"He is at once the inventor, the architect, the upholsterer, the milliner, the professor of languages, the chambermaid, the perfumer, the barber, the music-teacher, and the usurer. He renders his society all that it is. He it is who lulls it to sleep on a bed expressly arranged for sleep and adultery; he, who bows all women beneath the same misfortune; he, who buys on credit the horses, jewels, and clothes of all these handsome sons without stomach, without money, without heart. He is the first who has found the livid veneer, the pale complexion of distinguished company which causes all his heroes to be recognized. He has arranged in his fertile brain all the adorable crimes, the masked treasons, the ingenious rapes mental and physical which are the ordinary warp of his plots. The jargon spoken by this peculiar world, and which he alone can interpret, is none the less a mother-tongue rediscovered by Monsieur de Balzac, which partly explains the ephemeral success of this novelist, who still reigns in London and Saint Petersburg as the most faithful reproduction of the manners and actions of our century."
Janin"s animus blinded him to the rest, and it is just the rest of the qualities which converted the ephemeral success into the permanent.
Taine"s estimate is more discursive. He is further removed from polemics. He says:--
"Monsieur de Balzac has of private life a very deep and fine sentiment which goes even to minuteness of detail and of superst.i.tion. He knows how to move you and make you palpitate from the first, simply in depicting a garden-walk, a dining-room, a piece of furniture. He divines the mysteries of provincial life; sometimes he makes them.
Most often he does not recognize and therefore isolates the pudic and hidden side of life, together with the poetry it contains. He has a mult.i.tude of rapid remarks about old maids and old women, ugly girls, sickly women, sacrificed and devoted mistresses, old bachelors, misers. One wonders where, with his petulant imagination, he can have picked it all up. It is true that Monsieur de Balzac does not proceed with sureness, and that in his numerous productions, some of which appear to us almost admirable, at any rate touching and delicious or piquant and finely comic in observation, there is a dreadful pell-mell.
What a throng of volumes, what a flight of tales, novels of all sorts, droll, philosophic, and theosophic. There is something to be enjoyed in each, no doubt, but what prolixity! In the elaboration of a subject, as in the detail of style, Monsieur de Balzac has a facile, unequal, risky pen. He starts off quickly, sets himself in a gallop, and then, all at once, he stumbles to the ground, rising only to fall again. Most of his openings are delightful; but his conclusions degenerate or become excessive. At a certain moment, he loses self-control. His observing coolness escapes; something in his brain explodes, and carries everything far, far away. Hazard and accident have a good share in Monsieur de Balzac"s best production. He has his own manner, but vacillating, fidgety, often seeking to regain self-possession."
How much one could wish that, instead of producing more, Balzac should have produced less. With a man of his native power and perseverance, what greater perfection there might have been! Certainly, no defect is more patent in the _Comedie Humaine_ than the trail of hasty workmanship, the mark of being at so much a line. Strangely, the speed with which he wrote furnished him with a cause for boasting. More properly, it ought to have filled him with humiliation. Many _litterateurs_ are compelled to drive and overdrive their pens. But, if they have the love of letters innate in them, it will go against the grain to send into the world their sentences without having had leisure to polish each and all. Examples have already been given of the short time spent over several books of the _Comedy_. There is no need to repeat these or to add to their names. Occasionally, the result was not bad, when, as with _Cesar Birotteau_, the subject had been long in the novelist"s head. This, however, was the exception.
The fifty-five sheets once composed in a single week, and the six thousand lines once reeled off in ten days, were probably invented as well as set on paper within the periods stated. No doubt, much was altered in the galley proofs; but the alterations would be made with the same celerity, so that they risked being no improvement either in style or matter. Balzac, indeed, was aware of the imperfections arising from such a method; and he not infrequently strove to correct them in subsequent editions. The task might perhaps have been carried out fully, if the bulk of his new novels had not been continually growing faster than he could follow it with his revision.
The commercial compromises that he consented to were still more injurious to the artistic finish of some of his later pieces of fiction. For instance, when the _Employees_ was about to come out in a volume, after its publication as a serial the length was judged to be insufficient by the man of business. He wanted more for his money.
What did Balzac do? He searched through his drawers, pitched upon a ma.n.u.script ent.i.tled _Physiology of the Employee_, and drilled it into the other story. Of these patchwork novels _The Woman of Thirty Years Old_ is the worst. Originally, it was six distinct short tales which had appeared at divers dates. The first was ent.i.tled _Early Mistakes_; the second, _Hidden Sufferings_; the third, _At Thirty Years Old_; the fourth, _G.o.d"s Finger_; the fifth, _Two Meetings_; and the sixth and last, _The Old Age of a Guilty Mother_. In 1835, the author took it into his head to join them together under one t.i.tle, _The Same Story_, although the names of the characters differed in each chapter, so that the chief heroine had no fewer than six appellations. Not till 1842 did he remedy this primary incoherence, yet without the removal of the _aliases_ doing anything towards bestowing consistency on the several personages thus connected in Siamese-twin fashion. To-day, any one who endeavors to read the novel through will proceed from astonishment to bewilderment, and thence to amazement. Nowhere else does Balzac come nearer to that peculiar vanity which fancies that every licence is permissible to talent.
In his chapter on the social importance of the _Comedie Humaine_, Brunetiere tries to persuade us that, before Balzac"s time, novelists in general gave a false presentation of the heroes by making love the unique preoccupation of life. And he seems to include dramatists in his accusation, declaring that love as a pa.s.sion, the love which Shakespeare and Racine speak of, is a thing exceeding rare, and that humanity is more usually preoccupied with everything and anything besides love; love, he says, has never been the great affair of life except with a few idle people. Monsieur Brunetiere"s erudition was immense, and the nights as well as the days he spent in acquiring his formidable knowledge may in his case have prevented more than a pa.s.sing thought being given to the solicitation of love. If the eminent critic had been as skilled in psychology as he was in literature, he would have been more disposed to recognize that, amidst all the toils and cares of life, love, in some phase, is after all the mainspring, and that, if it were eliminated from man"s nature, the most puissant factor of his activity would disappear. Love is part of the huge sub-conscious in man; and the novelist, in making the events of his fiction turn upon it, does no more than follow nature.
However, it is not exact that all novelists and dramatists, or even the majority of them, before Balzac"s time made love the sole preoccupation of their heroes. What they did rather--in so far as their writing was true--was to give a visible relief to it which in real life is impossible, since it belongs to the invisible, inner experience. Nor is it exact that Balzac consistently a.s.signs a secondary place in his novels to love. He does so in his best novels, but not in some that he thought his best--_The Lily in the Valley_ and _Seraphita_ for example. The relegation of love to the background in these novels which happen to be his masterpieces was caused by something mentioned in a preceding chapter, to wit, that Balzac never thoroughly felt or understood love as a great and n.o.ble pa.s.sion. And love, with him, being so oddly mixed up with calculation, it was to be expected he should succeed best in books in which the dominant interest was some other pa.s.sion--an exceptional one. If money plays, on the contrary, such an intrusive role in his novels, its introduction was less from voluntary, reasoned choice than from obsession. He deals with this subject sometimes splendidly, but, at other times, he wearies. Had money filled a smaller part of his work, the work would not have been lost.
In fine, with its beauties and its ugliness, its perfections and its shortcomings, the _Comedy_ is the illumination cast by a master-mind upon the goings-out and comings-in of his contemporaries, the creation of a more universal and representative history of social life than had been previously written. Having considerable ethical value, it is worth still more on account of the ways it opens towards the fiction of the future.
CHAPTER XVI
THE INFLUENCE
Balzac"s influence during his lifetime was, with but few exceptions, exercised outside his own, novelist"s profession. The sphere in which it made itself chiefly felt was that of the cultured reading public, and the public was, first and foremost, a foreign one. History repeated itself. To Honore d"Urfe, the author of the _Astree_, in the sixteenth century, while living in Piedmont, a letter came announcing that twenty-nine princesses and nineteen lords of Germany had adopted the names and characters of his heroes and heroines in the _Astree_, and had founded an academy of true lovers. Almost the same thing occurred to the nineteenth-century Honore de Balzac. For a while, certain people in Venetian society a.s.sumed the t.i.tles and roles of his chief personages, playing the parts, in some instances, out to their utmost conclusion.
Sainte-Beuve, who, in 1850, drew attention to this curious historical a.n.a.logy, went on to mention that, in Hungary, Poland, and Russia, Balzac"s novels created a fashion. The strange, rich furniture that was a.s.sembled and arranged, according to the novelist"s fancy, out of the artistic productions of many countries and epochs, became an after-reality. Numerous wealthy persons prided themselves on possessing what the author had merely imagined. The interior of their houses was adorned _a la Balzac_.
One evening at Vienna, says his sister, he entered a concert-room, where, as soon as his presence was perceived and bruited about, all the audience rose in his honour; and, at the end of the entertainment, a student seized his hand and kissed it, exclaiming: "I bless the hand that wrote _Seraphita_." Balzac himself relates that, once travelling in Russia, he and his friends, as night was coming on, went and asked for hospitality at a castle. On their entrance, the lady of the house and some other members of the fair s.e.x vied with each other in eagerness to serve the guests. One of the younger ladies hurried to the kitchen for refreshment. In the meantime, the novelist"s ident.i.ty was revealed to the _chatelaine_. A lively conversation was immediately engaged in, and, when the impromptu Abigail returned with the refreshment, the first words she heard were: "Well, Monsieur Balzac, so you think--" Full of surprise and joy she started, dropped the tray she had in her hands, and everything was broken. "Glory I have known and seen," adds the narrator; "wasn"t that glory?"
It was more. It was power wielded for good or evil, like that of every other great man, be he statesman, or priest, or artist. The conviction of possessing this power caused Balzac to complain with sincere indignation of those who charged him with being an immoral writer.
"The reproach of immorality," he said in his preface to the second edition of _Pere Goriot_, "which has ever been launched at the courageous author, is the last that remains to be made, when nothing else can be urged against a poet. If you are true in your portrayal, if, by dint of working night and day you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the world, the epithet immoral is cast in your face. Socrates was immoral, Jesus Christ was immoral. Both were persecuted in the name of the societies they overthrew or reformed.
When the world wishes to destroy any one, it taxes him with immorality."
This argument is beside the question. It does not settle whether the apologist"s influence upon the men and women of his generation and beyond--an influence which, in his lifetime, was incontestable, and may be deemed potent still, to judge by the extent to which his books are read--was and is good or bad. Balzac"s personality is here only indirectly involved. His individual character might have been better or worse without the conclusion to be drawn being affected. Good men"s influence is not always good, nor bad men"s influence always bad.
Intention may be inoperative, and effect may be involuntary.
Balzac claimed the right to speak of all conduct, to represent all conduct in his fiction; and we shall see, farther on, that he imposed his claim upon those who followed him in literature. But, if he antic.i.p.ated reality--and this is acknowledged--if he led society to imitate his fiction, if his exceptional representations tended, with him and after him, to become general or more frequent in one or another cla.s.s of society, he must be considered morally responsible for the result. It has already been remarked, in the preceding chapter, that there are two ways of reproducing reality in literature and art, one of them favouring, not through didacticism but through emotion, the creation in the mind of a state of healthy feeling, thought, and effort; the other, that sort of fascination with which the serpent attracts its victims. It is certain that Balzac did not adequately take this into account, certain also that in parts of his _Comedy_, the secret, unconscious sympathy of the author with some of his sicklier heroes and heroines could not and did not have that dynamic moral action which he vainly desired.
Of the chief French novelists or _litterateurs_ who were his contemporaries, critics are inclined to esteem his influence most evident on George Sand and Victor Hugo. Brunetiere, indeed, begins with Sainte-Beuve. But the similarities discoverable between the author of _Volupte_ and the author of the _Comedie Humaine_ were present in Sainte-Beuve"s work at a period when Balzac was only just issuing from obscurity, and appear, moreover, to be due to temperament. In the case of George Sand, the inference is based partly on the praise she meted out to Balzac in her reminiscences. Brunetiere specifies the _Marquis de Villemer_ as the one proved example of imitation. But this novel was written in 1861, eleven years after Balzac"s death; and, in so far as it differs from _Mauprat_ and the earlier books, whether _La Pet.i.te Fadette_ or _Consuelo_, can be shown to be the result of a natural and independent evolution.
As regards Victor Hugo, on the contrary, there is plenty of _prima facie_ evidence that he largely utilized Balzac"s material and method; and there is evidence also that Balzac utilized, though in a less degree, the subjects developed by Hugo. The reciprocal borrowing is easy to explain, both men, in spite of their fundamental peculiarities, having much in them that was common--imagination difficult to control, fondness for exaggeration, language p.r.o.ne to be verbose and turgid, research of devices to astonish the reader. Hugo"s _Miserables_ is a monument of his fiction that owes much to Balzacian architecture. The realism of the latter author is converted without difficulty into the former"s romanticism, or, rather, the alloy of romanticism is so considerable in Balzac"s work that there is little conversion to make. Ferragus and Vautrin are prototypes of Valjean, just as Valjean"s Cosette exploited by Madame Thenardier is an adaptation of Ferragus" daughter or Doctor Minoret"s Ursula. The prison manners and slang of the _Miserables_ inevitably recall those of _Vautrin"s Last Incarnation_, while, on the other hand, Hugo"s salon _ultra_ reappears in the _Cabinet of Antiques_. And the a.n.a.logies present themselves continually. One might almost say that the whole of the _Comedie Humaine_ suggested things to its future panegyrist, who wrote his greatest novel in the years consecutive to Balzac"s death. Of course, Hugo"s borrowings, being those of a man of genius, were not made use of servilely. Like Shakespeare and Moliere, the author of the _Miserables_ metamorphosed and enhanced what he took.
Balzac"s major influence on literature began as soon as he was dead.
And the men he reacted on soonest were the dramatists; not through his own plays, which figured so small in his achievement, or, if through them at all, then only as they applied the same principles as his novels. The stage, being ever _en vedette_, is best situated to interpret the signs of the times, and is likewise more open to the solicitations of novelty, more ready to try new methods. A noticeable defect of the French drama, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the p.r.o.nounced artificiality of its characters and plots.
Whatever the kind of play exhibited, the same stereotyped n.o.ble fathers, ingenuous maidens, coquettes, and Lotharios strutted on the boards. Whatever else changed, these did not. Only their costumes differed. Moreover, the adventures in which the _dramatis personae_ displayed themselves contained always the same sort of tricks for bringing about the denouement. Even the language had its own style, outside which nothing was appropriate. All this was cla.s.sicism in its most degenerate form, an art from which original inspiration was banished to the profit of a much inferior species of skill. Be it granted that the drama, more than any other kind of literature, is liable to the encroachment and dominance of such artificiality on account of its foreshortening in perspective. Be it granted, also, that sometimes a new movement will intensify an old habit. The Romanticists, though reformers in other respects, did little or nothing to render the stage more real. Their lyricism, in front of the footlights, needed buskins and frippery, or, at any rate, fostered them, as the pieces of Hugo and de Vigny proved.
The younger Dumas, Emile Augier, Halevy and Becque--with a crescendo that in the last of the four is somewhat harsh--diverged from the traditional path, and in their plays put men and women whose motives and conduct were nearer to the humanity of their audience. The departure from old lines in these dramatists is patent; and, after discounting the part that may have been temperamental or contingent on some other cause, there remains the larger share to attribute to Balzac"s influence. Dumas" _Dame aux Camelias_ originally staged in 1852, was a timid start in the new direction. The theme, that of the courtezan in love, was a favourite one with the cla.s.sical school, and much of the ancient style and tone pervades it; yet its atmosphere is a modern one, the expression of its sentiment is modern too, and the accessories are supplied with an eye to material and moral exact.i.tude.
The same author"s _Question d"Argent_, composed a few years later, was a more direct tribute to the modifying power of the _Comedie Humaine_.
It was Balzac"s _Mercadet the Jobber_ remodelled with a larger stage science. Hypnotized subsequently by the _piece a these_ (and not to his advantage) Dumas went off at a tangent whereas Augier, once engaged in the newer manner with his _Gendre de Monsieur Poirier_, persisted in it with each of his succeeding pieces, flattering his model by resurrection after resurrection of the _Comedy"s_ princ.i.p.al actors, Bixiou and Lousteau in Giboyer and Vernouillet, Balthazar Claes in the Desronceretz of _Maitre Guerin_. Ludovic Halevy apparently wished every one to perceive what he owed to the father of French realism. Finding in the _Petty Bourgeois_ a Madame Cardinal whose comic personality and peculiar moral squint suited one of his plays, he adopted her entirely, name and all, altering only what her more recent surroundings required. Henri Becque digested Balzac rather than imitated him. One feels in reading his _Corbeaux_ that it is a disciple"s own work. The master"s virtues and some of the disciple"s faults are everywhere present, both in the subject and in the treatment. We have the same world of money and business that shows so big throughout the _Comedy_, an unfaithful partner and lawyer introducing ruin into the house of the widow and orphan. The practice of legal ruse and robbery--in these things Balzac had rung the changes again and again. What Becque added were sharpness of contrast, dramatic concentration, bitterer satire, and likewise greater art.
If one may hazard a guess at the reasons that convinced the older school of playwrights of their error, there are two by which they must have been struck--the artistic possibilities of the real suggested by the _Comedie Humaine_, and the prescience--one might say the intuition --it exhibited of things that were destined to reveal themselves more prominently in the latter half of the nineteenth century. And in this respect Balzac in no wise contributed to what he foresaw and, so to speak, prophesied--the growing stress of the struggle for life in domains political, social, financial, industrial, the coming of uncrowned kings greater in puissance than monarchs of yore, the reign of not one despot but many, the generalization of intrigue, the replacement of ancient disorders by others of equal or increased virulence and harder to remedy, hundred-headed hydras to combat, most difficult of herculean tasks. The reflection of all this in the _Comedy_ was calculated to impress at its hour, and the hour arrived.
Men looked at the counterfeit presentment and wondered why no one had recognized these things sooner. From that moment, the reputation of the _Comedie Humaine_ was made. Perhaps, after all, in such connection, the one or two of Balzac"s plays that went so resolutely off the old lines--the _Resources of Quinola_ and _Mercadet_,--may have served, in remembrance, despite their insignificance beside the novels, which were the true drama, to awaken the attention of professional dramatists, especially as one after another story of the _Comedy_ was dramatized. But it was the fund of observation and the leaven of satire which startled, aroused, and ultimately set the stage agog. Not even the lighter forms of composition were left unaffected.
Labiche, in the vaudeville style, with his _Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon_ and _La Cagnotte_, gave his audience, behind his puppets, the touch of present reality, the sensation of existent follies.
The relative slowness with which the novels of Balzac"s younger contemporaries and his successors were penetrated with realism was partly due to the lasting effect of George Sand"s idealistic fiction.
As we have seen, Balzac himself was reacted upon by it to some extent; but he yielded against his will, and the result in his case was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d one. She whom he called his brother George survived him for more than twenty years, and continued to the last to add to her reputation, so that naturally the impetus she lent to the idealistic movement was long before it was spent, if indeed one may say that the impetus has altogether been lost. Adepts like Octave Feuillet, with his _Roman d"un Jeune Homme Pauvre_, and Victor Cherbuliez, with his _Comte Kostia_, endeavoured to perpetuate idealism or at least to recreate it in other forms. And then there were independents, like Flaubert who, with _Madame Bovary_, pa.s.sed realism by on his way to naturalism. Yet it is worth remarking that Flaubert made a sort of _volte face_ in 1869, and wrote his _Education Sentimentale_, in which, under the pressure of simple circ.u.mstance, the hero descends gradually from the soaring of youth"s hopes and ambitions to the dull, dun monotony of mature life, with nothing left him save the iron circle of his environment. Here the disillusionment is that of all Balzac"s chief _dramatis personae_. Moreover, the minor characters of _Madame Bovary_ may well owe something to the _Comedy_. These doctors, chemists, cures, prefectoral councillors and country squires would possibly never have been depicted but for their having already existed for twenty years in the predecessor"s gallery of portraits.
There is no need to call the de Goncourts and Guy de Maupa.s.sant imitators because they bear a strong stamp of Balzac"s influence. They have greater art, a finer style, and, above all, more pathos than the earlier master was capable of. But they are true disciples, as likewise Feuillet in his later manner with _Monsieur de Camors_. De Maupa.s.sant"s short stories, exemplifying his severely objective treatment at his best, are Balzac"s purified of their lingering romanticism, and his _Bel Ami_ is a modernized Lucien de Rubempre.
And, if the resemblances are closer between works of the de Goncourts less known, such as _Charles Demailly_, or _Manette Salomon_ and the _Lost Illusions_, _Peter Gra.s.sou_, the _Muse of the County_, yet the means employed by the two brothers to endow with life and form _Renee Mauperin_ and _Germinie Lacerteux_, fixing a background, stamping the outlines, filling in details, adding particularities, all this was Balzacian method, insufficient forsooth, in the domain of psychology, but furnishing idiosyncrasy in plentiful variations.
When we come to Alphonse Daudet, time enough has elapsed for realism to evolve into naturalism so-called. Naturalism is realism stark-naked --the dissecting-room, and a good deal besides, which Monsieur Zola ill.u.s.trated well but not wisely. Daudet, fortunately for his reputation, was a naturalist _sui generis_, with a delicate artistic perception altogether lacking to the author of the Rougon-Macquart series. He was also an independent, but willing to take lessons in his trade. And how much he learnt from _Cousin Bette_ may be judged by his _Numa Roumestan_ and _Froment Jeune et Rissler aine_. There are close a.n.a.logies also between the best of Balzac"s fiction and the sombre realism of the _Evangeliste_, based on tragic facts that had come under Daudet"s personal notice. Of the two realisms Daudet"s is certainly the more genuine, with its lambent humour that glints on even the saddest of his pictures.
In neither the naturalistic school of fiction, nor the psychological, in so far as the latter is represented by Bourget, has Balzac"s influence been a gain. Bourget has borrowed Balzac"s furniture, his pompous didacticism, his occasional indecency--in fine, all that is least essential in the elder"s a.s.sets, without learning how to breathe objective life into one of his characters. Zola borrowed more, but mainly the unwholesome parts, truncating these further to suit his theory of the novel as a slice of life seen through a temperament, and travestying in the Rougon-Macquart scheme, with its burden of heredity and physiological blemish, Balzac"s c.u.mbrous and plausible doctrine of the _Comedy_. Both novelists made a mistake in arrogating to themselves the role of the _savant_. Neither of them seemed to understand that there are limits imposed on each profession by the mode of its operation. For Zola the novel was not only an observation working upon the voluntary acts of life, it was an experiment--like that of the astrologers whom Moses met in Egypt--producing phenomena artificially, and allowing a law of necessity to be deduced from the result. And for Balzac the novel was something of the same kind--a synthesis of every human activity framed by one who, as he proudly claimed, had observed and a.n.a.lysed society in all its phases from top to bottom, legislations, religions, histories, and present time. What Balzac did in fiction and what he thought he did are separated by a gulf which could only have been bridged over by the long and painful study of a man surviving for centuries. His scientific knowledge was superficial in nearly every branch. It was his divination which was great. And divination is not omniscience.
An offshoot from the naturalistic school apparently, but derived more truly from the _Comedie Humaine_, is that decadent, p.o.r.nographic art, of which Balzac would have been ashamed, had he lived to see the vegetation that grew up from the seeds he had sown without knowing what they would bring forth. In Zola"s novels the plant was already full grown; its earlier appearance as the slender blade was Champfleury"s vulgar satire, the _Bourgeois de Molinchart_. More recently the blossom has revealed its pestilential rankness so plainly that no one can be deceived as to its noxious effect.
Where Balzac"s influence is likeliest to remain potent for good is in the domain of history. He was not altogether an initiator here, having learnt from Walter Scott in the one as in the other capacity; but he developed and focussed what he had received; he added to it, and made it a factor in the historical science. After him historians began to a.s.sign a more important place in their narrations and chronicles to the manners and interests of the people, patiently seeking to a.s.semble and situate everything that could relate them exactly to the great political and other public events which would be nothing but names without them. The de Goncourts, in their _History of French Society during the Revolution and under the Directoire_, applied this method with all the zeal of fresh disciples, and with hardly enough discretion. Taine"s _Origins of Contemporary France_ abdicates none of the older historian"s role, but its background is Balzacian. Among the later writers who have taken up the historian"s pen, Ma.s.son, Lenotre, and Anatole France, ill.u.s.trate the newer principles, each with a difference, but all excellently, the first in his _Napoleon_, the second in his _Old Houses, Old Papers_, the third in his _Joan of Arc_.
It can scarcely be disputed that an entrance of realism into French literature would have occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, had there been no Balzac. Some other novelists or writers, themselves reacted upon by the scientific spirit, would have set the example in their own way, if not with the achievement of the author of the _Comedy_. On the other hand, it is certain that Balzac, had he put his hand to another treatment of fiction, would nevertheless have created a school. His tremendous force would have channelled into the future, whatever the nature of its current. As Sainte-Beuve well says, he wrote what he wrote with his blood and muscles, not merely with his thought, and such work backed by genius was sure to tell, notwithstanding its defects, the latter even to some extent aiding.
Having partly a bibliographic value, and partly confirming the statements above as to Balzac"s influence, the following details concerning theatrical adaptations of some of his novels may serve as a supplement to this chapter.
The first made was produced at the Vaudeville in 1832, and was based on the story of _Colonel Chabert_, which under another t.i.tle, _The Compromise_, had finished as a serial in the March _Artiste_ of the same year. In Balzac"s tale--the one of the novels that contains most real pathos--the Colonel, who is a Count of the Empire, is left for dead on the battlefield of Eylau, with wounds that disfigure him dreadfully. Rescued, and sojourning for a long while in German hospitals, he ultimately returns to France, but only to find his wife, who believes him dead, married to another n.o.bleman. Treated as an imposter by everybody save a former non-commissioned officer of his regiment, he falls into poverty and wretchedness, and dies in a hospice, whilst his wife continues to live rich and honoured. Jacques Arago and Louis Lurine, who composed the play, altered the denouement.
The husband is pensioned off by his wife, who, however, suffers for her hard-heartedness, being afterwards deserted by her second husband.
A second version of the same subject was produced twenty years later at the Beaumarchais Theatre by Faulquemont, and, in 1888, a third at Brussels.
_Eugenie Grandet_ was staged as a comedy, at the Gymnase in 1835, by Bayard and Paulin, who dealt with the plot very freely. Eugenie, happening to lay hold of the letter telling of her uncle"s intention to commit suicide, begs her father to send money enough to Paris to prevent the catastrophe. On her father"s refusing, she steals one of the old man"s strong-boxes and gives it to the son of a local notary, who hurries to the capital with it and reaches there in time to save Charles" father from ruin and death. As Charles has also fled with his uncle"s mare on the same errand, the miser thinks he is the thief, and obtains a warrant for his arrest. But Eugenie avows everything except the name of her accomplice. Explanations occur, now that Guillaume Grandet is saved; Charles comes out of prison and marries Eugenie, whose dowry is the money that has served so good a purpose. With Bouffe in the chief role, the _Miser"s Daughter_, as the piece was called, had a great popularity, and was several times revived.
In 1835 also, was produced _Pere Goriot_ at the Varietes, there being three collaborators in the dramatizing, Theaulon, de Comberousse, and Jaime. Their adaptation possessed the same characters as the novel, but the roles are considerably modified. Victorine Taillefer becomes Goriot"s illegitimate daughter, who is provided for by her father, yet brought up without ever seeing him and without the least inkling of her relationship to him. But Vautrin has discovered that a sum of five hundred thousand francs is deposited on her behalf with a notary; and he goes to Gren.o.ble, where she is living, brings her back with him to Paris, and presents her to Goriot as a poor girl, his intention being to ask her in marriage at the proper moment. The retired tradesman takes her in, and she remains with him when his other daughters marry, and during the time they pa.s.s in ungratefully stripping him of his fortune. At last his sons-in-law, to salve their consciences, offer to place him in an almshouse. Goriot indignantly refuses, and tells them he has another daughter whom he has made rich, and that he will go and live with her. Now is Vautrin"s opportunity. He informs Goriot who Victorine is, and, since she had given her affections to the young Rastignac, he, like a good fellow, renounces his own matrimonial project and a.s.sists the old father in marrying the lovers happily. The part of Goriot was acted by Vernet, who did entire justice to Balzac"s great creation. Simultaneously at the Vaudeville, another and poorer version of the novel was given; and, in 1891, at the Theatre Libre, Tabarand experimented a third piece, this last being a faithful reproduction of the novel. Antoine scored a big success in the part of Goriot, rendering the death-bed scene with remarkable power and skill.
In 1836, _La Grande Breteche_, with its vengeful husband who walls up his wife"s lover alive, tempted Scribe and another playwright, Melesville. In their arrangement, there is a virtuous wife whose husband is a bigamist. On learning the truth, she consents to receive the visit of Lara, an admirer of hers, whom she loves; and, when the Bluebeard, Valdini, surprises his victim and proceeds to the immurement, his first wife slips in most conveniently and whisks him off, leaving Valentine free to marry Lara.
It is curious to notice how, in almost every instance, the first adapting dramatists transformed Balzac"s tragedies into comedies, softening the stern facts of life and its injustices, and meting out the juster rewards and punishments which the novelist"s realism forbade.
In Antony Beraud"s _Gars_, a play drawn from the _Chouans_ and performed at the Ambigu-Comique in 1837, the hero and heroine, instead of dying, are saved by a political amnesty decreed by Napoleon; and the curtain falls to the cry of _Vive l"Empereur_. More than fifty years later, in 1894, the same theatre gave a close rendering of the dramatic portions of the _Chouans_, due to the collaboration of Berton and Blavet, the tragic ending being preserved, with all the effects properly belonging to it.
Commonplace, like the _Gars_, were the arrangements of the _Search for the Absolute_, in 1837, and _Cesar Birotteau_ in 1838. The former was staged under the bizarre t.i.tle, _A+Mx=O+X, or the Dream of a Savant_.
The authors, Bayard and Bieville, concealed their ident.i.ty under an algebraic X as well; and their piece, which made Balthazar Claes a Parisian chemist and a candidate to a vacant chair in the College de France, failed to attract at the Gymnase, in spite of Bouffe"s talent and the redemption of Balthazar.
_Cesar Birotteau_ was performed at the Pantheon Theatre, which was demolished in 1846. The love-story of Popinot and Cesarine, which is so briefly sketched in the novel, a.s.sumed chief importance in Cormon"s adaptation, and, of course, Cesar does not die.