Balzac

Michael Tilby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315505275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This canon of French literature, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is also a major European figure in the development of realism. His work is dominated by an inter-related sequence of novels and short stories, La Comedie Humanine, which charts the idiosyncrasies of French society from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1840's. Among the most famous of these are Le Pierre Gorio t and La Cousine Bette. Iin this study, Dr Tilby concentrates on the main approaches in practice and discusses some of the earliest responses to Balzac's work. His introduction and headnotes set Balzac's work in context. This book will be of interest to students of French language and literature and also to those studying French in combined studies or humanities courses.

Part One
Contemporary and other Nineteenth-Century Views

Introduction

The critical response to Balzac throughout most of the nineteenth century was almost exclusively French. The author of La Comédie humaine did receive plaudits, of a rather specialized nature, from both Marx and Engels (their views will be discussed later, with reference to the Marxist interpretations of Balzac by Lukâcs and Macherey). Henry James, however, stands out as virtually the only major literary figure writing in English to devote himself to Balzac’s work before the 1890s.¹ Oscar Wilde actually claimed, in conversation with Edmond de Goncourt, that the only Englishman to have read Balzac was the poet Swinburne. It was in 1889, significantly, that George Moore published his eulogistic essay devoted to some of Balzac’s lesser known compositions; he professed to find ‘more wisdom and more divine imagination in Balzac than in any other writer’.² In sharp contrast, though with equal enthusiasm, the fin de siècle aestheticists or Yellow Book generation, led by such figures as Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley (of whom his fellow artist William Rothenstein, also a devotee of Balzac’s work, wrote that he knew his Balzac from cover to cover), and the critic Arthur Symons (who, through his proneness to excessive toil, reminded W.B. Yeats of a character out of Balzac),³ found in such texts as La Fille aux yeux d’or, Séraphîta, and La Peau de chagrin préfigurations of their own attraction to an ambiguous, not to say perverse, eroticism, and of their fascination, in the wake of the symbolist movement, with specifically those forms of narrative fiction that could be termed ‘non-realist’.

Amongst earlier English writers, however, even Thackeray, whose heroine Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1847–8) has so often provoked comparisons with Balzac’s Valérie Mar neffe, the talented seductress and kept woman in La Cousine Bette (published the year before Vanity Fair), advocated the reading of the novels of Balzac’s disciple, Charles de Bernard, in preference to those of Balzac himself. Matthew Arnold, influenced perhaps by his friend Sainte-Beuve, failed signally to appreciate Balzac’s greatness in his brief remarks on the novelist contained in the tribute to George Sand he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884. George Eliot went so far as to describe Le Père Goriot as ‘a hateful book’. Virginia Woolfs father, Leslie Stephen, distinguished himself by contributing in 1871 a lengthy article on ‘Balzac’s novels’ to the influential Fortnightly Review. He revealed a familiarity with a wide range of Balzac’s fictions but found much in La Comédie humaine to offend his artistic sensibilities. There were those, such as the Brownings, Wilkie Collins and Swinburne, who enthused about Balzac’s genius, but in none of these cases did their enthusiasm lead to the honour of a critical study devoted exclusively to him. It was left to the anonymous author of an article published in the Westminster Review in 1853 to maintain that, contrary to the received idea, Balzac possessed ‘a far more elevated notion of virtue than those who attacked him’.

In nineteenth-century France, Balzac’s status as a writer, his moral and political standpoints, and the precise source of his unique novelistic universe, were still more controversial subjects. The extracts that follow show the widely differing emphases adopted by some of his more prominent readers.

No attempt has been made to group these extracts thematically. Instead, as far as has been practicable, they are given in chronological order (chronology is occasionally violated when extracts are included from more than one piece by the critic). This has the advantage of underlining the fact that the critical responses to Balzac in the nineteenth century do not constitute a marked progression from one distinct form of assessment to another, nor a movement towards a better informed or more complete understanding of him, but to a continual re-formulation of a dualistic perspective that was sometimes used to emphasize Balzac’s strength and sometimes, potentially at least, to reveal his disabling weakness. The reader of nineteenth-century discussions of Balzac’s works may indeed be struck by a certain degree of repetition that is to be encountered from one essay to the next, notwithstanding the variation in emphasis that has already been mentioned. Such individuality as they have is invariably located in their re-evaluation of a small number of agreed features or of the relationship between these features, rather than in any specific insights that might cause the critic to break free of familiar reference points. It could reasonably be objected, of course, that intimate familiarity with such a massive output as Balzac’s could not reasonably be expected of the writer or critic with many other subjects to discuss or works of his own to create.

Common to all the critics represented, however, is the recognition that Balzac was a phenomenon who posed a problem when considered according to existing aesthetic and moral criteria. Together, they exhibit the uncertainty that surrounded what later generations would call his ideological stance and which allowed some of them to enrol Balzac in the service of their own social or political beliefs, regardless of whether these were in line or not with his own explicit pronouncements.

It is not insignificant that imaginative writers, and prominent among them the leading poets of the age, made up so many of Balzac’s staunchest admirers. Compared with that of a novelist such as Eugène Sue, the size of Balzac’s readership scarcely warranted his being regarded as a popular writer. (He was perhaps less of an immediate threat to the moral fabric of society than Sainte-Beuve, in his abhorrence of the industrialization of literature, was so ready to maintain.) What emerges from a consideration of the most striking amongst the views of him is that Balzac was thought to be more than a mere writer of novels, at least as far as the activity of novel-writing was understood at that time. Instead, what exercised such an attraction for other literary figures was the unmistakable impression they gained of a singularly powerful creative imagination. Arthur Symons was by no means being unduly heterodox when, writing in 1899, he claimed: ‘The first man who has completely understood Balzac is [the sculptor] Rodin.’

Notes

1. In 1877 Saintsbury claimed of James: ‘He has read Balzac, if it be possible, just a little too much; has read him until he has fallen into the one sin of his great master, the tendency to bestow refined dissection and analysis on characters which are not of sufficient intrinsic interest to deserve such treatment’ (quoted by Kenneth Graham English Criticism of the Novel 1865–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 51).

2. See GEORGE MOORE ‘Balzac’ in Impressions and Opinions (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), pp. 1–43. This is an expanded version of the piece he wrote for The Fortnightly Review in 1889. Reworked in its turn, it became chapter 3 of the author’s Conversations in Ebury Street (London: Heinemann, 1924).

3. In an article he contributed on Balzac to The Fortnightly Review in 1899, Symons praised Balzac for respecting the ‘life’ of his creations and leaving so much of their natures secret (pp. 753–5). Towards the end of his life, he wrote to a correspondent: ‘[Balzac’s] style is passionate and visionary, magnetic and magnificent, and when his words become flesh and blood, he is the lyric poet. I have often considered whether, in the novel, perfect form is a good or even a possible thing, if the novel is to be what Balzac made it: he, who can only be compared with Shakespeare, because his mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet’s mind than that of any other novelist’ (letter to Professor Warner Taylor [late 1931?]: Arthur Symons Selected Letters, 1880–1935, edited by Karl Beckson and John M. Munro, London: Macmillan, 1989, p. 257). The comparison of Balzac to Shakespeare is a topos that runs through much nineteenth-century criticism and is prominent especially in the discussions by Taine, Leslie Stephen, and Henry James. It later formed the subject of a lecture George Moore first gave in French in 1910 (for an English translation, see The Century Magazine, May 1914). Symons’s mentor, Walter Pater, who exercised such considerable influence on the aesthetic movement in general, was not one of Balzac’s admirers: ‘Pater apparently thought Balzac’s novels grotesque […] Balzac was perhaps too curious about physiological and sociological details to suit Pater’ (Billie Andrew Inman Walter Pater and his Reading 1874–77, New York: Garland, 1990, pp. 310–11).

Further reading

BELLOS, DAVID Balzac Criticism in France 1850–1900. The Making of a Reputation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

DECKER, CLARENCE R. ‘Balzac’s literary reputation in Victorian society’, PMLA, 47 (1932), pp. 1150–7.

HUNT, H.J. ‘The Human Comedy: first English reactions’, in The French Mind. Studies in Honour of Gustave Rudler, edited by WILL MOORE, RHODA SUTHERLAND, and ENID STARKIE (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 273–90.

MONOD, SYLVERE ‘La fortune de Balzac en Angleterre’, Revue de littérature comparée, 24 (1950), pp. 181–210.

MOORE, GEORGE ‘Balzac’, in Impressions and Opinions (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), pp. 1–43.

ROBB, GRAHAM Baudelaire lecteur de Balzac (Paris: Corti, 1988).

SYMONS, ARTHUR ‘Balzac’, in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 2nd expanded edition, with an introduction by RICHARD ELLMANN (New York: Dutton, 1958), pp. 99–117.

—ΆA note on Zola’s method’, ibid., pp. 154–64.

TAYLOR, A. CAREY Non-French Admirers and Imitators of Balzac. An Inaugural Lecture (London: Ruddock and Sons, 1950).

1
Sainte-Beuve – an early detractor^*

It was Balzac’s lasting misfortune not to have found favour with the most eminent of all nineteenth-century French critics, Sainte-Beuve. In his private notebooks, the latter recorded the admission: ‘Every critic has his favourite quarry he falls upon and tears to pieces in preference to others. In my case, that quarry was Balzac.’ The article on Balzac he wrote for the Revue des deux mondes in November 1834 was occasioned by the publication of La Recherche de l’absolu, but, in effect, it was the first substantial attempt at a partial retrospective of Balzac’s work by a critic of note. That it was scarcely calculated to please the novelist is apparent from the (possibly apocryphal) story recounted by Sainte-Beuve himself, according to which Balzac’s response was to declare that he would exact his revenge in the form of a re-writing of Volupté, the novel Sainte-Beuve had published earlier that year.

In fact, the article did not seek totally to deny Balzac’s literary achievement. Sainte-Beuve had actually taken Balzac’s side against Victor Hugo when, in 1830, the latter attacked La Femme de trente ans. His essay was at least an attempt at a fair assessment. As A.G. Lehmann has observed ‘he was […] anxious to do justice to the novelist, where he could do so without compromising his standards’.¹ Eugénie Grandet, Sainte-Beuve conceded, was ‘almost a masterpiece’ and throughout his career as a critic, he was ready to recognize Balzac’s ability to give incomparable relief in his descriptions to both people and objects. Yet his essentially classical aesthetic could not countenance the exaggerated and vulgar effects that were, for him, so integral a part of Balzac’s way of writing. He was unable to resist being ironic at Balzac’s expense, dismissing his success, for example, as due to an unashamed appeal to the dubious curiosity of a naive female readership in the provinces. The essay was reprinted on a number of occasions during Sainte-Beuve’s lifetime and the critic took advantage of each reprinting to intensify the expression of the abhorrence aroused in him by many of the features of Balzac’s writing: as late as 1869, he was still to be found sharpening his knife. His severely critical view of Balzac, fuelled by the latter’s counter-attack in the Revue Parisienne in 1840, found incidental expression in many of his essays on other writers, as well as in the Causerie du lundi he wrote in response to Balzac’s death and which is partially reproduced as my second extract. In his eyes, the writer’s responsibility to safeguard the fundamental values of Art and Society was supreme. In spearheading the ‘industrialization of literature’, Balzac had failed to meet it.

Sainte-Beuve’s critical method was based on a profound belief in the need to study the relationship of the work to the personality of its creator. He is, therefore, to be found, as he himself pointed out in one of his earliest ‘literary portraits’ (on Boileau), moving constantly from ‘the man to the author’.

(1) From the outset, M. de Balzac has above all secured the backing of that half of the public whose support is indispensable, turning its members into his accomplices by artfully playing on those chords of which he has a secret knowledge. ‘Woman’, M. Janin [Jules Janin, b. 1804, the so-called ‘Prince of critics’] has somewhere said, ‘belongs to M. de Balzac. She belongs to him whether she is in her finery or has next to nothing on, she belongs to him in the tiniest details of her inmost thought; he both dresses and undresses her.’ Putting to good use in his writing as novelist and storyteller the fund of knowledge contained in his Physiologie du mariage, M. de Balzac has insinuated himself into the company of the fair sex on the footing of a confidant or comforter, a confessor with something of the doctor in him. He is highly knowledgeable about women and their sensitive or fleshly secrets. In his narratives he addresses bold, intimate questions to them, questions that constitute an intrusion. He is like a still youthful doctor with access to the bedchamber and the bedside. He has arrogated to himself the right to hint at those mysterious intimate details that delight in so ambiguous a fashion the most modest representatives of the female sex. […] In the Provinces, above all, where the lives led by some women are more painful, more repressed, and more undernourished than in Parisian society, where marital disharmony is more oppressive and less easy to escape, M. de Balzac has encountered some fond and lively responses; there the number of women aged between twenty eight and thirty five to whom he has revealed their secret, who profess to love Balzac, hold forth on the subject of his genius, and take up their pens in an attempt to embroider their own variations on the inexhaustible theme of those delightful stories, La Femme de trente ans, La Femme malheureuse, and La Femme abandonnée, is high.

[…]

M. de Balzac has a profound and perceptive sense of private life, one which is carried to the lengths of microscopic detail and superstition. He knows how to stir your emotions and cause your heart to palpitate from the very first page, merely by describing a side street, a dining room, or the way a room is furnished. He possesses a fund of instant remarks on spinsters, old ladies, ugly and deformed daughters, sickly young women who waste away, mistresses who are still loyal despite having been discarded, bachelors, and misers. One asks oneself where, given the train of his irrepressible imagination, he was able to observe and amass all these things. Admittedly, M. de Balzac does not proceed decisively, there being in his numerous works (some of which seem to us admirable, or at least touching and delightful, or else shrewd and piquant comedies of observation) the most fearsome jumble. Take away from his stories La Femme de trente ans, La Femme abandonnée, Le Réquisitionnaire, La Grenadière, and Les Célibataires; take away from his novels Louis Lambert and Eugénie Grandet, his masterpiece, and what a host of volumes, what a vast collection of stories and novels of every kind, droll, philosophical, economic, magnetic and theosophical, there remains! I do not presume to have read everything. There is doubtless something to be savoured in each of them, but, oh!, the sheer losses and prolixity! In the invention of his subject and in the details of his style, M. de Balzac’s pen is fluent, uneven, and lacking in delicacy. He’s off, at a gentle foot pace to start with, followed by a magnificent gallop, when all of a sudden he collapses, only to pick himself up and fall down again. His beginnings are mostly magnificent but the endings of his stories either deteriorate or fall into extravagance. There is a moment, a point at which he is carried away in spite of himself. The self-control of the observer takes its leave of him, a trigger is released within his brain and the conclusions are transported two hundred miles or more.

[…]

Charm and the purely accidental are prominent in even the best of M. de Balzac’s works. He has his own manner but it is hesitant and uncertain, attempting frequently to rediscover itself.

[…]

One has, moreover, simply to make the best of it, as far as M. de Balzac is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: CONTEMPORARY AND OTHER NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS
• PART TWO: HUMANIST READINGS
• PART THREE: MARXIST READINGS
• PART FOUR: PSYCHOANALYTIC READINGS
• PART FIVE: A FEMINIST READING
• PART SIX: STRUCTURALIST, FORMALIST, AND POST-STRUCTURALIST READINGS
• Glossary
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index