BALZA.C.* MANY years ago a foreign critic said of Balzac
that he is "one of the greatest literary geniuses, the most faithful painter of manners, and one of the purest moralists of his age." About the same time an English reviewer wrote: " His works are a series of unconnected tales of the vulgarest and most licentious character ; the shallow vein of his talents appears to be nearly worked out." Now which is right P His increased reputation in France justifies the former opinion, and the latter is contradicted by Mr. Lilly in his Chapters in European History, in the last pages of which he remarks : "Balzac is in his own domain what Tacitus is among historians, Michael Angelo in the arts of design, and Dante among poets." But whatever literary men may say of an author does not prove that the public think the same. Balzac has received his due award from many of our critics, but he still remains caviare to the million, who have not tasted him or -do not like the look of him. Lend one of his novels to an -ordinary man or woman, and it will soon be brought back with the remark, "I cannot get into the book ; there is so little plot, and what there is seems to me so grim." If this were true, and it is to a certain extent, the million would be right. He has written seventy-nine novels of great variety of character, many grim but interesting, others bright but with little plot. The majority, however, have so many excellent qualities that it seems quite a mystery that the English and French million hold such opposite views. Every Frenchman knows his Balzac almost as much as every Englishman knows his Shakespeare. We would recommend those who wish to come to this author without prejudice and with some knowledge of what they have to expect, to read one or more of the best French criticisms of him,—Victor Hugo, Lamartine, George Sand, Scherer, Taine, and, above all, Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of his day, who at first depreciated Balzac's genius, but after his death pronounced in his Lundis a glowing funeral oration upon him. The book which of all others will enlighten them is a small one by Mr. F.
Wedmore ; it contains a short biography, a list of his works, and a description and criticism of the best of them. Mr. Saints- bury is a well-known writer on English and French literature, and the fact that he is the editor of this translation proves that he hopes for better days for Balzac. The translation is good, and renders in English the peculiar characteristics of the author's style, which, not being equal to that of many French writers, does not lose very much by translating. He did not sacrifice ideas to style, and pare down his sentences so that ideas almost disappear, as some Frenchmen have done.
Balzac was the mirror of the age in which he lived, that of Napoleon and the Bourbons, as Shakespeare was of the age of Elizabeth. He was born in Tours in 1799. He was a chip of both blocks, for he inherited something of his genius both from his father and his mother. The former had much in him, we are told, of Montaigne and Rabelais; the latter a rare vivacity of imagination, an indefatigable activity, firmness of will, and a boundless devotion to her kindred. In all these qualities the son was like the mother, especially in his devotion for his kindred,—his sister, from whom he had no secrets. He went to school at his native place, and we learn from his Louis Lambert, where his early life is described, that he was very unhappy, and was not understood by his tutors, though he was a very precocious boy, for his mother, in answer to his profound and penetrating remarks, would snub him by replying, " You cannot understand what you are saying." The plots of several of his best novels are laid at Tours, and he evidently delights in going back to his old haunts and describing the beauties of the neighbourhood, especially in his -Femme de Trente Ans and La Femme Abandonnee. On removing to Paris he attended the lectures at the Sorbonne, of Cousin and -other great men. After studying law for some time, be gave it up, and, taking a garret, devoted himself to reading and writing. From henceforth he led two lives, a real and an ideal one. The latter was passed among the friends and acquaintances
• Old Goriot. By Ba'zac. Edited by Professor Salatsbn•y. Translated t7 Ellen Marriage. London: J. M. Dent and Co. of his own creation, many of whom seem never to die, but to appear again and again in his stories. Unfortunately, he became partner with another in a printing business, in which he lost so much money that he was for a long time in pecuniary difficulties and hence obliged to work for his creditors, whom he paid off most conscientiously, as did his Cesar Birotteau, whose happiest day of life was when he called together his creditors, and, to their surprise, paid them his debts, with interest into the bargain. His extra- ordinary application to work prevented him from mixing much with the outer world, and kept him to his ideal life, where he became acquainted with characters of every descrip- tion, angels as well as demons, who opened their hearts to him and kept no secrets from him, for the angels revealed to him, unsolicited, their thoughts and feelings, and from the demons he wormed out the most abominable and horrible secrets from the very depths of their hearts. Indeed, this is the principal characteristic of his genius,—the knowledge of man, in which he has only been surpassed byShakespeare. He was an anatomist; he laid bare the human heart and revealed it to the world, not in beautiful verse but in his own simple prose. He was obliged to live also in the outer world, so as to gain further knowledge of it, both of Nature and of man, for he could only describe what he had seen with his own eyes. A friend suggested to him to write a story, the plot of which should take place in North America; to this he merely re- plied, "But I have never been there." His learning was prodigious in philosophy, art, architecture, antiquities, history, natural science, and all that interests and con- cerns man. He knew the most important contents of all the bric•it-brat shops of Europe. M. Plat, the latest French writer on our author, says that he was a disciple of evolution even before the appearance of Darwin, and carried into the moral world his ideas of physical nature, which had much to do in making him la plus haute figure de ce siecle. We have not space to discuss this very interesting and important point, but refer our readers to M. Plat's small book, published three years ago in Paris. In the novel before us the hero, a retired tradesman, and Vautrin, an inmate of the dirty and low-class boarding-house, are two of Balzac's principal characters. From Old Goriot he has been called the Shakespeare of France because of its resemblance to King Lear. Respectable Frenchmen are seldom met with in boarding-houses in Paris ; probably their know- ledge of them has been acquired from this book, in which the inmates, the mistress, the furniture, and the cookery are all more or less nasty. Of Vautrin M. Plat remarks : " This grand creation surpasses all the works of modern authors, and makes Balzac more than a rival of Shakspere." There is not much humour or wit to enliven his stories ; still three of them abound with the former,—La Vieille Fille, in which there is a graphic description of country-town life ; Un Debut dans la Vie, which takes place chiefly in a diligence ; and Le Grand Gaudissart, the Napoleon of bagmen. Gaudissart, who had never been defeated, starts on his Waterloo campaign. Arriving in a small country town, he enters a shop and displays to the tradesmen numerous patterns of old - fashioned dresses, and suc- ceeds in selling them as being quite a la mode in Paris. He then betakes himself to the house of another man, where be finds himself alone with a half-witted fellow, the idiot of the town, who is continually making puns, a practice indicating a tendency to imbecility. This Wellington, to lead him on and astray, buys of him a lot of old newspapers and insures his life in an office for which Gaudissart is agent. Then he offers him a glass of wine, which the bagman finds so good that he wants to buy a large quantity. " How much have you ? "—" Two hundred bottles."—"I will give you 100 francs."—" No," says the idiot ; " cent vingt francs pour 200 bouteilles, sans via (cent vingt)," which the traveller greedily accepted as a good bargain, not seeing the pun ; thus he gets his two hundred empty bottles for his money. Immediately he discovers his mistake and defeat, he bolts out of the house into the street, where he is jeered at and followed by a large crowd until he takes refuge in the diligence for Paris. Eugenie Grandet, the story of an old miser and his daughter, is the best known in England of all his novels. It is a masterpiece ; Grandet "is not a man, but a living passion, which governs the miser till the very moment of his death," for when the priest approached and
presented to his lips the crucifix for him to kiss the golden image of Christ, be made a terrible effort to grasp hold of the gold, and died from the struggle. No doubt Balzac was "one of the purest moralists of his age," which was a wicked one, and he paints it as such; but he never disguises the truth; with him vice is al ways hideous, and under his guidance we are never led to admire it or to take it for virtue. There is no mawkish sentimentality, no religious immorality as in many of the novels of George Sand or the plays of Dumas the younger. Though Balzac introduces us to some of the worst scenes of Parisian high life, at the close of each our hatred of wickedness has been increased as well as our love of goodness and innocence.
Previous page
