BALZAC O Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac's novels had been dug out of a suffering woman's heart; but Goethe spoke not always wisely, and in this exacting world there be some that not only have found fault with Balzac's method and results but have dared to declare his theory of society the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was less observer than creator: his views were false, his vision was distorted, and though he had 'incomparable power' he had not power enough to make them accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they find Balzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; he made room for the work of Flaubert, Feydeau, the younger Dumas, Augier and Zola and the brothers Goncourt; and to him Charles Baudelaire is as some fat strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs. Sainte-Beuve refused Under which King? to accept him, but his 'Pigault-Lebrun des duchesses' is only malicious: he resented the man's exuberant and inordinate personality, and made haste to apply to it some drops of that sugared vitriol of which he had the secret. Taine is a fitter critic of the Comédie humaine than Sainte-Beuve; and Taine has come to other conclusions. Acute, coarse, methodical, exhaustive, he has recognised the greatness of one still more exhaustive, methodical, coarse, and acute than himself. English critics fall foul of Balzac's women; but Taine falls foul of English critics, and with the authority of a Parisian by profession declares that the Parisiennes of the Comédie are everything they ought to be the true daughters of their bon gros libertin de père.' And while Taine, exulting in his Marneffe and his Coralie, does solemnly and brilliantly show that he is right and everybody else is wrong, a later writer-English of coursecan find no better parallel of Balzac than Browning, and knows nothing in art so like the Pauline of la Peau de Chagrin as the Sistine Madonna. It is curious, this clash of opinions; and it is plain that one or other party must be wrong. Which is Is Taine a it? Qui trompe-t-on ici?' B ALZAC'S ambition was to be omni- The Fact. potent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail, His Hulot was to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the love of woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, in whom is incarnated the instinct and the science of sexual corruption, is Hulot's Cleopatra, and only dies because 'elle va faire le bon Dieu' as who should say 'to mash the Old Man'; Frenhoeffer, Philippe Bridau, Vautrin, Marsay, Rastignac, Grandet, Balthazar Claës, Béatrix, Sarrazine, Lousteau, Esther, Lucien Chardon the list is, I believe, some thousands strong! Also the argument is proved in advance: there is the Comédie itself'the new edition fifty volumes long.' Bad or good, foul or fair, impossible or actual, a monstrous debauch of mind or a triumph of realisation, there is the Comédie. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the last stones of it; and it exists-if a little the worse for wear: the bulk is enormous-if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten and crumbling. Truly, he had 'incomparable power.' He was the least capable and the most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer: he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinate effects. |