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THE HUMAN COMEDY
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.
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