21 APRIL 1900, Page 17

BOOKS.

BALZAC'S LETTERS TO MADAME HANSKA.* THESE letters reveal Balzao's personality, but not his genius. We have here about seven hundred and fifty pages of love- letters written by him to the Polish " stranger " whom he saw so seldom and adored so long. The translator tells us that there were some more of them, but they were accident- ally burned. Having just finished the book, we are not in the mood to regret them. Not that the letters are sot full of interesting passages, but that among the endless repetition of compliments and declarations of devotion it is hard work to find them. Nevertheless they all show somewhere or other the stamp of a great and original personality, what Balza° calls the "sublimity of the gift of self."

Balzac first fell in love with Madame liana& from her letters. He, having never seen her, writes to her as "you whom I caress as an illusion, who are in my dreams like a hope, and who have so graciously embodied my reveries." No wonder she was pleased I Later on, after they had met, though Balzac's passion increased rather than diminished, the expression of it became less poetical. The novelist—the poet, as he always calls himself—was a great giver of presents both valuable and worthless. Sentences such as "My cherished love, have you tasted your marmalade ? " might well have been left out. Also the reader—the public reader, at least— gets tired of hearing "I love you" repeated more than a certain number of times, and even begins to wonder why the lady herself did not reply, like Rostand's Roxane, "Volt. le theme--mais brodez ! brodez ! " The translator gives it as her opinion in the preface that some of these earlier letters are forgeries. For this view she offers little proof except her own moral certainty. Some of them doubtless are not much to Balzac's credit, but that hardly disproves their author- ship. Readers of the Coin(qie irupt:lie cannot take quite literally what "the poet" says of himself :—" It is my nature which God has made oblivious of evil while ceaselessly in presence of good. God made me to smell the fragrance of flowers, not the fetor of mud. I choke in the plains. I live on the mountains." Anyhow, the letters of which we are allowed to be certain are the most interesting. After M. Hensko had intercepted some of Balzac's letters and had complained of their warmth, Balzac introduced a little variety of subject into them,—that is, he suppressed his passion and introduced himself. In this business, by the way, Balzac did not appear in the light of a hero. He de- clared that he w'rote the letters in illustration of an argu- ment he had had with Madame Hanska about how love-letters should be written. He was anxious to apologise, and above all anxious not to fight. M. Hanska accepted the explanation, and later on Balzae dedicated a book to him, at Madame Hanska's request. Balzac's letters give the most detailed ac count of his working life. The amount of work he did seems almost impossible. Going to bed at six in the evening, "with his dinner in his throat," and rising at twelve or one, he toiled at his books for sixteen or eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. "Work, always work," he writes, "nights of flame succeeding nights of flame, days of meditation to days of meditation, execution to conception, conception to execu- tion." The sixteen volumes of the Co/111,4e lluiiwne were written between 1841 and 1846. That terrible section of the great work, the 'Pre Goriot," was finished in forty days, during which time Balzac declares he did not have eighty hours' sleep. "It is a fine work," be says, "but monstrously sad." Monstrous is the right word for that inhuman tragedy,— it is Lea,. without Cordelia. Balzac made a great deal of money and spent a great deal. He continually worked himself ill to decrease the mountain of debt which overshadowed him, and as often increased it again while he rested to regain his strength. Sometimes he writes that he is living under a feigned name to deceive his creditors, that he can only afford one room, sleeps in a little bed in the passage, and has not even money for stamps ; at another time he says, "All about me breathes opulence and ease, the wealth of the lucky artist." However much Balzac may grumble and pity himself for the amount of work which his • Ral:ac's Letter,: to Madame Hanska. Translated by Eatherine Prescutt Wurweley. Boston: Hardy Pratt Awl Cu. extravagance entailed upon him, there is no doubt that he intensely enjoyed the fecundity of his genius. "What a fate," he cries, "for Richardson and Cervantes to have been able to do but one work." Travel was the holiday for which he longed. This alone he felt gave him "a rest from fatigue and ideas,—in fact, from Paris." Every time he sets out on a journey he declares that he is going to visit Madame Henske in Poland, but at the last moment the tour is almost always prevented, or the route altered, so that in the fourteen years covered by these letters they did not meet more than two or three times. Sometimes after these changes of plan Balzac had some trouble to convince the lady of the unchanging nature of his affection, but he always succeeded in the end. Except these repeated disappointments which he made her suffer, there is no evidence that his devotion ever cooled, and when M. Henske died it was the" krangere," and not "the poet," who hesitated before marriage. They were married, however, in 1S50, three months before Balzac's death.

Fine clothes, jewellery, and splendid plate were great weaknesses of Balzac's. We hear about his white silk dressing-gown and his Chartreuse dressing-gown, "a cane that has made all Paris gabble," "a divine opera glass," "gold buttons on my blue coat,—buttons chiselled by fairy hands, for a man who carries in the nineteenth century a cane worthy of Louis XIV. cannot keep upon his coat ignoble pinchbeck buttons." But if he was foolishly lavish he was also very kind. Some of the most amusing passages in the letters

refer to his 7+1 almost all of whom disappointed him. He has a delightful knack of giving a complete portrait in a few words, but he does it seldom in his letters. Madame Henske, was, no doubt, more interested in him than in his friends. We quote a sketch of his secretary, Count Belloy : "Twenty-four years old, face happy, wit abundant, conduct bad, poverty dreadful, talent and future rich, confidence and devotion entire, nobility immemorial." His description of George Sand is well worth reading, but rather too long to quote here. It is to be found on p. *33. Judging by his replies, Madame Hanska made many attempts to convert her lover to Roman Catholicism, and evidently risked seriously annoying him by her importunity. Sometimes he answers her seriously, sometimes wittily, sometimes almost angrily. He does not like to be told to be less anxious about the sale of his work and to trust in Providence. "if I abandoned myself to Providence, as you propose, Providence would already have put me in prison for debt," he replies on one occasion. Speaking, apparently seriously, about his creed, he declares himself to be a Swedenborgian, only differing from this sect in his belief that God is incom- prehensible. Yet in other letters he speaks of the Almighty in the most anthropomorphic manner possible, telling Madame Hanska that he fears to pray for such-and-such things lest he should "irritate God "; and again : "If God heard or paid attention to what I ask of Him, you would have complete happiness."

To those readers of Balzac's novels who feel keenly the depressing effect of his genius these letters will bring a certain sense of relief as well as of pleasure. They to some extent break the spell, or, may we say ? lift the curse of the eclmAll,,flumeine. We have looked inside Balzac's work- shop and seen the toil of the great romancer, and this sight helps us to realise that after all the miser Grandet, for instance, or Pere Goriot's daughters never actually existed even in France. Balzac sat up night after night in his white silk dressing-gown and invented them to throw to his creditors, and then went to bed in the luxuriously furnished bedroom which he describes, along with the gold buttons, as one of his "innocent joys," or else in the passage—according to the state of his finances.