BALZAC

HERE are few writers so difficult to range and pronounce upon, even before the informal tribunal of one's own consciousness, as Honoré Balzac-or de Balzac, as he loved with childish vanity to hear himself called. 1 His ill-assorted literary gifts-huddled together as promiscuously as the various litter of the old curiosity shop in the Peau de Chagrin-the dulness of his spiritual perceptions, his total insensibility to many of the nobler aspects of life, his coarseness, sensationalism, and brutality -these in connection with his inexhaustible fecundity, the fervour of his imagination, and his riotous creativeness make up a bewildering and disconcerting personality. With the possible exception of a few short stories there is hardly a piece, certainly not a book, in the whole collection which is a thoroughly creditable performance, even in point of workmanship. Nor at the same time is there a single piece which does not somewhere convey an impression of tremendous though convulsive power, as if

The Temple Edition of the Comédie Humaine. Edited by George Saintsbury. New York: The Macmillan Co.

it had been forged cold in some terrible paroxysm of genius. But whatever one's literary prepossessions, there is the man, forty volumes of him, an undeniable influence, which must be reckoned with some way or other.

Personally he would seem to have been one of those ardent and energetic natures, the modern bedeutendes individuum or "strong" man, unsoftened by more than the slightest trace of sentiment and possessed by a rage of work so furious as to be all but unconscious of the doubts and hesitations of finer temperaments. His one passion is power; his notion of the world, a struggle, where victory is won by strength, courage, and audacity. To him success is in no way a matter of morals; the battle is to the brave, not to the righteous. It is this practical view of life which makes him seem so one-sided and deficient, not to say objectionable, to those who think that fiction exists, regardless of truth, for the vindication of the moral order. For himself he saw in literature his way to the exercise of the power which he loved with the violence of his kind. His whole character in its assumption and ambition is epitomised in the line which he inscribed below his bust of Napoleon: "What he could not achieve with his sword, I will accomplish with my pen."

His life, as it has been passed on to us, reads like the wildest romance of authorship, riddled

with preposterous debts, undermined by conspiracies, centred about with fabulous intrigues -so falsified, in short, by the forgeries of his imagination, in which his friends unduly encouraged him, that it is no longer possible to disentangle truth from-well, let us say, with Goethe, poetry. For, at worst, he was hardly more than his own dupe, confounding reality with illusion to such an extent that he seemed to see the characters of his own fiction visibly walking in the streets of Paris, and supposed his rooms to be sumptuously furnished when he had scrawled upon the bare walls in chalk the names of the luxuries which he coveted. But amid all these extravagances of an overwrought fancy the one fact is certain. Abandoned by his family to the pursuit of letters, without means or genuine literary gifts, unless the desire for literary fame be such in itself, he fought his way to success, in the very teeth of starvation and, as it were, against the express prohibition of nature, by sheer dint of perseverance and capacity for labour. His was perhaps the longest and severest apprenticeship ever served by a great writer; his unacknowledged work alone would constitute in quantity a very respectable achievement. And yet he never succeeded in mastering a style or acquiring a form. To the last his work is confused and amorphous, crammed with all sorts of

irrelevant details, crowded with episodes, and distracted by pretentious rigmarole anent the nearest trifle, the placing of a patch on a woman's face, or the relative merit of round waists and flat. At most he learned how to wreak his strength upon his readers, browbeating and domineering over them until at last they succumb to the imposition of that despotic personality.

Such a man can never make "agreeable reading, when every literary defect is faced with a moral lack. And yet upon some minds-and they are neither few nor commonplace-he acts like a powerful stimulant. That the fascination is generally uncanny and frequently morbid may be allowed; but that it is on the whole genuine is proved by the fact that he has long survived Eugene Sue, into whose province and that of the police court the remoter confines of his realm, as the whole Vautrin cycle, shade imperceptibly. For these minds, it is the man's ineradicable romance, or, to grant the most at once to his detractors, his sensationalism, which constitutes his perennial charm. For after all, his naturalism, of which so much has been made, as there are always those who insist upon admiring an author for the wrong thing, is only superficial. His circumstantial descriptions, his parade of affairs, his "physiology," are all but pretences, the cloak that he assumes

to disguise the enormity of his fabrications. At bottom he is a dexterous manipulator of intrigues, a manager of "powerful" situations, and a maker of high sententious phrases. It is for the sake of his bewitching duchesses with their melodiously nasal "Hein," who bear the burden of their thirty years so jauntily, his outrageous scamps like Maxime de Trailles, his whole gallery of preposterous and admirable prodigies, the Marneffes, the Rastignacs, the Goriots, that we delight in him.

But there is another side to his genius-to us, we frankly confess, by no means so interesting as the former because less characteristic and more commonplace. In the delineation of virtue it cannot be denied that Balzac is surpassed by many an inferior talent. And while Eugenie Grandet is very likely, on the whole, one of his best books, the character of old Grandet being strictly in his own best vein, yet in general innocence and delicacy suffer sad distortion at his violent hands, and probably no more grotesque book was ever written nor one in worse taste than Le Lys dans la Vallée, to which he sat down with the avowed intention of drawing an exemplary portrait.

It was in 1836, according to his own story, that the notion of the Comédie Humaine took shape in his mind, though it was not until six years later that he found himself at the head