Hours in a Library

Chapter 9

Prev List Next

Pusey gives to the Bible. This still remains distinctly below any genuine a.s.sent; for Balzac never wishes us really to forget, though he occasionally forgets himself, that his most lifelike characters are imaginary. But in certain subordinate topics he seems to make a higher demand on our faith. He is full of more or less fanciful heresies, and labours hard to convince us either that they are true or that he seriously holds them. This is what I mean by mystification, and one fears to draw a line as to which he was probably far from clear himself.

Thus, for example, he is a devout believer in physiognomy, and not only in its obvious sense; he erects it into an occult science. Lavater and Gall, he says, "prove incontestably" that ominous signs exist in our heads. Take, for example, the cha.s.seur Michu, his white face injected with blood and compressed like a Calmuck"s; his ruddy, crisp hair; his beard cut in the shape of a fan; the n.o.ble forehead which surmounts and overhangs his sunburnt, sarcastic features; his ears well detached, and possessing a sort of mobility, like those of a wild animal; his mouth half open, and revealing a set of fine but uneven teeth; his thick and glossy whiskers; his hair, close in front, long on the sides and behind, with its wild, ruddy hue throwing into relief the strange and fatal character of the physiognomy; his short, thick neck, designed to tempt the hatchet of the guillotine: these details, so accurately photographed, not only prove that M. Michu was a resolute, faithful servant, capable of the profoundest secresy and the most disinterested attachment, but for the really skilful reader of mystic symbols foretell his ultimate fate--namely, that he will be the victim of a false accusation. Balzac, however, ventures into still more whimsical extremes. He accepts, in all apparent seriousness, the theory of his favourite, Mr. Shandy, that a man"s name influences his character. Thus, for example, a man called Minoret-Levrault must necessarily be "un elephant sans trompe et sans intelligence," and the occult meaning of Z.

Marcas requires a long and elaborate commentary. Repeat the word Marcas, dwelling on the first syllable, and dropping abruptly on the second, and you will see that the man who bears it must be a martyr. The zigzag of the initial implies a life of torment. What ill wind, he asks, has blown upon this letter, which in no language (Balzac"s acquaintance with German was probably limited) commands more than fifty words? The name is composed of seven letters, and seven is most characteristic of cabalistic numbers. If M. Gozlan"s narrative be authentic, Balzac was right to value this name highly, for he had spent many hours in seeking for it by a systematic perambulation of the streets of Paris. He was rather vexed at the discovery that the Marcas of real life was a tailor.

"He deserved a better fate!" said Balzac pathetically; "but it shall be my business to immortalise him."

Balzac returns to this subject so often and so emphatically that one half believes him to be the victim of his own mystification. Perhaps he was the one genuine disciple of Mr. Shandy and Slawkenbergius, and believed sincerely in the occult influence of names and noses. In more serious matters it is impossible to distinguish the point at which his feigned belief pa.s.ses into real superst.i.tion; he stimulates conviction so elaborately, that his sober opinions shade off imperceptibly into his fanciful dreamings. For a time he was attracted by mesmerism, and in the story of Ursule Mirouet he labours elaborately to infect his readers with a belief in what he calls "magnetism, the favourite science of Jesus, and one of the powers transmitted to the apostles." He a.s.sumes his gravest airs in adducing the cases of Cardan, Swedenborg, and a certain Duke of Montmorency, as though he were a genuine historical inquirer. He almost adopts the tone of a pious missionary in describing how his atheist doctor was led by the revelations of a _clairvoyante_ to study Pascal"s "Pensees" and Bossuet"s sublime "Histoire des Variations," though what those works have to do with mesmerism is rather difficult to see. He relates the mysterious visions caused by the converted doctor after his death, not less minutely, though more artistically, than De Foe described the terrible apparition of Mrs.

Veal, and, it must be confessed, his story ill.u.s.trates with almost equal force the doctrine, too often forgotten by spiritualists, that ghosts should not make themselves too common. When once they begin to mix in general society, they become intolerably prosaic.

The ostentatious belief which is paraded in this instance is turned to more artistic account in the wonderful story of the "Peau de Chagrin."

Balzac there tries as conscientiously as ever to surmount the natural revolt of our minds against the introduction of the supernatural into life. The _peau de chagrin_ is the modern subst.i.tute for the old-fashioned parchment on which contracts were signed with the devil.

M. Valentin, its possessor, is a Faust of the boulevards; but our prejudices are softened by the circ.u.mstance that the _peau de chagrin_ has a false air of scientific authenticity. It is discovered by a gentleman who spends a spare half-hour before committing suicide in an old curiosity shop, which occupies a sort of middle standing-ground between a wizard"s laboratory and the ordinary Wardour Street shop.

There is no question of signing with one"s blood, but simply of accepting a curious substance with the property--rather a startling one, it is true--that its area diminishes in proportion to the amount of wishes gratified, and vanishes with the death of the possessor. The steady flesh-and-blood men of science treat it just as we feel certain that they would do. After smashing a hydraulic press in the attempt to compress it, and exhausting the power of chemical agents, they agree to make a joke of it. It is not so much more wonderful than some of those modern miracles, which leave us to hesitate between the two incredible alternatives that men of science are fallible, or that mankind in general, like Sir Walter Scott"s grandmother, are "awfu" leears." Every effort is made to reduce the strain upon our credulity to that moderate degree of intensity which may fairly be required from the reader of a wild fiction. When the first characteristic wish of the proprietor--namely, that he may be indulged in a frantic orgie--has been gratified without any apparent intervention of the supernatural, we are left just in that proper equilibrium between scepticism and credulity which is the right mental att.i.tude in presence of a marvellous story.

Balzac, it is true, seems rather to flag in continuing his narrative.

The symbolical meaning begins to part company with the facts. Stories of this kind require the congenial atmosphere of an ideal world, and the effort of interpreting such a poetical legend into terms of ordinary life is perhaps too great for the powers of any literary artist. At any rate M. Valentin drops after a time from the level of Faust to become the hero of a rather commonplace Parisian story. The opening scenes, however, are an admirable specimen of the skill by which our irrepressible scepticism may be hindered from intruding into a sphere where it is out of place; or rather--for one can hardly speak of belief in such a connection--of the skill by which the discord between the surroundings of the nineteenth century and a story of grotesque supernaturalism can be converted into a pleasant harmony. A similar effect is produced in one of Balzac"s finest stories, the "Recherche de l"Absolu." Every accessory is provided to induce us, so long as we are under the spell, to regard the discovery of the philosopher"s stone as a reasonable application of human energy. We are never quite clear whether Balthazar Claes is a madman or a commanding genius. We are kept trembling on the verge of a revelation till we become interested in spite of our more sober sense. A single diamond turns up in a crucible which was unluckily produced in the absence of the philosopher, so that he cannot tell what are the necessary conditions of repeating the process. He is supposed to discover the secret just as he is struck by a paralysis, which renders him incapable of revealing it, and dies whilst making desperate efforts to communicate the crowning success to his family. Balzac throws himself into the situation with such energy that we are irresistibly carried away by his enthusiasm. The impossibility ceases to annoy us, and merely serves to give additional dignity to the story.

One other variety of mystification may introduce us to some of Balzac"s most powerful stories. He indulges more frequently than could be wished in downright melodrama, or what is generally called sensational writing.

In the very brilliant sketch of Nathan in "Une Fille d"Eve," he remarks that "the mission of genius is to search, through the accidents of the true, for that which must appear probable to all the world." The common saying, that truth is stranger than fiction, should properly be expressed as an axiom that fiction ought not to be so strange as truth.

A marvellous event is interesting in real life, simply because we know that it happened. In a fiction we know that it did not happen; and therefore it is interesting only as far as it is explained. Anybody can invent a giant or a genius by the simple process of altering figures or piling up superlatives. The artist has to make the existence of the giant or the genius conceivable. Balzac, however, often enough forgets this principle, and treats us to purely preposterous incidents, which are either grotesque or simply childish. The history of the marvellous "Thirteen," for example, that mysterious band which includes statesmen, beggars, men of fortune, and journalists, and goes about committing the most inconceivable crimes without the possibility of discovery, becomes simply ludicrous. Balzac, as usual, labours to reconcile our minds to the absurdity; but the effort is beyond his powers. The amazing disease which he invents for the benefit of the villains in the "Cousine Bette"

can only be accepted as a broad joke. At times, as in the story of the "Grande Breteche," where the lover is bricked up by the husband in the presence of the wife, he reminds us of Edgar Poe"s worst extravagances.

There is, indeed, this much to be said for Balzac in comparison with the more recent school, who have turned to account all the most refined methods of breaking the ten commandments and the criminal code; the fault of the so-called sensation writer is, not that he deals in murder, bigamy, or adultery--every great writer likes to use powerful situations--but that he relies upon our interest in startling crimes to distract our attention from feebly-drawn characters and conventional details. Balzac does not often fall into that weakness. If his criminals are frequently of the most outrageous kind, and indulge even in practices unmentionable, the crime is intended at least to be of secondary interest. He tries to fix our attention on the pa.s.sions by which they are caused, and to attract us chiefly by the legitimate method of a.n.a.lysing human nature--even, it must be confessed, in some of its most abnormal manifestations. Macbeth is not interesting because he commits half-a-dozen murders; but the murders are interesting because they are committed by Macbeth. We may generally say as much for Balzac"s villains; and it is the only justification for a free use of blood and brutality. In applying these remarks, we come to the real secret of Balzac"s power, which will demand a fuller consideration.

It is common to say of all great novelists, and of Balzac in particular, that they display a wonderful "knowledge of the human heart." The chief objection to the phrase is that such knowledge does not exist. n.o.body has as yet found his way through the complexities of that intricate machine, and described the springs and balances by which its movement is originated and controlled. Men of vivid imagination are in some respects less competent for such a work than their neighbours. They have not the cool, hard, and steady hand required for psychological dissection.

Balzac gave a queer specimen of his own incapacity in an attempt to investigate the true history of a real murder, celebrated in its day, and supposed by everybody but Balzac to have been committed by one Peytel, who was put to death in spite of his pleading. His skill in devising motives for imaginary atrocities was a positive disqualification for dealing with facts and legal evidence. The greatest poet or novelist describes only one person, and that is himself; and he differs from his inferiors, not necessarily in having a more systematic knowledge, but in having wider sympathies, and so to speak, possessing a great number of characters. Cervantes was at once Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Shakespeare was Hamlet and Mercutio and Oth.e.l.lo and Falstaff; Scott was at once Dandie Dinmont and the Antiquary and the Master of Ravenswood; and Balzac embodies his different phases of feeling in Eugenie Grandet and Vautrin and the Pere Goriot. The a.s.sertion that he knew the human heart must be interpreted to mean that he could sympathise with, and give expression to, a wide range of human pa.s.sions; as his supposed knowledge of the world implies merely that he was deeply impressed by certain phenomena of the social medium in which he was placed. n.o.body, I should be inclined to think, would have given a more unsound judgment than Balzac as to the characters of the men whom he met, or formed a less trustworthy estimate of the real condition of society. He was totally incapable of stripping the bare facts given by observation of the colouring which they received from his own idiosyncrasy. But n.o.body, within certain points, could express more vividly in outward symbols the effect produced upon keen sympathies and a powerful imagination by the aspect of the world around him.

The characteristic peculiarities of Balzac"s novels may be described as the intensity with which he expresses certain motives, and the vigour with which he portrays the real or imaginary corruption of society. Upon one particular situation, or cla.s.s of situations, favourable to this peculiar power, he is never tired of dwelling. He repeats himself indeed, in a certain sense, as a man must necessarily repeat himself who writes eighty-five stories, besides doing other work, in less than twenty years. In this voluminous outpouring of matter the machinery is varied with wonderful fertility of invention, but one sentiment recurs very frequently. The great majority of Balzac"s novels, including all the most powerful examples, may thus be described as variations on a single theme. Each of them is in fact the record of a martyrdom. There is always a virtuous hero or heroine who is tortured, and most frequently, tortured to death, by a combination of selfish intrigues.

The commonest case is, of course, that which has become the staple plot of French novelists, where the interesting young woman is sacrificed to the brutality of a dull husband: that, for example, is the story of the "Femme de Trente Ans," of "Le Lys dans la Vallee," and of several minor performances; then we have the daughter sacrificed to the avaricious father, as in "Eugenie Grandet;" the woman sacrificed to the imperious lover in the "d.u.c.h.esse de Langeais;" the immoral beauty sacrificed to the ambition of her lover in the "Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes;" the mother sacrificed to the dissolute son in the "Menage de Garcon;" the woman of political ambition sacrificed to the contemptible intriguers opposed to her in "Les Employes;" and, indeed, in one way or other, as subordinate character or as heroine, this figure of a graceful feminine victim comes into nearly every novel. Virtuous heroes fare little better. Poor Colonel Chabert is disowned and driven to beggary by the wife who has committed bigamy; the luckless cure, Birotteau, is cheated out of his prospects and doomed to a broken heart by the successful villainy of a rival priest and his accomplices; the Comte de Manerville is ruined and transported by his wife and his detestable mother-in-law; Pere Goriot is left to starvation by his daughters; the Marquis d"Espard is all but condemned as a lunatic by the manoeuvres of his wife; the faithful servant Michu comes to the guillotine; the devoted notary Chesnel is beggared in the effort to save his scape-grace of a master; Michaud, another devoted adherent, is murdered with perfect success by the brutal peasantry, and his wife dies of the news; Balthazar Claes is the victim of his devotion to science; and Z. Marcas dies unknown and in the depths of misery as a reward for trying to be a second Colbert. The old-fashioned canons of poetical justice are inverted; and the villains are dismissed to live very happily ever afterwards, whilst the virtuous are slain outright or sentenced to a death by slow torture. Thackeray, in one or two of his minor stories, has touched the same note. The history of Mr. Deuceace, and especially its catastrophe, is much in Balzac"s style; but, as a rule, our English novelists shrink from anything so unpleasant.

Perhaps the most striking example of this method is the "Pere Goriot."

The general situation may be described in two words, by saying that Goriot is the modern King Lear. Mesdames de Restaud and de Nucingen are the representatives of Regan and Goneril; but the Parisian Lear is not allowed the consolation of a Cordelia; the cup of misery is measured out to him drop by drop, and the bitterness of each dose is a.n.a.lysed with chemical accuracy. We watch the poor old broken-down merchant, who has impoverished himself to provide his daughters" dowries, and has gradually stripped himself, first of comfort, and then of the necessaries of life to satisfy the demands of their folly and luxury, as we might watch a man clinging to the edge of a cliff and gradually dropping lower and lower, catching feebly at every point of support till his strength is exhausted, and the inevitable catastrophe follows. The daughters, allowed to retain some fragments of good feeling and not quite irredeemably hateful, are gradually yielding to the demoralising influence of a heartless vanity. They yield, it is true, pretty completely at last; but their wickedness seems to reveal the influence of a vague but omnipotent power of evil in the background. There is not a more characteristic scene in Balzac than that in which Rastignac, the lover of Madame de Nucingen, overhears the conversation between the father in his wretched garret and the modern Goneril and Regan. A gleam of good fortune has just encouraged old Goriot to antic.i.p.ate an escape from his troubles. On the morning of the day of expected release Madame Goneril de Nucingen rushes up to her father"s garret to explain to him that her husband, the rich banker, having engaged all his funds in some diabolical financial intrigues, refuses to allow her the use of her fortune; whilst, owing to her own misconduct, she is afraid to appeal to the law. They have a hideous tacit compact, according to which the wife enjoys full domestic liberty, whilst the husband may use her fortune to carry out his dishonest plots. She begs her father to examine the facts in the light of his financial experience, though the examination must be deferred, that she may not look ill with the excitement when she meets her lover at the ball. As the poor father is tormenting his brains, Madame Regan de Restaud appears in terrible distress. Her lover has threatened to commit suicide unless he can meet a certain bill, and to save him she has pledged certain diamonds which were heirlooms in her husband"s family. Her husband has discovered the whole transaction, and, though not making an open scandal, imposes some severe conditions upon her future. Old Goriot is raving against the brutality of her husband, when Regan adds that there is still a sum to be paid, without which her lover, to whom she has sacrificed everything, will be ruined.

Now old Goriot had employed just this sum--all but the very last fragment of his fortune--in the service of Goneril. A desperate quarrel instantly takes place between the two fine ladies over this last sc.r.a.p of their father"s property. They are fast degenerating into Parisian Billingsgate, when Goriot succeeds in obtaining silence and proposes to strip himself of his last penny. Even the sisters hesitate at such an impiety, and Rastignac enters with some apology for listening, and hands over to the countess a certain bill of exchange for a sum which he professes himself to owe to Goriot, and which will just save her lover.

She accepts the paper, but vehemently denounces her sister for having, as she supposes, allowed Rastignac to listen to their hideous revelations, and retires in a fury, whilst the father faints away. He recovers to express his forgiveness, and at this moment the countess returns, ostensibly to throw herself on her knees and beg her father"s pardon. She apologises to her sister, and a general reconciliation takes place. But before she has again left the room she has obtained her father"s endors.e.m.e.nt to Rastignac"s bill. Even her most genuine fury had left coolness enough for calculation, and her burst of apparent tenderness was a skilful bit of comedy for squeezing one more drop of blood from her father and victim. That is a genuine stroke of Balzac.

Hideous as the performance appears when coolly stated, it must be admitted that the ladies have got into such terrible perplexities from tampering with the seventh commandment, that there is some excuse for their breaking the fifth. Whether such an acc.u.mulation of horrors is a legitimate process in art, and whether a healthy imagination would like to dwell upon such loathsome social sores, is another question. The comparison suggested with "King Lear" may ill.u.s.trate the point. In Balzac all the subordinate details which Shakespeare throws in with a very slovenly touch are elaborately drawn, and contribute powerfully to the total impression. On the other hand, we never reach the lofty poetical heights of the grandest scenes in "King Lear." But the situation of the two heroes offers an instructive contrast. Lear is weak, but is never contemptible; he is the ruin of a gallant old king, is guilty of no degrading compliance, and dies like a man, with his "good biting falchion" still grasped in his feeble hand. To change him into Goriot we must suppose that he had licked the hand which struck him, that he had helped on the adulterous intrigues of Goneril and Regan from sheer weakness, and that all his fury had been directed against Cornwall and Albany for objecting to his daughters" eccentric views of the obligation of the marriage vow. Paternal affection leading a man to the most trying self-sacrifice is a worthy motive for a great drama or romance; but Balzac is so anxious to intensify the emotion, that he makes even paternal affection morally degrading. Everything must be done to heighten the colouring. Our sympathies are to be excited by making the sacrifice as complete, and the emotion which prompts it as overpowering, as possible; until at last the love of children becomes a monomania. Goriot is not only dragged through the mud of Paris, but he grovels in it with a will. In short, Balzac wants that highest power which shows itself by moderation, and commits a fault like that of an orator who emphasizes every sentence. With less expenditure of horrors, he would excite our compa.s.sion more powerfully. But after all, Goriot is, perhaps, more really affecting even than King Lear.

Situations of the "Pere Goriot" kind are, in some sense, more appropriate for heroines than for heroes. Self-sacrifice is, for the present at least, considered by a large part of mankind as the complete duty of woman. The feminine martyr can indulge without loss of our esteem in compliances which would be degrading in a man. Accordingly Balzac finds the amplest materials for his favourite situation in the torture of innocent women. The great example of his skill in this department is Eugenie Grandet, in which the situation of the Pere Goriot is inverted. Poor Eugenie is the victim of a domestic tyrant, who is, perhaps, Balzac"s most finished portrait of the cold-blooded and cunning miser. The sacrifice of a woman"s life to paternal despotism is unfortunately even commoner in real life than in fiction; and when the lover, from whom the old miser has divided her during his life, deserts her after his death, we feel that the mournful catastrophe is demanded by the sombre prologue. The book may indeed justify, to some extent, one of the ordinary criticisms upon Balzac, that he showed a special subtlety in describing the sufferings of women. The question as to the general propriety of that criticism is rather difficult for a male critic. I confess to a certain scepticism, founded partly on the general principle that hardly any author can really describe the opposite s.e.x, and partly on an antipathy which I cannot repress to Balzac"s most ambitious feminine portraits.

Eugenie Grandet is perhaps the purest of his women; but then Eugenie Grandet is simply stupid, and interesting from her sufferings rather than her character. She reminds us of some patient animal of the agricultural kind, with bovine softness of eyes and bovine obstinacy under suffering. His other women, though they are not simply courtesans, after the fashion of some French writers, seem, as it were, to have a certain perceptible taint; they breathe an unwholesome atmosphere. In one of his extravagant humours, he tells us that the most perfect picture of purity in existence is the Madonna of the Genoese painter, Piola, but that even that celestial Madonna would have looked like a Messalina by the side of the d.u.c.h.esse de Manfrigneuse. If the d.u.c.h.ess resembled either personage in character, it was certainly not the Madonna. And Balzac"s best women give us the impression that they are courtesans acting the character of virgins, and showing admirable dramatic skill in the performance. They may keep up the part so obstinately as to let the acting become earnest; but even when they don"t think of breaking the seventh commandment, they are always thinking about not breaking it. When he has done his best to describe a thoroughly pure woman, such as Henrietta in the "Lys dans la Vallee," he cannot refrain from spoiling his performance by throwing in a hint at the conclusion that, after all, she had a strong disposition to go wrong, which was only defeated by circ.u.mstances. Indeed, the ladies who in his pages have broken loose from all social restraints, differ only in external circ.u.mstances from their more correct sisters. Coralie, in the "Illusions Perdues," is not so chaste in her conduct as the immaculate Henriette, but is not a whit less delicate in her tastes.

Madame de la Baudraye deserts her husband, and lives for some years with her disreputable lover at Paris, and does not in the least forfeit the sympathies of her creator. Balzac"s feminine types may be cla.s.sified pretty easily. At bottom they are all of the sultana variety--playthings who occasionally venture into mixing with the serious affairs of life, but then only on pain of being ridiculous (as in the "Employes," or the "Muse du Departement"); but properly confined to their drawing-rooms, with delicate cajoleries for their policy, and cunning instead of intellect. Sometimes they are cold-hearted and selfish, and then they are vicious, making victims of lovers, husbands, or fathers, consuming fortunes, and spreading ill-will by cunning intrigues; sometimes they are virtuous, and therefore according to Balzac"s logic, pitiable victims of the world. But their virtue, when it exists, is the effect, not of lofty principle, but of a certain delicacy of taste corresponding to a fine organisation. They object to vice, because it is apt to be coa.r.s.e; and are perfectly ready to yield, if it can be presented in such graceful forms as not to shock their sensibilities. Marriage is therefore a complicated intrigue in which one party is always deceived, though it may be for his or her good. If you will be loved, says the judicious lady in the "Memoires de Deux Jeunes Mariees," the secret is not to love; and the rather flimsy epigram is converted into a great moral truth. The justification of the lady is, that love is only made permanent by elaborate intrigue. The wife is to be always on the footing of a mistress who can only preserve her lover by incessant and infinitely varied caresses. To do this, she must be herself cool. The great enemy of matrimonial happiness is satiety, and we are constantly presented with an affectionate wife boring her husband to death, and alienating him by over-devotion. If one party is to be cheated, the one who is freest from pa.s.sion will be the winner of the game. As a maxim, after the fashion of Rochefoucauld, this doctrine may have enough truth to be plausible; but when seriously accepted and made the substantive moral of a succession of stories, one is reminded less of a really acute observer than of a lad fresh from college who thinks that wisdom consists in an exaggerated cynicism. When ladies of this variety break their hearts, they either die or retire in a picturesque manner to a convent. They are indeed the raw material of which the genuine _devote_ is made. The morbid sentimentality directed to the lover pa.s.ses without perceptible shock into a religious sentimentality, the object of which is at least ostensibly different. The graceful but voluptuous mistress of the Parisian salon is developed without any violent transition into the equally graceful and ascetic nun. The connection between the luxurious indulgence of material flirtations and religious mysticism is curious, but unmistakable.

Balzac"s reputation in this respect is founded, not on his little h.o.a.rd of cynical maxims, which, to say the truth, are not usually very original, but on the vivid power of describing the details and scenery of the martyrdom, and the energy with which he paints the emotion, of the victim. Whether his women are very lifelike, or very varied in character, may be doubted; but he has certainly endowed them with an admirable capacity for suffering, and forces us to listen sympathetically to their cries of anguish. The peculiar cynicism implied in this view of feminine existence must be taken as part of his fundamental theory of society. When Rastignac has seen Goriot buried, the ceremony being attended only by his daughters" empty carriages, he climbs to the highest part of the cemetery, and looks over Paris. As he contemplates the vast buzzing hive, he exclaims solemnly, "a nous deux maintenant!" The world is before him; he is to fight his way in future without remorse. Accordingly, Balzac"s view of society is, that it is a masquerade of devils, engaged in tormenting a few wandering angels. That society is not what Balzac represents it to be is sufficiently proved by the fact that society exists; as indeed he is profoundly convinced that its destruction is only a question of time. It is rotten to the core.

l.u.s.t and avarice are the moving forms of the world, while profound and calculating selfishness has sapped the base of all morality. The type of a successful statesman is De Marsay, a kind of imaginary Talleyrand, who rules because he has recognised the intrinsic baseness of mankind, and has no scruples in turning it to account. Vautrin, who is an open enemy of society, is simply De Marsay in revolt. The weapons with which he fights are distinguished from those of greater men, not in their intrinsic wickedness, but in their being accidentally forbidden by law.

He is less of a hypocrite, and scarcely a greater villain than his more prosperous rivals. He ultimately recognises the futility of the strife, agrees to wear a mask like his neighbours, and accepts the congenial duties of a police agent. The secret of success in all ranks of life is to be without scruples of morality, but exceedingly careful of breaking the law. The bankers, Nucingen and Du Tillet, are merely cheats on a gigantic scale. They ruin their enemies by financiering instead of picking pockets. Be wicked if you would be successful; if possible let your wickedness be refined; but, at all events, be wicked.

There is, indeed, a cla.s.s of unsuccessful villains, to be found chiefly amongst journalists, for whom Balzac has a special aversion; they live, he tells us, partly on extortion, and partly on the prost.i.tution of their talents to gratify political or personal animosities, and are at the mercy of the longest purse. They fail in life, not because they are too immoral, but because they are too weak. They are the victims instead of the accomplices of more resolute evil-doers. Lucien de Rubempre is the type of this cla.s.s. Endowed with surpa.s.sing genius and personal beauty, he goes to Paris to make his fortune, and is introduced to the world as it is. On the one hand is a little knot of virtuous men, called the _cenacle_, who are working for posterity and meanwhile starving. On the other is a vast ma.s.s of cheats and dupes. After a brief struggle Lucien yields to temptation, and joins in the struggle for wealth and power. But he has not strength enough to play his part. His head is turned by the flattery of pretty actresses and scheming publishers: he is enticed into thoughtless dissipation, and, after a brilliant start, finds that he is at the mercy of the cleverer villains who surround him; that he has been bought and sold like a sheep; that his character is gone, and his imagination become sluggish; and, finally, he has to escape from utter ruin by scarcely describable degradation. He writes a libel on one of his virtuous friends, who is forgiving enough to improve it and correct it for the press. In order to bury his mistress, who has been ruined with him, he has to raise money by grovelling in the foulest depths of literary sewerage. He at last succeeds in crawling back to his relations in the country, morally and materially ruined. He makes another effort to rise, backed up by the diabolical arts of Vautrin, and relying rather on his beauty than his talents. The world is again too strong for him, and, after being accomplice in the most outrageous crimes, he ends appropriately by hanging himself in prison. Vautrin, as we have seen, escapes from the fate of his partner because he retains coolness enough to practise upon the vices of the governing cla.s.ses.

The world, in short, is composed of three cla.s.ses--consistent and, therefore, successful villains; inconsistent and, therefore, unsuccessful villains; and virtuous persons, who never have a chance of success, and enjoy the honours of starvation.

The provinces differ from Paris in the nature of the social warfare, but not in its morality. Pa.s.sions are directed to meaner objects; they are narrower, and more intense. The whole of a man"s faculties are concentrated upon one object; and he pursues it for years with relentless and undeviating ardour. To supplant a rival, to acquire a few more acres, to gratify jealousy of a superior, he will labour for a lifetime. The intensity of his hatred supplies his want of intellect; he is more cunning, if less far-sighted; and in the contest between the brilliant Parisian and the plodding provincial we generally have an ill.u.s.tration of the hare and the tortoise. The blind, persistent hatred gets the better in the long run of the more brilliant, but more transitory, pa.s.sion. The lower nature here, too, gets the better of the higher; and Balzac characteristically delights in the tragedy produced by genius which falls before cunning, as virtue almost invariably yields to vice. It is only when the slow provincial obstinacy happens to be on the side of virtue that stupidity, doubled with virtue, as embodied for example in two or three French Caleb Balderstons, generally gets the worst of it. There are exceptions to this general rule. Even Balzac sometimes relents. A reprieve is granted at the last moment, and the martyr is unbound from the stake. But those catastrophes are not only exceptional, but rather annoying. We have been so prepared to look for a sacrifice that we are disappointed instead of relieved. If Balzac"s readers could be consulted during the last few pages of a novel, I feel sure that most thumbs would be turned upwards, and the lions allowed to have their will of the Christians. Perhaps our appet.i.tes have been depraved; but we are not in the cue for a happy conclusion.

I know not whether it was the cause or the consequence of this sentiment that Balzac was a thorough legitimist. He does not believe in the vitality of the old order, any more than he believes in the truth of Catholicism. But he regrets the extinction of the ancient faiths, which he admits to be unsuitable; and sees in their representatives the only picturesque and really estimable elements that still survived in French society. He heartily despises the modern mediaevalists, who try to spread a thin varnish over a decaying order; the world is too far gone in wickedness for such a futile remedy. The old chivalrous sentiments of the genuine n.o.blesse are giving way to the base chicanery of the bourgeois who supplant them: the peasantry are mean, avaricious, and full of bitter jealousy; but they are triumphantly rooting out the last vestiges of feudalism. Democracy and communism are the fine names put forward to justify the enmity of those who have not, against those who have. Their success means merely an approaching "descent of Niagara,"

and the growth of a more debasing and more materialist form of despotism. But it would be a mistake to a.s.sume that this view of the world implies that Balzac is in a state of lofty moral indignation.

Nothing can be further from the case. The world is wicked; but it is fascinating. Society is very corrupt, it is true; but intensely and permanently amusing. Paris is a h.e.l.l; but h.e.l.l is the only place worth living in. The play of evil pa.s.sions gives infinite subjects for dramatic interests. The financial warfare is more diabolical than the old literal warfare, but quite as entertaining. There is really as much romance connected with bills of exchange as with swords and lances, and rigging the market is nothing but the modern form of lying in ambush.

Goneril and Regan are triumphant; but we may admire the grace of their manners and the dexterity with which they cloak their vices. Iago not only poisons Oth.e.l.lo"s peace of mind, but, in the world of Balzac, he succeeds to Oth.e.l.lo"s place, and is universally respected. The story receives an additional flavour. In a characteristic pa.s.sage, Balzac regrets that Moliere did not continue "Tartufe." It would then have appeared how bitterly Orgon regretted the loss of the hypocrite, who, it is said, made love to his wife, but who, at any rate, had an interest in making things pleasant. Your conventional catastrophe is a mistake in art, as it is a misrepresentation of facts. Tartufe has a good time of it in Balzac: instead of meeting with an appropriate punishment, he flourishes and thrives, and we look on with a smile not altogether devoid of complacency. Shall we not take the world as it is, and be amused at the "Comedie Humaine," rather than fruitlessly rage against it? It will be played out whether we like it or not, and we may as well adapt our tastes to our circ.u.mstances.

Ought we to be shocked at this extravagant cynicism; to quote it, as respectable English journalists used to do, as a proof of the awful corruption of French society, or to regard it as semi-humorous exaggeration? I can"t quite sympathise with people who take Balzac seriously. I cannot talk about the remorseless skill with which he tears off the mask from the fearful corruptions of modern society, and penetrates into the most hidden motives of the human heart; nor can I infer from his terrible pictures of feminine suffering that for every one of those pictures a woman"s heart had been tortured to death. This, or something like this, I have read; and I can only say that I don"t believe a word of it. Balzac, indeed, as compared with our respectable romancers, has the merit of admitting pa.s.sions whose existence we scrupulously ignore; and the further merit that he takes a far wider range of sentiment, and does not hold by the theory that the life of a man or a woman closes at the conventional end of a third volume. But he is above all things a dreamer, and his dreams resemble nightmares.

Powerfully as his actors are put upon the stage, they seem to me to be, after all, "such stuff as dreams are made of." A genuine observer of life does not find it so highly spiced, and draws more moderate conclusions. Balzac"s characters run into typical examples of particular pa.s.sions rather than genuine human beings; they are generally monomaniacs. Balthazar Claes, who gives up his life to search for the philosopher"s stone, is closely related to them all; only we must subst.i.tute for the philosopher"s stone some pet pa.s.sion, in which the whole nature is absorbed. They have the unnatural strain of mind which marks the approach to madness. It is not ordinary daylight which illuminates Balzac"s dreamland, but some fantastic combination of Parisian lamps, which tinges all the actors with an unearthly glare, and distorts their features into extravagant forms. The result has, as I have said, a strange fascination; but one is half-ashamed of yielding, because one feels that it is due to the use of rather unholy drugs. The vapours that rise from his magic caldron and shape themselves into human forms smell unpleasantly of sulphur, or perhaps of Parisian sewers.

The highest poetry, like the n.o.blest morality, is the product of a thoroughly healthy mind. A diseased tendency in one respect is certain to make itself manifest in the other. Now Balzac, though he shows some powers which are unsurpa.s.sed or unequalled, possessed a mind which, to put it gently, was not exactly well regulated. He took a pleasure in dwelling upon horrors from which a healthy imagination shrinks, and rejoiced greatly in gloating over the mysteries of iniquity. I do not say that this makes his work immoral in the ordinary sense. Probably few people who are likely to read Balzac would be any the worse for the study. But, from a purely artistic point of view, he is injured by his morbid tendencies. The highest triumph of style is to say what everybody has been thinking in such a way as to make it new; the greatest triumph of art is to make us see the poetical side of the commonplace life around us. Balzac"s ambition was, doubtless, aimed in that direction. He wished to show that life in Paris or at Tours was as interesting to the man of real insight as any more ideal region. In a certain sense, he has accomplished his purpose. He has discovered food for a dark and powerful imagination in the most commonplace details of daily life. But he falls short in so far as he is unable to represent things as they are, and has a taste for impossible horrors. There are tragedies enough all round us for him who has eyes to see. Balzac is not content with the materials at hand, or rather he has a love for the more exceptional and hideous manifestations. Therefore the "Comedie Humaine," instead of being an accurate picture of human life, and appealing to the sympathies of all human beings, is a collection of monstrosities, whose vices are unnatural, and whose virtues are rather like their vices. One feels that there is something narrow and artificial about his work. It is intensely powerful, but it is not the highest kind of power. He makes the utmost of the gossip of a club smoking-room, or the scandal of a drawing-room, or perhaps of a country public-house; but he represents a special phase of manners, and that not a particularly pleasant one, rather than the more fundamental and permanent sentiments of mankind. When shall we see a writer who can be powerful without being spasmodic, and pierce through the surface of society without seeking for interest in its foulest abysses?

_DE QUINCEY_

Little more than fourteen years ago there pa.s.sed from among us a man who held a high and very peculiar position in English literature. In 1821 De Quincey first published the work with which his name is most commonly a.s.sociated, and at uncertain intervals he gave tokens to mankind of his continued presence on earth. What his life may have been in the intervals seems to have been at times unknown even to his friends. He began by disappearing from school and from his family, and seems to have fallen into the habit of temporary eclipses. At one moment he dropped upon his acquaintance from the clouds; at another he would vanish into utter darkness for weeks or months together. One day he came to dine with Christopher North--so we are told in the professor"s life--was detained for the night by a heavy storm of rain, and prolonged his impromptu visit for a year. During that period his habits must have been rather amazing to a well-regulated household. His wants, indeed, were simple, and, in one sense, regular; a particular joint of mutton, cut according to a certain mathematical formula, and an ounce of laudanum, made him happy for a day. But in the hours when ordinary beings are awake he was generally to be found stretched in profound opium-slumbers upon a rug before the fire, and it was only about two or three in the morning that he gave unequivocal symptoms of vitality, and suddenly gushed forth in streams of wondrous eloquence to the supper parties detained for the purpose of witnessing the display. Between these irregular apparitions we are lastly given to understand that his life was so strange that its details would be incredible. What these incredible details may have been, I have no means of knowing. It is enough that he was a strange unsubstantial being, flitting uncertainly about in the twilight regions of society, emerging by fits and starts into visibility, afflicted with a general vagueness as to the ordinary duties of mankind, and generally taking much more opium than was good for him. He tells us, indeed, that he broke off his over-mastering habit by vigorous efforts; as he also tells us that opium is a cure for most grievous evils, and especially saved him from an early death by consumption. It is plain enough, however, that he never really refrained for any length of time; and perhaps we should congratulate ourselves on a propensity, unfortunate it may be, for its victim, but leading to the Confessions as one collateral result.

The life of De Quincey by "H. A. Page," published since this was written, has removed much of the mystery; and it has also done much to raise in some respects our estimate of his character. With all his weaknesses De Quincey undoubtedly was a man who could excite love as well as pity. Incapable, to a grotesque degree, of anything like business, he did his best to discharge domestic duties: he had a punctilious sense of honour, and got himself into difficulties by a generosity which was certainly not corrected by the virtue of prudence.

But I will not attempt to sum up the facts, for which, as for a higher estimate than I can subscribe of his intellectual position, I gladly refer to his biography. I have only to do with the De Quincey of books which have a singular fascination. De Quincey himself gives thanks for four circ.u.mstances. He rejoices that his lot was cast in a rustic solitude; that that solitude was in England: that his "infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters," instead of "horrid pugilistic brothers;" and that he and his were members of "a pure, holy, and" (the last epithet should be emphasized) "magnificent Church." The thanksgiving is characteristic, for it indicates his nave conviction that his admiration was due to the intrinsic merits of the place and circ.u.mstances of his birth, and not to the accident that they were his own. It would be useless to inquire whether a more bracing atmosphere and a less retired spot might have been more favourable to his talents; but we may trace the influence of these conditions of his early life upon his subsequent career.

De Quincey implicitly puts forward a claim which has been accepted by all competent critics. They declare, and he tacitly a.s.sumes, that he is a master of the English language. He claims a sort of infallibility in deciding upon the precise use of words and the merits of various styles.

But he explicitly claims something more. He declares that he has used language for purposes to which it has hardly been applied by any prose writers. The "Confessions of an Opium-eater" and the "Suspiria de Profundis" are, he tells us, "modes of impa.s.sioned prose, ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature." The only confessions that have previously made any great impression upon the world are those of St. Augustine and of Rousseau; but, with one short exception in St. Augustine, neither of those compositions contains any pa.s.sion, and, therefore, De Quincey stands absolutely alone as the inventor and sole performer on a new musical instrument--for such an instrument is the English language in his hands. He belongs to a genus in which he is the only individual. The novelty and the difficulty of the task must be his apology if he fails, and causes of additional glory if he succeeds. He alone of all human beings who have written since the world began, has entered a path, which the absence of rivals proves to be enc.u.mbered with some unusual obstacles. The accuracy and value of so bold a claim require a short examination. After all, every writer, however obscure, may contrive by a judicious definition to put himself into a solitary cla.s.s. He has some peculiarities which distinguish him from all other mortals. He is the only journalist who writes at a given epoch from a particular garret in Grub Street, or the only poet who is exactly six feet high and measures precisely forty-two inches round the chest. Any difference whatever may be applied to purposes of cla.s.sification, and the question is whether the difference is, or is not, of much importance. By examining, therefore, the propriety of De Quincey"s view of his own place in literature, we shall be naturally led to some valuation of his distinctive merits. In deciding whether a bat should be cla.s.sed with birds or beasts, we have to determine the nature of the beast and the true theory of his wings. And De Quincey, if the comparison be not too quaint, is like the bat, an ambiguous character, rising on the wings of prose to the borders of the true poetical region.

De Quincey, then, announces himself as an impa.s.sioned writer, as a writer in impa.s.sioned prose, and, finally, as applying impa.s.sioned prose to confessions. The first question suggested by this a.s.sertion concerns the sense of the word "impa.s.sioned." There is very little of what one ordinarily means by pa.s.sion in the Confessions or elsewhere. There are no explosions of political wrath, such as animate the "Letters on a Regicide Peace," or of a deep religious emotion, which breathes through many of our greatest prose writers. The language is undoubtedly a vehicle for sentiments of a certain kind, but hardly of that burning and impetuous order which we generally indicate by impa.s.sioned. It is deep, melancholy reverie, not concentrated essence of emotion; and the epithet fails to indicate any specific difference between himself and many other writers. The real peculiarity is not in the pa.s.sion expressed, but in the mode of expressing it. De Quincey resembles the story-tellers mentioned by some Eastern travellers. So extraordinary is their power of face, and so skilfully modulated are the inflections of their voices, that even a European, ignorant of the language, can follow the narrative with absorbing interest. One may fancy that if De Quincey"s language were emptied of all meaning whatever, the mere sound of the words would move us, as the lovely word Mesopotamia moved Whitefield"s hearer. The sentences are so delicately balanced, and so skilfully constructed, that his finer pa.s.sages fix themselves in the memory without the aid of metre. Humbler writers are content if they can get through a single phrase without producing a decided jar. They aim at keeping up a steady jog-trot, which shall not give actual pain to the jaws of the reader.

They no more think of weaving whole paragraphs or chapters into complex harmonies, than an ordinary pedestrian of "going to church in a galliard and coming home in a coranto." Even our great writers generally settle down to a stately but monotonous gait, after the fashion of Johnson or Gibbon, or are content with adopting a style as transparent and inconspicuous as possible. Language, according to the common phrase, is the dress of thought; and that dress is the best, according to modern canons of taste, which attracts least attention from its wearer. De Quincey scorns this sneaking maxim of prudence, and boldly challenges our admiration by indulgence in what he often calls "bravura." His language deserves a commendation sometimes bestowed by ladies upon rich garments, that it is capable of standing up by itself. The form is so admirable that, for purposes of criticism, we must consider it as something apart from the substance. The most exquisite pa.s.sages in De Quincey"s writings are all more or less attempts to carry out the idea expressed in the t.i.tle of the dream fugue. They are intended to be musical compositions, in which words have to play the part of notes.

They are impa.s.sioned, not in the sense of expressing any definite sentiment, but because, from the structure and combination of the sentences, they harmonise with certain phases of emotion.

Briefly, De Quincey is doing in prose what every great poet does in verse. The specific mark thus indicated is still insufficient to give him a solitary position among writers. All great rhetoricians, as De Quincey defines and explains the term, rise to the borders of poetry, and the art which has recently been cultivated among us under the name of word-painting may be more fitly described as an attempt to produce poetical effects without the aid of metre. From most of the writers described under this rather unpleasant phrase he differs by the circ.u.mstance, that his art is more nearly allied to music than to painting. Or, if compared to any painters, it must be to those who care comparatively little for distinct portraiture or dramatic interest. He resembles rather the school which is satisfied by contemplating gorgeous draperies, and graceful limbs and long processions of imposing figures, without caring to interpret the meaning of their works, or to seek for more than the harmonious arrangement of form and colour. In other words, his prose-poems should be compared to the paintings which aim at an effect a.n.a.logous to that of stately pieces of music. Milton is the poet whom he seems to regard with the sincerest admiration; and he apparently wishes to emulate the majestic rhythm of the "G.o.d-gifted organ-voice of England." Or we may, perhaps, admit some a.n.a.logy between his prose and the poetry of Keats, though it is remarkable that he speaks with very scant appreciation of his contemporary. The "Ode to a Nightingale," with its marvellous beauty of versification and the dim a.s.sociations half-consciously suggested by its language, surpa.s.ses, though it resembles, some of De Quincey"s finest pa.s.sages; and the "Hyperion" might have been translated into prose as a fitting companion for some of the opium dreams. It is in the success with which he produces such effects as these that De Quincey may fairly claim to be unsurpa.s.sed in our language. Pompous (if that word may be used in a good sense) declamation in prose, where the beauty of the thought is lost in the splendour of the style, is certainly a rare literary product. Of the great rhetoricians whom De Quincey quotes in the Essay on Rhetoric just noticed, such men as Burke and Jeremy Taylor lead us to forget the means in the end. They sound the trumpet as a warning, not for the mere delight in its volume of sound. Perhaps his affinity to Sir Thomas Browne is more obvious; and one can understand the admiration which he bestows upon the opening bar of a pa.s.sage in the Urn-burial:--"Now since these bones have rested quietly in the grave under the drums and tramplings of three conquests," &c. "What a melodious ascent," he exclaims, "as of a prelude to some impa.s.sioned requiem breathing from the pomps of earth and from the sanct.i.ties of the grave! What a _fluctus dec.u.ma.n.u.s_ of rhetoric! Time expounded, not by generations or centuries, but by vast periods of conquests and dynasties; by cycles of Pharaohs and Ptolemies, Antiochi and Arsacides! And these vast successions of time distinguished and figured by the uproars which revolve at their inaugurations; by the drums and tramplings rolling overhead upon the chambers of forgotten dead--the trepidations of time and mortality vexing, at secular intervals, the everlasting sabbaths of the grave!"

The commentator is seeking to eclipse the text, and his words are at once a description and an example of his own most characteristic rhetoric. Wordsworth once uttered an aphorism which De Quincey repeats with great admiration: that language is not, as I have just said, the dress, but "the incarnation of thought." But though accepting and enforcing the doctrine by showing that the "mixture is too subtle, the intertexture too ineffable" to admit of expression, he condemns the style which is the best ill.u.s.tration of its truth. He is very angry with the admirers of Swift; De Foe and "many hundreds" of others wrote something quite as good; it only wanted "plain good sense, natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in putting together the clockwork of sentences, and, above all, the advantage of an appropriate subject." Could Swift, he asks, have written a pendant to pa.s.sages in Sir W. Raleigh, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor? He would have cut the same figure as "a forlorn scullion from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if suddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival of Belshazzar the King, before a thousand of his lords." And what, we may retort, would Taylor, or Browne, or De Quincey himself, have done, had one of them been wanted to write down the project of Wood"s halfpence in Ireland? He would have resembled a king in his coronation robes compelled to lead a forlorn hope up the scaling ladders. The fact is, that Swift required for his style not only the plain good sense and other rare qualities enumerated, but pungent humour, quick insight, deep pa.s.sion, and general power of mind, such as is given to few men in a century. But, as in his case the thought is really incarnated in the language we cannot criticise the style separately from the thoughts, or we can only a.s.sign, as its highest merit, its admirable fitness for producing the desired effect. It would be wrong to invert De Quincey"s censure, and blame him because his gorgeous robes are not fitted for more practical purposes. To everything there is a time; for plain English, and for De Quincey"s highly-wrought pa.s.sages.

It would be difficult or impossible, and certainly it would be superfluous, to define with any precision the peculiar flavour of De Quincey"s style. A few specimens would do more than any description; and De Quincey is too well known to justify quotation. It may be enough to notice that most of his brilliant performances are variations on the same theme. He appeals to our terror of the infinite, to the shrinking of the human mind before astronomical distances and geological periods of time. He paints vast perspectives, opening in long succession, till we grow dizzy in the contemplation. The cadence of his style suggests sounds echoing each other, and growing gradually fainter, till they die away into infinite distance. Two great characteristics, he tells us, of his opium dreams were a deep-seated melancholy and an exaggeration of the things of s.p.a.ce and time. Nightly he descended "into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that he could ever reascend." He saw buildings and landscapes "in proportion so vast as the human eye is not fitted to receive." He seemed to live ninety or a hundred years in a night, and even to pa.s.s through periods far beyond the limits of human existence. Melancholy and an awe-stricken sense of the vast and vague are the emotions which he communicates with the greatest power; though the melancholy is too dreamy to deserve the name of pa.s.sion, and the terror of the infinite is not explicitly connected with any religious emotion. It is a proof of the fineness of his taste, that he scarcely ever falls into bombast; we tremble at his audacity in acc.u.mulating gorgeous phrases; but we confess that he is justified by the result. The only exception that I can remember is the pa.s.sage in "The English Mailcoach," where his exaggerated patriotism leads him into what strikes me at least as a rather vulgar bit of claptrap. If any reader will take the trouble to compare De Quincey"s account of a kind of antic.i.p.ation of the Balaclava charge at the battle of Talavera, with Napier"s description of the same facts, he will be amused at the distortion of history; but whatever the accuracy of the statements, one is a little shocked at finding "the inspiration of G.o.d"

attributed to the gallant dragoons who were cut to pieces on that occasion, as other gallant men have been before and since. The phrase is overcharged, and inevitably suggests a cynical reaction of mind. The ideas of dragoons and inspiration do not coalesce so easily as might be wished; but, with this exception, I think that his purple patches are almost irreproachable, and may be read and re-read with increasing delight. I know of no other modern writer who has soared into the same regions with so uniform and easy a flight.

The question is often raised how far the attempt to produce by one art effects specially characteristic of another can be considered as legitimate; whether, for example, a sculptor, when encroaching upon the province of the painter, or a prose writer attempting to rival poets, may not be summarily condemned. The answer probably would be that a critic who lays down such rules is erecting himself into a legislator, when he should be a simple observer. Success justifies itself; and when De Quincey obtains, without the aid of metre, graces which few other writers have won by the same means, it is all the more creditable to De Quincey. A certain presumption, however, remains in such cases, that the failure to adopt the ordinary methods implies a certain deficiency of power. If we ask why De Quincey, who trenched so boldly upon the peculiar province of the poet, yet failed to use the poetical form, there is one very obvious answer. He has one intolerable fault, a fault which has probably done more than any other to diminish his popularity, and which is, of all faults, most diametrically opposed to poetical excellence. He is utterly incapable of concentration. He is, from the very principles on which his style is constructed, the most diffuse of writers. Other men will pack half-a-dozen distinct propositions into a sentence, and care little if they are somewhat crushed and distorted in the process. De Quincey insists upon putting each of them separately, smoothing them out elaborately, till not a wrinkle disturbs their uniform surface, and then presenting each of them for our acceptance with a placid smile. His commendable desire for lucidity of expression makes him nervously anxious to avoid any complexity of thought. Each step of his argument, each shade of meaning, and each fact in his narrative, must have its own separate embodiment; and every joint and connecting link must be carefully and accurately defined. The clearness is won at a price. There is some advantage in this elaborate method of dissecting out every distinct fibre and ramification of an argument.

But, on the whole, one is apt to remember that life is limited, and that there are some things in this world which must be taken for granted. If a man"s boyhood fill two volumes, and if one of these (though under unfavourable circ.u.mstances) took six months to revise, it seems probable that in later years he would have taken longer to record events than to live them. No autobiography written on such principles could ever reach even the middle life of the auth

Prev List Next