artistic temperament" 
 abounded. In common with most people 
 in whom the humour-sense is strongly 
 developed, he was often curiously obtuse 
 to the humour generally rather costly 
 of his own performances. His schemes 
 for obtaining the vast fortune of which he 
 was so often dreaming were as wild as 
 anything in the " Arabian Nights," yet he 
 seems to have been perfectly serious about 
 them, and spent thousands of ill-spared 
 francs on their prosecution. He jumped 
 from scheme to scheme. If he had told a 
 friend on Monday that he was going to 
 make a huge income by growing pine- 
 apples in his back garden, on the principle 
 of the Englishman who having sold a pig 
 at a profit of a pound, was about to make 
 a thousand a year by fattening a thousand 
 pigs, he would have forgotten it on 
 Tuesday, and would inform the same 
 friends that at last riches were coming to 
 him by the importation of timber, overland, 
 from Russia or Poland. 
 
 Yet in spite of this failure to see the cruel 
 1 80
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 humour of his own eccentricities a word, 
 as he tells us, invented by the English Bal- 
 zac's power of seeing the humours of life in 
 general must have aided him to keep up his 
 courage in circumstances which would have 
 broken many a man of stout heart even 
 before they broke him. With his load of 
 debts accumulating as fast as they were 
 discharged, the necessity of hiding in out- 
 of-the way places whilst he toiled at his 
 novels, the pressure of engagements with 
 publishers and editors which sometimes 
 he could not carry out, and which, when 
 carried out, necessitated many days and 
 nights almost without sleep, Balzac is one 
 of the most complete examples in the 
 story of human endeavour of the strong 
 man struggling with adversity. 
 
 Even when his humour is entirely con- 
 scious, it is not usually of the kind that 
 appeals to that now famous personage "the 
 man in the street." That man requires a 
 certain effrontery on the part of witticisms, 
 they must stare him in the face, or he will 
 pass them by without notice. To be accepted 
 181
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 as a humourist by the world in general an 
 author must make jokes ; the majority of 
 readers will be satisfied with bad jokes, but 
 the minority will require jokes of a superior 
 quality. 
 
 Now it is just because Balzac " jocked wi' 
 deefeeculty " that he is not generally re- 
 garded as a humourist. Most of the jokes 
 in his novels are of poor quality, and as for 
 the puns, Charles Lamb, who desired that 
 his last breath should be inhaled through a 
 pipe, and exhaled in a pun, would have died 
 with a pun still unblown rather than have 
 allowed his reputation to be damaged at the 
 last moment by such specimens as Balzac 
 was accustomed to manufacture. It is true 
 that Balzac's puns are usually placed in the 
 mouths of his characters, and that their 
 inferiority may be attributed to his striving 
 after consistency of characterisation. In 
 that case, of course, the very badness of the 
 puns may often be regarded as their special 
 merit. Yet he so frequently draws our 
 attention to them, almost in the very words 
 " This is a pun," and offers so many com- 
 182
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 ments on their qualities, that we cannot 
 entirely acquit him of a personal fondness 
 for some of these things, even when he 
 knew that they were poor. Let us recall 
 one or two examples from the scores that 
 might be collected. Madame Crmiere of 
 Nemours, who says that the composer of 
 the Moonlight Sonata was rightly named 
 " Bete a Vent," and turns "affaire a vous " 
 into " un fer a vous," is a sort of Mrs. Mala- 
 prop, if partly conscious of her offences ; 
 Joseph Bridau intends to be funny when 
 he says of his soldier brother, who recoils 
 from the notion of serving under a foreign 
 government : " He is right, a Frenchman 
 is too proud of his Colonne s'encotonnerelse.- 
 where ; " while it is an acknowledged joker 
 who declares in the same novel that life is 
 " un qu'on bat" (un combat). One of the 
 happiest puns of Balzac, because it is at 
 once so simple and so fine in its point, is 
 that of the excellent Abbe Chaperon, who, 
 when the apparition of Dr. Minoret is 
 reported to the "hdritiers" in " Ursule 
 Mirouet," and one of those unworthy 
 183
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 creatures asks: "Croyez-vous aux reve- 
 nants ? " sagely replies : <( Croyez-vous aux 
 revenus ? " 
 
 That Balzac knew a bad pun from a good 
 is partly shown in his account of a social 
 evening at Angoulme, when, after Lucien's 
 recitations, some one who has seen the card 
 tables set out says : "That was very well 
 recited, but I prefer whist," a remark, writes 
 the author, " which was regarded as a 
 witticism because of the English meaning 
 of the word." 
 
 Some of the better puns of the ' ' Com6die 
 Humaine " are to be found in "La Cousine 
 Bette." When Hortense is uncertain how 
 far her aunt is speaking the truth about 
 the romantic Polish sculptor Wenceslas, she 
 says : " Prouve-moi que Wenceslas n'est 
 pas un conte, et je te donne mon chale de 
 cachemire jaune," and Lisbeth replies, quite 
 seriously and truthfully : " Mais il est 
 comte ! " Marneffe, complaining, as usual, 
 of his unhappy lot, says to the offensively 
 prosperous Crevel, who is maire of his 
 quarter : <( Si j'avais te comme vous, je 
 184
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 serais pair et maire." Another kind of word- 
 play not unfrequent with Balzac is brightly 
 illustrated when Lousteau, the unprincipled 
 and lively journalist, who sells the books 
 given him to review and buys his gloves 
 with the proceeds, says to those authors 
 who publish at their own expense : " J'ai 
 toujours votre livre dans les mains." 
 
 So much for the verbal witticisms. What 
 of the jokes that are not dependent on 
 such playing upon words ? 
 
 A whole series of practical jokes is per- 
 petrated on the citizens of Issoudun by the 
 ctisceuvrance of that town, rowdy youths 
 whose parents allow them latchkeys, and 
 who are captained by the dashing and im- 
 moral Maxence Gilet, the less evil of the 
 two scoundrels who divide the part of 
 "hero" in that amazingly original and 
 fascinating study of the effects of maternal 
 spoiling, " Un Menage de Garden." The 
 sous-pr6fet who, as Balzac quaintly says, 
 " united to the mania for having fresh eggs 
 for breakfast, that of liking to cook them 
 himself," is harassed by the nightly substi- 
 185
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 tution of hard-boiled eggs for fresh in his 
 hen-house, without ever suspecting that 
 there has been any trickery in the matter, 
 and is compelled to change his diet ; a 
 farmer loses his cart, which he has left in 
 the market-place, and finds it on the top of 
 the castle mound ; the watch-dogs in the 
 town are poisoned, and so on. These 
 "jokes" were not regarded by Balzac as 
 humourous, being entirelyappropriate to the 
 place and people with whom they are asso- 
 ciated, and especially to the odious type of 
 youth represented by the practical jokers. 
 
 I have touched on the puns and practical 
 jokes at the outset, in order to leave the 
 way open for a brief examination of the 
 qualities in which Balzac most clearly re- 
 veals himself as a humourist. His humour, 
 if we try to analyse it, shows much that is 
 kindly and sympathetic, as in the account 
 of the passion of poor old Madame Des- 
 coings for the lottery, and her ruinous 
 pursuit of a lucky terne> or group of three 
 numbers, during years of confident hope 
 constantly deferred. " She never gave up 
 186
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 trying for the term, which had not been 
 drawn for over twenty years. Towards 
 this period she began to mistrust the 
 administration. She accused the Govern- 
 ment, and believed it quite capable of sup- 
 pressing the three numbers in the ballot- 
 box in order to provoke the fury of the 
 actionnaires" 
 
 Regarded as a whole, however, the 
 humour of the " Comedie Humaine " is 
 bitter in its nature, being concerned for the 
 most part with the vices rather than with 
 the amiable weaknesses of men and women. 
 In the attacks on humanity made by Voltaire 
 or by Swift there is nothing more vitriolic 
 than the account of the events and con- 
 versations of the day on which L'Alcade 
 dans fembarras was produced at the 
 Panorama Dramatique (" Illusions Per- 
 dues "), an account wherein the literature, 
 the drama, the press, publishers, book- 
 sellers, managers, actors, editors, journal- 
 ists of the Restoration are represented as 
 a seething mass of corruption, existing on 
 blackmail, chicanery, and "log-rolling" of 
 187
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 the most degrading kind, every man an 
 unprincipled Ishmael, every woman save 
 perhaps Madame Vernou, who has soured 
 her husband's life, but is a comparatively 
 honest creature being beneath the con- 
 tempt of the three or four noble spirits of 
 the cdnacle of honest men from whom 
 Lucien de Rubempr is inevitably de- 
 tached by the interplay of his character 
 and opportunities. 
 
 One of the mildest of the crimes charged 
 against the Paris journalists of that time 
 is the utter disregard of fairness in the 
 reviewing of books. Lousteau, when he 
 first takes Lucien to his room, describes 
 how he review's books without reading 
 more than a few of their pages. Having 
 sold a "Voyage en Egypte " which had 
 just been sent to him, he replies to his 
 innocent acquaintance, who asks how on 
 earth he will be able to write an article 
 about the book : 
 
 " Bah ! you don't know how that is done ! 
 I have glanced at the book here and there 
 1 88
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 without cutting it, and have discovered 
 eleven mistakes in French. I shall fill a 
 column in saying that, if the author has 
 learnt the language of the ducks engraved 
 upon the Egyptian obelisks, he does not 
 know his own, and I shall prove it. I 
 shall say that instead of talking about 
 natural history and antiquities he should 
 have discussed the future of Egypt, the 
 progress of civilisation, the means of bind- 
 ing that country to France, which, having 
 conquered and lost it, can at least gain a 
 moral ascendancy over it. I shall do the 
 patriotic trick, in fact, and fill up with 
 tirades upon Marseilles, the Levant, and 
 our commercial interests." 
 
 " But," asks his companion, " supposing 
 the author had done all you suggest, what 
 would you say then ? " 
 
 " Oh, then I should say that instead of 
 wearying us with politics, he should have 
 dealt with art, and painted the country 
 under its picturesque aspects." 
 
 It is no wonder that Lucien, whose ideals 
 189
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 are as yet little damaged, should cry out in 
 so many words, " Good heavens, and that 
 is criticism ! " 
 
 Balzac gathered the subjects of his hu- 
 mour from social types, but he went so 
 little into the world working so hard that, 
 as M. Bourget has said, he scarcely had 
 " le temps de vivre " that his imagination 
 supplied as much material, or more, than 
 his observation. The result is perhaps seen 
 in his habit of generalisation. His financiers, 
 his journalists, his politicians are almost in- 
 variably corrupt, his aristocrats wanting in 
 the most ordinary evidences of good man- 
 ners, as has already been illustrated from the 
 scene in Madame d'Espard's box at the 
 opera, where the choicest spirits among the 
 men of her exclusive set come to examine 
 the provincial cousin and the cousin's tame 
 poet, and the superfine de Marsay and his 
 associates whisper and stare and sneer with 
 a want of consideration for the feelings of 
 the new arrivals or of their hostess which 
 would be astonishing in the occupants of 
 a coster's donkey-cart on a Bank Holiday, 
 190
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 The wit and humour of Balzac lie so 
 much in the whole scheme of a book or 
 of a scene there are usually no chapters, 
 the publishers having done away with such 
 divisions in the author's lifetime, "to save 
 space " that, for the most part, to offer 
 specimens is to rank oneself with the man 
 who sent a brick as a sample of his house 
 to a possible purchaser. 
 
 As an instance of the difficulty of ex- 
 tracting the humour of Balzac without 
 losing most of its flavour, I may refer to 
 the account of Madame de Bargeton's 
 "evening" (in the first volume of " Illu- 
 sions Perdues "), of which, as a picture of 
 life and character, it would not be easy to 
 find many parallels in fiction. The various 
 types of the provincial aristocracy are in- 
 troduced to us as they arrive in the salon 
 of the queen of Angouleme society, in- 
 troduced with a description of their 
 peculiarities which might have led to their 
 speedy retirement if they had been able 
 to hear it. But first the host, who is no- 
 body in the world but the husband of the 
 191
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 wife whom he adores and obeys without 
 hesitation, even to the risk of his life, is 
 presented to us. 
 
 " A tdte-d-tete caused him the only em- 
 barrassment which disturbed his vegetative 
 life ; he was then obliged to seek in the 
 immensity of his internal void for some- 
 thing to say. Usually, he saved himself 
 such trouble in following the naive habits 
 of his childhood : he thought out loud ; he 
 initiated you into the smallest details of his 
 life ; he described to you his wants, his 
 little sensations, which, for him, took the 
 place of ideas. He did not talk of the 
 weather, nor take refuge in those common- 
 places of conversation by which stupid 
 people generally save themselves ; he 
 spoke of the most intimate interests of 
 his existence. 
 
 ' To please Madame de Bargeton,' he 
 would say, ' I have eaten some veal, of 
 which she is very fond, and it has upset my 
 stomach. I knew it would, for it always 
 does ; what can be the reason ? ' 
 192
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Among the guests was the musical 
 amateur, M. de Bartas, with whom " music 
 had become a monomania ; he only 
 brightened up when one talked of music ; 
 he suffered during a whole evening until 
 he was asked to sing. As soon as he had 
 bellowed one of his ballads his life com- 
 menced ; he strutted about the room, 
 raised himself on his toes when he was 
 complimented ; he affected to be modest, 
 and, when all had been said, came back to 
 music in starting a discussion on the diffi- 
 culties of the song he had sung, or in 
 praising the composer." Another guest in 
 the drawing-room of " Nai's " de Bargeton 
 on this memorable occasion was M. Alex- 
 andre de Brebian, " the hero of sepia, who 
 covered the walls of his friends' houses 
 with ridiculous drawings, and spoiled all 
 the albums in the neighbourhood." M. de 
 Bartas and M. de Brebian were great allies, 
 and allowed themselves, in their quality of 
 artists, a provincial kind of carelessness 
 which made them rather curious to see. 
 " Their rumpled clothes gave them the air 
 193 N
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 of the ' supers ' who in the smaller theatres 
 represent the people of high society invited 
 to weddings," a description which reminds 
 us of the famous " Adelphi guests " of 
 aforetime. 
 
 We also have the pleasure of meeting 
 M. de S6v6rac, a middle-aged maire, whose 
 mind is so possessed by the composition of 
 a monograph on silkworms that he cannot 
 help talking of it. He seems to a match- 
 making mother who is present to be a 
 likely parti for her gawky and stupid 
 daughter of twenty-seven, whom she re- 
 presents as sharing the tastes of all the 
 eligible men in turn. She says to M. de 
 S6ve"rac, when he has given an account of 
 his silkworms : 
 
 " My daughter has always loved animals. 
 So, as the silk that these little creatures 
 make is interesting to women, I will ask 
 your permission to bring my Camille to 
 Severac, to show her how it is obtained. 
 Camille is so intelligent that she will 
 understand directly everything you tell 
 194 

 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 her. Has she not understood, one day, 
 the inverse ratio of the square of dis- 
 tances ? " 
 
 Balzac, if in the humour that bubbles like 
 that of Mark Twain, or that squeaks like 
 that of Mark Twain's imitators, he is not 
 of much account, is strong in the humour 
 which depends on the discovery of affecta- 
 tion and the appreciation of motives. He 
 also was "the lord of irony." Recall, for 
 example, the extract from the local news- 
 paper concerning the marriage of " La 
 Rabouilleuse." That lovely peasant, after 
 being the mistress of a weak-minded 
 elderly man for years, becomes his wife, 
 in order that she may inherit his money. 
 As soon as the old man can be killed 
 through the over-indulgence into which he 
 is to be tempted, the abominable Colonel 
 Bridau, who has arranged the whole busi- 
 ness of the wedding, will himself marry the 
 widow and get rid of her in turn with the 
 aid of strong drink. It is the wedding 
 of the old victim and his unprincipled
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 mistress, under the compelling force of his 
 still more unprincipled nephew, that moves 
 the local newspaper to produce an article 
 wherein the world is informed that : "The 
 religious movement is making progress in 
 Berri. All the friends of the Church and 
 the right-thinking people of Issoudun were 
 witnesses yesterday of a ceremony by 
 which one of the principal landed pro- 
 prietors of the neighbourhood has put an 
 end to a scandalous situation." 
 
 One must read the whole novel to 
 appreciate the caustic humour of this inci- 
 dent, but its ironical point, not intentional 
 on the newspaper's part, must be evident 
 even with the sketch of the context here 
 supplied. 
 
 What bitter irony, again, is expressed 
 in the last lines in " Le Pere Goriot," 
 where Rastignac, caught by the demon of 
 social ambition, and disillusionised by con- 
 tact with the world, leaves the grave of 
 the poor father of the neglectful and un- 
 grateful Delphine de Nucingen and Anas- 
 tasie de Restaud, and gazes over the 
 196
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 fashionable quarter of Paris from the high 
 ground of Pere-Lachaise. "He threw 
 upon that buzzing hive a regard which 
 seemed to drain its honey by anticipation 
 and uttered these grandiose words : ' A 
 nous deux maintenant ! ' And then, for 
 the first act of the challenge that he offered 
 to Society, Rastignac went to dine with 
 Madame de Nucingen." 
 
 The finest humour of Balzac cannot 
 even be suggested in quotations, unless 
 pages together are quoted. " Les Come*- 
 diens sans le savoir," for instance, contains 
 some intensely diverting things, especially 
 the account of the visit to Marius, the 
 superfine hairdresser ; but there is no one 
 " bit " in that account which can be cut 
 out without losing more than half its force. 
 This sketch of the provincial Gazonal 
 " taken round " by Bixiou the caricaturist, 
 and Leon de Lora, the " Mistigris " of past 
 years, who has never outgrown his high 
 spirits and love of joking, is a highly de- 
 lightful work of art which can only be 
 enjoyed as a whole. 
 
 197
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Balzac, with all his fondness for allu- 
 sions to the England of which he knew so 
 little at first hand, had probably never heard 
 the word ''spoof," which was not familiar 
 in the days of Richardson or Byron. But 
 the process, if not the word, was very 
 familiar to him, and is abundantly illus- 
 trated in his novels. In its perfection it is 
 seen in " Un Debut dans la Vie," the 
 journey in the carrier's conveyance to 
 Presle being chiefly occupied with a game 
 of " spoof," very amusing for the time 
 being to most of the players, but disas- 
 trous in its termination. " Les Employes " 
 is rich in finer humour, the foibles of the 
 place-hunting officials and their families, 
 the jealousies of the clerks, the denseness 
 of people who can never understand irony 
 being displayed under the strong light of 
 one of the most searching and most caustic 
 of humourists. 
 
 Both the leading prtcieuses of the 
 "Comdie," Dinah de la Baudraye and 
 Anai's de Bargeton, are admirable exam- 
 ples of the author's humour in charac- 
 198
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 terisation. Of Anai's, the brightest, per- 
 haps, of the two women, though she does 
 not court fame as a writer, Balzac tells us 
 that " she was prodigal beyond measure of 
 superlatives in her conversation, where the 
 least thing assumed gigantic proportions. 
 She began typiser, individualiser, synthe'- 
 tiser, dramatiser, siip'erioriser> analyser, 
 pottiser, prosaiser, colossifier, angdliser, 
 ndologiser, et trag^q^ter, for one must do 
 violence for a moment to the French lan- 
 guage if one wants to suggest the whim- 
 sical novelties of speech in which some 
 women indulge." 
 
 A few of the more detachable instances 
 of Balzac's humour however partially re- 
 presented in such extracts may be recalled 
 in no particular order. 
 
 Agathe Bridau, bewailing to her aunt 
 Madame Descoings that her boy Joseph 
 has been drawing in a studio, cries : " You 
 don't know what goes on in these studios ! 
 The artists have naked women to paint 
 from." And the old woman replies, quite 
 simply, " I hope there is a fire there." 
 199
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 Pierquin, the notary of Douai (in 
 " La Recherche de 1'Absolu "), became 
 celebrated for his answer to the Comman- 
 dant of the Camp at Saint-Omer, who 
 invited him to a military fete : " Monsieur 
 Pierquin- Claes de Molina- Nourho, Maire 
 de la ville de Douai, Chevalier de la Legion 
 d'honneur, aura celui de se rendre," etc. 
 That celui, surely, is a charming touch. 
 
 At Hochon's, when that miserly old man 
 " entertains " his relations from Paris at 
 Issoudun, dessert is wanted after dinner. 
 '" Aliens done, Gritte, du fruit ! " calls out 
 Madame Hochon, and the old servant 
 replies : " Mais, madame, n'y en a plus de 
 pourri." It is no wonder that " Joseph burst 
 out laughing as if he was among his friends 
 in the studio," and cried " Bah ! We will 
 eat them all the same." M. Hochon, 
 " much scandalised," fetched some peaches, 
 pears and plums. 
 
 Hochon's fellow-citizen, the President 
 of the Judicial Bench of Issoudun, before 
 reaching that position of dignity, had ren- 
 dered himself celebrated by one of those 
 200
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 sayings which, in the country, coiffent pour 
 toute sa vie un homme dun bonnet ddne. 
 After having finished the preliminary in- 
 quiry into a criminal charge for which the 
 punishment was death, he said to the ac- 
 cused : " My poor Pierre, your case is 
 clear, you will be guillotined. Let that be 
 a lesson to you ! " 
 
 Of the jokes in the " Contes Drola- 
 tiques " I need not say much. I have 
 heard an accomplished critic describe 
 those stories as the cleverest things Balzac 
 ever wrote. To me it appears that their 
 effect depends very largely on the imi- 
 tation of the language and form of the 
 " Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles." Had they 
 been related in the French that Balzac 
 ordinarily employed, it is doubtful, I think, 
 whether the majority of them would be 
 thought very humourous. They do, un- 
 questionably, include some very witty 
 ideas. Perhaps there is no livelier touch 
 of its kind than is given in the cry of 
 the silk-dyer's wife to her husband when 
 she finds herself in the presence of an 
 
 201
 
 imminent tragedy: " Arrete, malheureux, 
 tu vas tuer le pere de tes enfans ! " 
 
 If thehumourof the "Contes Drolatiques" 
 depends a good deal on the quaint old 
 French some hostile critics held that it was 
 more quaint than old the comicality of the 
 Germans and Alsatians of the " Come"die " 
 owes much to their queer pronunciation. 
 We are mildly amused when the " Paron " 
 de Nucingen says to Baron Hulot, who is 
 begging for a loan, " Rassirez-fus, cheu ne 
 fus ai vait 1'objection que bir fus vair aber- 
 cevoir que ch'ai quelque mdride a fus tonner 
 la somme ; " or when Schmucke, whose em- 
 brace has been misunderstood by Madame 
 Cibot, tells that French connection of 
 Mrs. Gamp that she is " eine pede." We 
 know from his sister that Balzac himself 
 laughed consumedly over these confusions 
 of tongues. 
 
 Some of the most unexpected sallies in 
 the "Comdie Humaine" are those directed 
 against the parvenus who assume a particle 
 if they have it not. Madame de Bargeton, 
 wishing to humiliate her would-be lover, 
 
 202
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 the " directeur des contributions indirectes " 
 at Angoulme, calls him " Monsieur Cha- 
 telet," and petrifies him by making him 
 understand that she knows he has no right 
 to the particle, for " M. du Chatelet, venu 
 au monde Sixte Chatelet tout court, avait 
 eu le bon esprit de se qualifier." Since M. 
 de Balzac himself was once Honore Balzac 
 tout court, and " avait eu le bon esprit de 
 se qualifier," there is a candour about his 
 references to the " illegale superfetation de 
 sa particule " by the director of indirect 
 taxes which is quite refreshing. A boo- 
 merang of like kind is aimed, in " Le Bal 
 de Sceaux," at Maximilien de Longueville, 
 of whom M. de Fontaine remarks, waggling 
 his head from side to side, that "His father 
 was an attorney before the Revolution ; 
 and the ' de ' that he has assumed since the 
 Restoration belongs to him just as much 
 or as little as the half of his fortune." 
 
 I will close these few illustrations of Bal- 
 zac's intentionally humourous sallies with 
 one or two specimens addressed directly to 
 his friends, and not gathered from his books. 
 203
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 The garden wall of his villa near Ville- 
 d'Avray, the ramshackle " Les Jardies," 
 fell down and was rebuilt over and over 
 again, and always fell in the adjoining field. 
 At length Balzac, having bought the field, 
 said to a friend, with a sigh of contentment, 
 " The price was high, but no matter for 
 that ; one is always happy to be able to 
 end one's days at home. My poor wall 
 will at least be able to die in its bed." 
 
 To a lady whose house was so draughty 
 that even in summer it was cold, Balzac 
 replied, when his hostess said, " Must you 
 go so soon ? " : " Yes, Madame, I am going 
 into the street to warm myself a little." 
 
 Of unconscious humour there is truly 
 no lack in the novels of Balzac, such 
 humour as that over which the Revue de 
 Paris, in its bitterness at having lost the 
 action in which it claimed the right to 
 publish the conclusion of " Le Lys dans 
 la Vallee," made itself merry in its "Fin 
 d'une Histoire qui ne devait pas finir," in 
 June 1836, when the novel had appeared 
 in book form. The writer of that very 
 204
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 spiteful attack on Balzac's style declared that 
 in the book which Balzac regarded as a 
 masterpiece, he had found more nonsense, 
 more fatuity, more dulness, more preten- 
 tious extravaga.nce and bad French than 
 he had come across in all his previous ex- 
 perience ; and undoubtedly some of his 
 examples are absurd enough, such for ex- 
 ample as the passage wherein the narrator 
 says of Arabelle that she possesses that 
 science of existence which, among other 
 peculiarities, " verse a 1'heure dite un the" 
 suave, savammentde'plie," and "fait de la 
 matiere une pulpe nourrissante et coton- 
 neuse, brillante et propre au sein de 
 laquelle 1'ame expire sous la jouissance, 
 qui produit 1'affreuse monotonie du bien- 
 etre ? " There is no doubt much of this 
 kind of word-spinning in some of Balzac's 
 novels, but it nowhere else abounds as in 
 " Le Lys dans la Valtee." 
 
 If these examples of some aspects of 
 
 Balzac's humour cannot save perhaps in 
 
 the last instance of the unconscious afford 
 
 sufficient material for arriving at a judg- 
 
 205
 
 ASPECTS OF BALZAC 
 
 ment on its quality, they will at least, I 
 hope, serve to convey to some who may 
 not yet have gone far along the highways 
 and byways of Balzac's domain, a distrust 
 of the old and paradoxical accusation of 
 want of humour against the proprietor. 
 The conclusions here suggested are simply 
 these, that for the most part Balzac was 
 not notably spirituel in his jesting, that his 
 finest wit was that of characterisation and 
 suggestion rather than of phraseology, and 
 that humour of a high quality is inherent 
 in his pictures of social and individual 
 types and experiences, humour which, if 
 sometimes forced in order to produce the 
 effect desired, and often bitter in its taste, 
 is the elixir of life in the gigantic body of 
 that mass of tragedies, the "Come" die 
 Humaine." 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. 
 Lo. Ion 6- Edinburgh
 
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