I would flatly refuse to two cla.s.ses of persons, at any rate, any claim to be regarded as genuine lovers of fiction. The first cla.s.s are those who want nothing but moral support and encouragement. These are still under the illusion that Balzac is a wicked writer. The second cla.s.s are those who want nothing but neurotic excitement and tingling sensual thrills. These are under the illusion that Balzac is a dull writer.
There is yet a third cla.s.s to whom I refuse the name of lovers of fiction. These are the intellectual and psychological maniacs who want nothing but elaborate social and personal problems, the elucidation of which may throw scientific light upon anthropological evolution. Well! We have George Eliot to supply the need of the first; the author of "h.o.m.o Sapiens" to supply the need of the second; and Paul Bourget to deal with the last.
It is difficult not to extend our refusal of the n.o.ble t.i.tle of real Fiction-Lovers to the whole modern generation. The frivolous craze for short books and short stories is a proof of this.
The unfortunate illusion which has gone abroad of late that a thing to be "artistic" must be concise and condensed and to the point, encourages this heresy. I would add these "artistic" persons with their pedantry of condensation and the "exact phrase" to all the others who don"t really love this large and liberal art. To a genuine fiction-lover a book cannot be too long. What causes such true amorists of imaginative creation real suffering is when a book comes to an end. It can never be enjoyed again with quite the same relish, with quite the same glow and thrill and ecstasy.
To listen to certain fanatics of the principle of unity is to get the impression that these mysterious "artistic qualities" are things that may be thrust into a work from outside, after a careful perusal of, shall we say, Flaubert"s Letters to Madame Something-or-other, or a course of studies of the Short Story at Columbia University. Chop the thing quite clear of all "surplusage and irrelevancy"; chop it clear of all "unnecessary detail"; chop the descriptions and chop the incidents; chop the characters; "chop it and pat it and mark it with T," as the nursery rhyme says, "and put it in the oven for Baby and me!" It is an impertinence, this theory, and an insult to natural human instincts.
Art is not a "hole and corner" thing, an affair of professional preciosities and discriminations, a set of tiresome rules to be learned by rote.
Art is the free play of generous and creative imaginations with the life-blood of the demiurgic forces of the universe in their veins.
There is a large and n.o.ble joy in it, a magnanimous nonchalance and aplomb, a sap, an ichor, a surge of resilient suggestion, a rich ineffable magic, a royal liberality.
Devoid of the energy of a large and free imagination, art dwindles into an epicene odalisque, a faded minion of pleasure in a perfumed garden. It becomes the initiatory word of an exclusive Rosicrucian order. It becomes the amulet of an affected superiority, the signet ring of a masquerading conspiracy.
The habitation of the spirit of true art is the natural soul of man, as it has been from the beginning and as it will be to the end. The soul of man has depths which can only be fathomed by an art which breaks every rule of the formalists and transgresses every technical law.
The mere fact that the kind of scrupulous artistry advocated by these pedants of "style" is a kind that can be defined in words at all writes its own condemnation upon it. For the magical evocations of true genius are beyond definition.
As Goethe says the important thing in all great art is just what cannot be put in words. Those who would seek so to confine it are the bunglers who have missed the mark themselves, and "they like"--the great critic adds malignantly--"they like to be together."
The so-called rules of technique are nothing when you come to a.n.a.lyse them but a purely empirical and pragmatic deduction from the actual practise of the masters. And every new master creates new laws and a new taste capable of appreciating these new laws. There is no science of art. These modern critics, with their cult of "the unique phrase" and the "sharply defined image," are just as intolerant as the old judicial authorities whose prestige they scout; just as intolerant and just as unilluminating.
It is to the _imagination_ we must go for a living appreciation of genius, and many quite simple persons possess this, to whom the jargon of the studios is empty chatter.
No human person has a right to say "Balzac ought to have put more delicacy, more subtlety into his style," or to say, "Balzac ought to have eliminated those long descriptions." Balzac is Balzac; and that ends it. If you prefer the manner of Henry James, by all means read him and let the other alone.
There is such a thing as the mere absence of what the "little masters"
call style being itself a quite definite style.
A certain large and colourless fluidity of manner is often the only medium through which a vision of the world can be expressed at all; a vision, that is to say, of a particular kind, with the pa.s.sion of it carried to a particular intensity.
In America, at this present time, the work of Mr. Theodore Dreiser is an admirable example of this sort of thing. Mr. Dreiser, it must be admitted, goes even beyond Balzac in his contempt for the rules; but just as none of the literary goldsmiths of France convey to us the flavour of Paris as Balzac does, so none of the clever writers of America convey to us the flavour of America as Mr. Dreiser does.
Indeed I am ready to confess that I have derived much light in regard to my feeling for the demonic energy of the great Frenchman from watching the methods of this formidable American. I discern in Mr. Dreiser the same obstinate tenacity of purpose, the same occult perception of subterranean forces, the same upheaving, plough-like "drive" through the materials of life and character.
Balzac is undoubtedly the greatest purely creative genius that has ever dealt with the art of fiction. It is astonishing to realise how entirely the immense teeming world through which he leads us is the product of unalloyed imagination.
Experience has its place in the art of literature; it would be foolish to deny it; but the more one contemplates the career of Balzac the more evident does it become that his art is the extreme opposite of the art of the doc.u.ment-hunters and the chroniclers.
The life which he habitually and continually led was the life of the imagination. He lived in Paris. He knew its streets, its tradesmen, its artists, its adventurers, its aristocratic and its proletarian demi monde.
He came from the country and he knew the country; its peasants, its farmers, its provincial magnates, its village tyrants, its priests, its doctors, its gentlemen of leisure.
But when one comes to calculate the enormous number of hours he spent over his desk, night after night, and day after day, one comes to see that there was really very scant margin left for the conscious collecting of material. The truth is he lived an abnormally sedentary life. Had he gone about a little more he would probably have lived much longer. The flame of his genius devoured him, powerful and t.i.tanic though his bodily appearance was, and unbounded though his physical energy. He _lived by the imagination_ as hardly another writer has ever done and his reward is that, as long as human imagination interests itself in the panorama of human affairs, his stories will remain thrilling. How little it really matters whether this story or the other rounds itself off in the properly approved way!
Personally I love to regard all the stories of Balzac as one immense novel--of some forty volumes--dealing with the torrential life of the human race itself as it roars and eddies in its huge turbulency with France and Paris for a background. I am largely justified in this view of Balzac"s work by his own catholic and comprehensive t.i.tle--The Human Comedy--suggestive certainly of a sort of uniting thread running through the whole ma.s.s of his productions. I am also justified by his trick of introducing again and again the same personages; a device which I daresay is profoundly irritating to the modern artistic mind, but which is certainly most pleasing to the natural human instinct.
This alone, this habit of introducing the same people in book after book, is indicative of how Balzac belongs to the company of the great natural story-tellers. A real lover of a story wants it to go on forever; wants n.o.body in it ever to die; n.o.body in it ever to disappear; n.o.body in it ever to round things off or complete his life"s apprenticeship, with a bow to the ethical authorities, in that annoying way of so many modern writers.
No wonder Oscar Wilde wept whenever he thought of the death of Lucien de Rubempre. Lucien should have been allowed at least one more "avatar." That is one of the things that pleases me so much in that old ten-penny paper edition published by the great Paris house.
We have a list of the characters in the index, with all their other appearances on the stage; just exactly as if it were real life! It was all real enough at any rate to Balzac himself, according to that beautiful tale of how he turned away from some troublesome piece of personal gossip with the cry:
"Come back to actualities! Come back to my books!"
And in the old ideal platonic sense it _is_ the true reality, this reproduction of life through the creative energy of the imagination.
The whole business of novel writing lies in two things; in the creating of exciting situations and imaginatively suggestive characters--and in making these situations and characters _seem real._
They need not be dragged directly forth from personal experiences.
One grows to resent the modern tendency to reduce everything to autobiographical reminiscence. These histories of free-thinking young men breaking loose from their father"s authority and running amuck among Paris studios and Leicester Square actresses become tedious and ba.n.a.l after a time. Such sordid piling up of meticulous detail, drawn so obviously from the writer"s own adventures, throws a kind of grey dust over one"s interest in the narrative.
One"s feeling simply is that it is all right and all true; that just in this casual chaotic sort of way the impact of life has struck oneself as one drifted along. But there is no more in it than a clever sort of intellectual photography, no more in it than a more or less moralised version of the ordinary facts of an average person"s life-story.
One is tempted to feel that, after all, there is a certain underlying justification for the man in the street"s objection to this kind of so-called "realism." We have a right after all to demand of art something more than a clever reproduction of the experiences we have undergone. We have a right to demand something creative, something exceptional, something imaginative, something that lifts us out of ourselves and our ordinary environments, something that has _deep holes_ in it that go down into unfathomable mystery, something that has vistas, horizons, large and n.o.ble perspectives, breadth, sweep, and scope.
The truth is that these grey psychological histories of typical young persons, drearily revolting against dreary conventions, are, in a deep and inherent sense, false to the mystery of life.
One feels certain that even the clever people who write them have moods and impulses far more vivid and thrilling, far more abnormal and bizarre, than they have the audacity to put into their work. A sort of perverted Puritanism restrains them. They have the diseased conscience of modern art, and they think that nothing can be true which is not draggle-tailed and nothing can be real which is not petty and unstimulating. And all the while the maddest, beautifulest fantasticalest things are occurring every day, and every day the great drunken G.o.ds are tossing the crazy orb of our fate from hand to hand and making it shine with a thousand iridescent hues! The natural man takes refuge from these people"s drab perversions of the outrageous reality, in the sham wonders of meretricious romances which are not real at all.
What we cry out for is something that shall have about it the liberating power of the imagination and yet be able to convince us of its reality. We need an imaginative realism. We need a romanticism which has its roots in the solid earth. We need, in fact, precisely what Balzac brings.
So far from finding anything tedious or irksome in the heavy ma.s.sing up of animate and inanimate back-grounds which goes on all the while in Balzac"s novels, I find these things most germane to the matter. What I ask from a book is precisely this huge weight of formidable verisimilitude which shall surround me on all sides and give firm ground for my feet to walk on. I love it when a novel is thick with the solid ma.s.s of earth-life, and when its pa.s.sions spring up volcano-like from flaming pits and bleeding craters of torn and convulsed materials. I demand and must have in a book a four-square sense of life-illusion, a rich field for my imagination to wander in at large, a certain quant.i.ty of blank s.p.a.ce, so to speak, filled with a huge litter of things that are not tiresomely pointing to the projected issue.
I hold the view that in the larger aspects of the creative imagination there is room for many free margins and for many materials that are not slavishly symbolic. I protest from my heart against this tyrannous "artistic conscience" which insists that every word "should tell" and every object and person referred to be of "vital importance" in the evolution of the "main theme."
I maintain that in the broad canvas of a n.o.bler, freer art there is ample s.p.a.ce for every kind of digression and by-issue. I maintain that the mere absence of this self-conscious vibrating pressure upon one string gives to a book that amplitude, that nonchalance, that huge friendly discursiveness, which enables us to breathe and loiter and move around and see the characters from all sides--from behind as well as from in front! The constant playing upon that one string of a symbolic purpose or a philosophical formula seems to me to lead invariably to a certain attenuation and strain. The imagination grows weary under repeated blows upon the same spot. We long to debouch into some path that leads nowhere. We long to meet some one who is interesting in himself and does nothing to carry anything along.
Art of this tiresomely technical kind can be taught to any one. If this were all--if this were the one thing needful--we might well rush off en ma.s.se to the lecture-rooms and acquire the complete rules of the Short Story. Luckily for our pleasant hours there is still, in spite of everything, a certain place left for what we call genius in the manufacture of books; a place left for that sudden thrilling lift of the whole thing to a level where the point of the interest is not in the mere accidents of one particular plot but in the vast stream of the mystery of life itself.
Among the individual volumes of the Human Comedy, I am inclined to regard "Lost Illusions"--of which there are two volumes in that ten-penny edition--as the finest of all, and no one who has read that book can forget the portentous weight of realistic background with which it begins.
After "Lost Illusions" I would put "Cousin Bette" as Balzac"s master-piece, and, after that, "A Bachelor"s Establishment." But I lay no particular stress upon these preferences. With the exception of such books as "The Wild a.s.s"s Skin" and the "Alkahest" and "Seraphita," the bulk of his work has a sort of continuous interest which one would expect in a single tremendous prose epic dealing with the France of his age.
Balzac"s most remarkable characteristic is a sort of exultant reveling in every kind of human pa.s.sion, in every species of desire or greed or ambition or obsession which gives a dignity and a tragic grandeur to otherwise prosaic lives. There is a kind of subterranean torrent of blind primeval energy running through his books which focusses itself in a thick smouldering fuliginous eruption when the moment or the occasion arises. The "will to power," or whatever else you may call it, has never been more terrifically exposed. I cannot but feel that as a portrayer of such a "will to power" among the obstinate, narrow, savage personages of small provincial towns, no one has approached Balzac.
Here, in his country scenes, he is a supreme master; and the tough, resistant fibre of his slow-moving, ma.s.sively egotistic provincials, with their backgrounds of old houses full of wicked secrets and h.o.a.rded wealth, lends itself especially well to his brooding materialistic imagination, ready to kindle under provocation into crackling and licking flames.
His imagination has transformed, for me at least, the face of more than one country-side. Coming in on a windy November evening, through muddy lanes and sombre avenues of the outskirts of any country town, how richly, how magically, the lights in the scattered high walled houses and the faces seen at the windows, suggest the infinite possibilities of human life! The sound of wheels upon cobblestones, as the street begins and as the spire of the church rises over the moaning branches of its leafless elm-trees has a meaning for me now, since I have read Balzac, different from what it had before. Is that m.u.f.fled figure in the rumbling cart which pa.s.ses me so swiftly the country doctor or the village priest, summoned to the death-bed of some notorious atheist? Is the slender white hand which closes those heavy shutters in that gloomy house the hand of some heart-broken Eugenie, desolately locking herself up once more, for another lonely night, with her sick hopes and her sacred memories?
I feel as though no one but Balzac has expressed the peculiar brutality, thick, impervious, knotted and fibrous like the roots of the tree-trunks at his gate, of the small provincial farmer in England as well as in France.
I am certain no one but Balzac--except it be some of the rougher, homelier Dutch painters--has caught the spirit of those mellow, sensual "interiors" of typical country houses, with their mixture of grossness and avarice and inveterate conservatism; where an odour of centuries of egotism emanates from every piece of furniture against the wall and from every gesture of every person seated over the fire! One is plunged indeed into the dim, sweet, brutal heart of reality here, and the imagination finds starting places for its wanderings from the mere gammons of dried bacon hanging from the smoky rafters and the least gross repartee and lewd satyrish jest of the rustic Grangousier and Gargamelle who quaff their amber-coloured cider under the flickering of candles.
If he did not pile up his descriptions of old furniture, old warehouses, old barns, old cellars, old shops, old orchards and old gardens, this thick human atmosphere--overlaid, generation after generation, by the sensual proclivities of the children of the earth--would never possess the unction of verisimilitude which it has.
If he were all the while fussing about his style in the exhausting Flaubert manner, the rich dim reek of all this time-mellowed humanity would never strike our senses as it does. Thus much one can see quite clearly from reading de Maupa.s.sant, Flaubert"s pupil, whose stark and savage strokes of clean-cut visualisation never attain the imaginative atmosphere or Rabelaisian aplomb of Balzac"s rural scenes.