The Human Comedy: Introductions and Appendix

With the first of these charges he himself, on different occasions, rather vainly endeavored to grapple, once drawing up an elaborate list of his virtuous and vicious women, and showing that the former outnumbered the latter; and, again, laboring (with that curious lack of sense of humor which distinguishes all Frenchmen but a very few, and distinguished him eminently) to show that though no doubt it is very difficult to make a virtuous person interesting, he, Honore de Balzac, had attempted it, and succeeded in it, on a quite surprising number of occasions.

The fact is that if he had handled this last matter rather more lightly his answer would have been a sufficient one, and that in any case the charge is not worth answering. It does not lie against the whole of his work; and if it lay as conclusively as it does against Swift's, it would not necessarily matter. To the artist in analysis as opposed to the romance-writer, folly always, and villainy sometimes, does supply a much better subject than virtuous success, and if he makes his fools and his villains lifelike and supplies them with a fair contrast of better things, there is nothing more to be said. He will not, indeed, be a Shakespeare, or a Dante, or even a Scott; but we may be very well satisfied with him as a Fielding, a Thackeray, or a Balzac. As to the more purely personal matter I own that it was some time before I could persuade myself that Balzac, to speak familiarly, was a much better fellow than others, and I myself, have been accustomed to think him. But it is also some time since I came to the conclusion that he was so, and my conversion is not to be attributed to any editorial retainer. His education in a lawyer's office, the accursed advice about the bonne speculation, and his constant straitenings for money, will account for his sometimes looking after the main chance rather too narrowly; and as for the Eugenie Grandet story (even if the supposition referred to in a note above be fanciful) it requires no great stretch of charity or comprehension to see in it nothing more awkward, very easily misconstrued, but not necessarily in the least heartless or brutal attempt of a rather absent and very much self-centered recluse absorbed in one subject, to get his interlocutor as well as himself out of painful and useless dwelling on sorrowful matters. Self-centered and self-absorbed Balzac no doubt was; he could not have lived his life or produced his work if he had been anything else. And it must be remembered that he owed extremely little to others; that he had the independence as well as the isolation of the self-centered; that he never sponged or fawned on a great man, or wronged others of what was due to them. The only really unpleasant thing about him that I know, and even this is perhaps due to ignorance of all sides of the matter, is a slight touch of snobbishness now and then, especially in those late letters from Vierzschovnia to Madame de Balzac and Madame Surville, in which, while inundating his mother and sister with commissions and requests for service, he points out to them what great people the Hanskas and Mniszechs are, what infinite honor and profit it will be to be connected with them, and how desirable it is to keep struggling engineer brothers-in-law and ne'er-do-well brothers in the colonies out of sight lest they should disgust the magnates.

But these are "sma' sums, sma' sums," as Bailie Jarvie says; and smallness of any kind has, whatever it may have to do with Balzac the man, nothing to do with Balzac the writer. With him as with some others, but not as with the larger number, the sense of greatness increases the longer and the more fully he is studied. He resembles, I think, Goethe more than any other man of letters – certainly more than any other of the present century – in having done work which is very frequently, if not even commonly, faulty, and in yet requiring that his work shall be known as a whole. His appeal is cumulative; it repeats itself on each occasion with a slight difference, and though there may now and then be the same faults to be noticed, they are almost invariably accompanied, not merely by the same, but by fresh merits.

As has been said at the beginning of this essay, no attempt will be made in it to give that running survey of Balzac's work which is always useful and sometimes indispensable in treatment of the kind. But something like a summing up of that subject will here be attempted because it is really desirable that in embarking on so vast a voyage the reader should have some general chart – some notes of the soundings and log generally of those who have gone before him.

There are two things, then, which it is more especially desirable to keep constantly before one in reading Balzac – two things which, taken together, constitute his almost unique value, and two things which not a few critics have failed to take together in him, being under the impression that the one excludes the other, and that to admit the other is tantamount to a denial of the one. These two things are, first, an immense attention to detail, sometimes observed, sometimes invented or imagined; and secondly; a faculty of regarding these details through a mental lens or arrangement of lenses almost peculiar to himself, which at once combines, enlarges, and invests them with a peculiar magical halo or mirage. The two thousand personages of the Comedie Humaine are, for the most part, "signaled," as the French official word has it, marked and denoted by the minutest traits of character, gesture, gait, clothing, abode, what not; the transactions recorded are very often given with a scrupulous and microscopic accuracy of reporting which no detective could outdo. Defoe is not more circumstantial in detail of fact than Balzac; Richardson is hardly more prodigal of character-stroke. Yet a very large proportion of these characters, of these circumstances, are evidently things invented or imagined, not observed. And in addition to this the artist's magic glass, his Balzacian speculum, if we may so say (for none else has ever had it), transforms even the most rigid observation into something flickering and fanciful, the outline as of shadows on the wall, not the precise contour of etching or of the camera.

It is curious, but not unexampled, that both Balzac himself when he struggled in argument with his critics and those of his partisans who have been most zealously devoted to him, have usually tried to exalt the first and less remarkable of these gifts over the second and infinitely more remarkable. Balzac protested strenuously against the use of the word "gigantesque" in reference to his work; and of course it is susceptible of an unhandsome innuendo. But if we leave that innuendo aside, if we adopt the sane reflection that "gigantesque" does not exceed "gigantic," or assert as constant failure of greatness, but only indicates that the magnifying process is carried on with a certain indiscriminateness, we shall find none, I think, which so thoroughly well describes him.

The effect of this singular combination of qualities, apparently the most opposite, may be partly anticipated, but not quite. It results occasionally in a certain shortcoming as regards verite vraie, absolute artistic truth to nature. Those who would range Balzac in point of such artistic veracity on a level with poetical and universal realists like Shakespeare and Dante, or prosaic and particular realists like Thackeray and Fielding, seem not only to be utterly wrong but to pay their idol the worst of all compliments, that of ignoring his own special qualifications. The province of Balzac may not be – I do no think it is – identical, much less co-extensive, with that of nature. But it is his own – a partly real, partly fantastic region, where the lights, the shades, the dimensions, and the physical laws are slightly different from those of this world of ours, but with which, owing to the things it has in common with that world, we are able to sympathize, which we can traverse and comprehend. Every now and then the artist uses his observing faculty more, and his magnifying and distorting lens less; every now and then he reverses the proportion. Some tastes will like him best in the one stage; some in the other; the happier constituted will like him best in both. These latter will decline to put Eugenie Grandet above the Peau de Chagrin, or Le Pere Goriot above the wonderful handful of tales which includes La Recherche de l'Absolu and Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu, though they will no doubt recognize that even in the first two named members of these pairs the Balzacian quality, that of magnifying and rendering grandiose, is present, and that the martyrdom of Eugenie, the avarice of her father, the blind self-devotion of Goriot to his thankless and worthless children, would not be what they are if they were seen through a perfectly achromatic and normal medium.

This specially Balzacian quality is, I think, unique. It is like – it may almost be said to be– the poetic imagination, present in magnificent volume and degree, but in some miraculous way deprived and sterilized of the specially poetical quality. By this I do not of course mean that Balzac did not write in verse: we have a few verses of his, and they are pretty bad, but that is neither here nor there. The difference between Balzac and a great poet lies not in the fact that the one fills the whole page with printed words, and the other only a part of it – but in something else. If I could put that something else into distinct words I should therein attain the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the primum mobile, the grand arcanum, not merely of criticism but of all things. It might be possible to coast about it, to hint at it, by adumbrations and in consequences. But it is better and really more helpful to face the difficulty boldly, and to say that Balzac, approaching a great poet nearer perhaps than any other prose writer in any language, is distinguished from one by the absence of the very last touch, the finally constituting quiddity, which makes a great poet different from Balzac.

Now, when we make this comparison, it is of the first interest to remember – and it is one of the uses of the comparison, that it suggests the remembrance of the fact – that the great poets have usually been themselves extremely exact observers of detail. It has not made them great poets; but they would not be great poets without it. And when Eugenie Grandet starts from le petit banc de bois at the reference to it in her scoundrelly cousin's letter (to take only one instance out of a thousand), we see in Balzac the same observation, subject to the limitation just mentioned, that we see in Dante and Shakespeare, in Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great poets do not as a rule accumulate detail. Balzac does, and from this very accumulation he manages to derive that singular gigantesque vagueness – differing from the poetic vague, but ranking next to it – which I have here ventured to note as his distinguishing quality. He bewilders us a very little by it, and he gives us the impression that he has slightly bewildered himself. But the compensations of the bewilderment are large.

For in this labyrinth and whirl of things, in this heat and hurry of observation and imagination, the special intoxication of Balzac consists. Every great artist has his own means of producing this intoxication, and it differs in result like the stimulus of beauty or of wine. Those persons who are unfortunate enough to see in Balzac little or nothing but an ingenious piler-up of careful strokes – a man of science taking his human documents and classing them after an orderly fashion in portfolio and deed-box – must miss this intoxication altogether. It is much more agreeable as well as much more accurate to see in the manufacture of the Comedie the process of a Cyclopean workshop – the bustle, the hurry, the glare and shadow, the steam and sparks of Vulcanian forging. The results, it is true, are by no means confused or disorderly – neither were those of the forges that worked under Lipari – but there certainly went much more to them than the dainty fingering of a literary fretwork-maker or the dull rummagings of a realist a la Zola.

In part, no doubt, and in great part, the work of Balzac is dream-stuff rather than life-stuff, and it is all the better for that. What is better than dreams? But the coherence of his visions, their bulk, their solidity, the way in which they return to us and we return to them, make them such dream-stuff as there is all too little of in this world. If it is true that evil on the whole predominates over good in the vision of this "Voyant," as Philarete Chasles so justly called him, two very respectable, and in one case very large, though somewhat opposed divisions of mankind, the philosophic pessimist and the convinced and consistent Christian believer, will tell us that this is at least not one of the points in which it is unfaithful to life. If the author is closer and more faithful in his study of meanness and vice than in his studies of nobility and virtue, the blame is due at least as much to his models as to himself. If he has seldom succeeded in combining a really passionate with a really noble conception of love, very few of his countrymen have been more fortunate in that respect. If in some of his types – his journalists, his married women, and others – he seems to have sacrificed to conventions, let us remember that those who know attribute to his conventions such a power if not altogether such a holy influence that two generations of the people he painted have actually lived more and more up to his painting of them.

And last of all, but also greatest, has to be considered the immensity of his imaginative achievement, the huge space that he has filled for us with vivid creation, the range of amusement, of instruction, of (after a fashion) edification which he has thrown open for us all to walk in. It is possible that he himself and others more or less well-meaningly, though more or less maladroitly, following his lead, may have exaggerated the coherence and the architectural design of the Comedie. But it has coherence and it has design; nor shall we find anything exactly to parallel it. In mere bulk the Comedie probably, if not certainly, exceeds the production of any novelist of the first class in any kind of fiction except Dumas, and with Dumas, for various and well-known reasons, there is no possibility of comparing it. All others yield in bulk; all in a certain concentration and intensity; none even aims at anything like the same system and completeness. It must be remembered that owing to shortness of life, lateness of beginning, and the diversion of the author to other work, the Comedie is the production, and not the sole production, of some seventeen or eighteen years at most. Not a volume of it, for all that failure to reach the completest perfection in form and style which has been acknowledged, can be accused of thinness, of scamped work, of mere repetition, of mere cobbling up. Every one bears the marks of steady and ferocious labor, as well as of the genius which had at last come where it had been so earnestly called and had never gone away again. It is possible to overpraise Balzac in parts or to mispraise him as a whole. But so long as inappropriate and superfluous comparisons are avoided and as his own excellence is recognized and appreciated, it is scarcely possible to overestimate that excellence in itself and for itself. He stands alone; even with Dickens, who is his nearest analogue, he shows far more points of difference than of likeness. His vastness of bulk is not more remarkable than his peculiarity of quality; and when these two things coincide in literature or elsewhere, then that in which they coincide may be called, and must be called, Great, without hesitation and without reserve.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

APPENDIX

THE BALZAC PLAN OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE

The form in which the Comedie Humaine was left by its author, with the exceptions of Le Depute d'Arcis (incomplete) and Les Petits Bourgeois, both of which were added, some years later, by the Edition Definitive.

The original French titles are followed by their English equivalents. Literal translations have been followed, excepting a few instances where preference is shown for a clearer or more comprehensive English title.

[Note from Team Balzac, the Etext preparers: In some cases more than one English translation is commonly used for various translations/editions. In such cases the first translation is from the Saintsbury edition copyrighted in 1901 and that is the title referred to in the personages following most of the stories. We have added other title translations of which we are currently aware for the readers' convenience.]

SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVEE

SCENES FROM PRIVATE LIFE

At the Sign of the Cat and Racket (La Maison du Chat-qui Pelote)

The Ball at Sceaux (Le Bal de Sceaux)

The Purse (La Bourse)

Vendetta (La Vendetta)

Madame Firmiani (Mme. Firmiani)

A Second Home (Une Double Famille)

Domestic Peace (La Paix du Menage)

Paz (La Fausse Maitresse)

Study of a Woman (Etude de femme)

Another Study of Woman (Autre etude de femme)

The Grand Breteche (La Grande Breteche)

Albert Savarus (Albert Savarus)

Letters of Two Brides (Memoires de deux Jeunes Mariees)

A Daughter of Eve (Une Fille d'Eve)

A Woman of Thirty (La Femme de Trente Ans)

The Deserted Woman (La Femme abandonnee)

La Grenadiere (La Grenadiere)

The Message (Le Message)

Gobseck (Gobseck)

The Marriage Contract (Le Contrat de Mariage)

A Start in Life (Un Debut dans la vie)

Modeste Mignon (Modeste Mignon)

Beatrix (Beatrix)

Honorine (Honorine)

Colonel Chabert (Le Colonel Chabert)

The Atheist's Mass (La Messe de l'Athee)

The Commission in Lunacy (L'Interdiction)

Pierre Grassou (Pierre Grassou)

SCENES DE LA VIE PROVINCE

SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE

Ursule Mirouet (Ursule Mirouet)

Eugenie Grandet (Eugenie Grandet)

Pierrette (Les Celibataires, Pierrette)

The Vicar of Tours (Le Cure de Tours)

The Two Brothers, (The Black Sheep) (Un Menage de Garcon, La Rabouilleuse)

The Illustrious Gaudissart (L'illustre Gaudissart, Parisians in the Country)

The Muse of the Department (La Muse du departement)

The Old Maid, Jealousies of a Country Town (La Vieille Fille, Les Rivalites)

The Collection of Antiquities (Le Cabinet des antiques)

The Lily of the Valley (Le Lys dans la Vallee)

Two Poets, Lost Illusions: – I. (Les Deux Poetes, Illusions Perdues: – I.)

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris (Un Grand homme de province a Paris, 1re partie)

Eve and David (Eve et David)

SCENES DE LA VIE PARISIENNE

SCENES FROM PARISIAN LIFE

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life, Esther Happy (Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes

What Love Costs an Old Man (A combien l'amour revient aux vieillards)

The End of Evil Ways (Ou menent les mauvais Chemins)

Vautrin's Last Avatar (La derniere Incarnation de Vautrin)

A Prince of Bohemia (Un Prince de la Boheme)

A Man of Business (Un Homme d'affaires)

Gaudissart II (Gaudissart II.)

Unconscious Comedians, The Unconscious Humorists (Les Comediens sans le savoir)

Ferragus, The Thirteen (Ferragus, Histoire des Treize)

The Duchesse de Langeais (La Duchesse de Langeais)

Girl with the Golden Eyes (La Fille aux yeux d'or)

Father Goriot, Old Goriot (Le Pere Goriot)

Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau (Grandeur et Decadence de Cesar Birotteau)

The Firm of Nucingen (La Maison Nucingen)

Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan (Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan)

Bureaucracy, The Government Clerks (Les Employes)

Sarrasine (Sarrasine)

Facino Cane (Facino Cane)

Cousin Betty, Poor Relations: – I. (La Cousine Bette, Les Parents Pauvres: – I.)

Cousin Pons, Poor Relations: – II. (Le Cousin Pons, Les Parents Pauvres: – II.)

The Lesser Bourgeoisie, The Middle Classes (Les Petits Bourgeois)

SCENES DE LA VIE POLITIQUE

SCENES FROM POLITICAL LIFE

An Historical Mystery, The Gondreville Mystery (Une Tenebreuse Affaire)

An Episode Under the Terror (Un Episode sous la Terreur)

Brotherhood of Consolation, Seamy Side of History (Mme. de la Chanterie, L'Envers de l'Histoire Contemporaine)

Initiated, The Initiate (L'Initie)

Z. Marcas (Z. Marcas)

The Deputy of Arcis, The Member for Arcis (Le Depute d'Arcis)

SCENES DE LA VIE MILITAIRE

SCENES FROM MILITARY LIFE

The Chouans (Les Chouans)

A Passion in the Desert (Une Passion dans le desert)

SCENES DE LA VIE DE CAMPAGNE

SCENES FROM COUNTRY LIFE

The Country Doctor (Le Medecin de Campagne)

The Village Rector, The Country Parson (Le Cure de Village)

Sons of the Soil, The Peasantry (Les Paysans)

ETUDES PHILOSOPHIQUES

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

The Magic Skin (La Peau de Chagrin)

The Alkahest, The Quest of the Absolute (La Recherche de l'Absolu)

Christ in Flanders (Jesus-Christ en Flandre)

Melmoth Reconciled (Melmoth reconcilie)

The Unknown Masterpiece, The Hidden Masterpiece (Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu)

The Hated Son (L'Enfant Maudit)

Gambara (Gambara)

Massimilla Doni (Massimilla Doni)

Juana, The Maranas (Les Marana)

Farewell (Adieu)

The Recruit, The Conscript (Le Requisitionnaire)

El Verdugo (El Verdugo)

A Drama on the Seashore, A Seaside Tragedy (Un Drame au bord de la mer)

The Red Inn (L'Auberge rouge)

The Elixir of Life (L'Elixir de longue vie)

Maitre Cornelius (Maitre Cornelius)

Catherine de' Medici, The Calvinist Martyr (Sur Catherine de Medicis, Le Martyr calviniste)

The Ruggieri's Secret, (La Confidence des Ruggieri)

The Two Dreams (Les Deux Reves) Louis Lambert (Louis Lambert)

The Exiles (Les Proscrits)

Seraphita (Seraphita)