they try to calumniate it, because it takes without sharing ; but they yield if it persists; they adore it on their bended knees if they have not succeeded in burying it in the mud. ... I defy you to take two steps in Paris without stumbling on infernal machinations. Hence the honest man is the

common enemy. But who do you suppose is the honest man? In Paris he is the man who keeps silence and refuses to share."

Rastignac is the typical young Frenchman of that period. He is talented, but not in any uncommon degree, and has no idealism beyond that which is begotten by the inexperience of youth. Profoundly impressed by all that he sees and experiences, he begins to aspire with steadily diminishing conscientiousness, steadily growing desire, after fortune's favours. How indignantly he repudiates the idea when Vautrin first puts the old hypothetical question to him— whether, if a mere act of will could do it, he would kill an unknown mandarin in China to obtain the millions he desires! Yet how short a time elapses before "the mandarin" is lying in his death-throes! Rastignac says to himself at first, as all men do in their youth, that to resolve to become great or wealthy at any cost is the same as to resolve to lie, cheat, and cringe to and flatter those who have lied, cheated, cringed, and flattered. Presently he dismisses the thought, determining not to think at all, but to follow the instincts of his heart. There comes a time when he is still too young to make definite calculations, but old enough to be haunted by vague ideas and hazy visions, which, if they could be chemically condensed, would leave no very pure deposit. His liaison with the fashionable lady, Delphine de Nucingen, Goriot's daughter, completes his education. And whilst he has been acquiring a full and perfect understanding of that sum of small and great meannesses which constitutes fashionable life, he has been influenced by Vautrin's satirical cynicism. "One or two more such political reflections, and you will see the world as it is. If he will but act an occasional little virtuous scene, the man of superior powers may satisfy all his fancies and receive loud applause from the fools in the pit. . . . I give

you leave to despise me to-day, being certain that ere long you will love me. You will find in me those yawning abysses, those great concentrated feelings, which the foolish call vices; but you will never find me either cowardly or ungrateful."

Rastignac's eyes are opened; he sees all the shams by which he is surrounded, sees that morals and laws are simply screens behind which impudent vice acts unrestrainedly. Everywhere, everywhere, sham respectability, sham friendship, sham love, sham kindness, sham sacredness, sham marriages! With masterly skill Balzac has seized and immortalised that moment in the young man's life when, as I have already put it, his heart swells and becomes strangely heavy, and he feels, when he looks about him, as if a fountain of scorn were surging in his breast. "His reflections whilst he was dressing were of the saddest and most depressing. Society appeared to him like an ocean of mud, in which the man who dipped his foot at once sank up to the neck. In society men commit only mean crimes,' he said to himself; Vautrin is greater.'" In the end, after he has taken all the measurements of this hell, he settles down comfortably in it, and prepares to scale the heights of society, to rise to the elevated official position which we find him occupying when we meet him again in later novels.

Almost all Balzac's characteristic qualities stood him in good stead in the evolution of this broadly planned work. His almost animal liveliness, his inexhaustible flow of cutting epithet, lent themselves naturally to the reproduction of the conversation of the mixed, shabby, wanton, impudently clever company who sat at the table of the Pension Vauquer. There are hardly any noble characters in the book, and the author has consequently no opportunity of indulging in tasteless pathos; but the reader has countless opportunities of rejoicing in the unerring eye and the precision with which Balzac dissects the soul of a criminal, a coquette, a millionaire, an envious old maid. The neglected, disowned old father, from whom the book takes its title, is by no means an entirely successful character. Père Goriot is a victim, and Balzac always waxes sentimental over victims. With

extremely bad taste he calls the old man "the Christ of paternal love"; and to the paternal love he imparts such a sensually hysterical character that he almost disgusts us with it.1 Nevertheless the fact that the whole plot centres round this forsaken old man, upon whose heart his own daughters trample, gives to the composition a satisfactory unity and solidity. The whole Juvenal-like satire of society is concentrated, is compressed, as it were, into an epigram, in the passage which describes how Delphine does not visit her dying father because it is imperative, if she desires to mount a step higher on the social ladder, that she should avail herself of the long-coveted invitation to Madame Beauséant's ball-a ball to which "the whole of Paris" is crowding merely to spy with cruel curiosity for traces in the hostess's face of the pain caused her by the engagement of her lover, the news of which had only reached her that morning.

We follow Delphine as she drives, with Rastignac by her side, in her own carriage to the ball. The young man, who is well aware that she would drive over her father's corpse to show herself at this ball, but who is neither able to give her up nor brave enough to incur her displeasure by reproaching her, cannot refrain from saying a few words about the old man's pitiable condition. The tears come into her eyes. “I shall look ugly if I cry," she thinks; and they dry at once. "To-morrow morning I shall go to my father," she says, "and nurse him, and never leave his pillow." And she means what she says. She is not a radically bad woman, but she is a living picture of the discords of society; she belongs to the lower classes by birth, to the upper by marriage; she is rich, but the humiliating conditions of her marriage deprive her of the control of her fortune; she is pleasure-loving, empty-minded, and ambitious. Balzac's creative power was not equal to the production of a simple, pure, Shakespearean Cordelia; his region is not the region of the noble; but he has created a Regan and a Goneril who are more human and true to life than the great Englishman's.

1 "Mon Dieu! pleurer, elle a pleuré ?”—“La tête sur mon gilet," dit Eugène. "Oh! donnez-le-moi, ce gilet," dit le père Goriot.

L

XVI

BALZAC

ONE day in 1836 Balzac appeared in his sister's room in the wildest of spirits. Imitating the gestures of a drummajor with his thick cane (on the cornelian handle of which was engraved in Turkish a sultan's motto: "I am the destroyer of obstacles "), he shouted to her during the pauses of an accompaniment of martial music made with his tongue : "Congratulate me, little one, for I am on the point of becoming a genius." He had conceived the idea of combining all his novels, those already published and those yet to be written, into one great work-La Comédie Humaine.

The plan was stupendous and perfectly original; nothing of the kind existed in any known literature; it was a product of the same genius for systematisation which at the beginning of his career had inspired him with the idea of writing a series of historical romances embracing a succession of centuries. But this was a far more interesting and fertile idea. For, if the work were successful, it would possess the same force of illusion as if it dealt with historic facts, and it would, moreover, not merely be a little fragment of life symbolically and artistically enlarged into an image of the whole, but might justly lay claim to be, in the scientific sense of the word, a whole. In the Divina Commedia Dante had, as it were, focussed all the philosophy and experience of life of the Middle Ages; his ambitious rival purposed giving to the world by means of two to three thousand characters, which each represented hundreds of others, a complete psychology of all the different classes of French society, and thus, indirectly, of his age.

It is undeniable that the result was something unique.
Balzac's country has, like the real country, its ministers,

its judges, its generals, its financiers, manufacturers, merchants, and peasants. It has its priests, its town and country doctors, its men of fashion, its painters, sculptors, and designers, its poets, prose authors, and journalists, its old and its newly created aristocracy, its vain and unfaithful, and its lovable, victimised wives, its authoresses of genius and its provincial blue-stockings, its old maids, its actresses, and its host of courtesans. And the illusion is astonishing and

complete.

The personages reappear in one after another of the numerous novels; we make acquaintance with them in all the different stages of their lives; they are constantly being alluded to by other characters when they do not appear themselves; the descriptions of their appearance, dress, homes, habits, and daily life are as minute and exact as if they had been given by a dressmaker, a doctor, a tradesman, or a lawyer, and at the same time so vivid that we feel as if we must certainly find the person described either in the street and house indicated as his home, or else paying a call upon the distinguished lady whose salon is the rendezvous of all the people of fashion in the novels. It seems almost impossible that these beings, one and all, should be mere figments of the brain; we involuntarily think of the France of that day as peopled by them.

And it is the whole of France. For Balzac described in their turn towns and districts in every part of the country.' Far from despising the provinces, he took a pride in displaying his intimate knowledge of all the peculiarities of their stagnant life, of their virtues, all culminating in resignation, and their vices, the offspring of narrow-mindedness. But Paris in a very special manner lives in his pages. And Balzac's Paris is not the old city of Notre-Dame de Paris, the picturesque, medieval capital with its marked social contrasts, its animated street life, and its superstitious ecclesiasticism; still less is it Victor Hugo's ideal Paris, that impossible New

1 Issoudun in Un Ménage de Garçon, Douai in Le Recherche de l'Absolu, Alençon in La vieille Fille, Besançon in Albert Savarus, Saumur in Eugénie Grandet, Angoulême in Les deux Poètes, Tours in Le Curé de Tours, Limoges in Le Curé de Village, Sancerre in La Muse du Département, &c.