Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
Balzac, we understand, is one of that wretched class of writers who live
by the pen. In Paris they count now by thousands, and their leaves fall
from the press thick-rustling like the November forest. I had heard of
this class not without envy, for I had been told pretty tales of the gay
poverty of the Frenchman--how he will live in garrets, on dry bread,
salad, and some wine, and spend all his money on a single good suit of
clothes, in which, when the daily labor of copying music, correcting the
press, or writing poems or novels, is over, he sallies forth to enjoy
the theatre, the social soiree, or the humors of the streets and cafes,
as gay, as keenly alive to observation and enjoyment, as if he were to
return to a well-stocked table and a cheerful hearth, encompassed by
happy faces.
I thought the intellectual Frenchman, in the extreme of want, never sunk
into the inert reverie of the lazzaroni, nor hid the vulture of famine
beneath the mantle of pride with the bitter mood of a Spaniard. But
Balzac evidently is familiar with that which makes the agony of
poverty--its vulgarity.
Dirt, confusion, shabby expedients, living to live,--these are what make
poverty terrible and odious, and in these Balzac would seem to have been
steeped to the very lips.
These French writers possess the art of plunging at once _in medias
res_, and Balzac places you, in the twinkling of an eye, in one of the
lowest boarding-houses of Paris. At first all is dirt, hubbub, and
unsavory odors; but from the vapors of the caldron evolves a web of
many-colored life, of terrible pathos, and original humor, not
unenlivened by pale golden threads of beauty, which had better never
been.
All the characters are excellently drawn: the harpy mistress of the
house; Mlle. Michonnet the spy, and her imbecile lover; Mme. Coutuner,
with her purblind strivings after virtue, and her real, though meagre
respectability; Vautrim, the disguised galley-slave, with his cynical
philosophy and Bonaparte character; and the young students of medicine,
cheering the dense fog with the scintillations of their wit, and the
joyousness and petulance with which their age meets the most adverse
circumstances, at least in France!
The connection between this abject poverty and the highest luxury of
Parisian life is made naturally by Eugene, connected to his misfortune
with a noble family, of which his own is a poor and young branch,
studying a profession and sighing to live like a duke, and _Le Pere
Goriot_, who has stripped himself of all his wealth for his daughters,
who are more naturally unnatural than those of Lear. The transitions are
made with as much swiftness as a curtain is drawn upon the stage, yet
with no feeling of abruptness, so skilfully are the incidents woven into
one another.
And be it recorded to the credit of Balzac, that, much as he appears to
have suffered from the want of wealth, the vices which pollute it are
represented with as terrible force as those of poverty.
The book affords play for similar powers, and brings a similar range of
motives into action with Scott's "Fortunes of Nigel." If less rich than
that work, it is more original, and has a force of pencil all its own.
Insight and a master's hand are admirable throughout; but the product of
genius is _Le Pere Goriot_. And, wonderful to relate, this character is
as much ennobled, made as poetical by abandonment to a single instinct,
as others by the force of will. Prometheus, chained on his rock, and
giving his heart to the birds of prey for aims so majestic, is scarcely
a more affecting, a more reverent object, than the rich confectioner
whose intellect has never been awakened at all, except in the way of
buying and selling, and who gives up his acuteness even there, and
commits such unspeakable follies through paternal love; a _blind_ love
too, nowise superior to that of the pelican!
Analyze it as you will, see the difference between this and the instinct
of the artist or the philanthropist, and it produces on your mind the
same impression of a present divinity. And scarce any tears could be
more sacred than those which choke the breath at the death-bed of this
man, who forgot that he was a man, to be wholly a father, this poor,
mad, stupid, father Goriot. I know nothing in fiction to surpass the
terrible, unpretending pathos of this scene, nor the power with which
the mistaken benediction given to the two medical students whom he takes
for his daughters, is redeemed from burlesque.
The scepticism as to _virtue_ in this book is fearful, but the love for
innocence and beautiful instincts casts a softening tint over the gloom.
We never saw any thing sweeter or more natural than the letters of the
mother and sisters of Eugene, when they so delightfully sent him the
money of which he had been wicked enough to plunder them. These traits
of domestic life are given with much grace and delicacy of sentiment.
How few writers can paint _abandon_, without running into exaggeration!
and here the task was one of peculiar difficulty. It seemed as if the
writer were conscious enough of his power to propose to himself the most
difficult task he could undertake.
A respectable reviewer in "Les Deux Mondes" would wish us to think that
there is no life in Paris like what Balzac paints; but we can never
believe that: evidently it is "too true," though we doubt not there is
more redemption than he sees.
But this book was too much for our nerves, and would be, probably, for
those of most people accustomed to breathe a healthier atmosphere.
Balzac has been a very fruitful writer, and, as he is fond of jugglers'
tricks of every description, and holds nothing earnest or sacred, he is
vain of the wonderful celerity with which some of his works, and those
quite as good as any, have been written. They seem to have been
conceived, composed, and written down with that degree of speed with
which it is possible to lay pen to paper. Indeed, we think he cannot be
surpassed in the ready and sustained command of his resources. His
almost unequalled quickness and fidelity of eye, both as to the
disposition of external objects, and the symptoms of human passion,
combined with a strong memory, have filled his mind with materials, and
we doubt not that if his thoughts could be put into writing with the
swiftness of thought, he would give us one of his novels every week in
the year.
Here end our praises of Balzac; what he is, as a man, in daily life, we
know not. He must originally have had a heart, or he could not read so
well the hearts of others; perhaps there are still private ties that
touch him. But as a writer, never was the modern Mephistopheles, "the
spirit that denieth," more worthily represented than by Balzac.
He combines the spirit of the man of science with that of the amateur
collector. He delights to analyze, to classify; there is no anomaly too
monstrous, no specimen too revolting, to insure his ardent but
passionless scrutiny. But then he has taste and judgment to know what is
fair, rare, and exquisite. He takes up such an object carefully, and
puts it in a good light. But he has no hatred for what is loathsome, no
contempt for what is base, no love for what is lovely, no faith in what
is noble. To him there is no virtue and no vice; men and women are more
or less finely organized; noble and tender conduct is more agreeable
than the reverse, because it argues better health; that is all.
Nor is this from an intellectual calmness, nor from an unusual power of
analyzing motives, and penetrating delusions merely; neither is it mere
indifference. There is a touch of the demon, also, in Balzac, the cold
but gayly familiar demon; and the smile of the amateur yields easily to
a sneer, as he delights to show you on what foul juices the fair flower
was fed. He is a thorough and willing materialist. The trance of
religion is congestion of the brain; the joy of the poet the thrilling
of the blood in the rapture of sense; and every good not only rises
from, but hastens back into, the jaws of death and nothingness; a
rainbow arch above a pestilential chaos!
Thus Balzac, with all his force and fulness of talent, never rises one
moment into the region of genius. For genius is, in its nature, positive
and creative, and cannot exist where there is no heart to believe in
realities. Neither can he have a permanent influence on a nature which
is not thoroughly corrupt. He might for a while stagger an ingenuous
mind which had not yet thought for itself. But this could not last. His
unbelief makes his thought too shallow. He has not that power which a
mind, only in part sophisticated, may retain, where the heart still
beats warmly, though it sometimes beats amiss. Write, paint, argue, as
you will, where there is a sound spot in any human being, he cannot be
made to believe that this present bodily frame is more than a temporary
condition of his being, though one to which he may have become
shamefully enslaved by fault of inheritance, education, or his own
carelessness.
Taken in his own way, we know no modern tragedies more powerful than
Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet," "Sweet Pea," "Search after the Absolute,"
"Father Goriot." See there goodness, aspiration, the loveliest
instincts, stifled, strangled by fate, in the form of our own brute
nature. The fate of the ancient Prometheus was happiness to that of
these, who must pay, for ever having believed there was divine fire in
heaven, by agonies of despair, and conscious degradation, unknown to
those who began by believing man to be the most richly endowed of
brutes--no more!
Balzac is admirable in his description of look, tone, gesture. He has a
keen sense of whatever is peculiar to the individual. Nothing in modern
romance surpasses the death-scene of Father Goriot, the Parisian Lear,
in the almost immortal life with which the parental instincts are
displayed. And with equal precision and delicacy of shading he will
paint the slightest by-play in the manners of some young girl.
"Seraphitus" is merely a specimen of his great powers of intellectual
transposition. Amid his delight at the botanical riches of the new and
elevated region in which he is travelling, we catch, if only by echo,
the hem and chuckle of the French materialist.
No more of him!--We leave him to his suicidal work.
It is cheering to know how great is the influence such a writer as Sue
exerts, from his energy of feeling on some subjects of moral interest.
It is true that he has also much talent and a various experience of
life; but writers who far surpass him here, as we think Balzac does,
wanting this heart of faith, have no influence, except merely on the
tastes of their readers.
We observe, in a late notice of Sue, that he began to write at quite
mature age, at the suggestion of a friend. We should think it was so;
that he was by nature intended for a practical man, rather than a
writer. He paints all his characters from the practical point of view.
As an observer, when free from exaggeration, he has as good an eye as
Balzac, but he is far more rarely thus free, for, in temperament, he is
unequal and sometimes muddy. But then he has the heart and faith that
Balzac wants, yet is less enslaved by emotion than Sand; therefore he
has made more impression on his time and place than either. We refer now
to his later works; though his earlier show much talent, yet his
progress, both as a writer and thinker, has been so considerable that
those of the last few years entirely eclipse his earlier essays.
These latter works are the "Mysteries of Paris," "Matilda," and the
"Wandering Jew," which is now in course of publication. In these, he has
begun, and is continuing, a crusade against the evils of a corrupt
civilization which are inflicting such woes and wrongs upon his