XVII

BALZAC

IN his history of France Michelet dates a new epoch in the intellectual life of that country from the period when coffee came into general use as a beverage. This is pushing an idea to the extreme; but there would be no exaggeration in asserting that in Voltaire's style we can trace an inspiration of coffee, just as we can trace an inspiration of wine in the style of earlier authors. Balzac's method of working obliged him to refresh himself during his long, fatiguing nights of labour with an injurious quantity of coffee. It has been aptly said: "He lived on 50,000 cups of coffee and died of 50,000 cups of coffee."

One is conscious in his works of his ceaseless toil and of his nervous excitement, but it is probable that if he had worked more calmly he would not have communicated the same life to them. While we are reading his pages we feel the confused tumult of the great capital, its furious competition, its fever of work and pleasure, the sleepless whirr of the great loom. All these hearths and lamps and furnaces have lent some of their fire to his books. He was in his native element when he had work before him and behind him and round him-when, like a sailor in mid-ocean who sees nothing but sea, he saw nothing but work as far as his sight could reach.

During the last seventeen years of his life his labours were interrupted and enlivened by intellectual intercourse with a lady who lived at a great distance from Paris, to whom he wrote almost every day. We have an account of this friendship, only slightly disguised, in Albert Savarus.

In February 1832 a young Polish Countess, Madame Evelina Hanska, then aged twenty-six or twenty-eight, wrote

an anonymous letter to Balzac, in which she thanked him for his writings and tried to persuade him to look on things from a more spiritual point of view. This led to a correspondence between them. Madame Hanska, a gifted, highly educated woman, belonged by birth to the famous Rzewuski family; the eminent Polish author, Henri Rzewuski, was her brother. Her husband was a rich old man, an invalid, with a peculiar temper. They lived a very lonely life on their estate in Little Russia, and literature and Balzac were her only interests.

Balzac and she had first met at Neuchâtel in Switzerland early in 1833, but on this occasion they were only for a few minutes alone together; in December of the same year, however, they spent six weeks together at Geneva, and, before they parted, agreed that they would marry whenever Countess Hanska became a widow. Henceforward they met almost every year, in Switzerland or Austria; and they carried on a constant correspondence. There is not the slightest doubt that Balzac was devotedly attached to Countess Hanska, although his devotion to her did not prevent his having numerous liaisons with other women. She was his guiding star, and he felt impelled to communicate all his thoughts and all the events of his life to her.

She undoubtedly loved him in return, with a love which was partly real passion, partly satisfied vanity; but Balzac's letters to her show that she never ceased tormenting him with her passionate jealousy. He had begun to cool when a meeting in Vienna in 1835, arranged by Countess Hanska, fanned the sinking fire of his passion into a blaze again. After this a number of years passed without their seeing each other. In 1841 Madame Hanska in her turn manifested a certain coldness, born of suspicion; and after Count Hanska's death, which happened in November of that year, she does not seem to have shown much inclination to marry Balzac.

But the agreement remained in force, and Balzac's one wish was to marry the woman he loved. She held back. They did not meet till 1843 (in St. Petersburg). In 1845 they met in Paris, in 1847 at her home at Vierz

chovnia; and there Balzac spent part of 1848 and the whole of 1849. But it was not till 1850, when his health was already undermined, that Madame Hanska consented to marry him. A fatal affection of the heart, the consequence of years of over-exertion, had declared itself before the wedding took place at Berditsjev in March 1850. Three months from that date Balzac was dead. He had furnished a beautiful house in Paris for himself. His friends were reminded of the Turkish proverb: "When the house is ready, Death enters."

Short as was the married life of the couple, it was long enough for Balzac to discover how mistaken had been his estimate of the woman he had worshipped and treated as a higher being for years. She seems to have been in reality a very heartless creature, with an ill-regulated mind; and her youthful passion for the great author had entirely evaporated. In Victor Hugo's book, Choses Vues, he tells how in June 1850, hearing disquieting reports of Balzac's condition, he went to inquire after him. The door was opened by a maid-servant, who said: "Monsieur is dying. Madame has gone to her own room." Hugo went up to Balzac's bedroom, and found an old woman, a nurse, and a man-servant standing by the bed. The old woman was Balzac's mother. His wife was not with him in his last moments.

It is difficult to define her influence upon him as a writer; but it was inconsiderable. To it we owe the fanciful Swedenborgian romance, Séraphita, and the delicately finished, clever story, Modeste Mignon.

Death came when Balzac's intellectual powers were in their zenith. He never wrote better than in the last year of his life. Hence his fame, too, was at its height. It had grown slowly. The first score of his novels gained him no widespread reputation among the general public; but they attracted the attention of the men of talent of the younger generation, who gathered round him and watched the progress of his literary career with the deepest interest. Το those of them who wished to succeed in literature he recommended three things-diligence, a solitary life, and (this half

in jest) the vow of chastity. He sanctioned correspondence with the object of their affections, because "letter-writing forms one's style." The young men were astonished to receive such advice from a man whose books were invariably greeted by the press with angry shrieks of offended morality; they had yet to learn that the charge of immorality is the invariable insult hurled by literary impotence at everything in literature that is vigorous and virile. In spite of all the attacks upon it, his name was held in ever more honourable repute, and at the time of his death his contemporaries had almost grasped the fact that in Balzac they possessed one of the really great authors who imbue a whole school of art with their spirit. Not only had he laid the foundation of the modern style of novel-writing, but-true son of a century during which science has penetrated ever farther into the domain of art-he had introduced a method of observation which could be followed by others. His name in itself was a great name, but the name of the founder of a school is Legion.

The fact that he did not obtain full recognition in his lifetime is explained by two deficiencies in his works.

His style was uncertain. It was at times vulgarly trivial, at times bombastic. And deficiency in the matter of style is a serious deficiency; because what distinguishes art from that which is not art, is just that determined exclusion of what is almost, but not quite right, to which we give the name of style. It is, moreover, a particularly objectionable deficiency in the eyes of Frenchmen, with their keen rhetorical sense. But after Balzac's death his works began to be much read abroad as well as in France, and foreigners made very light of this shortcoming of his. The man who understands a language well enough to read it, but has not sufficient knowledge to appreciate all its refinements, easily forgives sins of style when they are compensated for by rare and attractive qualities. And this was the position of the great novel-reading European public. Educated Italians, Austrians, Poles, Russians, &c., read Balzac with unalloyed pleasure, paying small heed to the inequality of his style. The fault will, however, undoubtedly

affect the duration of his work. Nothing formless or only half-formed endures. The great Comédie Humaine (like the 10,000 stadia long painting which Aristotle maintained would not be a work of art at all) will not be regarded by posterity in the light of a single work, and the length of time during which its separate fragments retain their place in the literature of the world will be exactly proportioned to the degree of artistic perfection possessed by each. After the lapse of a few centuries they are not likely to be read simply because of the material they provide for the student of the history of civilisation.

To deficiency in the matter of form Balzac adds a much greater deficiency in the matter of abstract ideas. was impossible that the man who was great only as a writer of fiction should receive full recognition in his lifetime. Men had become accustomed to see in the author the spiritual guide, and Balzac was certainly not that. His great powers as an analyst of the human soul were obscured by his total want of understanding of the emancipatory religious and social ideas of his age, ideas which so early aroused George Sand's enthusiasm, and had such a powerful influence on Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and others. His political and religious doctrines, which were a species of homage to absolutism and Catholic orthodoxy, were obnoxious to many. At first men smiled when the sensuous writer with the reformatory ideas quoted the dogmatists of the white banner, Joseph de Maistre and Bonald; but by degrees they comprehended the confusion that reigned in his mind.

The sensuousness of his temperament and the unbridled strength of his imagination inclined Balzac to mysticism in both science and religion. Animal magnetism, which from about 1820 onwards plays such a prominent part in literature, was a power in the influence of which over men's minds he had a strong belief. In La Peau de Chagrin, Séraphita, and Louis Lambert, will is defined as a force resembling steam, as "a fluid which according to its density can alter everything, even natural laws." In spite of the modernity of his intellect Balzac was enough of the Romanticist to believe