Little French Masterpieces

Balzac's short stories, which we call in French nouvelles are, generally speaking, not the best-known or the most popular part of his work; nor are they the part best fitted to give a true and complete idea of his genius. But some of them are none the less masterpieces in their kind; they have characteristics and a significance not always possessed by their author's long novels, such as Eugénie Grandet or Cousin Pons; and finally, for this very reason, they hold in the unfinished structure of The Human Comedy a place which it will be interesting to try to determine. That is all that will be attempted in this Introduction.Some of the stories contained in the present volume were written under curious circumstances. In the first place it is to be noted that they all date from 1830, 1831, and 18321 and therefore precede the conception and planning of The Human Comedy. Their value is far from being diminished by that fact. An Episode under the Terror (1830), for instance, was composed as an introduction to the Memoirs of Sanson – that executioner who of all executioners in the world's history probably despatched the fewest criminals and yet shed the most blood; and the Memoirs themselves, which are entirely apocryphal, are also in part Balzac's own work. But, though composed in this way, to order and as a piece of hack work, An Episode under the Terror is in its artistic brevity one of Balzac's most tragic and most finished narratives. La Grande Bretèche (1832) was at first only an episode inserted among the more extended narratives of which it made part, as in the old-fashioned novel of tales within tales of which Gil Blas is the type; and brief as it is, Balzac nevertheless rewrote it three or four times. It is therefore anything but an improvisation. Yet no other of these short stories can give more vividly than La Grande Bretèche the impression of a work sprung at once in full completeness from its author's brain, and conceived from the very first in its indivisible unity. But, precisely, it is one of the characteristic traits of Balzac's genius that we hardly need to know when or for what purpose he wrote this or that one of his novels or stories. He bore them all within him at once – we might say that the germ of them was preëxistent in him before he had any conscious thought of objectivising them. His characters were born in him, as though from all eternity, before he knew them himself; and before he himself suspected it, The Human Comedy was alive, was confusedly moving, was slowly shaping itself, in his brain. This point must be clearly seen before he can be understood or appreciated at his true value. However much interest a monograph on some animal or plant may have in itself – and that interest, no doubt, is often great – it has far more through the relations it bears to other monographs and to the whole field of knowledge of which its subject is only a fragmentary part. So it is with Balzac's novels and stories. Their interest is not limited to themselves. They bring out one another's value and significance, they illustrate and give importance to each other; they have, outside themselves, a justification for existence. This will become clear if we compare Mérimée's Mateo Falcone; for instance, with A Seashore Drama (1835). The subject is the same: in each case it is a father who constitutes himself justiciary of the honour of his race. But while Mérimée's work, though perhaps better written or at least engraved with deeper tooling, is after all nothing but an anecdote, a sensational news-item, a story of local manners, Balzac's is bound up with a whole mass of ideas, not to say a whole social philosophy, of which it is, properly speaking, only a chapter; and of which The Conscript (1831) is another.

But why did Balzac confine some of his subjects within the narrow limits of the nouvelle, while he expanded others to the dimensions of epic, we might say, or of history? It was because, though analogies are numerous between natural history and what we may call social history or the natural history of society, yet their resemblance is not complete nor their identity absolute. There are peculiarities or variations of passion which, though physiologically or pathologically interesting, are socially insignificant and can be left out of account: for instance, A Passion in the Desert (1830), or The Unknown Masterpiece (1831). It is rare, in art, for the passionate pursuit of progress to result only, as with Frenhofer, in jumbling the colours on a great painter's canvas; and, even were this less rare, artists are not very numerous! So, if the writer gave to his narrative of this painful but infrequent adventure as full a development, if he diversified and complicated it with as many episodes and details as the adventures of Baron Hulot in Cousin Bette or those of Madame de Mortsauf in The Lily in the Valley, he would thereby attribute to it, socially or historically, an importance it does not possess. He would err, and would make us err with him, regarding the true proportions of things. He would represent the humanity which he was attempting to depict, in a manner far from consistent with reality. Hence may be deduced the æsthetics of the nouvelle, and its distinction from the conte, and also from the roman or novel.

The nouvelle differs from the conte in that it always claims to be a picture of ordinary life; and it differs from the novel in that it selects from ordinary life, and depicts by preference and almost exclusively, those examples of the strange, the rare, and the extraordinary which ordinary life does in spite of its monotony nevertheless contain. It is neither strange nor rare for a miser to make all the people about him, including his wife and children, victims of the passion to which he is himself enslaved; and that is the subject of Eugénie Grandet. It is nothing extraordinary for parents of humble origin to be almost disowned by their children whom they have married too far above them, in another class of society; and that is the subject of Father Goriot. But for a husband, as in La Grande Bretèche, to wall up his wife's lover in a closet, and that before her very eyes; and, through a combination of circumstances in themselves quite out of the ordinary, for neither one of them to dare or be able to make any defence against his vengeance – this is certainly somewhat rare! Then read The Conscript, or An Episode under the Terror; the plot is no ordinary one, and perhaps, with a little exaggeration, we may say it can have occurred but once. Such, then, is the field of the nouvelle. Let us set off from it the fantastic, in the style of Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe, even though Balzac sometimes tried that also, as in The Wild Ass's Skin, for instance, or in Melmoth Converted; for the fantastic belongs to the field of the conte. But unusual events, especially such as result from an unforeseen combination of circumstances; and really tragic adventures, which, like Monsieur and Madame de Merret's in La Grande Bretèche or Cambremer's in A Seashore Drama, make human conscience hesitate to call the crime by its name; and illogical variations, deviations, or perversions of passion; and the pathology of feeling, as in The Unknown Masterpiece; and still more generally, if I may so express myself, all those things in life which are out of the usual run of life, which happen on its margin, and so are beside yet not outside it; all that makes its surprises, its differences, its startlingness, so to speak – all this is the province of the nouvelle, bordering on that of the novel yet distinct from it. Out of common every-day life you cannot really make nouvelles, but only novels – miniature novels, when they are brief, but still novels. In no French writer of the last century, I think, is this distinction more evident or more strictly observed than it is in The Human Comedy; and unless I am much mistaken, this may serve to solve, or at least to throw light on, the vexed question of Honoré de Balzac's naturalism or romanticism.

In the literal and even the etymological sense of the word naturalism– that is, without taking account of the way in which Émile Zola and some other Italians have perverted its nature– no one can question that Balzac was a naturalist. One might as well deny that Victor Hugo was a romanticist! Everybody to-day knows that neither the freedom of his vocabulary, nor some very detailed descriptions in Notre Dame de Paris and especially in Les Misérables, nor his coarse popular jokes, often in doubtful taste if not sometimes worse, nor yet the interest in social questions which characterised him from the very first – that nothing of all this, I say, prevents Victor Hugo from having been, up to the day of his death, the romanticist; we may rest assured that in whatever way romanticism shall be defined, he will always be, in the history of French literature, its living incarnation. Balzac, on the other hand, will always be the living incarnation of naturalism. And surely, if to be a naturalist is to confine the field of one's art to the observation of contemporary life, and to try to give a complete and adequate representation thereof, not drawing back or hesitating, not abating one tittle of the truth, in the depiction of ugliness and vice; if to be a naturalist is, like a portrait-painter, to subordinate every æsthetic and moral consideration to the law of likeness – then it is impossible to be more of a naturalist than Balzac. But with all this, since his imagination is unruly, capricious, changeable, with a strong tendency to exaggeration, audacious, and corrupt; since he, as much as any of his contemporaries, feels the need of startling us; since he habitually writes under the dominion of a kind of hallucinatory fever sufficient of itself to mark what we may call the romantic state of mind – romanticism is certainly not absent from the work of this naturalist, but on the contrary would fill and inspire the whole of it, were that result not prevented by the claims, or conditions, of observation. A romantic imagination, struggling to triumph over itself, and succeeding only by confining itself to the study of the model – such may be the definition of Balzac's imagination or genius; and, in a way, to justify this definition by his work we need only to distinguish clearly his nouvelles from his novels.

Balzac's nouvelles represent the share of romanticism in his work. La Grande Bretèche is the typical romantic narrative, and we may say as much of The Unknown Masterpiece. The observer shuts his eyes; he now looks only within himself; he imagines "what might have been"; and he writes An Episode under the Terror. It is for him a way of escape from the obsession of the real:

"The real is strait; the possible is vast."

His unbridled imagination takes free course. He works in dream. And, since of course we can never succeed in building within ourselves perfectly water-tight compartments, entirely separating dream from memory and imagination from observation, reality does find its way into his nouvelles by way of exactness in detail, but their conception remains essentially or chiefly romantic; just as in his long novels, Eugénie Grandet, A Bachelor's Establishment (Un Ménage de Garçon), César Birotteau, A Dark Affair, Cousin Pons, and Cousin Bette, his observation remains naturalistic, and his imagination perverts it, by magnifying or exaggerating, yet never intentionally or systematically or to the extent of falsifying the true relations of things. Shall I dare say, to English readers, that by this fact he belongs to the family of Shakespeare? His long novels are his Othello, his Romeo, his Macbeth, his Richard III., and Coriolanus; and his nouvelles, his short stories, are his Tempest, his Twelfth Night, and his Midsummer Night's Dream.

This comparison, which really is not a comparison but a mere analogy, such as might be drawn between Musset and Byron, may serve to bring out one more characteristic of Balzac's nouvelles– they are philosophic; in his The Human Comedy it is under the title of Philosophic Studies that he brought together, whatever their origin, such stories as A Seashore Drama, The Unknown Masterpiece, and even The Conscript. By so doing he no doubt meant to imply that the sensational stories on which they are based did not contain their whole significance; that he was using them merely as a means of stating a problem, of fixing the reader's attention for a moment on the vastness of the mysterious or unknown by which we are, so to speak, enwrapped about. "We might add this tragic story," he writes at the end of his The Conscript, "to the mass of other observations on that sympathy which defies the law of space – a body of evidence which some few solitary scholars are collecting with scientific curiosity, and which will one day serve as basis for a new science, a science which till now has lacked only its man of genius." These are large words, it would seem, with which to point the moral of a mere historical anecdote. But if we consider them well, we shall see that, whatever we may think of this "new science," Balzac wrote his The Conscript for the sole purpose of ending it with that sentence. Read, too, A Seashore Drama. It is often said that "A fact is a fact" – and I scarcely know a more futile sophism, unless it be the one which consists in saying that "Of tastes and colours there is no disputing." Such is not Balzac's opinion, at any rate. He believes that a fact is more than a fact, that it is the expression or manifestation of something other or more than itself; or again, that it is a piece of evidence, a document, which it is not enough to have put on record, but in which we must also seek, through contrasts and resemblances, its deep ulterior meaning. And this is what he has tried to show in his nouvelles.

Thus we see what place they hold in his The Human Comedy. Balzac's short stories are not, in his work, what one might be tempted to call somewhat disdainfully "the chips of his workshop." Nor are they even, in relation to his long novels, what a painter's sketches, rough drafts, and studies are to his finished pictures. He did not write them by way of practice or experiment; they have their own value, intrinsic and well-defined. It would be a mistake, also, to consider them as little novels, in briefer form, which more time or leisure might have allowed their author to treat with more fullness. He conceived them for their own sake; he would never have consented to give them proportions which did not befit them. The truth of the matter is that by reason of their dealing with the exceptional or extraordinary, they are, in a way, the element of romantic drama in Balzac's Comedy; and by reason of their philosophic or symbolic significance, they add the element of mystery to a work which but for them would be somewhat harshly illumined by the hard light of reality. Once more, that is why he did not classify his The Conscript with the Scenes of Political Life, or his A Seashore Drama with the Scenes of Country Life. That, too, is what gives them their interest and their originality. That is what distinguishes them from the stories of Prosper Mérimée, or, later, those of Guy de Maupassant. So much being made clear, it is not important now to ask whether they really have as much depth of meaning as their author claimed for them. That is another question; and I have just indicated why I cannot treat it in this brief Introduction. Only in a complete study of Balzac could his nouvelles be adequately judged. Then their due place would be assigned to them, in the full scheme of The Human Comedy. I shall be happy if the English reader remembers this; and if the reading of these nouvelles, after having for a moment charmed him, shall also inspire him with the wish to know more closely and completely the greatest of French novelists.

TO A LORD:

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1845.

I

GILLETTE

Late in the year 1612, one cold morning in December, a young man whose garments seemed very thin was walking before the door of a house on Rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris. After pacing that street for a long time, with the indecision of a lover who dares not pay a visit to his first mistress, however kind she may be, he at last crossed the threshold of the door and asked if Master François Porbus was at home. Upon receiving an affirmative reply from a woman who was sweeping a room on the lower floor, the young man went slowly up-stairs, hesitating from stair to stair, like a courtier of recent creation, apprehensive of the greeting which he was to receive from the king. When he reached the top of the winding staircase, he stood for a moment on the landing, uncertain whether he should lift the grotesque knocker affixed to the door of the studio where the painter of Henri IV., cast aside for Rubens by Marie de Medici, was doubtless at work. The young man felt that profound emotion which must cause the hearts of all great artists to beat quickly, when, in the prime of youth and of their love for art, they approach a man of genius, or some noble masterpiece.

There exists in all human sentiments a primitive flower, engendered by a noble enthusiasm which grows constantly weaker and weaker, until happiness ceases to be more than a memory and glory more than a lie. Among these transitory sentiments, nothing bears so close a resemblance to love as the youthful passion of an artist just beginning to experience the delicious torture of his destiny of renown and of misfortune, a passion full of audacity and shyness, of vague beliefs and of certain discouragement. The youthful genius, with empty pockets, whose heart has not throbbed upon appearing before a master, will always lack one chord in his heart, some indefinable touch of the brush, some feeling in his work, some shade of poetical expression. If some boasters, puffed out with conceit, believe too early in the future, they are considered people of intellect by fools alone. In this regard, the young stranger seemed to possess real merit, if talent is to be measured by that early timidity, that indescribable modesty which people destined to glory gradually lose in the exercise of their art, as pretty women lose theirs in the manoeuvring of coquetry. The habitude of triumph lessens doubt, and modesty perhaps is a form of doubt.

Overwhelmed by surprise and distress at that moment of his overweening presumption, the poor neophyte would not have entered the studio of the painter to whom we owe the admirable portrait of Henri IV., except for an extraordinary reinforcement sent him by chance. An old man ascended the stairs. From the oddity of his costume, the magnificence of his lace ruff, the ponderous self-assurance of his gait, the young man divined that he was either the painter's patron or his friend; he drew back against the wall to make room for him, and gazed at him curiously, hoping to find in him the kindly nature of an artist, or the obliging disposition of those who love art; but he detected something diabolical in that face, and above all that indefinable expression which artists dote upon. Imagine a bald, prominent, even protuberant forehead, overshadowing a small, flattened nose, turned up at the end like Rabelais's or Socrates's; a smiling mouth, wrinkled at the corners; a short chin, proudly raised, and adorned with a gray beard trimmed to a point; sea-green eyes, apparently dulled by age, which, however, by virtue of the contrast of the pearly-white in which the pupils swam, sometimes emitted magnetic glances under the spur of wrath or enthusiasm. The face was woefully ravaged by the fatigues of age, and even more by the thoughts which tire mind and body alike. The eyes had no lashes, and one could barely detect a trace of eyebrows over their protruding arches. Place that head upon a slender and fragile body, surround it with a lace ruff of snowy whiteness and of a pattern as elaborate as that of a silver fish-knife, throw a heavy gold chain over the old man's black doublet, and you will have an imperfect image of that individual, to whom the dim light of the hall imparted an even stranger colouring. You would have said that it was one of Rembrandt's canvases, walking silently, without a frame, through the dark atmosphere which that great painter made his own. The old man cast a sagacious glance at the young one, tapped thrice on the door, and said to a sickly-looking personage of about forty years, who opened it:

"Good morning, master."

Porbus bowed respectfully; he admitted the young man, thinking that he had come with the other, and paid the less heed to him because the neophyte was evidently under the spell which a born painter inevitably experiences at the aspect of the first studio that he sees, where some of the material processes of art are revealed to him. A window in the ceiling lighted Master Porbus's studio. The light, concentrated upon a canvas standing on the easel, which as yet bore only a few light strokes, did not reach the dark recesses in the corners of that enormous room; but a few stray gleams lighted up the silver bull's-eye in the centre of a cavalryman's cuirass hanging on the wall in the ruddy shadow; illuminated with a sudden beam the carved and polished cornice of an old-fashioned sideboard, laden with curious vessels; or studded with dazzling points of light the rough woof of certain old curtains of gold brocade, with broad, irregular folds, scattered about as drapery. Plaster casts, busts, and fragments of antique goddesses, fondly polished by the kisses of centuries, lay about upon tables and consoles. Innumerable sketches, studies in coloured chalk, in red lead, or in pen and ink, covered the walls to the ceiling. Boxes of colours, bottles of oil and of essences, and overturned stools, left only a narrow path to the sort of halo projected by the high stained-glass window, through which the light fell full upon Porbus's pale face and upon the ivory skull of his strange visitor. The young man's attention was soon exclusively absorbed by a picture which had already become famous even in that epoch of commotion and revolution, and which was visited by some of those obstinate enthusiasts to whom we owe the preservation of the sacred fire during evil days. That beautiful canvas represented St. Mary the Egyptian preparing to pay for her passage in the boat. That masterpiece, painted for Marie de Medici, was sold by her in the days of her destitution.

"I like your saint," the old man said to Porbus, "and I would give you ten golden crowns above the price that the queen is to pay; but meddle in her preserves! the deuce!"

"You think it is well done, do you?"

"Hum!" said the old man, "well done? Yes and no. Your saint is not badly put together, but she is not alive. You fellows think that you have done everything when you have drawn a figure correctly and put everything in its place according to the laws of anatomy. You colour this feature with a flesh-tint prepared beforehand on your palette, taking care to keep one side darker than the other; and because you glance from time to time at a nude woman standing on a table, you think that you have copied nature, you imagine that you are painters, and that you have discovered God's secret! Bah! To be a great poet, it is not enough to know syntax, and to avoid errors in grammar.

"Look at your saint, Porbus. At first glance she seems admirable; but at the second, one sees that she is glued to the canvas, and that it is impossible to walk about her body. She is a silhouette with but a single face, a figure cut out of canvas, an image that can neither turn nor change its position. I am not conscious of the air between that arm and the background of the picture; space and depth are lacking. However, everything is right so far as perspective is concerned, and the gradation of light and shade is scrupulously observed; but, despite such praise-worthy efforts, I am unable to believe that that beautiful body is animated with the warm breath of life. It seems to me that, if I should put my hand upon that firm, round breast, I should find it as cold as marble. No, my friend, the blood does not flow beneath that ivory skin; life does not swell with its purple dew the veins and fibres which intertwine like network beneath the transparent, amber-hued temples and breast. This place throbs with life, but that other place is motionless; life and death contend in every detail; here it is a woman, there a statue, and there a corpse. Your creation is incomplete. You have been able to breathe only a portion of your soul into your cherished work. The torch of Prometheus has gone out more than once in your hands, and many parts of your picture have not been touched by the celestial flame."