The Human Comedy: Introductions and Appendix - Honoré de Balzac (the snowy day read aloud txt) 📗

done, except the
_Parents Pauvres_, that he contrasts Dumas with Scott saying that
_on relit Walter Scott_, and he does not think any one will
re-read Dumas. This may be unjust to the one writer, but it is
conclusive as to any sense of "wasted time" (his own phrase)
having ever existed in Balzac's mind about the other.

It would seem as if nothing but this sun of popular approval had been wanting to make Balzac's genius burst out in full bloom. Although we have a fair number of letters for the ensuing years, it is not very easy to make out the exact sequence of production of the marvelous harvest which his genius gave. It is sufficient to say that in the three years following 1829 there were actually published the _Physiologie du Mariage_, the charming story of _La Maison du Chat-que-Pelote_, the _Peau de Chagrin_, the most original and splendid, if not the most finished and refined, of all Balzac's books, most of the short _Contes Philosophiques_, of which some are among their author's greatest triumphs, many other stories (chiefly included in the _Scenes de la Vie Privee_) and the beginning of the _Contes Drolatiques_.*

* No regular attempt will after this be made to indicate the date of
production of successive works, unless they connect themselves
very distinctly with incidents in the life or with general
critical observations. At the end of this introduction will be
found a full table of the _Comedie Humaine_ and the other works.
It may perhaps be worth while to add here, that while the labors
of M. de Lovenjoul (to whom every writer on Balzac must
acknowledge the deepest obligation) have cleared this matter up
almost to the verge of possibility as regards the published works,
there is little light to be thrown on the constant references in
the letters to books which never appeared. Sometimes they are
known, and they may often be suspected, to have been absorbed into
or incorporated with others; the rest must have been lost or
destroyed, or, which is not quite impossible, have existed chiefly
in the form of project. Nearly a hundred titles of such things are
preserved.

But without a careful examination of his miscellaneous work, which is very abundant and includes journalism as well as books, it is almost as impossible to come to a just appreciation of Balzac as it is without reading the early works and letters. This miscellaneous work is all the more important because a great deal of it represents the artist at quite advanced stages of his career, and because all its examples, the earlier as well as the later, give us abundant insight on him as he was "making himself." The comparison with the early works of Thackeray (in _Punch_, _Fraser_, and elsewhere) is so striking that it can escape no one who knows the two. Every now and then Balzac transferred bodily, or with slight alterations, passages from these experiments to his finished canvases. It appears that he had a scheme for codifying his "Physiologies" (of which the notorious one above mentioned is only a catchpenny exemplar and very far from the best) into a seriously organized work. Chance was kind or intention was wise in not allowing him to do so; but the value of the things for the critical reader is not less. Here are tales--extensions of the scheme and manner of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, or attempts at the _goguenard_ story of 1830--a thing for which Balzac's hand was hardly light enough. Here are interesting evidences of striving to be cosmopolitan and polyglot--the most interesting of all of which, I think, is the mention of certain British products as "mufflings." "Muffling" used to be a domestic joke for "muffin;" but whether some wicked Briton deluded Balzac into the idea that it was the proper form or not it is impossible to say. Here is a _Traite de la Vie Elegante_, inestimable for certain critical purposes. So early as 1825 we find a _Code des Gens Honnetes_, which exhibits at once the author's legal studies and his constant attraction for the shady side of business, and which contains a scheme for defrauding by means of lead pencils, actually carried out (if we may believe his exulting note) by some literary swindlers with unhappy results. A year later he wrote a _Dictionnaire des Enseignes de Paris_, which we are glad enough to have from the author of the _Chat-que-Pelote_; but the persistence with which this kind of miscellaneous writing occupied him could not be better exemplified than by the fact that, of two important works which closely follow this in the collected edition, the _Physiologie de l'Employe_ dates from 1841 and the _Monographie de la Presse Parisienne_ from 1843.

It is well known that from the time almost of his success as a novelist he was given, like too many successful novelists (_not_ like Scott), to rather undignified and foolish attacks on critics. The explanation may or may not be found in the fact that we have abundant critical work of his, and that it is nearly all bad. Now and then we have an acute remark in his own special sphere; but as a rule he cannot be complimented on these performances, and when he was half-way through his career this critical tendency of his culminated in the unlucky _Revue Parisienne_, which he wrote almost entirely himself, with slight assistance from his friends, MM. de Belloy and de Grammont. It covers a wide range, but the literary part of it is considerable, and this part contains that memorable and disastrous attack on Sainte-Beuve, for which the critic afterwards took a magnanimous revenge in his obituary _causerie_. Although the thing is not quite unexampled it is not easily to be surpassed in the blind fury of its abuse. Sainte-Beuve was by no means invulnerable, and an anti-critic who kept his head might have found, as M. de Pontmartin and others did find, the joints in his armor. But when, _a propos_ of the _Port Royal_ more especially, and of the other works in general, Balzac informs us that Sainte-Beuve's great characteristic as a writer is _l'ennui, l'ennui boueux jusqu'a mi-jambe_, that his style is intolerable, that his historical handling is like that of Gibbon, Hume, and other dull people; when he jeers at him for exhuming "La mere Angelique," and scolds him for presuming to obscure the glory of the _Roi Soleil_, the thing is partly ludicrous, partly melancholy. One remembers that agreeable Bohemian, who at a symposium once interrupted his host by crying, "Man o' the hoose, gie us less o' yer clack and mair o' yer Jairman wine!" Only, in human respect and other, we phrase it: "Oh, dear M. de Balzac! give us more _Eugenie Grandets_, more _Pere Goriots_, more _Peaux de Chagrin_, and don't talk about what you do not understand!"

Balzac was a great politician also, and here, though he may not have been very much more successful, he talked with more knowledge and competence. He must have given himself immense trouble in reading the papers, foreign as well as French; he had really mastered a good deal of the political religion of a French publicist. It is curious to read, sixty years after date, his grave assertion that "_La France a la conquete de Madagascar a faire_," and with certain very pardonable defects (such as his Anglophobia), his politics may be pronounced not unintelligent and not ungenerous, though somewhat inconsistent and not very distinctly traceable to any coherent theory. As for the Anglophobia, the Englishman who thinks the less of him for that must have very poor and unhappy brains. A Frenchman who does not more or less hate and fear England, an Englishman who does not regard France with a more or less good-humored impatience, is usually "either a god or a beast," as Aristotle saith. Balzac began with an odd but not unintelligible compound, something like Hugo's, of Napoleonism and Royalism. In 1824, when he was still in the shades of anonymity, he wrote and published two by no means despicable pamphlets in favor of Primogeniture and the Jesuits, the latter of which was reprinted in 1880 at the last _Jesuitenhetze_ in France. His _Lettres sur Paris_ in 1830-31, and his _La France et l'Etranger_ in 1836, are two considerable series of letters from "Our Own Correspondent," handling the affairs of the world with boldness and industry if not invariably with wisdom. They rather suggest (as does the later _Revue Parisienne_ still more) the political writing of the age of Anne in England, and perhaps a little later, when "the wits" handled politics and society, literature and things in general with unquestioned competence and an easy universality.

The rest of his work which will not appear in this edition may be conveniently despatched here. The _Physiologie du Mariage_ and the _Scenes de la Vie Conjugale_ suffer not merely from the most obvious of their faults but from defect of knowledge. It may or may not be that marriage, in the hackneyed phrase, is a net or other receptacle where all the outsiders would be in, and all the insiders out. But it is quite clear that Coelebs cannot talk of it with much authority. His state may or may not be the more gracious: his judgment cannot but lack experience. The "Theatre," which brought the author little if any profit, great annoyance, and a vast amount of trouble, has been generally condemned by criticism. But the _Contes Drolatiques_ are not so to be given up. The famous and splendid _Succube_ is only the best of them, and though all are more or less tarred with the brush which tars so much of French literature, though the attempt to write in an archaic style is at best a very successful _tour de force_, and represents an expenditure of brain power by no means justifiable on the part of a man who could have made so much better use of it, they are never to be spoken of disrespectfully. Those who sneer at their "Wardour Street" Old French are not usually the best qualified to do so; and it is not to be forgotten that Balzac was a real countryman of Rabelais and a legitimate inheritor of _Gauloiserie_. Unluckily no man can "throw back" in this way, except now and then as a mere pastime. And it is fair to recollect that as a matter of fact Balzac, after a year or two, did not waste much more time on these things, and that the intended ten _dizains_ never, as a matter of fact, went beyond three.

Besides this work in books, pamphlets, etc., Balzac, as has been said, did a certain amount of journalism, especially in the _Caricature_, his performances including, I regret to say, more than one puff of his own work; and in this, as well as by the success of the _Chouans_, he became known about 1830 to a much wider circle, both of literary and of private acquaintance. It cannot indeed be said that he ever mixed much in society; it was impossible that he should do so, considering the vast amount of work he did and the manner in which he did it. This subject, like that of his speculations, may be better finished off in a single passage than dealt with by scattered indications here and there. He was not one of those men who can do work by fits and starts in the intervals of business or of amusement; nor was he one who, like Scott, could work very rapidly. It is true that he often