Chapter XV: Balzac

Of the books published by Balzac in 1833 and 1834, two are especially deserving of notice--the delicately wrought, classic tale, _Eugénie Grandet_, and the powerful, fateful _Père Goriot_. In the first-mentioned work Balzac competes with Molière (_l'Avare_) in the second with no less a writer than Shakespeare (_King Lear_).

_Eugénie Grandet_ does not represent the full measure of Balzac's talent, though he long went by the name of its author as a kind of title of honour. The book interested because of its careful and accurate descriptions of provincial life with its virtues and vices; it could be recommended for family reading, because the heroine was a chaste and noble-minded young girl; but its chief distinction lay in the wonderful manner in which Balzac's genius makes of covetousness and avarice, qualities of which hitherto only the comical side had been displayed, imposing vices. He shows how the instinct of amassing money, which it is the custom to regard as a laughable weakness, by degrees stifles every human feeling, and, raising its terrible Medusa head, tyrannises over the miser's surroundings; and he at the same time makes the miser himself a more human figure. To Balzac he is not the stereotyped comedy bourgeois, but a power-loving monomaniac, a petrified enthusiast, a poet, who at the sight of his gold revels in satisfied desire, but also in wild dreams. The miser is simply a man who is more thoroughly impressed than other men with the truth that money represents all human powers and pleasures. In the representation of such a character, Balzac displays his peculiar gift, which is that of producing a powerful effect with small means, with what others have overlooked or despised. From the symbolic standpoint the horizon of _Eugénie Grandet_ is not narrow; but it was narrow in comparison with Balzac's characteristic and usual one.

In _Père Goriot_ it widens. Here it is not an out-of-the-way provincial nook, but the great city of Paris which is studied, and which is unrolled, like a panorama, before our eyes. And there is no generalising and symbolising, as in _La Peau de Chagrin_; each class of society and each character in each class is provided with its own characteristic features. I have spoken of _King Lear_; but the story of the two cold-hearted daughters and their father, full of deep meaning and feeling as it is, is only in an external sense the theme of the book. The real theme is the comparatively uncorrupted provincial youth's introduction to the world of Paris, his gradual discovery of the real nature of that world, his horror at the discovery, his refusal to do what others do, his temptations, and his gradual, yet rapidly completed, education for the life that is being lived around him. Nothing more profound than this study of the development of Rastignac's character has been produced by Balzac, or indeed by any modern novelist. He shows with marvellous art how on every side, except where men's words are dictated by hypocrisy or extreme naïveté, the young man meets with the same conception of society and receives the same advice. His relative and protectress, the charming and distinguished Madame de Beauséant, says to him: "The more coldly you calculate, the higher you will rise. Think of men and women simply as post-horses to be left behind you, broken-winded, at each stage of your journey.... If you have any real feeling, hide it; never let it be suspected, or you are lost.... If you can manage to make women think you clever, men will soon believe that you are, unless you destroy their illusion too rudely.... You will find out what society is--a company of dupes and rogues. Be neither the one nor the other." And the escaped galley-slave Vautrin says to him: "One must either force a way for one's self into the heart of that crowd as a cannon-ball does, or sneak in like the plague. Honesty is of no use. Men bend and submit to the power of genius; they hate it, 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.