Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes, Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,
and blood everywhere. And these unmerry tales are always recounted _ab extra_; in fact, many of them are real or pretended abstracts from chronicles of the very kind which furnished Browning with the matter of _The Ring and the Book_. It is, however, more apt and more curious to compare them with the scenes of Gerard"s experiences with the princess in _The Cloister and the Hearth_, as instances of different handling of the same matter by two novelists of talent almost, if not quite, reaching genius.
[Sidenote: _Le Rouge et le Noir._]
This singular aloofness, this separation of subject and spectator by a vast and impenetrable though translucent wall, as in a museum or a _morgue_, is characteristic of all Beyle"s books more or less. In fact, he somewhere confesses--the confession having, as always in persons of anything like his stamp, the nature of a boast--that he cannot write otherwise than in _recit_, that the broken conversational or dramatic method is impossible to him. But an almost startling change--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say reinforcement--of this method appears in what seems to me by far the most remarkable and epoch-making of his books, _Le Rouge et le Noir_. That there is a strong autobiographic element in this, though vigorously and almost violently "transposed,"
must have been evident to any critical reader long ago. It became not merely evident but _evidenced_ by the fresh matter published thirty years since.
[Sidenote: Beyle"s masterpiece, and why.]
The book is a long one; it drags in parts; and, long as it is, there is stuff in it for a much longer--indeed preferably for two or three. It is not only a _roman pa.s.sionnel_, as Beyle understood pa.s.sion, not only a collection of Parisian and Provincial scenes, but a romance of secret diplomacy, and one of Seminarist life, with constant side-excursions of Voltairianism, in religion, of the revolutionary element in politics which Voltaire did not ostensibly favour, however much he may have been responsible for it, of private cynicism, and above all and most consistently of all, of that psychological realism, which is perhaps a more different thing from psychological reality than our clever ones for two generations have been willing to admit, or, perhaps, able to perceive.
That--to adopt a division which foolish folk have sneered at directly and indirectly, but which is valuable and almost necessary in the case of second-cla.s.s literature--it is rather an unpleasant than a pleasant book, must be pretty well apparent from what has been already said of its author and itself. That it is a powerful one follows almost in the same way. But what has to be said, for the first, if not also the last, time in reference to Beyle"s fiction, is that it is interesting.
[Sidenote: Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole.]
The interest depends almost entirely--I really do not think it would be rash to say entirely--upon the hero and one of the heroines. The other personages are dramatically and psychologically competent, but Beyle has--perhaps save in one or two cases intentionally--made them something of _compa.r.s.es_ or "supers." There may be two opinions about the other heroine, Madame de Renal, Julien Sorel"s first and last love, his victim in two senses and directly the cause of his death, though he was not directly the cause of hers. She seems to me merely what the French call a _femmelette_, feebly amorous, feebly fond of her children, feebly estranged from and unfaithful to her husband, feebly though fatally jealous of and a traitress to her lover--feebly everything. Shakespeare or Miss Austen[134] could have made such a character interesting, Beyle could not. Nor do the other "seconds"--Julien"s brutal peasant father and brothers, the notables of Verrieres, the husband, M. de Renal (himself a _gentillatre_, as well as a man of business, a bully, and a blockhead), and the hero"s just failure of a father-in-law, the Marquis de la Mole--seem to me to come up to the mark. But, after all, they furnish forth the action, and are necessary in their various ways to set forth the character of that hero and his second love, almost in the mediaeval sense his wife and his widow, Mathilde de la Mole, heiress, great lady, _fille folle de son corps_, and, in a kind of way, Queen Whims.
Julien Sorel, allowance being made for his date, is one of the most remarkable heroes of fiction. He is physically handsome, in fact beautiful,[135] intellectually very clever, and possessed, in especial, of a marvellous memory; also, though not well educated early, capable of learning anything in a very short time--but presented in these favourable lights without any exaggeration. A distinguished Lord Justice was said by his admirers, at the beginning of his manhood, to have obtained more marks in examinations than any youthful person in the United Kingdom: and Julien, with equal opportunities, would probably have done the same in France. Morally, in no limited sense of the word, he does not possess a single good quality, and does possess most bad ones, with the possible exceptions of gluttony and avarice. That, being in each case a family tutor or _employe_ under trust, he seduces the wife of his first employer and the daughter of the second, cannot, in the peculiar circ.u.mstances, be said to count. This is, as it were, the starting-point, the necessary handicap, in the compet.i.tion of this kind of novel. It is as he is, and in reference to what he does, after this is put aside, that he has to be considered. He is not a stage villain, though he has the peculiar, and in the circ.u.mstances important, if highly-to-be-deprecated habit of carrying pocket-pistols. He is not a Byronic hero with a terrible but misty past. He is not like Valmont of the _Liaisons Dangereuses_,[136] a professional and pa.s.sionless lady-killer. He is not a swindler nor (though he sometimes comes near to this also) a conspirator like Count Fosco of _The Woman in White_. One might make a long list of such negatives if it were worth while. He is only an utterly selfish, arrogant, envious, and generally bad-blooded[137] young man, whom circ.u.mstances partly, and his own misdeeds helping them, first corrupt and then destroy. You never sympathise with him for one moment, except in a peculiar fashion to be noted presently; but at the same time he neither quite bores you nor quite disgusts you. _h.o.m.o est_, and it is Beyle"s having made him so that makes Beyle a sort of genius and much more than a sort of novelist.
But I am not certain that Mathilde is not even a greater creation, though again it is, except quite towards the end, equally impossible to like her. _Femina est_, though sometimes _furens_, oftener still _furiosa_ (in a still wider sense than that in which Mr. Norris has[138]
ingeniously "feminated" Orlando _Furioso_), and, in part of her conduct already alluded to, as dest.i.tute of any morality as Julien himself.
Although there could hardly be (and no doubt had better not be) many like her, she is real and true, and there are not a few redeeming features in her artistically and even personally. She is, as has been said, both rich and n.o.ble, the famous lover of the third Valois Marguerite being an (I suppose collateral) ancestor of hers.[139] Her father is not merely a patrician but a Minister at the close of the French Restoration; she may marry any one she likes; and has, in fact, a train of admirers whom she alternately cajoles and snubs. Julien is taken into the household as half private secretary, half librarian; is especially favoured by her father, and treated by her brother (one of Beyle"s few thoroughly good fellows) almost on equal terms. But his bad blood and his want of breeding make him stiff and mysterious, and Mathilde takes a perverse fancy to him, the growth of which is skilfully drawn. Although she is nothing so little as a Lelia or an Indiana or a Valentine (_vide_ next chapter), she is idiosyncratically romantic, and at last it is a case of ladders up to the window, "the irreparable," and various wild performances on her part and her lover"s. But this is all comparatively ba.n.a.l. Beyle"s touch of genius only reappears later. An extraordinary but (when one comes to think of it) not in the least unnatural series of "ups and downs" follows. Julien"s bad blood and vulgar nature make him presume on the advantage he has obtained; Mathilde"s _morgue_ and hot-headedness make her feel degraded by what she has given. She neglects him and he becomes quite frantic about _her_; he takes sudden dudgeon and she becomes frantically desirous of _him_. This spiritual or emotional man-and-woman-in-the-weather-house business continues; but at last, with ambages and minor peripeteias impossible to abstract, it so comes about that the great and proud Marquis de La Mole, startlingly but not quite improbably, chooses to recognise this traitor and seducer as a possible by-blow of n.o.bility, gets him a commission, endows him handsomely, and all but gives his consent to a marriage.
Then the final revolution comes. With again extraordinary but, as it is told, again not inconceivable audacity, Julien refers for character to his first mistress in both senses, Madame de Renal, and she "gives him away." The marquis breaks off the treaties, and Julien, leaving his quarters, journeys down to Verrieres and shoots Madame de Renal (with the pocket-pistols) in church. She does not die, and is not even very seriously wounded; but he is tried, is (according, it would seem, to a state of French law, which contrasts most remarkably with one"s recent knowledge of it) condemned, and after a time is executed for a murder which has not been committed. Mathilde (who is to bear him a child and always considers herself his wife) and Madame de Renal both visit him in prison, the former making immense efforts to save him. But Julien, consistently with his character all through, is now rather bored by Mathilde and exceedingly fond of Madame de Renal, who dies shortly after him. What becomes of Mathilde we are not told, except that she devotes herself to her paulo-post-future infant. The mere summary may seem rather preposterous; the book is in a way so. But it is also, in no ordinary sense, once more real and true. It has sometimes been regarded as a childish, but I believe it to be a true, criterion of novels that the reader should feel as if he would like to have had personal dealings with the personages. I should very much like to have shot[140] Julien Sorel, though it would have been rather an honour for him. And I should very much like to have made Mathilde fall in love with me. As for Madame de Renal, she was only good for suckling fools and telling tales out of school. But I do not find fault with Beyle for drawing her, and she, too, is very human.
In fact the book, pleasant or unpleasant, if we reflect on what the French novel was at the time, deserves a very high place. Compare it with others, and nowhere, except in Balzac, will you find anything like it for firm a.n.a.lysis of character, while I confess that it seems to me to be more strictly human of this world, and at the same time more original,[141] than a good deal of the _Comedie_.
[Sidenote: The resuscitated work--_Lamiel_.]
The question, "Would a novelist in altered circ.u.mstances have given us more or better novels?" is sometimes treated as _ultra vires_ or _nihil ad rem_ on the critic"s part. I myself have been accused rather of limiting than of extending the province of the literary critic; yet I think this question is, sometimes at least, in place. If so, it can seldom be more in place than with Beyle, first because of the unusually mperfect character of his actual published work; and secondly, because of the still more unusual abundance of half-done work, or of fragments of self-criticism, which what has been called the "Beyle resurrection"
of the close of the last century has furnished. Indeed the unfinished and scarcely more than half-drafted novel of _Lamiel_ almost by itself suggests the question and supplies the answer. That answer--except from favourers of the grime-novel which, oddly enough, whether by coincidence or common causation became so popular at about the time of this "resurrection"--can hardly be favourable. _Lamiel_ is a very grubby little book. The eponymous heroine is adopted as a child by a parish beadle and his wife, who do not at all maltreat her, except by bringing her up in ways of extreme propriety, which she detests, taking delight in the histories of Mandrin, Cartouche and Co. At early maidenhood she is pitched upon as _lectrice_, and in a way favourite, by the great lady of the neighbourhood, the d.u.c.h.ess of Miossens; and in this position first attracts the attention of a peculiarly diabolical little dwarf doctor, who, bar the comic[142] element, reminds one rather of Quilp.
His designs are, however, baulked in a most Beylian manner; for Lamiel (who, by a pleasing chance, was at first called "Amiel"--a delightfully _other_ Amiel!) coolly bestows some money upon a peasant to "teach her what love is," and literally asks the Gebirian question about the ocean, "Is this all?" after receiving the lesson. Further, in the more and more unfinished parts of the book, she levants for a time with the young duke, quits him, becomes a professional hetaera in Paris, but never takes any fancy to the business of her avocation till she meets an all-conquering criminal, Valbayre.[143] The scenario tells us that, Valbayre having been caught by justice, she sets fire to the Palace thereof, and her own bones are discovered in the ashes.
This, though Beyle at least meant to season the misanthropy with irony (he might be compared with Meredith for some slightly cryptic views of "the Comic Spirit"), is rather poor stuff, and certainly shows no improvement or likelihood of improvement on the earlier productions. It is even somewhat lamentable, not so much for the presence of grime as because of the absence of any other attraction. _Le Rouge et le Noir_ is not exactly rose-pink, but it derives hardly any, if any, interest from its smirches of mud and blood and blackness. In _Lamiel_ there is little else. Moreover, that unchallengeable "possibility of humanity" which redeems not merely _Le Rouge et le Noir_ but the less exciting books, is wanting here. Sansfin, the doctor, is a mere monstrosity in mind as well as in body, and, except perhaps when she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es (as more briefly reported above), "Comment! ce fameux amour, _ce n"est que ca_?" Lamiel herself is not made interesting.
[Sidenote: The _Nouvelles Inedites_.]
The _Vie de Henri Brulard_, of high importance for a History of Novelists, is in strictness outside the subject of a historian of the Novel, though it might be adduced to strengthen the remarks made on Rousseau"s _Confessions_.[144] And the rest of the "resurrected" matter is also more autobiographical, or at best ill.u.s.trative of Beyle"s restless and "masterless" habit of pulling his work to pieces--of "never being able to be ready" (as a deservedly unpopular language has it)--than contributory to positive novel-achievement. But the first and by far the most substantive of the _Nouvelles Inedites_, which his amiable but not very strong-minded literary executor, Colomb, published soon after his death, needs a little notice.
[Sidenote: _Le Cha.s.seur Vert._]
_Le Cha.s.seur Vert_[145] (which had three other t.i.tles, three successive prefaces, and in its finished, or rather unfinished, form is the salvage of five folio volumes of MS., the rest being at best sketched and at worst illegible) contains, in what we have of it, the account of the tribulations of a young sub-lieutenant of Lancers (with a great deal of money, a cynical but rather agreeable banker-papa, an adoring mother, and the record of an expulsion from the Polytechnique for supposed Republicanism) suddenly pitchforked into garrison, soon after the Revolution of July, at Nancy. Here, in the early years of the July monarchy, the whole of decent society is Legitimist; a very small but not easily suppressible minority Republican; while officialdom, civil and military, forms a peculiar _juste milieu_, supporting itself by espionage and by what Their Majesties of the present moment, the Trade Unions, call "victimisation," but in a constant state of alarm for its position, and "looking over its shoulder" with a sort of threefold squint, at the white flag, the eagles--and the guillotine. Nothing really happens, but it takes 240 pages to bring us to an actual meeting between Lieutenant Lucien Leeuwen and his previously at distance adored widow, the Marquise de Chasteller.
The book is not a _very_ good novel, even as a fragment, and probably nothing would ever have made it so as a whole. But there is good novel-stuff in it, and it is important to a student of the novel and almost indispensable to a student of this novelist. Of the cynical papa--who, when his son comes to him in a "high-falutin" mood, requests him to go to his (the papa"s) opera-box, to replace his sire with some agreeable girl-officials of that same inst.i.tution, and to spend at least 200 francs on a supper for them at the Rocher--one would gladly see more. Of the barrack (or rather _not_-barrack) society at Nancy, the sight given, though not agreeable, is interesting, and to any one who knew something of our old army, especially before the abolition of purchase, very curious. There is no mess-room and apparently no common life at all, except on duty and at the "pension" hotel-meals, to which,--rather, it would seem, at the arbitrary will of the colonel than by "regulation,"--you have to subscribe, though you may, and indeed must, live in lodgings exactly like a _particulier_. Of the social-political life of the place we see rather too much, for Beyle, not content with making the politics which he does not like make themselves ridiculous--or perhaps not being able to do so--himself tells us frequently that they _are_ ridiculous, which is not equally effective. So also, instead of putting severe or "spiritual" speeches in Lucien"s mouth, he tells us that they _were_ spiritual or severe, an a.s.surance which, of course, we receive with due politeness, but which does not give us as much personal delectation as might be supplied by the other method. No doubt this and other things are almost direct results of that preference for _recit_ over semi-dramatic evolution of the story by deed and word, which has been noticed. But they are damaging results all the same: and, after making the fairest allowance for its incomplete condition, the thing may be said to support, even more than _Lamiel_ does, the conclusion already based upon the self-published stories (and most of all upon that best of them, _Le Rouge et le Noir_) that Beyle could never have given us a thoroughly hit-off novel.
[Sidenote: Beyle"s place in the story.]
Still, there is always something unfair in making use of "Remains," and for my part I do not think that, unless they are of extraordinary merit, they should ever be published. "Death _should_ clear all scores" in this way as in others. Yet no really critical person will think the worse of Beyle"s published work because of these _anecdota_, though they may, as actually before us, be taken as throwing some light on what is not so good in the _publicata_. There can be no doubt that Beyle occupies a very important position in the history of the novel, and not of the French novel only, as the first, or almost the first, a.n.a.lyst of the ugly for fict.i.tious purposes, and as showing singular power in his a.n.a.lysis. Unfortunately his synthetic gifts were not equally great. He had strange difficulty in making his stories _march_; he only now and then got them to _run_; and though the real life of his characters has been acknowledged, it is after all a sort of "Life-in-Death," a new manifestation of the evil power of that mysterious ent.i.ty whom Coleridge, if he did not discover, first named and produced in quasi-flesh, though he left us without any indication of more than one tiny and accidental part of her dread kingdom.
He has thus the position of _pere de famille_, whether (to repeat the old joke) of a _famille deplorable_ in the moral, not the sentimental, sense, must, I suppose, be left matter of opinion. The plentiful crop of monographs about him since M. Stryienski"s Pompeian explorations and publications is in a manner--if only in a manner--justified by the numerous followers--not always or perhaps often conscious followers, and so even more important--in his footsteps. n.o.body can say that the picaresque novelists, whether in their original country or when the fashion had spread, were given to _berquinades_ or fairy-tales. n.o.body can say that the tale-writers who preceded and followed them were apostles of virtue or painters of Golden-Age scenes. But, with some exceptions (chiefly Italian) among the latter, they did not, unless their aim were definitely tragical--an epithet which one could show, on irrefragable Aristotelian principles, to be rarely if ever applicable to Beyle and his school--they did not, as the common phrase goes, "take a gloomy view" only. There were cakes and ale; and the cakes did not always give internal pains, nor the ale a bad headache. As even Hazlitt (who has been selected, not without reason, as in many ways like Beyle) said of himself on his death-bed, rather to some folks" surprise though not to mine, most of the characters "had a happy life," though the happiness might be chequered: and some of them were "good." It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in Beyle"s books happiness does not exist, and virtue has hardly a place. There are some characters who may be said to be neutral or "on the line"; they may be not definitely unhappy or definitely bad. But this is about as far as he ever goes in that direction. And accordingly he and his followers have the fault of one-sidedness; they may (he did) see life steadily, but they do not see it whole. There is no need to preach a sermon on the text: in this book there is full need to record the fact.[146]
[Sidenote: Balzac--conditions of the present dealing.]
In dealing with Beyle"s greater companion here there are certain things--not exactly difficulties, but circ.u.mstances conditioning the treatment--which should be stated. That it is well to know something about your subject has been an accepted doctrine with all save very young persons, idle paradoxers, and (according to Sir Walter Scott) the Scottish Court of Session in former days.[147] That it is also well not to know too much about it has sometimes been maintained, without any idleness in either sense of the word; the excess being thought likely to cause weariness, "staleness," and absence of interest. If this were necessarily so, it might be better for the writer once more to leave this part of the chapter (since at least the heading of it could not possibly be omitted in the history) a blank or a constellation of asterisks in Sternian fashion. For it has fallen to his lot to translate one whole novel of Balzac"s,[148] to edit a translation of the entire _Comedie_,[149] superintending some of the volumes in narrow detail, and studying each in short, but (intentionally at least) thorough _Introductions_, with a very elaborate preface-study of the whole; to read all Balzac"s rather voluminous miscellanea from the early novel-attempts to posthumous things, including letters; and, finally, to discuss the subject once more, with the aid or burden of many previous commentaries, in a long _Review_ article.[150] Nevertheless, he does not feel that any disgust forbids while a clear duty calls: and he hopes to show that it is not always necessary to weary of quails as in the Biblical, partridges as in the old _fabliau_, and pigeons in the Dumas _fils_ (_v. inf._) version of the Parable of Satiety.
[Sidenote: Limitations of Subject.]
In no case, however, not even in that of Victor Hugo, is the eas.e.m.e.nt given by the general plan of the book, in regard to biographical and other not strictly literary details, more welcome. We shall say nothing on the point whether the author of the _Comedie Humaine_ should be called M. de Balzac or M. Balzac or M. Balssa; nothing about his family, his friends, his enemies, his strangely long-deferred, and, when it came, as strangely ill-fated marriage; little, though something necessarily, about his tastes, his commercial and other enterprises, and so forth; and not very much--something here also becoming obligatory--on his manner of producing the immense and wonderful work which he has left us. Those who are curious about such things will find ample satisfaction in the labours of M. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, of MM. Christophe and Cerfbeer, and of others.[151] Here he is, for us, Honore de Balzac, author of the _Juvenilia_ (saved from, as it is understood, a larger bulk still) in ten volumes; of the mighty "Comedy" itself, and, more incidentally, of the considerable epistolary and miscellaneous production referred to above. The manner in which this enormous output was put out has perhaps too much to do with its actual character to be pa.s.sed over in total silence. It represents thirty years" working time almost entirely spent upon it,[152] the alternatives being the above-mentioned commercial speculations (which were almost invariably unfortunate, and involved him, during the whole of his career, in complicated indebtedness) and a good deal of travel, very frequently connected with these speculations. Of the society which formed so large a part of the life of the time and of which he wrote so often, Balzac saw little. He worked at enormous stretches, and he rewrote his work, in MS., in proof and in temporarily final print, with insatiable and indefatigable industry. To no writer could the commonplace extravagance about burning the candle at both ends be applied so truly as to Balzac.
Only, his candle was shaped like a wheel with no felloes, and he burnt it at the end of every spoke and at the nave as well. How he managed to last, even to fifty, is one of the major curiosities of literary biography.
[Sidenote: And of Balzac himself.]
Of the three divisions of this vast but far from chaotic production, the miscellaneous, of course, concerns us least. It shows Balzac as a failure of a dramatist, a critic of very varying competence,[153] not a particularly effective _writer_ merely as such, not possessed of much logical power, but having pretty wide interests and abundantly provided with what we may call the odd tools of the novelist"s workshop. As a correspondent his writing has absolutely none of what may be called the "departmental" interest of great letter-writers--of Madame de Sevigne or Lady Mary, of Horace Walpole or Cowper; its attraction is not epistolary but wholly autobiographic. And it is only fair to say that, despite Balzac"s immense and intense self-centredness, it leaves one on the whole with a much better opinion of him as a man than might be derived from his books or from the anecdotes about him. To adapt one of the best known of these, there was, in fact, nothing real to him but Honore de Balzac, Honore de Balzac"s works and schemes, and, in rare cases (of which Madame Hanska was the chief), Honore de Balzac"s loves. These const.i.tuted his subject, his universe of thought and feeling, of action and pa.s.sion. But at the same time he stands apart from all the other great egotists. He differs from those of whom Byron is the chief in that he does not introduce himself prominently in his fict.i.tious creations.
He does not, like those who may take their representative in Goethe, regard everything merely as it relates to his personality. His chief peculiarity, his unique literary character, and, it may be added at once, his greatness and his weakness, all consist in the fact that he evolves a new world out of himself. Now and then he may have taken an actual human model--George Sand, Madame d"Agoult, Madame de Castries, Liszt, Latouche,[154] Remusat--as many others as anybody likes. But always these had not merely to receive the Balzacian image and superscription, but to be trans.m.u.ted into creatures of a _Balzacium Sidus_. And it is the humanity of this planet or system, much more than of our world, whereof his _Comedie_ is the Comedy--a _Comedie Balzacienne_.
[Sidenote: Balzac"s "general ideas."]
But, it has been said, and the saying has been attributed to no less a critic than M. f.a.guet, there are no "general ideas" in Balzac.[155] One can only reply, "Heavens! Why should there be?" The celebrated unreason of "going to a gin-palace for a leg of mutton" (already quoted, and perhaps to be quoted again) is sound and sensible as compared with asking general ideas from a novelist. They are not quite absolutely forbidden to him, though he will have to be very careful lest they get in his way. But they are most emphatically not his business, except as very rare and very doubtful means to a quite different end, means absolutely insufficient by themselves and exceedingly difficult to combine with the other means which--more or fewer of them--are not only sufficient but necessary. The "slice of human life," not necessarily, but preferably ordinary, presenting probable and interesting characters, connected by sufficient plot, diversified and adorned by descriptive and other devices, and abundantly furnished with the conversation of men and women of this world, the whole forming such a whole as will amuse, thrill, affect, and in other ways, to use the all-important word once more, _interest_ the reader,--that is what is wanted. And this definition is as rigid at least as the Aristotelian definition of tragedy and perhaps more exhaustive, as concerns the novel, including, with the necessary modifications, the romance--and the romance, including, with the necessary modifications, the novel. In it "general ideas," unless a very special and not at all usual meaning is attached to the term, can have no right of place. They may be brought in, as almost anything may be brought in if the writer is Samson enough to bring it. But they cannot be demanded of him as facts, images, emotions, style, and a very large number of other things can or may be, not, of course, all at once, but in larger or smaller selection. General ideas may and perhaps should be demanded from the philosopher, the historian, the political student. From the poet and the novelist they cannot be. And that they should be so demanded is one of the chief instances of what seems to the present writer to be the greatest mistake of French novel, as of other, criticism--its persistent relapse upon the rule-system and its refusal to judge by the result.[156]
It is all the more unreasonable to demand general _ideas_ from Balzac himself, because he is so liberal of general _imagery_, and what is more, general _prosopopoeia_. Be the Balzacian world real, as some would have it to be, or be it removed from our mundane reality by the subtle "other-planetary" influence which is apparent to others, its complexity, its fullness, its variety, its busy and by no means unsystematic life and motion, cannot be denied. Why on earth cannot people be content with asking Platonism from Plato and Balzacity from Balzac? At any rate, it is Balzacity which will be the subject of the following pages, and if anybody wants anything else let him go elsewhere.
[Sidenote: Abstinence from abstract.]
There is hardly likely to be much grumbling at the absence of such detailed abstract or survey of individual books as has been given in cases of what may seem to be much less importance. To begin with, such a survey as is possible[157] exists already from these hands in the Introductions to the translated edition above referred to, and to paraphrase or refashion it here would probably occupy a hundred pages, if not more. Nor would the plan, elsewhere adopted, of a.n.a.lysing afresh one, or two, or more examples, as representative, be satisfactory.
Although Balzac is in a sense one of the most intensely individual of all novelists, his individuality, as in a very few others of the greatest cases, cannot be elicited from particular works. Just as _Hamlet_ will give you no idea of the probable treatment of _As You Like It_, so _Eugenie Grandet_ contains no key to _La Cousine Bette_. Even the groups into which he himself rather empirically, if not quite arbitrarily, separated the _Comedie_, though they lend themselves a little more to specification, do not yield very much to the cla.s.sifier.
The _Comedie_, once more, is a world--a world open to the reader, "all before him." Chronological order may tell him a little about Balzac, but it will not tell him very much about Balzac"s work that he cannot gain from the individual books, except in the very earliest stages. There is no doubt that the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, if not very delightful to the reader (I have myself read them not without pleasure), are very instructive; the instruction increases, while the pleasure is actually multiplied, when you come to _Les Chouans_ and the _Peau de Chagrin_.
But it is, after a fashion, only beyond these that the true Balzac begins, and the beginning is, to a large extent, a reaction from previous work in consequence of a discovery that the genius, without which he had acknowledged that it was all up with him,[158] did not lie that way, and that he had no hope of finding it there. Not that there is no genius in the two books mentioned; on the contrary, it is there first to be found, and in _La Peau_ is of the first order. But their ways are not the ways in which he was to find it--and himself--more specially.
[Sidenote: The _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_.]
As to _Argow le Pirate_[159] and _Jane la Pale_ (I have never ceased lamenting that he did not keep the earlier t.i.tle, _Wann-Chlore_) and the rest, they have interest of various kinds. Some of it has been glanced at already--you cannot fully appreciate Balzac without them. But there is another kind of interest, perhaps not of very general appeal, but not to be neglected by the historian. They are almost the only accessible body, except Pigault-Lebrun"s latest and Paul de k.o.c.k"s earliest, of the popular fiction _before_ 1830, of the stuff of which, as previously mentioned, Ducray-Duminil, the lesser Ducange, and many others are representatives, but representatives difficult to get at. This cla.s.s of fiction, which arose in all parts of Europe during the last years of the eighteenth century and the earlier of the nineteenth, has very similar characteristics, though the examples differ very slightly in different countries. What are known with us as the Terror Novel, the Minerva Press, the Silver Fork school, etc. etc., all have their part in it, and even higher influences, such as Scott"s, are not wanting. _Han d"Islande_ and _Bug-Jargal_ themselves belong to some extent to the cla.s.s, and I am far from certain that the former is at all better than some of these _juvenilia_ of Balzac"s. But as a whole they are of course little more than curiosities.
Whether these curiosities are more widely known than they were some five-and-twenty, or thirty, years ago, when Mr. Louis Stevenson was the only friend of mine who had read them, and when even special writers on Balzac sometimes unblushingly confessed that they had not, I cannot say.
Although printed in the little fifty-five-volume[160] edition which for so many years represented Balzac, they were excluded, as noted above, from the statelier "Definitive," and so may have once more "gone into abscondence." I do not want to read them again, but I no more repent the time once spent on them than I did earlier. In fact I really do not think any one ought to talk about Balzac who has not at least gained some knowledge of them, for many of their defects remained with him when he got rid of the others. These defects are numerous enough and serious enough. The books are nothing if not uncritical, generally extravagant, and sometimes (especially in _Jean Louis_) appallingly dull. Scarf-pins, made of poisoned fish-bones (_Argow le Pirate_), extinction of virgins under copper bells (_Le Centenaire_), attempts at fairy-tales (_La Derniere Fee_) jostle each other. The weaker historical kind figures largely in _L"Excommunie_ (one of the least bad), _L"Israelite_, _L"Heritiere de Birague_, _Dom Gigadas_. There is a _Vicaire des Ardennes_ (remarkably different from him of Wakefield), which is a kind of introduction to _Argow le Pirate_, and which, again, is not the worst. When I formerly wrote about these curious productions, after reading them, I had not read Pigault-Lebrun, and therefore did not perceive, what I now see to be an undoubted fact, that Balzac was, sometimes at least, trying to follow in Pigault"s popular footsteps. But he had not that writer"s varied knowledge of actual life or his power of telling a story, and though he for the most part avoided Pigault"s _grossierete_, the chaotic plots, the slovenly writing, and other defects of his model abode with him.
[Sidenote: _Les Chouans._]
There are not many more surprising things, especially _in pari materia_, to be found in literary history than the sun-burst of _Les Chouans_ after this darkness-that-can-be-felt of the early melodramas. Not that _Les Chouans_ is by any means a perfect novel, or even a great one. Its narrative drags, in some cases, almost intolerably; the grasp of character, though visible, is inchoate; the plot is rather a polyptych of separate scenes than a connected action; you see at once that the author has changed his model to Sir Walter and think how much better Sir Walter would have done the thing. But there is a strange air of "coming alive" in some of the scenes, though they are too much separated, as in the case of the finale and of the execution of the rather hardly used traitor earlier. These possess a character of thrill which may be looked for in vain through all the ten volumes of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_.
Montauran _is_ a hero in more than one sense, and Mlle. de Verneuil is still more a heroine. Had Balzac worked her out as he worked out others, who did not deserve it so well, later, she might have been one of the great characters in fiction. Even as it is, the "jour sans lendemain,"
which in one sense unites, and in another parts, her and her lover for ever, is one of the most really pa.s.sionate things that the French novel, in its revival, had yet seen. Besides this, there is a sort of extrinsic appeal in the book, giving that curious atmosphere referred to already, and recalling the old prints of the earth yawning in patches and animals rearing themselves from it at the Creation. The names and personages of Hulot and Corentin were to be well known later to readers of the "fifty volumes," and even the ruffianly patriot[161] Marche-a-Terre had his future.
[Sidenote: _La Peau de Chagrin._]
The second[162] blast of the horn with which Balzac challenged admission to the Inner Sanctuaries or strongholds of the novel, _La Peau de Chagrin_, had that character of _difference_ which one notices not seldom in the first worthy works of great men of letters--the absence of the mould and the rut. _Les Chouans_ was a Waverley novel Gallicised and Balzacified; _La Peau de Chagrin_ is a cross between the supernatural romance and the novel of psychology. It is one of the greatest of Balzac"s books. The idea of the skin--a new "wishing" talisman, which shrinks with every exercise of the power it gives, and so threatens extinction at once of wishing and living--is of course not wholly novel, though refreshed in detail. But then nothing is wholly novel, and if anything could be it would probably be worthless. The endless changes of the eternal substance make the law, the curse, and the blessing of life.
In the working out of his theme it may possibly be objected that Balzac has not _interested_ the reader quite enough in his personages--that he seems in a way to be thinking more of the play than of the actors or the audience. His "orgie" is certainly not much of a success; few orgies in print are, except when they are burlesqued. But, on the other hand, the curiosity-shop is splendid. Yet it is not on the details of the book, important as these have been allowed to be throughout Balzac, that attention should be mainly concentrated. The point of it is the way in which the necessary atmosphere of bad dream is kept up throughout, yet with an appropriate contrast of comparatively ordinary life. A competent critic who read _Les Chouans_, knowing nothing about its author or his work, should have said, "Here is more than a promising craftsman"; reading _La Peau de Chagrin_ in the same conditions he should have said, "Here is a great, though by no means a faultless, artist." One who read both ought to have had no doubt as to the coming of something and somebody extraordinary.