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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Human Comedy, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Human Comedy
+       Introductions and Appendix
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Commentator: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: November, 1999  [Etext #1968]
+Posting Date: March 8, 2010
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HUMAN COMEDY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HUMAN COMEDY
+
+INTRODUCTIONS AND APPENDIX
+
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+
+      Note: 
+
+      This reposting is dedicated to Dagny, who, 10 years ago,
+      was part of the "Balzac Team" which produced 113 eBooks
+      for Project Gutenberg. I cannot locate her present email
+      address to thank her for the extraordinarily fine work she
+      did at a time when we had none of the present easy programs
+      to help locate errors--and to notify her that all her Balzac
+      files have been rechecked and reposted.
+
+      DW
+
+
+
+                             CONTENTS
+
+    Honore de Balzac
+    Introduction and brief biography by George Saintsbury.
+
+    Appendix
+    List of titles in French with English translations and grouped
+    in the various classifications.
+
+    Author's introduction
+    Balzac's 1842 introduction to The Human Comedy.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+                  _"Sans genie, je suis flambe!"_
+
+Volumes, almost libraries, have been written about Balzac; and perhaps
+of very few writers, putting aside the three or four greatest of all, is
+it so difficult to select one or a few short phrases which will in any
+way denote them, much more sum them up. Yet the five words quoted above,
+which come from an early letter to his sister when as yet he had not
+"found his way," characterize him, I think, better than at least some
+of the volumes I have read about him, and supply, when they are properly
+understood, the most valuable of all keys and companions for his
+comprehension.
+
+"If I have not genius, it is all up with me!" A very matter-of-fact
+person may say: "Why! there is nothing wonderful in this. Everybody
+knows what genius is wanted to make a name in literature, and most
+people think they have it." But this would be a little short-sighted,
+and only excusable because of the way in which the word "genius" is too
+commonly bandied about. As a matter of fact, there is not so very much
+genius in the world; and a great deal of more than fair performance is
+attainable and attained by more or less decent allowances or exhibitions
+of talent. In prose, more especially, it is possible to gain a very
+high place, and to deserve it, without any genius at all: though it is
+difficult, if not impossible, to do so in verse. But what Balzac felt
+(whether he was conscious in detail of the feeling or not) when he used
+these words to his sister Laure, what his critical readers must feel
+when they have read only a very little of his work, what they must feel
+still more strongly when they have read that work as a whole--is that
+for him there is no such door of escape and no such compromise. He had
+the choice, by his nature, his aims, his capacities, of being a genius
+or nothing. He had no little gifts, and he was even destitute of some of
+the separate and indivisible great ones. In mere writing, mere style,
+he was not supreme; one seldom or never derives from anything of his the
+merely artistic satisfaction given by perfect prose. His humor, except
+of the grim and gigantic kind, was not remarkable; his wit, for a
+Frenchman, curiously thin and small. The minor felicities of the
+literature generally were denied to him. _Sans genie, il etait flambe_;
+_flambe_ as he seemed to be, and very reasonably seemed, to his friends
+when as yet the genius had not come to him, and when he was desperately
+striving to discover where his genius lay in those wonderous works
+which "Lord R'Hoone," and "Horace de Saint Aubin," and others obligingly
+fathered for him.
+
+It must be the business of these introductions to give what assistance
+they may to discover where it did lie; it is only necessary, before
+taking up the task in the regular biographical and critical way of the
+introductory cicerone, to make two negative observations. It did
+not lie, as some have apparently thought, in the conception, or the
+outlining, or the filling up of such a scheme as the _Comedie Humaine_.
+In the first place, the work of every great writer, of the creative
+kind, including that of Dante himself, is a _comedie humaine_. All
+humanity is latent in every human being; and the great writers are
+merely those who call most of it out of latency and put it actually on
+the stage. And, as students of Balzac know, the scheme and adjustment
+of his comedy varied so remarkably as time went on that it can hardly be
+said to have, even in its latest form (which would pretty certainly have
+been altered again), a distinct and definite character. Its so-called
+scenes are even in the mass by no means exhaustive, and are, as they
+stand, a very "cross," division of life: nor are they peopled by
+anything like an exhaustive selection of personages. Nor again is
+Balzac's genius by any means a mere vindication of the famous definition
+of that quality as an infinite capacity of taking pains. That Balzac had
+that capacity--had it in a degree probably unequaled even by the dullest
+plodders on record--is very well known, is one of the best known things
+about him. But he showed it for nearly ten years before the genius came,
+and though no doubt it helped him when genius had come, the two things
+are in his case, as in most, pretty sufficiently distinct. What the
+genius itself was I must do my best to indicate hereafter, always
+beseeching the reader to remember that all genius is in its essence and
+quiddity indefinable. You can no more get close to it than you can get
+close to the rainbow, and your most scientific explanation of it
+will always leave as much of the heart of the fact unexplained as the
+scientific explanation of the rainbow leaves of that.
+
+
+
+Honore de Balzac was born at Tours on the 16th of May, 1799, in the same
+year which saw the birth of Heine, and which therefore had the honor
+of producing perhaps the most characteristic writers of the nineteenth
+century in prose and verse respectively. The family was a respectable
+one, though its right to the particle which Balzac always carefully
+assumed, subscribing himself "_de_ Balzac," was contested. And there
+appears to be no proof of their connection with Jean Guez de Balzac,
+the founder, as some will have him, of modern French prose, and the
+contemporary and fellow-reformer of Malherbe. (Indeed, as the novelist
+pointed out with sufficient pertinence, his earlier namesake had no
+hereditary right to the name at all, and merely took it from some
+property.) Balzac's father, who, as the _zac_ pretty surely indicates,
+was a southerner and a native of Languedoc, was fifty-three years old at
+the birth of his son, whose Christian name was selected on the ordinary
+principle of accepting that of the saint on whose day he was born.
+Balzac the elder had been a barrister before the Revolution, but under
+it he obtained a post in the commissariat, and rose to be head of that
+department for a military division. His wife, who was much younger than
+himself and who survived her son, is said to have possessed both beauty
+and fortune, and was evidently endowed with the business faculties so
+common among Frenchwomen. When Honore was born, the family had not long
+been established at Tours, where Balzac the elder (besides his
+duties) had a house and some land; and this town continued to be their
+headquarters till the novelist, who was the eldest of the family, was
+about sixteen. He had two sisters (of whom the elder, Laure, afterwards
+Madame Surville, was his first confidante and his only authoritative
+biographer) and a younger brother, who seems to have been, if not a
+scapegrace, rather a burden to his friends, and who later went abroad.
+
+The eldest boy was, in spite of Rousseau, put out to nurse, and at seven
+years old was sent to the Oratorian grammar-school at Vendome, where he
+stayed another seven years, going through, according to his own account,
+the future experiences and performances of Louis Lambert, but making no
+reputation for himself in the ordinary school course. If, however, he
+would not work in his teacher's way, he overworked himself in his own by
+devouring books; and was sent home at fourteen in such a state of health
+that his grandmother (who after the French fashion, was living with her
+daughter and son-in-law), ejaculated: _"Voila donc comme le college nous
+renvoie les jolis enfants que nous lui envoyons!"_ It would seem indeed
+that, after making all due allowance for grandmotherly and sisterly
+partiality, Balzac was actually a very good-looking boy and young man,
+though the portraits of him in later life may not satisfy the more
+romantic expectations of his admirers. He must have had at all times
+eyes full of character, perhaps the only feature that never fails in men
+of intellectual eminence; but he certainly does not seem to have been in
+his manhood either exactly handsome or exactly "distinguished-looking."
+But the portraits of the middle of the century are, as a rule, rather
+wanting in this characteristic when compared with those of its first
+and last periods; and I cannot think of many that quite come up to one's
+expectations.
+
+For a short time he was left pretty much to himself, and recovered
+rapidly. But late in 1814 a change of official duties removed the
+Balzacs to Paris, and when they had established themselves in the famous
+old _bourgeois_ quarter of the Marais, Honore was sent to divers private
+tutors or private schools till he had "finished his classes" in 1816
+at the age of seventeen and a half. Then he attended lectures at the
+Sorbonne where Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin were lecturing, and
+heard them, as his sister tells us, enthusiastically, though there are
+probably no three writers of any considerable repute in the history of
+French literature who stand further apart from Balzac. For all three
+made and kept their fame by spirited and agreeable generalizations
+and expatiations, as different as possible from the savage labor of
+observation on the one hand and the gigantic developments of imagination
+on the other, which were to compose Balzac's appeal. His father destined
+him for the law; and for three years more he dutifully attended the
+offices of an attorney and a notary, besides going through the necessary
+lectures and examinations. All these trials he seems to have passed, if
+not brilliantly, yet sufficiently.
+
+And then came the inevitable crisis, which was of an unusually severe
+nature. A notary, who was a friend of the elder Balzac's and owed him
+some gratitude offered not merely to take Honore into his office, but
+to allow him to succeed to his business, which was a very good one, in
+a few years on very favorable terms. Most fathers, and nearly all French
+fathers, would have jumped at this; and it so happened that about
+the same time M. de Balzac was undergoing that unpleasant process of
+compulsory retirement which his son has described in one of the best
+passages of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, the opening scene of _Argow
+le Pirate_. It does not appear that Honore had revolted during his
+probation--indeed he is said, and we can easily believe it from his
+books, to have acquired a very solid knowledge of law, especially in
+bankruptcy matters, of which he was himself to have a very close shave
+in future. A solicitor, indeed, told Laure de Balzac that he found
+_Cesar Birotteau_ a kind of _Balzac on Bankruptcy_; but this may have
+been only the solicitor's fun.
+
+It was no part of Honore's intentions to use this knowledge--however
+content he had been to acquire it--in the least interesting, if nearly
+the most profitable, of the branches of the legal profession; and he
+protested eloquently, and not unsuccessfully, that he would be a man of
+letters and nothing else. Not unsuccessfully; but at the same time with
+distinctly qualified success. He was not turned out of doors; nor were
+the supplies, as in Quinet's case only a few months later, absolutely
+withheld even for a short time. But his mother (who seems to have been
+less placable than her husband) thought that cutting them down to the
+lowest point might have some effect. So, as the family at this time
+(April 1819) left Paris for a house some twenty miles out of it, she
+established her eldest son in a garret furnished in the most Spartan
+fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after
+him. He did not literally stay in this garret for the ten years of his
+astonishing and unparalleled probation; but without too much metaphor
+it may be said to have been his Wilderness, and his Wanderings in it to
+have lasted for that very considerable time.
+
+We know, in detail, very little of him during the period. For the first
+years, between 1819 and 1822, we have a good number of letters to Laure;
+between 1822 and 1829, when he first made his mark, very few. He began,
+of course, with verse, for which he never had the slightest vocation,
+and, almost equally of course, with a tragedy. But by degrees and
+apparently pretty soon, he slipped into what was his vocation, and like
+some, though not very many, great writers, at first did little better in
+it than if it had not been his vocation at all. The singular tentatives
+which, after being allowed for a time a sort of outhouse in the
+structure of the _Comedie Humaine_, were excluded from the octavo
+_Edition Definitive_ five-and-twenty years ago, have never been the
+object of that exhaustive bibliographical and critical attention which
+has been bestowed on those which follow them. They were not absolutely
+unproductive--we hear of sixty, eighty, a hundred pounds being paid for
+them, though whether this was the amount of Balzac's always sanguine
+expectations, or hard cash actually handed over, we cannot say. They
+were very numerous, though the reprints spoken of above never extended
+to more than ten. Even these have never been widely read. The only
+person I ever knew till I began this present task who had read them
+through was the friend whom all his friends are now lamenting and are
+not likely soon to cease to lament, Mr. Louis Stevenson; and when I once
+asked him whether, on his honor and conscience, he could recommend me
+to brace myself to the same effort, he said that on his honor and
+conscience he must most earnestly dissuade me. I gather, though I am not
+sure, that Mr. Wedmore, the latest writer in English on Balzac at any
+length, had not read them through when he wrote.
+
+Now I have, and a most curious study they are. Indeed I am not sorry,
+as Mr. Wedmore thinks one would be. They are curiously, interestingly,
+almost enthrallingly bad. Couched for the most part in a kind of
+Radcliffian or Monk-Lewisian vein--perhaps studied more directly from
+Maturin (of whom Balzac was a great admirer) than from either--they
+often begin with and sometimes contain at intervals passages not unlike
+the Balzac that we know. The attractive title of _Jane la Pale_ (it
+was originally called, with a still more Early Romantic avidity for
+_baroque_ titles, _Wann-Chlore_) has caused it, I believe, to be
+more commonly read than any other. It deals with a disguised duke, a
+villainous Italian, bigamy, a surprising offer of the angelic first wife
+to submit to a sort of double arrangement, the death of the second wife
+and first love, and a great many other things. _Argow le Pirate_ opens
+quite decently and in order with that story of the _employe_ which
+Balzac was to rehandle so often, but drops suddenly into brigands
+stopping diligences, the marriage of the heroine Annette with a retired
+pirate marquis of vast wealth, the trial of the latter for murdering
+another marquis with a poisoned fish-bone scarf-pin, his execution,
+the sanguinary reprisals by his redoubtable lieutenant, and a finale
+of blunderbusses, fire, devoted peasant girl with _retrousse_ nose, and
+almost every possible _tremblement_.
+
+In strictness mention of this should have been preceded by mention of
+_Le Vicaire des Ardennes_, which is a sort of first part of _Argow le
+Pirate_, and not only gives an account of his crimes, early history,
+and manners (which seem to have been a little robustious for such a
+mild-mannered man as Annette's husband), but tells a thrilling tale of
+the loves of the _vicaire_ himself and a young woman, which loves are
+crossed, first by the belief that they are brother and sister, and
+secondly by the _vicaire_ having taken orders under this delusion. _La
+Derniere Fee_ is the queerest possible cross between an actual fairy
+story _a la_ Nordier and a history of the fantastic and inconstant loves
+of a great English lady, the Duchess of "Sommerset" (a piece of
+actual _scandalum magnatum_ nearly as bad as Balzac's cool use in his
+acknowledged work of the title "Lord Dudley"). This book begins so
+well that one expects it to go on better; but the inevitable defects
+in craftsmanship show themselves before long. _Le Centenaire_ connects
+itself with Balzac's almost lifelong hankering after the _recherche de
+l'absolu_ in one form or another, for the hero is a wicked old person
+who every now and then refreshes his hold on life by immolating a virgin
+under a copper-bell. It is one of the most extravagant and "Monk-Lewisy"
+of the whole. _L'Excommunie_, _L'Israelite_, and _L'Heritiere de
+Birague_ are mediaeval or fifteenth century tales of the most
+luxuriant kind, _L'Excommunie_ being the best, _L'Israelite_ the most
+preposterous, and _L'Heritiere de Birague_ the dullest. But it is not
+nearly so dull as _Dom Gigadus_ and _Jean Louis_, the former of which
+deals with the end of the seventeenth century and the latter with the
+end of the eighteenth. These are both as nearly unreadable as anything
+can be. One interesting thing, however, should be noted in much of this
+early work: the affectionate clinging of the author to the scenery of
+Touraine, which sometimes inspires him with his least bad passages.
+
+It is generally agreed that these singular _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_ were
+of service to Balzac as exercise, and no doubt they were so; but I think
+something may be said on the other side. They must have done a little,
+if not much, to lead him into and confirm him in those defects of style
+and form which distinguish him so remarkably from most writers of his
+rank. It very seldom happens when a very young man writes very much, be
+it book-writing or journalism, without censure and without "editing,"
+that he does not at the same time get into loose and slipshod habits.
+And I think we may set down to this peculiar form of apprenticeship of
+Balzac's not merely his failure ever to attain, except in passages and
+patches, a thoroughly great style, but also that extraordinary method
+of composition which in after days cost him and his publishers so much
+money.
+
+However, if these ten years of probation taught him his trade, they
+taught him also a most unfortunate avocation or by-trade, which he never
+ceased to practise, or to try to practise, which never did him the least
+good, and which not unfrequently lost him much of the not too abundant
+gains which he earned with such enormous labor. This was the "game
+of speculation." His sister puts the tempter's part on an unknown
+"neighbor," who advised him to try to procure independence by _une bonne
+speculation_. Those who have read Balzac's books and his letters will
+hardly think that he required much tempting. He began by trying to
+publish--an attempt which has never yet succeeded with a single man of
+letters, so far as I can remember. His scheme was not a bad one, indeed
+it was one which has brought much money to other pockets since, being
+neither more nor less than the issuing of cheap one-volume editions of
+French classics. But he had hardly any capital; he was naturally quite
+ignorant of his trade, and as naturally the established publishers and
+booksellers boycotted him as an intruder. So his _Moliere_ and his
+_La Fontaine_ are said to have been sold as waste paper, though if any
+copies escaped they would probably fetch a very comfortable price now.
+Then, such capital as he had having been borrowed, the lender, either
+out of good nature or avarice, determined to throw the helve after the
+hatchet. He partly advanced himself and partly induced Balzac's parents
+to advance more, in order to start the young man as a printer, to which
+business Honore himself added that of typefounder. The story was just
+the same: knowledge and capital were again wanting, and though actual
+bankruptcy was avoided, Balzac got out of the matter at the cost not
+merely of giving the two businesses to a friend (in whose hands they
+proved profitable), but of a margin of debt from which he may be said
+never to have fully cleared himself.
+
+He had more than twenty years to live, but he never cured himself of
+this hankering after _une bonne speculation_. Sometimes it was ordinary
+stock-exchange gambling; but his special weakness was, to do him
+justice, for schemes that had something more grandiose in them. Thus,
+to finish here with the subject, though the chapter of it never actually
+finished till his death, he made years afterwards, when he was a
+successful and a desperately busy author, a long, troublesome, and
+costly journey to Sardinia to carry out a plan of resmelting the slag
+from Roman and other mines there. Thus in his very latest days, when he
+was living at Vierzschovnia with the Hanska and Mniszech household,
+he conceived the magnificently absurd notion of cutting down twenty
+thousand acres of oak wood in the Ukraine, and sending it _by railway_
+right across Europe to be sold in France. And he was rather reluctantly
+convinced that by the time a single log reached its market the freight
+would have eaten up the value of the whole plantation.
+
+It was perhaps not entirely chance that the collapse of the printing
+scheme, which took place in 1827, the ninth year of the Wanderings in
+the Wilderness, coincided with or immediately preceded the conception of
+the book which was to give Balzac passage into the Promised Land.
+This was _Les Chouans_, called at its first issue, which differed
+considerably from the present form, _Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne
+en 1800_ (later _1799_). It was published in 1829 without any of the
+previous anagrammatic pseudonyms; and whatever were the reasons which
+had induced him to make his bow in person to the public, they were well
+justified, for the book was a distinct success, if not a great one. It
+occupies a kind of middle position between the melodramatic romance of
+his nonage and the strictly analytic romance-novel of his later time;
+and, though dealing with war and love chiefly, inclines in conception
+distinctly to the latter. Corentin, Hulot, and other personages of the
+actual Comedy (then by no means planned, or at least avowed) appear; and
+though the influence of Scott is in a way paramount* on the surface,
+the underwork is quite different, and the whole scheme of the loves of
+Montauran and Mademoiselle de Verneuil is pure Balzac.
+
+  * Balzac was throughout his life a fervent admirer of Sir Walter,
+    and I think Mr. Wedmore, in his passage on the subject, distinctly
+    undervalues both the character and the duration of this esteem.
+    Balzac was far too acute to commit the common mistake of thinking
+    Scott superficial--men who know mankind are not often blind to
+    each other's knowledge. And while Mr. Wedmore seems not to know
+    any testimony later than Balzac's _thirty-eighth_ year, it is in
+    his _forty-sixth_, when all his own best work was done, except the
+    _Parents Pauvres_, that he contrasts Dumas with Scott saying that
+    _on relit Walter Scott_, and he does not think any one will
+    re-read Dumas. This may be unjust to the one writer, but it is
+    conclusive as to any sense of "wasted time" (his own phrase)
+    having ever existed in Balzac's mind about the other.
+
+It would seem as if nothing but this sun of popular approval had been
+wanting to make Balzac's genius burst out in full bloom. Although we
+have a fair number of letters for the ensuing years, it is not very easy
+to make out the exact sequence of production of the marvelous harvest
+which his genius gave. It is sufficient to say that in the three
+years following 1829 there were actually published the _Physiologie
+du Mariage_, the charming story of _La Maison du Chat-que-Pelote_,
+the _Peau de Chagrin_, the most original and splendid, if not the most
+finished and refined, of all Balzac's books, most of the short _Contes
+Philosophiques_, of which some are among their author's greatest
+triumphs, many other stories (chiefly included in the _Scenes de la Vie
+Privee_) and the beginning of the _Contes Drolatiques_.*
+
+  * No regular attempt will after this be made to indicate the date of
+    production of successive works, unless they connect themselves
+    very distinctly with incidents in the life or with general
+    critical observations. At the end of this introduction will be
+    found a full table of the _Comedie Humaine_ and the other works.
+    It may perhaps be worth while to add here, that while the labors
+    of M. de Lovenjoul (to whom every writer on Balzac must
+    acknowledge the deepest obligation) have cleared this matter up
+    almost to the verge of possibility as regards the published works,
+    there is little light to be thrown on the constant references in
+    the letters to books which never appeared. Sometimes they are
+    known, and they may often be suspected, to have been absorbed into
+    or incorporated with others; the rest must have been lost or
+    destroyed, or, which is not quite impossible, have existed chiefly
+    in the form of project. Nearly a hundred titles of such things are
+    preserved.
+
+But without a careful examination of his miscellaneous work, which is
+very abundant and includes journalism as well as books, it is almost
+as impossible to come to a just appreciation of Balzac as it is without
+reading the early works and letters. This miscellaneous work is all the
+more important because a great deal of it represents the artist at quite
+advanced stages of his career, and because all its examples, the earlier
+as well as the later, give us abundant insight on him as he was "making
+himself." The comparison with the early works of Thackeray (in _Punch_,
+_Fraser_, and elsewhere) is so striking that it can escape no one who
+knows the two. Every now and then Balzac transferred bodily, or with
+slight alterations, passages from these experiments to his finished
+canvases. It appears that he had a scheme for codifying his
+"Physiologies" (of which the notorious one above mentioned is only
+a catchpenny exemplar and very far from the best) into a seriously
+organized work. Chance was kind or intention was wise in not allowing
+him to do so; but the value of the things for the critical reader is
+not less. Here are tales--extensions of the scheme and manner of the
+_Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, or attempts at the _goguenard_ story of 1830--a
+thing for which Balzac's hand was hardly light enough. Here are
+interesting evidences of striving to be cosmopolitan and polyglot--the
+most interesting of all of which, I think, is the mention of certain
+British products as "mufflings." "Muffling" used to be a domestic joke
+for "muffin;" but whether some wicked Briton deluded Balzac into the
+idea that it was the proper form or not it is impossible to say. Here
+is a _Traite de la Vie Elegante_, inestimable for certain critical
+purposes. So early as 1825 we find a _Code des Gens Honnetes_, which
+exhibits at once the author's legal studies and his constant attraction
+for the shady side of business, and which contains a scheme for
+defrauding by means of lead pencils, actually carried out (if we may
+believe his exulting note) by some literary swindlers with unhappy
+results. A year later he wrote a _Dictionnaire des Enseignes de
+Paris_, which we are glad enough to have from the author of the
+_Chat-que-Pelote_; but the persistence with which this kind of
+miscellaneous writing occupied him could not be better exemplified than
+by the fact that, of two important works which closely follow this in
+the collected edition, the _Physiologie de l'Employe_ dates from 1841
+and the _Monographie de la Presse Parisienne_ from 1843.
+
+It is well known that from the time almost of his success as a novelist
+he was given, like too many successful novelists (_not_ like Scott), to
+rather undignified and foolish attacks on critics. The explanation may
+or may not be found in the fact that we have abundant critical work of
+his, and that it is nearly all bad. Now and then we have an acute remark
+in his own special sphere; but as a rule he cannot be complimented on
+these performances, and when he was half-way through his career this
+critical tendency of his culminated in the unlucky _Revue Parisienne_,
+which he wrote almost entirely himself, with slight assistance from his
+friends, MM. de Belloy and de Grammont. It covers a wide range, but
+the literary part of it is considerable, and this part contains that
+memorable and disastrous attack on Sainte-Beuve, for which the critic
+afterwards took a magnanimous revenge in his obituary _causerie_.
+Although the thing is not quite unexampled it is not easily to be
+surpassed in the blind fury of its abuse. Sainte-Beuve was by no means
+invulnerable, and an anti-critic who kept his head might have found, as
+M. de Pontmartin and others did find, the joints in his armor. But when,
+_a propos_ of the _Port Royal_ more especially, and of the other works
+in general, Balzac informs us that Sainte-Beuve's great characteristic
+as a writer is _l'ennui, l'ennui boueux jusqu'a mi-jambe_, that his
+style is intolerable, that his historical handling is like that of
+Gibbon, Hume, and other dull people; when he jeers at him for exhuming
+"La mere Angelique," and scolds him for presuming to obscure the glory
+of the _Roi Soleil_, the thing is partly ludicrous, partly melancholy.
+One remembers that agreeable Bohemian, who at a symposium once
+interrupted his host by crying, "Man o' the hoose, gie us less o' yer
+clack and mair o' yer Jairman wine!" Only, in human respect and other,
+we phrase it: "Oh, dear M. de Balzac! give us more _Eugenie Grandets_,
+more _Pere Goriots_, more _Peaux de Chagrin_, and don't talk about what
+you do not understand!"
+
+Balzac was a great politician also, and here, though he may not have
+been very much more successful, he talked with more knowledge and
+competence. He must have given himself immense trouble in reading the
+papers, foreign as well as French; he had really mastered a good deal
+of the political religion of a French publicist. It is curious to
+read, sixty years after date, his grave assertion that "_La France a
+la conquete de Madagascar a faire_," and with certain very pardonable
+defects (such as his Anglophobia), his politics may be pronounced not
+unintelligent and not ungenerous, though somewhat inconsistent and
+not very distinctly traceable to any coherent theory. As for the
+Anglophobia, the Englishman who thinks the less of him for that must
+have very poor and unhappy brains. A Frenchman who does not more or less
+hate and fear England, an Englishman who does not regard France with
+a more or less good-humored impatience, is usually "either a god or
+a beast," as Aristotle saith. Balzac began with an odd but not
+unintelligible compound, something like Hugo's, of Napoleonism and
+Royalism. In 1824, when he was still in the shades of anonymity, he
+wrote and published two by no means despicable pamphlets in favor of
+Primogeniture and the Jesuits, the latter of which was reprinted in
+1880 at the last _Jesuitenhetze_ in France. His _Lettres sur Paris_ in
+1830-31, and his _La France et l'Etranger_ in 1836, are two considerable
+series of letters from "Our Own Correspondent," handling the affairs of
+the world with boldness and industry if not invariably with wisdom. They
+rather suggest (as does the later _Revue Parisienne_ still more) the
+political writing of the age of Anne in England, and perhaps a little
+later, when "the wits" handled politics and society, literature and
+things in general with unquestioned competence and an easy universality.
+
+The rest of his work which will not appear in this edition may be
+conveniently despatched here. The _Physiologie du Mariage_ and the
+_Scenes de la Vie Conjugale_ suffer not merely from the most obvious
+of their faults but from defect of knowledge. It may or may not be that
+marriage, in the hackneyed phrase, is a net or other receptacle where
+all the outsiders would be in, and all the insiders out. But it is quite
+clear that Coelebs cannot talk of it with much authority. His state
+may or may not be the more gracious: his judgment cannot but lack
+experience. The "Theatre," which brought the author little if any
+profit, great annoyance, and a vast amount of trouble, has been
+generally condemned by criticism. But the _Contes Drolatiques_ are not
+so to be given up. The famous and splendid _Succube_ is only the best of
+them, and though all are more or less tarred with the brush which tars
+so much of French literature, though the attempt to write in an archaic
+style is at best a very successful _tour de force_, and represents an
+expenditure of brain power by no means justifiable on the part of a
+man who could have made so much better use of it, they are never to be
+spoken of disrespectfully. Those who sneer at their "Wardour Street" Old
+French are not usually the best qualified to do so; and it is not to be
+forgotten that Balzac was a real countryman of Rabelais and a legitimate
+inheritor of _Gauloiserie_. Unluckily no man can "throw back" in this
+way, except now and then as a mere pastime. And it is fair to recollect
+that as a matter of fact Balzac, after a year or two, did not waste much
+more time on these things, and that the intended ten _dizains_ never, as
+a matter of fact, went beyond three.
+
+Besides this work in books, pamphlets, etc., Balzac, as has been said,
+did a certain amount of journalism, especially in the _Caricature_, his
+performances including, I regret to say, more than one puff of his own
+work; and in this, as well as by the success of the _Chouans_, he became
+known about 1830 to a much wider circle, both of literary and of private
+acquaintance. It cannot indeed be said that he ever mixed much in
+society; it was impossible that he should do so, considering the vast
+amount of work he did and the manner in which he did it. This subject,
+like that of his speculations, may be better finished off in a single
+passage than dealt with by scattered indications here and there. He was
+not one of those men who can do work by fits and starts in the intervals
+of business or of amusement; nor was he one who, like Scott, could work
+very rapidly. It is true that he often achieved immense quantities of
+work (subject to a caution to be given presently) in a very few days,
+but then his working day was of the most peculiar character. He could
+not bear disturbance; he wrote best at night, and he could not work at
+all after heavy meals. His favorite plan (varied sometimes in detail)
+was therefore to dine lightly about five or six, then to go to bed and
+sleep till eleven, twelve, or one, and then to get up, and with the help
+only of coffee (which he drank very strong and in enormous quantities)
+to work for indefinite stretches of time into the morning or afternoon
+of the next day. He speaks of a sixteen hours' day as a not uncommon
+shift or spell of work, and almost a regular one with him; and on one
+occasion he avers that in the course of forty-eight hours he took but
+three of the rest, working for twenty-two hours and a half continuously
+on each side thereof. In such spells, supposing reasonable facility of
+composition and mechanical power in the hand to keep going all the time,
+an enormous amount can of course be accomplished. A thousand words
+an hour is anything but an extraordinary rate of writing, and fifteen
+hundred by no means unheard of with persons who do not write rubbish.
+
+The references to this subject in Balzac's letters are very numerous;
+but it is not easy to extract very definite information from them. It
+would be not only impolite but incorrect to charge him with unveracity.
+But the very heat of imagination which enabled him to produce his work
+created a sort of mirage, through which he seems always to have regarded
+it; and in writing to publishers, editors, creditors, and even his own
+family, it was too obviously his interest to make the most of his labor,
+his projects, and his performance. Even his contemporary, though elder,
+Southey, the hardest-working and the most scrupulously honest man of
+letters in England who could pretend to genius, seems constantly to have
+exaggerated the idea of what he could perform, if not of what he had
+performed in a given time. The most definite statement of Balzac's that
+I remember is one which claims the second number of _Sur Catherine de
+Medicis_, "La Confidence des Ruggieri," as the production of a single
+night, and not one of the most extravagant of his nights. Now, "La
+Confidence des Ruggieri" fills, in the small edition, eighty pages
+of nearer four hundred than three hundred words each, or some thirty
+thousand words in all. Nobody in the longest of nights could manage
+that, except by dictating it to shorthand clerks. But in the very
+context of this assertion Balzac assigns a much longer period to the
+correction than to the composition, and this brings us to one of the
+most curious and one of the most famous points of his literary history.
+
+Some doubts have, I believe, been thrown on the most minute account of
+his ways of composition which we have, that of the publisher Werdet. But
+there is too great a consensus of evidence as to his general system to
+make the received description of it doubtful. According to this,
+the first draft of Balzac's work never presented it in anything like
+fulness, and sometimes it did not amount to a quarter of the bulk
+finally published. This being returned to him from the printer in
+"slip" on sheets with very large margins, he would set to work on the
+correction; that is to say, on the practical rewriting of the thing,
+with excisions, alterations, and above all, additions. A "revise"
+being executed, he would attack this revise in the same manner, and not
+unfrequently more than once, so that the expenses of mere composition
+and correction of the press were enormously heavy (so heavy as to eat
+into not merely his publisher's but his own profits), and that the last
+state of the book, when published, was something utterly different from
+its first state in manuscript. And it will be obvious that if anything
+like this was usual with him, it is quite impossible to judge his actual
+rapidity of composition by the extent of the published result.
+
+However this may be (and it is at least certain that in the years above
+referred to he must have worked his very hardest, even if some of the
+work then published had been more or less excogitated and begun during
+the Wilderness period), he certainly so far left his eremitical habits
+as to become acquainted with most of the great men of letters of the
+early thirties, and also with certain ladies of more or less high
+rank, who were to supply, if not exactly the full models, the texts
+and starting-points for some of the most interesting figures of
+the _Comedie_. He knew Victor Hugo, but certainly not at this time
+intimately; for as late as 1839 the letter in which he writes to Hugo to
+come and breakfast with him at Les Jardies (with interesting and
+minute directions how to find that frail abode of genius) is couched in
+anything but the tone of a familiar friendship. The letters to Beyle
+of about the same date are also incompatible with intimate knowledge.
+Nodier (after some contrary expressions) he seems to have regarded
+as most good people did regard that true man of letters and charming
+tale-teller; while among the younger generation Theophile Gautier and
+Charles de Bernard, as well as Goslan and others, were his real and
+constant friends. But he does not figure frequently or eminently in any
+of the genuine gossip of the time as a haunter of literary circles,
+and it is very nearly certain that the assiduity with which some of his
+heroes attend _salons_ and clubs had no counterpart in his own life. In
+the first place he was too busy; in the second he would not have been at
+home there. Like the young gentleman in _Punch_, who "did not read books
+but wrote them," though in no satiric sense, he felt it his business not
+to frequent society but to create it.
+
+He was, however, aided in the task of creation by the ladies already
+spoken of, who were fairly numerous and of divers degrees. The most
+constant, after his sister Laure, was that sister's schoolfellow, Madame
+Zulma Carraud, the wife of a military official at Angouleme and the
+possessor of a small country estate at Frapesle, near Tours. At both
+of these places Balzac, till he was a very great man, was a constant
+visitor, and with Madame Carraud he kept up for years a correspondence
+which has been held to be merely friendly, and which was certainly
+in the vulgar sense innocent, but which seems to me to be tinged with
+something of that feeling, midway between love and friendship, which
+appears in Scott's letters to Lady Abercorn, and which is probably not
+so rare as some think. Madame de Berny, another family friend of higher
+rank, was the prototype of most of his "angelic" characters, but she
+died in 1836. He knew the Duchesse d'Abrantes, otherwise Madame Junot,
+and Madame de Girardin, otherwise Delphine Gay; but neither seems to
+have exercised much influence over him. It was different with another
+and more authentic duchess, Madame de Castries, after whom he dangled
+for a considerable time, who certainly first encouraged him and probably
+then snubbed him, and who is thought to have been the model of his
+wickeder great ladies. And it was comparatively early in the thirties
+that he met the woman whom, after nearly twenty years, he was at last to
+marry, getting his death in so doing, the Polish Madame Hanska. These,
+with some relations of the last named, especially her daughter, and
+with a certain "Louise"--an _Inconnue_ who never ceased to be so--were
+Balzac's chief correspondents of the other sex, and, as far as is known,
+his chief friends in it.
+
+About his life, without extravagant "pudding" of guesswork or of mere
+quotation and abstract of his letters, it would be not so much difficult
+as impossible to say much; and accordingly it is a matter of fact that
+most lives of Balzac, including all good ones, are rather critical
+than narrative. From his real _debut_ with _Le Dernier Chouan_ to his
+departure for Poland on the long visit, or brace of visits, from which
+he returned finally to die, this life consisted solely of work. One of
+his earliest utterances, "_Il faut piocher ferme_," was his motto to
+the very last, varied only by a certain amount of traveling. Balzac
+was always a considerable traveler; indeed if he had not been so his
+constitution would probably have broken down long before it actually
+did; and the expense of these voyagings (though by his own account he
+generally conducted his affairs with the most rigid economy), together
+with the interruption to his work which they occasioned, entered no
+doubt for something into his money difficulties. He would go to Baden or
+Vienna for a day's sight of Madame Hanska; his Sardinian visit has been
+already noted; and as a specimen of others it may be mentioned that he
+once journeyed from Paris to Besancon, then from Besancon right
+across France to Angouleme, and then back to Paris on some business
+of selecting paper for one of the editions of his books, which his
+publishers would probably have done much better and at much less
+expense.
+
+Still his actual receipts were surprisingly small, partly, it may be,
+owing to his expensive habits of composition, but far more, according to
+his own account, because of the Belgian piracies, from which all popular
+French authors suffered till the government of Napoleon the Third
+managed to put a stop to them. He also lived in such a thick atmosphere
+of bills and advances and cross-claims on and by his publishers, that
+even if there were more documents than there are it would be exceedingly
+difficult to get at facts which are, after all, not very important.
+He never seems to have been paid much more than 500 pounds for the
+newspaper publication (the most valuable by far because the pirates
+could not interfere with its profits) of any one of his novels. And to
+expensive fashions of composition and complicated accounts, a steady
+back-drag of debt and the rest, must be added the very delightful, and
+to the novelist not useless, but very expensive mania for the
+collector. Balzac had a genuine taste for, and thought himself a genuine
+connoisseur in, pictures, sculpture, and objects of art of all kinds,
+old and new; and though prices in his day were not what they are in
+these, a great deal of money must have run through his hands in this
+way. He calculated the value of the contents of the house, which in his
+last days he furnished with such loving care for his wife, and which
+turned out to be a chamber rather of death than of marriage, at some
+16,000 pounds. But part of this was Madame Hanska's own purchasing, and
+there were offsets of indebtedness against it almost to the last. In
+short, though during the last twenty years of his life such actual "want
+of pence" as vexed him was not due, as it had been earlier, to the fact
+that the pence refused to come in, but only to imprudent management
+of them, it certainly cannot be said that Honore de Balzac, the most
+desperately hard worker in all literature for such time as was allotted
+him, and perhaps the man of greatest genius who was ever a desperately
+hard worker, falsified that most uncomfortable but truest of
+proverbs--"Hard work never made money."
+
+If, however, he was but scantily rewarded with the money for which he
+had a craving (not absolutely, I think, devoid of a touch of genuine
+avarice, but consisting chiefly of the artist's desire for pleasant
+and beautiful things, and partly presenting a variety or phase of the
+grandiose imagination, which was his ruling characteristic), Balzac had
+plenty of the fame, for which he cared quite as much as he cared for
+money. Perhaps no writer except Voltaire and Goethe earlier made such
+a really European reputation; and his books were of a kind to be more
+widely read by the general public than either Goethe's or Voltaire's.
+In England (Balzac liked the literature but not the country, and never
+visited England, though I believe he planned a visit) this popularity
+was, for obvious reasons, rather less than elsewhere. The respectful
+vogue which French literature had had with the English in the eighteenth
+century had ceased, owing partly to the national enmity revived and
+fostered by the great war, and partly to the growth of a fresh and
+magnificent literature at home during the first thirty years of the
+nineteenth in England. But Balzac could not fail to be read almost at
+once by the lettered; and he was translated pretty early, though not
+perhaps to any great extent. It was in England, moreover, that by far
+his greatest follower appeared, and appeared very shortly. For it would
+be absurd in the most bigoted admirer of Thackeray to deny that the
+author of _Vanity Fair_, who was in Paris and narrowly watching French
+literature and French life at the very time of Balzac's most exuberant
+flourishing and education, owed something to the author of _Le Pere
+Goriot_. There was no copying or imitation; the lessons taught by Balzac
+were too much blended with those of native masters, such as Fielding,
+and too much informed and transformed by individual genius. Some
+may think--it is a point at issue not merely between Frenchmen and
+Englishmen, but between good judges of both nations on each side--that
+in absolute veracity and likeness to life, in limiting the operation of
+the inner consciousness on the outward observation to strictly artistic
+scale, Thackeray excelled Balzac as far as he fell short of him in the
+powers of the seer and in the gigantic imagination of the prophet. But
+the relations of pupil and master in at least some degree are not, I
+think, deniable.
+
+So things went on in light and in shade, in homekeeping and in travel,
+in debts and in earnings, but always in work of some kind or another,
+for eighteen years from the turning point of 1829. By degrees, as he
+gained fame and ceased to be in the most pressing want of money, Balzac
+left off to some extent, though never entirely, those miscellaneous
+writings--reviews (including puffs), comic or general sketches,
+political diatribes, "physiologies" and the like--which, with his
+discarded prefaces and much more interesting matter, were at last,
+not many years ago, included in four stout volumes of the _Edition
+Definitive_. With the exception of the _Physiologies_ (a sort of short
+satiric analysis of this or that class, character, or personage), which
+were very popular in the reign of Louis Philippe in France, and which
+Albert Smith and others introduced into England, Balzac did not do any
+of this miscellaneous work extremely well. Very shrewd observations are
+to be found in his reviews, for instance his indication, in reviewing La
+Touche's _Fragoletta_, of that common fault of ambitious novels, a sort
+of woolly and "ungraspable" looseness of construction and story, which
+constantly bewilders the reader as to what is going on. But, as a rule,
+he was thinking too much of his own work and his own principles of
+working to enter very thoroughly into the work of others. His politics,
+those of a moderate but decided Royalist and Conservative, were, as has
+been said, intelligent in theory, but in practice a little distinguished
+by that neglect of actual business detail which has been noticed in his
+speculations.
+
+At last, in the summer of 1847, it seemed as if the Rachel for whom
+he had served nearly if not quite the full fourteen years already, and
+whose husband had long been out of the way, would at last grant herself
+to him. He was invited to Vierzschovnia in the Ukraine, the seat
+of Madame Hanska, or in strictness of her son-in-law, Count Georges
+Mniszech; and as the visit was apparently for no restricted period, and
+Balzac's pretensions to the lady's hand were notorious, it might have
+seemed that he was as good as accepted. But to assume this would have
+been to mistake what perhaps the greatest creation of Balzac's great
+English contemporary and counterpart on the one side, as Thackeray was
+his contemporary and counterpart on the other, considered to be the
+malignity of widows. What the reasons were which made Madame Hanska
+delay so long in doing what she did at last, and might just as well, it
+would seem, have done years before, is not certainly known, and it would
+be quite unprofitable to discuss them. But it was on the 8th of October
+1847 that Balzac first wrote to his sister from Vierzschovnia, and it
+was not till the 14th of March 1850 that, "in the parish church of
+Saint Barbara at Berditchef, by the Count Abbe Czarski, representing
+the Bishop of Jitomir (this is as characteristic of Balzac in one way
+as what follows is in another) a Madame Eve de Balzac, born Countess
+Rzevuska, or a Madame Honore de Balzac or a Madame de Balzac the elder"
+came into existence.
+
+It does not appear that Balzac was exactly unhappy during this huge
+probation, which was broken by one short visit to Paris. The interest
+of uncertainty was probably much for his ardent and unquiet spirit, and
+though he did very little literary work for him, one may suspect that
+he would not have done very much if he had stayed at Paris, for signs
+of exhaustion, not of genius but of physical power, had shown themselves
+before he left home. But it is not unjust or cruel to say that by the
+delay "Madame Eve de Balzac" (her actual baptismal name was Evelina)
+practically killed her husband. These winters in the severe climate of
+Russian Poland were absolutely fatal to a constitution, and especially
+to lungs, already deeply affected. At Vierzschovnia itself he had
+illnesses, from which he narrowly escaped with life, before the
+marriage; his heart broke down after it; and he and his wife did not
+reach Paris till the end of May. Less than three months afterwards, on
+the 18th of August, he died, having been visited on the very day of his
+death in the Paradise of bric-a-brac which he had created for his Eve in
+the Rue Fortunee--a name too provocative of Nemesis--by Victor Hugo,
+the chief maker in verse as he himself was the chief maker in prose of
+France. He was buried at Pere la Chaise. The after-fortunes of his house
+and its occupants were not happy: but they do not concern us.
+
+In person Balzac was a typical Frenchman, as indeed he was in most ways.
+From his portraits there would seem to have been more force and address
+than distinction or refinement in his appearance, but, as has been
+already observed, his period was one ungrateful to the iconographer. His
+character, not as a writer but as a man, must occupy us a little longer.
+For some considerable time--indeed it may be said until the publication
+of his letters--it was not very favorably judged on the whole. We may,
+of course, dismiss the childish scandals (arising, as usual, from clumsy
+or malevolent misinterpretation of such books as the _Physiologie de
+Mariage_, the _Peau de Chagrin_, and a few others), which gave rise to
+the caricatures of him such as that of which we read, representing him
+in a monk's dress at a table covered with bottles and supporting a young
+person on his knee, the whole garnished with the epigraph: Scenes de la
+Vie Cachee. They seem to have given him, personally, a very unnecessary
+annoyance, and indeed he was always rather sensitive to criticism. This
+kind of stupid libel will never cease to be devised by the envious,
+swallowed by the vulgar, and simply neglected by the wise. But Balzac's
+peculiarities, both of life and of work, lent themselves rather fatally
+to a subtler misconstruction which he also anticipated and tried to
+remove, but which took a far stronger hold. He was represented--and
+in the absence of any intimate male friends to contradict the
+representation, it was certain to obtain some currency--as in his
+artistic person a sardonic libeler of mankind, who cared only to take
+foibles and vices for his subjects, and who either left goodness and
+virtue out of sight altogether, or represented them as the qualities
+of fools. In private life he was held up as at the best a self-centered
+egotist who cared for nothing but himself and his own work, capable of
+interrupting one friend who told him of the death of a sister by the
+suggestion that they should change the subject and talk of "something
+real, of _Eugenie Grandet_," and of levying a fifty per cent commission
+on another who had written a critical notice of his, Balzac's, life and
+works.*
+
+  * Sandeau and Gautier, the victims in these two stories, were
+    neither spiteful, nor mendacious, nor irrational, so they are
+    probably true. The second was possibly due to Balzac's odd notions
+    of "business being business." The first, I have quite recently
+    seen reason to think, may have been a sort of reminiscence of one
+    of the traits in Diderot's extravagant encomium on Richardson.
+
+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.]
+
+
+
+
+COMEDIE HUMAINE
+
+
+
+
+SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVEE
+
+     SCENES FROM PRIVATE LIFE
+
+
+     La Maison du Chat-qui Pelote
+     At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
+
+     Le Bal de Sceaux
+     The Ball at Sceaux
+
+     La Bourse
+     The Purse
+
+     La Vendetta
+     The Vendetta
+
+     Mme. Firmiani
+     Madame Firmiani
+
+     Une Double Famille
+     A Second Home
+
+     La Paix du Menage
+     Domestic Peace
+
+     La Fausse Maitresse
+     The Imaginary Mistress
+     Paz
+
+     Etude de femme
+     A Study of Woman
+
+     Autre etude de femme
+     Another Study of Woman
+
+     La Grande Breteche
+     La Grand Breteche
+
+     Albert Savarus
+     Albert Savarus
+
+     Memoires de deux Jeunes Mariees
+     Letters of Two Brides
+
+     Une Fille d'Eve
+     A Daughter of Eve
+
+     La Femme de Trente Ans
+     A Woman of Thirty
+
+     La Femme abandonnee
+     The Deserted Woman
+
+     La Grenadiere
+     La Grenadiere
+
+     Le Message
+     The Message
+
+     Gobseck
+     Gobseck
+
+     Le Contrat de Mariage
+     A Marriage Settlement
+     A Marriage Contract
+
+     Un Debut dans la vie
+     A Start in Life
+
+     Modeste Mignon
+     Modeste Mignon
+
+     Beatrix
+     Beatrix
+
+     Honorine
+     Honorine
+
+     Le Colonel Chabert
+     Colonel Chabert
+
+     La Messe de l'Athee
+     The Atheist's Mass
+
+     L'Interdiction
+     The Commission in Lunacy
+
+     Pierre Grassou
+     Pierre Grassou
+
+
+
+
+SCENES DE LA VIE PROVINCE
+
+     SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE
+
+     Ursule Mirouet
+     Ursule Mirouet
+
+     Eugenie Grandet
+     Eugenie Grandet
+
+     Les Celibataires:
+     The Celibates:
+       Pierrette
+       Pierrette
+
+       Le Cure de Tours
+       The Vicar of Tours
+
+     Un Menage de Garcon
+     A Bachelor's Establishment
+     The Two Brothers
+     The Black Sheep
+     La Rabouilleuse
+
+     Les Parisiens en Province:
+     Parisians in the Country:
+       L'illustre Gaudissart
+       Gaudissart the Great
+       The Illustrious Gaudissart
+
+       La Muse du departement
+       The Muse of the Department
+
+     Les Rivalites:
+     The Jealousies of a Country Town:
+       La Vieille Fille
+       The Old Maid
+
+       Le Cabinet des antiques
+       The Collection of Antiquities
+
+     Le Lys dans la Vallee
+     The Lily of the Valley
+
+     Illusions Perdues:--I.
+     Lost Illusions:--I.
+       Les Deux Poetes
+       The Two Poets
+
+       Un Grand homme de province a Paris, 1re partie
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris, Part 1
+
+     Illusions Perdues:--II.
+     Lost Illusions:--II.
+       Un Grand homme de province, 2e p.
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris, Part 2
+
+       Eve et David
+       Eve and David
+
+
+
+
+SCENES DE LA VIE PARISIENNE
+
+     SCENES FROM PARISIAN LIFE
+
+     Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes:
+     Scenes from a Courtesan's Life:
+       Esther heureuse
+       Esther Happy
+
+       A combien l'amour revient aux vieillards
+       What Love Costs an Old Man
+
+       Ou menent les mauvais Chemins
+       The End of Evil Ways
+
+       La derniere Incarnation de Vautrin
+       Vautrin's Last Avatar
+
+     Un Prince de la Boheme
+     A Prince of Bohemia
+
+     Un Homme d'affaires
+     A Man of Business
+
+     Gaudissart II.
+     Gaudissart II.
+
+     Les Comediens sans le savoir
+     The Unconscious Humorists
+     The Unconscious Comedians
+
+     Histoire des Treize:
+     The Thirteen:
+       Ferragus
+       Ferragus
+
+       La Duchesse de Langeais
+       The Duchesse de Langeais
+
+       La Fille aux yeux d'or
+       The Girl with the Golden Eyes
+
+     Le Pere Goriot
+     Father Goriot
+     Old Goriot
+
+     Grandeur et Decadence de Cesar Birotteau
+     The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau
+
+     La Maison Nucingen
+     The Firm of Nucingen
+
+     Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan
+     The Secrets of a Princess
+     The Secrets of the Princess Cadignan
+
+     Les Employes
+     The Government Clerks
+     Bureaucracy
+
+     Sarrasine
+     Sarrasine
+
+     Facino Cane
+     Facine Cane
+
+     Les Parents Pauvres:--I.
+     Poor Relations:--I.
+       La Cousine Bette
+       Cousin Betty
+
+     Les Parents Pauvres:--II.
+     Poor Relations:--II.
+       Le Cousin Pons
+       Cousin Pons
+
+     Les Petits Bourgeois
+     The Middle Classes
+     The Lesser Bourgeoise
+
+
+
+
+SCENES DE LA VIE POLITIQUE
+
+     SCENES FROM POLITICAL LIFE
+
+     Une Tenebreuse Affaire
+     The Gondreville Mystery
+     An Historical Mystery
+
+     Un Episode sous la Terreur
+     An Episode Under the Terror
+
+     L'Envers de l'Histoire Contemporaine:
+     The Seamy Side of History:
+     The Brotherhood of Consolation:
+       Mme. de la Chanterie
+       Madame de la Chanterie
+
+       L'Initie
+       Initiated
+       The Initiate
+
+     Z. Marcas
+     Z. Marcas
+
+     Le Depute d'Arcis
+     The Member for Arcis
+     The Deputy for Arcis
+
+
+
+
+SCENES DE LA VIE MILITAIRE
+
+     SCENES FROM MILITARY LIFE
+
+     Les Chouans
+     The Chouans
+
+     Une Passion dans le desert
+     A Passion in the Desert
+
+
+
+
+SCENES DE LA VIE DE CAMPAGNE
+
+     SCENES FROM COUNTRY LIFE
+
+     Le Medecin de Campagne
+     The Country Doctor
+
+     Le Cure de Village
+     The Country Parson
+     The Village Rector
+
+     Les Paysans
+     The Peasantry
+     Sons of the Soil
+
+
+
+
+ETUDES PHILOSOPHIQUES
+
+     PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
+
+     La Peau de Chagrin
+     The Magic Skin
+
+     La Recherche de l'Absolu
+     The Quest of the Absolute
+     The Alkahest
+
+     Jesus-Christ en Flandre
+     Christ in Flanders
+
+     Melmoth reconcilie
+     Melmoth Reconciled
+
+     Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu
+     The Unknown Masterpiece
+     The Hidden Masterpiece
+
+     L'Enfant Maudit
+     The Hated Son
+
+     Gambara
+     Gambara
+
+     Massimilla Doni
+     Massimilla Doni
+
+     Les Marana
+     The Maranas
+     Juana
+
+     Adieu
+     Farewell
+
+     Le Requisitionnaire
+     The Conscript
+     The Recruit
+
+     El Verdugo
+     El Verdugo
+
+     Un Drame au bord de la mer
+     A Seaside Tragedy
+     A Drama on the Seashore
+
+     L'Auberge rouge
+     The Red Inn
+
+     L'Elixir de longue vie
+     The Elixir of Life
+
+     Maitre Cornelius
+     Maitre Cornelius
+
+     Sur Catherine de Medicis:
+     About Catherine de' Medici
+       Le Martyr calviniste
+       The Calvinist Martyr
+
+       La Confidence des Ruggieri
+       The Ruggieri's Secret
+
+       Les Deux Reves
+       The Two Dreams
+
+     Louis Lambert
+     Louis Lambert
+
+     Les Proscrits
+     The Exiles
+
+     Seraphita
+     Seraphita
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
+
+
+
+In giving the general title of "The Human Comedy" to a work begun nearly
+thirteen years since, it is necessary to explain its motive, to relate
+its origin, and briefly sketch its plan, while endeavoring to speak of
+these matters as though I had no personal interest in them. This is
+not so difficult as the public might imagine. Few works conduce to
+much vanity; much labor conduces to great diffidence. This observation
+accounts for the study of their own works made by Corneille, Moliere,
+and other great writers; if it is impossible to equal them in their fine
+conceptions, we may try to imitate them in this feeling.
+
+The idea of _The Human Comedy_ was at first as a dream to me, one of
+those impossible projects which we caress and then let fly; a chimera
+that gives us a glimpse of its smiling woman's face, and forthwith
+spreads its wings and returns to a heavenly realm of phantasy. But this
+chimera, like many another, has become a reality; has its behests, its
+tyranny, which must be obeyed.
+
+The idea originated in a comparison between Humanity and Animality.
+
+It is a mistake to suppose that the great dispute which has lately
+made a stir, between Cuvier and Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, arose from
+a scientific innovation. Unity of structure, under other names, had
+occupied the greatest minds during the two previous centuries. As we
+read the extraordinary writings of the mystics who studied the sciences
+in their relation to infinity, such as Swedenborg, Saint-Martin,
+and others, and the works of the greatest authors on Natural
+History--Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., we detect in the
+_monads_ of Leibnitz, in the _organic molecules_ of Buffon, in the
+_vegetative force_ of Needham, in the correlation of similar organs of
+Charles Bonnet--who in 1760 was so bold as to write, "Animals vegetate
+as plants do"--we detect, I say, the rudiments of the great law of Self
+for Self, which lies at the root of _Unity of Plan_. There is but one
+Animal. The Creator works on a single model for every organized being.
+"The Animal" is elementary, and takes its external form, or, to be
+accurate, the differences in its form, from the environment in which
+it is obliged to develop. Zoological species are the result of these
+differences. The announcement and defence of this system, which is
+indeed in harmony with our preconceived ideas of Divine Power, will
+be the eternal glory of Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier's victorious
+opponent on this point of higher science, whose triumph was hailed by
+Goethe in the last article he wrote.
+
+I, for my part, convinced of this scheme of nature long before the
+discussion to which it has given rise, perceived that in this respect
+society resembled nature. For does not society modify Man, according to
+the conditions in which he lives and acts, into men as manifold as the
+species in Zoology? The differences between a soldier, an artisan, a man
+of business, a lawyer, an idler, a student, a statesman, a merchant, a
+sailor, a poet, a beggar, a priest, are as great, though not so easy
+to define, as those between the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow,
+the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc. Thus social species have always
+existed, and will always exist, just as there are zoological species. If
+Buffon could produce a magnificent work by attempting to represent in
+a book the whole realm of zoology, was there not room for a work of the
+same kind on society? But the limits set by nature to the variations of
+animals have no existence in society. When Buffon describes the lion, he
+dismisses the lioness with a few phrases; but in society a wife is not
+always the female of the male. There may be two perfectly dissimilar
+beings in one household. The wife of a shopkeeper is sometimes worthy of
+a prince, and the wife of a prince is often worthless compared with the
+wife of an artisan. The social state has freaks which Nature does not
+allow herself; it is nature _plus_ society. The description of social
+species would thus be at least double that of animal species, merely in
+view of the two sexes. Then, among animals the drama is limited; there
+is scarcely any confusion; they turn and rend each other--that is all.
+Men, too, rend each other; but their greater or less intelligence makes
+the struggle far more complicated. Though some savants do not yet admit
+that the animal nature flows into human nature through an immense tide
+of life, the grocer certainly becomes a peer, and the noble sometimes
+sinks to the lowest social grade. Again, Buffon found that life was
+extremely simple among animals. Animals have little property, and
+neither arts nor sciences; while man, by a law that has yet to be
+sought, has a tendency to express his culture, his thoughts, and his
+life in everything he appropriates to his use. Though Leuwenhoek,
+Swammerdam, Spallanzani, Reaumur, Charles Bonnet, Muller, Haller and
+other patient investigators have shown us how interesting are the habits
+of animals, those of each kind, are, at least to our eyes, always and
+in every age alike; whereas the dress, the manners, the speech, the
+dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a citizen, a priest, and
+a pauper are absolutely unlike, and change with every phase of
+civilization.
+
+Hence the work to be written needed a threefold form--men, women, and
+things; that is to say, persons and the material expression of their
+minds; man, in short, and life.
+
+As we read the dry and discouraging list of events called History,
+who can have failed to note that the writers of all periods, in Egypt,
+Persia, Greece, and Rome, have forgotten to give us a history of
+manners? The fragment of Petronius on the private life of the Romans
+excites rather than satisfies our curiosity. It was from observing this
+great void in the field of history that the Abbe Barthelemy devoted his
+life to a reconstruction of Greek manners in _Le Jeune Anacharsis_.
+
+But how could such a drama, with the four or five thousand persons which
+society offers, be made interesting? How, at the same time, please
+the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry and
+philosophy under striking imagery? Though I could conceive of the
+importance and of the poetry of such a history of the human heart, I
+saw no way of writing it; for hitherto the most famous story-tellers had
+spent their talent in creating two or three typical actors, in depicting
+one aspect of life. It was with this idea that I read the works
+of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, the modern troubadour, or finder
+(_trouvere=trouveur_), had just then given an aspect of grandeur to a
+class of composition unjustly regarded as of the second rank. Is it not
+really more difficult to compete with personal and parochial interests
+by writing of Daphnis and Chloe, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote,
+Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Gil Blas, Ossian,
+Julie d'Etanges, My Uncle Toby, Werther, Corinne, Adolphe, Paul and
+Virginia, Jeanie Deans, Claverhouse, Ivanhoe, Manfred, Mignon, than
+to set forth in order facts more or less similar in every country,
+to investigate the spirit of laws that have fallen into desuetude, to
+review the theories which mislead nations, or, like some metaphysicians,
+to explain what _Is_? In the first place, these actors, whose existence
+becomes more prolonged and more authentic than that of the generations
+which saw their birth, almost always live solely on condition of their
+being a vast reflection of the present. Conceived in the womb of their
+own period, the whole heart of humanity stirs within their frame, which
+often covers a complete system of philosophy. Thus Walter Scott raised
+to the dignity of the philosophy of History the literature which, from
+age to age, sets perennial gems in the poetic crown of every nation
+where letters are cultivated. He vivified it with the spirit of the
+past; he combined drama, dialogue, portrait, scenery, and description;
+he fused the marvelous with truth--the two elements of the times; and he
+brought poetry into close contact with the familiarity of the humblest
+speech. But as he had not so much devised a system as hit upon a manner
+in the ardor of his work, or as its logical outcome, he never thought of
+connecting his compositions in such a way as to form a complete history
+of which each chapter was a novel, and each novel the picture of a
+period.
+
+It was by discerning this lack of unity, which in no way detracts from
+the Scottish writer's greatness, that I perceived at once the scheme
+which would favor the execution of my purpose, and the possibility of
+executing it. Though dazzled, so to speak, by Walter Scott's amazing
+fertility, always himself and always original, I did not despair, for I
+found the source of his genius in the infinite variety of human nature.
+Chance is the greatest romancer in the world; we have only to study it.
+French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary.
+By drawing up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the
+chief facts of the passions, by depicting characters, by choosing
+the principal incidents of social life, by composing types out of a
+combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in
+writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of
+Manners. By patience and perseverance I might produce for France in the
+nineteenth century the book which we must all regret that Rome, Athens,
+Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India have not bequeathed to us; that history
+of their social life which, prompted by the Abbe Barthelemy, Monteil
+patiently and steadily tried to write for the Middle Ages, but in an
+unattractive form.
+
+This work, so far, was nothing. By adhering to the strict lines of a
+reproduction a writer might be a more or less faithful, and more or less
+successful, painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the dramas of
+private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloguer of
+professions, a registrar of good and evil; but to deserve the praise of
+which every artist must be ambitious, must I not also investigate the
+reasons or the cause of these social effects, detect the hidden sense
+of this vast assembly of figures, passions, and incidents? And finally,
+having sought--I will not say having found--this reason, this motive
+power, must I not reflect on first principles, and discover in what
+particulars societies approach or deviate from the eternal law of truth
+and beauty? In spite of the wide scope of the preliminaries, which might
+of themselves constitute a book, the work, to be complete, would need a
+conclusion. Thus depicted, society ought to bear in itself the reason of
+its working.
+
+The law of the writer, in virtue of which he is a writer, and which I do
+not hesitate to say makes him the equal, or perhaps the superior, of the
+statesman, is his judgment, whatever it may be, on human affairs,
+and his absolute devotion to certain principles. Machiavelli, Hobbes,
+Bossuet, Leibnitz, Kant, Montesquieu, _are_ the science which statesmen
+apply. "A writer ought to have settled opinions on morals and politics;
+he should regard himself as a tutor of men; for men need no masters to
+teach them to doubt," says Bonald. I took these noble words as my guide
+long ago; they are the written law of the monarchical writer. And
+those who would confute me by my own words will find that they have
+misinterpreted some ironical phrase, or that they have turned against me
+a speech given to one of my actors--a trick peculiar to calumniators.
+
+As to the intimate purpose, the soul of this work, these are the
+principles on which it is based.
+
+Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and capabilities;
+society, far from depraving him, as Rousseau asserts, improves him,
+makes him better; but self-interest also develops his evil tendencies.
+Christianity, above all, Catholicism, being--as I have pointed out in
+the Country Doctor (_le Medecin de Campagne_)--a complete system for
+the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the most powerful
+element of social order.
+
+In reading attentively the presentment of society cast, as it were, from
+the life, with all that is good and all that is bad in it, we learn this
+lesson--if thought, or if passion, which combines thought and feeling,
+is the vital social element, it is also its destructive element. In this
+respect social life is like the life of man. Nations live long only
+by moderating their vital energy. Teaching, or rather education, by
+religious bodies is the grand principle of life for nations, the only
+means of diminishing the sum of evil and increasing the sum of good in
+all society. Thought, the living principle of good and ill, can only be
+trained, quelled, and guided by religion. The only possible religion is
+Christianity (see the letter from Paris in "Louis Lambert," in which the
+young mystic explains, _a propos_ to Swedenborg's doctrines, how there
+has never been but one religion since the world began). Christianity
+created modern nationalities, and it will preserve them. Hence, no
+doubt, the necessity for the monarchical principle. Catholicism and
+Royalty are twin principles.
+
+As to the limits within which these two principles should be confined
+by various institutions, so that they may not become absolute, every one
+will feel that a brief preface ought not to be a political treatise. I
+cannot, therefore, enter on religious discussions, nor on the political
+discussions of the day. I write under the light of two eternal
+truths--Religion and Monarchy; two necessities, as they are shown to be
+by contemporary events, towards which every writer of sound sense ought
+to try to guide the country back. Without being an enemy to election,
+which is an excellent principle as a basis of legislation, I reject
+election regarded as _the only social instrument_, especially so badly
+organized as it now is (1842); for it fails to represent imposing
+minorities, whose ideas and interests would occupy the attention of
+a monarchical government. Elective power extended to all gives us
+government by the masses, the only irresponsible form of government,
+under which tyranny is unlimited, for it calls itself law. Besides, I
+regard the family and not the individual as the true social unit. In
+this respect, at the risk of being thought retrograde, I side with
+Bossuet and Bonald instead of going with modern innovators. Since
+election has become the only social instrument, if I myself were to
+exercise it no contradiction between my acts and my words should be
+inferred. An engineer points out that a bridge is about to fall, that it
+is dangerous for any one to cross it; but he crosses it himself when it
+is the only road to the town. Napoleon adapted election to the spirit of
+the French nation with wonderful skill. The least important members of
+his Legislative Body became the most famous orators of the Chamber
+after the Restoration. No Chamber has ever been the equal of the _Corps
+Legislatif_, comparing them man for man. The elective system of the
+Empire was, then, indisputably the best.
+
+Some persons may, perhaps, think that this declaration is somewhat
+autocratic and self-assertive. They will quarrel with the novelist for
+wanting to be an historian, and will call him to account for writing
+politics. I am simply fulfilling an obligation--that is my reply. The
+work I have undertaken will be as long as a history; I was compelled
+to explain the logic of it, hitherto unrevealed, and its principles and
+moral purpose.
+
+Having been obliged to withdraw the prefaces formerly published, in
+response to essentially ephemeral criticisms, I will retain only one
+remark.
+
+Writers who have a purpose in view, were it only a reversion to
+principles familiar in the past because they are eternal, should always
+clear the ground. Now every one who, in the domain of ideas, brings his
+stone by pointing out an abuse, or setting a mark on some evil that it
+may be removed--every such man is stigmatized as immoral. The accusation
+of immorality, which has never failed to be cast at the courageous
+writer, is, after all, the last that can be brought when nothing else
+remains to be said to a romancer. If you are truthful in your pictures;
+if by dint of daily and nightly toil you succeed in writing the most
+difficult language in the world, the word _immoral_ is flung in your
+teeth. Socrates was immoral; Jesus Christ was immoral; they both were
+persecuted in the name of the society they overset or reformed. When a
+man is to be killed he is taxed with immorality. These tactics, familiar
+in party warfare, are a disgrace to those who use them. Luther and
+Calvin knew well what they were about when they shielded themselves
+behind damaged worldly interests! And they lived all the days of their
+life.
+
+When depicting all society, sketching it in the immensity of its
+turmoil, it happened--it could not but happen--that the picture
+displayed more of evil than of good; that some part of the fresco
+represented a guilty couple; and the critics at once raised a cry
+of immorality, without pointing out the morality of another position
+intended to be a perfect contrast. As the critic knew nothing of the
+general plan I could forgive him, all the more because one can no more
+hinder criticism than the use of eyes, tongues, and judgment. Also the
+time for an impartial verdict is not yet come for me. And, after all,
+the author who cannot make up his mind to face the fire of criticism
+should no more think of writing than a traveler should start on his
+journey counting on a perpetually clear sky. On this point it remains
+to be said that the most conscientious moralists doubt greatly whether
+society can show as many good actions as bad ones; and in the picture
+I have painted of it there are more virtuous figures than reprehensible
+ones. Blameworthy actions, faults and crimes, from the lightest to the
+most atrocious, always meet with punishment, human or divine, signal or
+secret. I have done better than the historian, for I am free. Cromwell
+here on earth escaped all punishment but that inflicted by thoughtful
+men. And on this point there have been divided schools. Bossuet even
+showed some consideration for great regicide. William of Orange, the
+usurper, Hugues Capet, another usurper, lived to old age with no more
+qualms or fears than Henri IV. or Charles I. The lives of Catherine
+II. and of Frederick of Prussia would be conclusive against any kind
+of moral law, if they were judged by the twofold aspect of the morality
+which guides ordinary mortals, and that which is in use by crowned
+heads; for, as Napoleon said, for kings and statesmen there are the
+lesser and the higher morality. My scenes of political life are founded
+on this profound observation. It is not a law to history, as it is to
+romance, to make for a beautiful ideal. History is, or ought to be, what
+it was; while romance ought to be "the better world," as was said by
+Mme. Necker, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the last century.
+
+Still, with this noble falsity, romance would be nothing if it were not
+true in detail. Walter Scott, obliged as he was to conform to the ideas
+of an essentially hypocritical nation, was false to humanity in his
+picture of woman, because his models were schismatics. The Protestant
+woman has no ideal. She may be chaste, pure, virtuous; but her
+unexpansive love will always be as calm and methodical as the fulfilment
+of a duty. It might seem as though the Virgin Mary had chilled the
+hearts of those sophists who have banished her from heaven with her
+treasures of loving kindness. In Protestantism there is no possible
+future for the woman who has sinned; while, in the Catholic Church, the
+hope of forgiveness makes her sublime. Hence, for the Protestant writer
+there is but one Woman, while the Catholic writer finds a new woman in
+each new situation. If Walter Scott had been a Catholic, if he had set
+himself the task of describing truly the various phases of society which
+have successively existed in Scotland, perhaps the painter of Effie
+and Alice--the two figures for which he blamed himself in his later
+years--might have admitted passion with its sins and punishments,
+and the virtues revealed by repentance. Passion is the sum-total of
+humanity. Without passion, religion, history, romance, art, would all be
+useless.
+
+Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and paint them
+as they are, with passion for their motive power, have supposed,
+but wrongly, that I must belong to the school of Sensualism and
+Materialism--two aspects of the same thing--Pantheism. But their
+misapprehension was perhaps justified--or inevitable. I do not share the
+belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's
+improvement in himself. Those who insist on reading in me the intention
+to consider man as a finished creation are strangely mistaken.
+_Seraphita_, the doctrine in action of the Christian Buddha, seems to me
+an ample answer to this rather heedless accusation.
+
+In certain fragments of this long work I have tried to popularize the
+amazing facts, I may say the marvels, of electricity, which in man
+is metamorphosed into an incalculable force; but in what way do
+the phenomena of brain and nerves, which prove the existence of an
+undiscovered world of psychology, modify the necessary and undoubted
+relations of the worlds to God? In what way can they shake the Catholic
+dogma? Though irrefutable facts should some day place thought in the
+class of fluids which are discerned only by their effects while their
+substance evades our senses, even when aided by so many mechanical
+means, the result will be the same as when Christopher Columbus detected
+that the earth is a sphere, and Galileo demonstrated its rotation. Our
+future will be unchanged. The wonders of animal magnetism, with which
+I have been familiar since 1820; the beautiful experiments of Gall,
+Lavater's successor; all the men who have studied mind as opticians have
+studied light--two not dissimilar things--point to a conclusion in favor
+of the mystics, the disciples of St. John, and of those great thinkers
+who have established the spiritual world--the sphere in which are
+revealed the relations of God and man.
+
+A sure grasp of the purport of this work will make it clear that I
+attach to common, daily facts, hidden or patent to the eye, to the acts
+of individual lives, and to their causes and principles, the importance
+which historians have hitherto ascribed to the events of public national
+life. The unknown struggle which goes on in a valley of the Indre
+between Mme. de Mortsauf and her passion is perhaps as great as the most
+famous of battles (_Le Lys dans la Vallee_). In one the glory of the
+victor is at stake; in the other it is heaven. The misfortunes of the
+two Birotteaus, the priest and the perfumer, to me are those of mankind.
+La Fosseuse (_Medecin de Campagne_) and Mme. Graslin (_Cure de Village_)
+are almost the sum-total of woman. We all suffer thus every day. I have
+had to do a hundred times what Richardson did but once. Lovelace has a
+thousand forms, for social corruption takes the hues of the medium
+in which it lives. Clarissa, on the contrary, the lovely image of
+impassioned virtue, is drawn in lines of distracting purity. To create
+a variety of Virgins it needs a Raphael. In this respect, perhaps
+literature must yield to painting.
+
+Still, I may be allowed to point out how many irreproachable figures--as
+regards their virtue--are to be found in the portions of this work
+already published: Pierrette Lorrain, Ursule Mirouet, Constance
+Birotteau, La Fosseuse, Eugenie Grandet, Marguerite Claes, Pauline
+de Villenoix, Madame Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve Chardon,
+Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon, Madame Firmiani, Agathe Rouget, Renee de
+Maucombe; besides several figures in the middle-distance, who, though
+less conspicuous than these, nevertheless, offer the reader an example
+of domestic virtue: Joseph Lebas, Genestas, Benassis, Bonnet the cure,
+Minoret the doctor, Pillerault, David Sechard, the two Birotteaus,
+Chaperon the priest, Judge Popinot, Bourgeat, the Sauviats, the
+Tascherons, and many more. Do not all these solve the difficult literary
+problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?
+
+It was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous
+types of a period; for this is, in fact, the number presented to us by
+each generation, and which the Human Comedy will require. This crowd of
+actors, of characters, this multitude of lives, needed a setting--if
+I may be pardoned the expression, a gallery. Hence the very natural
+division, as already known, into the Scenes of Private Life, of
+Provincial Life, of Parisian, Political, Military, and Country Life.
+Under these six heads are classified all the studies of manners which
+form the history of society at large, of all its _faits et gestes_, as
+our ancestors would have said. These six classes correspond, indeed, to
+familiar conceptions. Each has its own sense and meaning, and answers to
+an epoch in the life of man. I may repeat here, but very briefly, what
+was written by Felix Davin--a young genius snatched from literature by
+an early death. After being informed of my plan, he said that the Scenes
+of Private Life represented childhood and youth and their errors, as
+the Scenes of Provincial Life represented the age of passion, scheming,
+self-interest, and ambition. Then the Scenes of Parisian Life give a
+picture of the tastes and vice and unbridled powers which conduce to
+the habits peculiar to great cities, where the extremes of good and
+evil meet. Each of these divisions has its local color--Paris and
+the Provinces--a great social antithesis which held for me immense
+resources.
+
+And not man alone, but the principal events of life, fall into classes
+by types. There are situations which occur in every life, typical
+phases, and this is one of the details I most sought after. I have tried
+to give an idea of the different districts of our fine country. My work
+has its geography, as it has its genealogy and its families, its places
+and things, its persons and their deeds; as it has its heraldry, its
+nobles and commonalty, its artisans and peasants, its politicians and
+dandies, its army--in short, a whole world of its own.
+
+After describing social life in these three portions, I had to delineate
+certain exceptional lives, which comprehend the interests of many
+people, or of everybody, and are in a degree outside the general law.
+Hence we have Scenes of Political Life. This vast picture of society
+being finished and complete, was it not needful to display it in its
+most violent phase, beside itself, as it were, either in self-defence or
+for the sake of conquest? Hence the Scenes of Military Life, as yet the
+most incomplete portion of my work, but for which room will be allowed
+in this edition, that it may form part of it when done. Finally, the
+Scenes of Country Life are, in a way, the evening of this long day, if
+I may so call the social drama. In that part are to be found the purest
+natures, and the application of the great principles of order, politics,
+and morality.
+
+Such is the foundation, full of actors, full of comedies and tragedies,
+on which are raised the Philosophical Studies--the second part of my
+work, in which the social instrument of all these effects is displayed,
+and the ravages of the mind are painted, feeling after feeling; the
+first of the series, _The Magic Skin_, to some extent forms a link
+between the Philosophical Studies and Studies of Manners, by a work
+of almost Oriental fancy, in which life itself is shown in a mortal
+struggle with the very element of all passion.
+
+Besides these, there will be a series of Analytical Studies, of which
+I will say nothing, for one only is published as yet--The Physiology of
+Marriage.
+
+In the course of time I purpose writing two more works of this class.
+First the Pathology of Social Life, then an Anatomy of Educational
+Bodies, and a Monograph on Virtue.
+
+In looking forward to what remains to be done, my readers will perhaps
+echo what my publishers say, "Please God to spare you!" I only ask to be
+less tormented by men and things than I have hitherto been since I began
+this terrific labor. I have had this in my favor, and I thank God for
+it, that the talents of the time, the finest characters and the truest
+friends, as noble in their private lives as the former are in public
+life, have wrung my hand and said, Courage!
+
+And why should I not confess that this friendship, and the testimony
+here and there of persons unknown to me, have upheld me in my career,
+both against myself and against unjust attacks; against the calumny
+which has often persecuted me, against discouragement, and against the
+too eager hopefulness whose utterances are misinterpreted as those of
+overwhelming conceit? I had resolved to display stolid stoicism in
+the face of abuse and insults; but on two occasions base slanders have
+necessitated a reply. Though the advocates of forgiveness of injuries
+may regret that I should have displayed my skill in literary fence,
+there are many Christians who are of opinion that we live in times when
+it is as well to show sometimes that silence springs from generosity.
+
+The vastness of a plan which includes both a history and a criticism of
+society, an analysis of its evils, and a discussion of its principles,
+authorizes me, I think, in giving to my work the title under which it
+now appears--_The Human Comedy_. Is this too ambitious? Is it not exact?
+That, when it is complete, the public must pronounce.
+
+
+PARIS, July 1842
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Human Comedy, by Honore de Balzac
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