Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 20.djvu/19

INTRODUCTION to see that we need not even limit ourselves to the French peasant in admitting that it is. There are passages in the book which read as if they might be extracts mutatis mutandis from a novel on the Irish Land League or the Welsh Anti-Tithe Agitation. To a certain extent, no doubt, the English peasant, at least when he is not Celtic, is rather less bitten with actual "land-hunger" than the Frenchman; and even when he is a Celt, it does not seem to be so much landhunger proper as a dislike to adopting any other occupation which drives him to crime. Moreover, Free Trade and other things have made land in the United Kingdom very much less an object of positive greed than it was in France eighty years ago, or, indeed, than it is there still. Yet the main and special ingredients of a land agitation—the ruthless disregard of life, the indifference to all considerations of gratitude or justice, the secret-society alliance against the upper classes,—all these things are delineated here with an almost terrifying veracity.

For individual and separate sketches of scenes and characters (with the limitation above expressed) the book may vie almost with the best. The partly real, partly fictitious, otter-hunting of the old scoundrel Fourchon is quite first-rate; and it is of a kind rarely found in French writers till a time much more modern than Balzac's. The machinations of Gaubertin, Sibilet, and Rigou are a little less vivid; but the latter is a masterly character of the second class, and perhaps the best type in fiction of the intelligent sensualist of the lower rank—of the man hard-headed, harder-hearted, and entirely destitute of any merit but shrewdness. The character of Bonnébault is a little, a very little, theatrical; the troupier français debauched, but not ungenerous,