Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 02.djvu/515

BALZAC. character. To an intense imagination that made him at times a visionary, he joined an intense application that made him at times a recluse. In thought, the child was a man; in action the man was a child, capricious and prodigal, full of schemes that made others rich and kept him poor: restless, passionate, morbid sometimes, especially in the hope deferred of his unfortunate relation to Madame Hanska, but never forfeiting sympathy, because always frank and almost childlike in his broad humanity. There was something awesome in the intensity with which he lived out his fifty years. Hugo expressed this when he said at his grave in Père Lachaise that "such coffins proclaim immortality. We feel the divine destiny of that intellect which has traversed earth to suffer and be purified. So great a genius in his life cannot but be a great spirit hereafter."

In any survey of Balzac's work it is well to consider first what he tried to do. He explains this in the preface to his novels collected under the title La Comédie Humaine. He says his thought was to do for human nature what had recently been done for zoölogy — to show that all society was bound together by a unity of composition, diversified by evolution in varied environments, so that there were species of men as of animals. The soldier, the lawyer, the workman, the scholar, the statesman, would show as distinct and abiding characteristics as the wolf, the shark, the ass, the raven, and the sheep. But this, he continues, would require several thousand characters; and how should he give unity to his creations? He would let society tell its own story. He would be its secretary, draw up an inventory of its virtues and vices, gather the facts of its passions, compose types for it by uniting homogeneous natures, and so produce a history of manners from the point of view of a conservative, a Christian, and a monarchist, who knew through friends the Old Régime and the Republic, and had lived under the Empire, the Bourbons, and the democratic monarchy of July. His novels were to be as a secretary's minutes, ideal in conception, but real in detail, shrinking from neither vice nor passion, because these are the motive forces that melt and recast human nature, but giving to religion its due place, and making virtue not only lovable but interesting. That is what he undertook to do, and though his work is incomplete, he left no part unessayed. He has a right to ask that his work be judged as a whole, by the good as well as by the evil. Like that other Comedy of Dante, his Human Comedy has its Hell, but it has also its Purgatory and its Paradise. Balzac is by some considered immoral; others pronounce his work as a whole serious in purpose, high and edifying in tone.

The Comédie Humaine, as it stands, vast yet unfinished, has been compared by Zola to a cyclopean palace, with splendid halls and wretched corners, with broad corridors and narrow passages, and superpiled stories in varied architecture. Two thousand characters cross its stage; and in their mimic life, which to Balzac for the time became reality, they formulate the chief types and events of social existence in such a variety of setting that his comedy has not only its genealogy but its geography. It is a work of criticism, analysis, and investigation, to be enjoyed in its parts, but to be understood only as a whole. Balzac divided his Human Comedy into Scenes of Private Life, of Provincial Life, of Parisian Life, of Country Life, of Politics and War, and to these he added Studies, philosophical and analytic. There are those who admire the analytic acumen displayed in this division; but as Balzac frequently transferred tales and novels from one to another group to suit his fancy or a publisher's convenience, it seems time wasted to stress the classification. It is more philosophical to study his work as it grew in his mind — that is, chronologically — and then to treat it briefly in its entirety. Les Chouans was followed by six Scènes de la Vie Privée (1830), of which El Verdugo is a masterly tale of terror, and Gobseck one of the world's great studies of morbid avarice. La Maison du Chat-qui-pélote (1830), written before these, though published a little later, in its plea for conventional marriage shows Balzac to be a master in social psychology. And, as though he would excel at once in every genre, the same year witnesses the Dresden-shepherdess introduction and the luridly romantic close of Une Double Famille; the curious Macchiavellianism of Les Deux Rèves; Adieu, a masterpiece of tragic pathos; the fantastic L'Elixir de Longue Vie; two stories of abnormal love, Sarrasine and Une Passion dans le Désert; and, finally, an acute study of the purification of religious feeling through persecution in Une Episode sous la Terreur. And with all this came contributions to journals whose titles for this year alone fill two octavo pages of Louvenjoul's Histoire des Œuvres de Honoré de Balzac.

A marvelous fertility characterized the next three years, till his first meeting with Madame Hanska (1833). Much of this time he passed away from Paris, to avoid interruptions. The more important works of 1831 are La Femme de Trente Ans (incomplete), L'Enfant Maudit (incomplete), Le Réquisitionnaire, Les Exilés (a wonderful evocation of Paris in 1308, setting ajar the gate that was to open on the spirit world in Louis Lambert and Séraphita); Le Chef d'Œuvre inconnu; the remarkable L'Auberge Rouge; the curiously mystic Peau de Chagrin; the mediæval legend, Jésus-Christ en Flandre; a remarkable study of avarice, Maître Cornélius; and, outside the frame of the Human Comedy, the Contes Drôlatiques. The work of 1832 is even more remarkable. It touches the depths of horror in La Grande Bretéche, rises to philosophic heights in Louis Lambert, deals gracefully with romantic honor in Madame Firmiani, and with romantic love in La Bourse; becomes pitiful in Colonel Chabert, and tragic in Le Message; gives an exquisite picture of child-life in La Grenadière, preaches a stern social morality in La Femme Abundonnée, epitomizes the French clergy of the Restoration in Le Curé de Tours, unveils the courtesan morals of the Renaissance in Les Marana, and crowns the year with the mystic Louis Lambert. And during 1833 also, he tells a correspondent that he lives in "an atmosphere of thoughts, ideas, plans, works, conceptions, that mingle, bubble, and sparkle in my brain." Of these, the Contes Drôlatiques show the effervescing of a joyous animal nature; Férragus is a sort of detective story; Le Médecin-de-campagne is photographic in its reproduction of peasant thought and country scenes, and Eugénie Grandet is Balzac's greatest study of ava-