After these pages, whose completion was prevented by his sudden death, the calm and peaceful pictures of the “Scènes de la Vie de Campagne” follow in orderly sequence. They represent rest after exertion, landscapes after interiors, the hush of the country after the uproar of the city, the cicatrice after the wound. This last division contains the same interests and the same struggles, but weakened now by lack of contact, like passions grown dull in solitude. It is the twilight of a busy day, a summer evening solemn with sombre shadows. It contains the purest characters and the application of the great principles of order, morality, and religion, and its actors, worn with the fatigues of the world, mingle complacently with the innocence of childhood.[[14]]
Thus completed, the entire work has its geography and its own genealogy, its localities and their concomitants, its personages and their deeds. It has its own armorial, its nobility and middle class, its artisans, its peasants, and its army. It is a world in itself. But its most striking feature is the admirable unity preserved throughout; and this unity is undoubtedly due to a suggestion derived from the works of Sir Walter Scott, whom Balzac considered as a gifted sculptor who chiseled magnificent figures and draped them with genius and sublimity, but, while presenting the seductive effects of a marvelous analysis, left them lacking in synthesis and totally unrelated.
“The Waverley Novels,” he said,[[15]] “resemble the Musée de la Rue des Petits-Augustins, in which each object, while magnificent in design, relates but to itself. Genius is complete only when to the faculty of creating it joins the power of coördinating its creations. The gifts of observation and description are in themselves insufficient; they must tend to a certain result. The Scotch bard was possessed of too clear a vision not to have understood this axiom, but its understanding assuredly came too late.” To this reflection the unity of the “Comédie Humaine” is probably due; and that it may not be objected that certain of its passages are unrelated to the others, it is well to note that Balzac died too suddenly to be able to connect the broken threads, which in any event are but few and far between.
But the task of rendering his work at once interesting and instructive was one of much greater difficulty than that of Scott’s, who drew his characters from former days, when every class of society was clearly defined, and clothed them from a wardrobe opulent with historical effects; whereas Balzac was obliged to offer in clear relief the almost imperceptible differences of the types of yesterday and to-day, that through an equality of fortune and education have destroyed the contrasts which once existed between the different degrees of the social order. Aided, however, by that peculiar intuition which never forsook him, he chose from among the physiognomies of his epoch an assortment of those fugitive traits which are imperceptible to the eyes of the vulgar; and in scrutinizing face after face, attentive to the changes of expression and inflections of voice, he was enabled to present a series of individualities which are far more realistic than those of his illustrious predecessor.
After displaying in the “Études de Mœurs” all the moral and physical transformations through which mankind passes, and after describing the social effects of their natural or civil positions, Balzac sought in the “Études Philosophiques” to demonstrate the causes of these effects; and while the first part of the “Comédie Humaine” contains but a series of individualities typified in the treatment of his subject, in the second part are to be found the same types individualized: as, for example, where in the “Études de Mœurs” Grandet is purely and simply a miser, avarice in the “Études Philosophiques” is incarnated in the person of Maître Cornélius, and the subject, like a sponge, gains in weight what it loses in breadth.
The “Études Philosophiques” is the fruit of analyzed comparisons of all the works which the philosophers of antiquity and the specialists of his day had produced on the intellect; and starting with the famous axiom of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that “l’homme qui pense est un animal dépravé,”—an idea which, as is well known, found its poetic interpretation in Byron’s “Manfred,” and its dramatic aspect in the “Faust” of Goethe,—Balzac proceeds to prove that ideas and sentiments are simply dissolvents of a greater or less activity; and taking as his premises the admitted fact that instincts violently excited by factitious or fortuitous circumstances produce unconsciousness and even death, and also that thought, when augmented by the transitory force of passion, may become a poison or a dagger, he infers, from the ravages produced by the intellect, that thought is the most active agent in the disorganization of man, and consequently of society. “Consider,” he says in “Louis Lambert,” “the difference between man who desires nothing and lives like a plant for a hundred years, and the creating artist who suffers early death. Where the sun is, there is thought and brevity of existence; where the cold is, there is torpor and longevity.” Then, after considering man as a simple organization, he brandishes the proposition that vitality decreases in exact proportion to the strength of desire and the dissipation of thought, and leads the reader, therewith, through the gradual development of his theory, which is first attacked in “La Peau de Chagrin.” This weird and fantastic production, in which skepticism and the supernatural join hands, represents the ravages of thought and the supreme expression of egotism as seared by the hot iron of civilization.
In “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” the theme is continued, but viewed in a broader and more comprehensive light. In “La Peau de Chagrin,” the individual is destroyed by the force of desire. In “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” the pursuit of an idea annihilates an entire family. The first is the world of pleasure, an epoch in itself; the second is the world of science, and glitters with brilliant hypotheses. In both instances, an idea, gradually strengthened, becomes a passion and a disorganizing force. In “L’Adieu,” happiness, exalted to the highest degree, becomes a destructive agency. In “Le Réquisitionnaire”, a mother is killed by the violence of maternal affection. In “El Verdugo,” a father is slain by his son that a title may be preserved. In “Le Drame au Bord de la Mer,” a son is slain by his father that an hereditary instinct may be destroyed. In “Maître Cornélius,” avarice kills the miser. In “Le Chef d’Œuvre Inconnu,” art kills the artist. In “Gambara,” the composer is crazed by his own conceptions. In “L’Enfant Maudit,” terror is the destroyer, and the subject treated herein finds a natural and logical sequence in the “Auberge Rouge.” In “Les Proscrits,” the sentiment of religion becomes the destroyer, and in “Séraphita” the same idea is more vividly presented. “César Birotteau,” an existence untroubled by misery, is, through sudden good fortune, cut off as by a scythe. In the “Église,” the agent is incredulity, but in “Louis Lambert” is to be found the most severe deduction from the fundamental proposition in that it represents the thinker killed by thought.
The destructive power of the mind and imagination, from the Neronian conflagration to the suicide of Castlereagh and Chatterton, the aphasia of Emerson, and the insanity of Tourgénieff, is too well known and too thoroughly understood to need further commentary in these pages; and in connection with this it need but be said that, while the attraction of gravity had been witnessed by countless generations, as it remained to Newton to formulate the obvious propositions of cause and effect, so in this branch of mental science, whose results have been patent since the beginning of history, a Balzac was necessary for the full elucidation of the subject, and for the proper presentation of the conclusions derived from the psycho-mental evidence of ages.
After having, in the “Études de Mœurs,” described society in every aspect, and demonstrated in the “Études Philosophiques” all the underlying causes of the general results, Balzac proposed in the third and last division of the “Comédie Humaine,” namely, in the “Études Analytiques,” to examine the principles upon which the first two rest.
This last division, however, is one of the few unfinished windows of his Aladdin’s palace, for, out of the six volumes which it was to contain, two only were written before death intervened. These two works, the “Physiologie du Mariage” and the “Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale,” are a series of duos between husband and wife, augmented at times by the tenor notes of the amant. The first is dedicated to the reader, and contains the deceptions of the husband; the second, those of the wife. At once malicious and diabolically witty, these two books are as delicately analytical as the deductions of Leuwenhoeck and Swammerdam, and abound with that peculiar though refreshing condiment which is generally known as Gallic salt.