It may be affirmed, without thereby disparaging the Comedie Humaine, that Balzac’s personality is even more interesting than his work; and this is a sufficient excuse for returning to it in a last chapter and trying, at the risk of repetition, to make its presentment completer by way of supplement and summary.
The interest does not arise alone from the contrasts of his foibles, which, forsooth, are nearly always comic — when they are not tragic. We are just as much attracted by the contrasts of his qualities, and by the interplay of the former with the latter — the victories and defeats, the glimpses of immense possibility, the struggles between temperament and environment, all these having a fullness of display rarely found in human nature.
Besides the portraits in painting or sculpture executed of the novelist by Deveria, Boulanger, David d’Angers, and others, some mention of which has already been made, there was one begun by Meissonier, who unfortunately did not finish it. Monsieur Jules Claretie states that the canvas on which it was drawn was subsequently covered by the artist’s Man choosing a Sword, to-day in the Van Prael collection at Brussels. About Boulanger’s picture Theophile Gautier has a good deal to tell us in his article of 1837, published in the Beaux Arts de la Presse; and it scarcely agrees with Balzac’s condemnation of the portrait as a daub, when he saw the canvas some years later in Russia. Remarking on the difficulty of rendering the novelist’s physiognomy, on account of its mobility and strange aspect, Gautier gives it as his opinion that Boulanger succeeded perfectly in seizing the complex expression which seemed to escape all efforts of the brush. The description is a long one; and any one desirous of comparing with each other the impressions received by Balzac’s contemporaries who came into close contact with him would do well to read it after this description by Lamartine. In the tenth of his lectures on Literature during the year 1856, the author of Jocelyn, speaking of what he had observed, said:—
“His exterior was as uncultivated as his genius. It was the shape of an element: big head, hair scattered over his collar and cheeks like a mane that scissors never trimmed, lips thick, eyes soft but of flame; costume clashing with every elegance; clothes too small for his colossal body; waistcoat unbuttoned; linen coarse; blue stockings; shoes that made holes in the carpet; an appearance as of a schoolboy on holiday, who has grown during the year and whose stature has burst his garments. Such was the man that by himself wrote a whole library about his century, the Walter Scott of France, not the Walter Scott of landscape and adventure, but what is much more prodigious, the Walter Scott of characters, the Dante of the infinite circles of human life, the Moliere of read comedy, less perfect but more fertile than the Moliere of played comedy. Why does not his style equal his conception? France would then have two Molieres, and the greater would not be he who lived first.”
Returning to the same subject in his hundred and sixth lecture, eight years later, Lamartine continued:—
“He bore his genius so simply that he did not feel it. He was not tall, and, however, the lighting up of his face and the mobility of his body prevented his small stature from being noticed; but this height swayed like his thought. Between the ground and him there appeared to be a certain margin; now, he stooped down to pick up a sheaf of ideas; now, he stood on tiptoe to follow the soaring of his thought into the infinite. He was big, thick-set, square-shouldered-and-hipped. His neck, chest, body, thighs, and limbs were mighty. There was much of the ampleness of Mirabeau, but no heaviness; there was so much soul that this carried that lightly. The weight seemed to give him force and not to take it from him. His short arms gesticulated with ease; he talked as an orator speaks. His voice resounded with the somewhat savage energy of his lungs, but it had neither roughness nor irony nor anger. His legs, on which he waddled a little, carried his bust smartly; his hands, plump and broad, expressed his whole thought by their waving movements. Such was the man in his stalwart frame. But, in front of the face, one forgot the framework. The speaking countenance, from which it was impossible to detach one’s gaze, both charmed and fascinated the beholder. His hair floated over the forehead in large locks; his black eyes pierced like arrows blunted by benevolence; they entered yours confidently as if they were friends; his cheeks were full, rosy, and strongly coloured; the nose was well modelled, yet a trifle long; his lips, gracefully limned, ample and raised at the corners; his teeth, unequal, broken, and blackened by cigar-smoke; his head often inclining towards the neck, then proudly raised during speech. But the dominating trait of his face, even more than intelligence, was communicative kindness. He charmed your mind when he spoke, and, when not speaking, he charmed your heart. No passion of hatred or envy could have been expressed by this physiognomy; it would have been impossible for him not to be kind. Yet it was not a kindness of indifference or nonchalance, as in the epicurean face of a La Fontaine; it was a loving kindness, intelligent with regard to itself and others, which inspired gratitude and the outpouring of the heart, and defied a person not to love him. A gay childishness was the characteristic of this figure, a soul on holiday when he laid down his pen to forget himself with his friends.... But, when I saw him some years later, what gravity did that which was serious not inspire in him? what repulsion did his conscience not evince towards evil? What difficult virtues did his apparent joviality not conceal?”
This tribute of an intimate, as generous as that of Hugo and perhaps more sincere, may pass without comment in so far as it concerns the outer man. On the moral side its exactitude may be questioned, both for what it omits and what it asserts. The omissions are considerable. The assertions deal too exclusively with that conduct which people generally exhibit in their most amicable relations with each other. Balzac’s kindness of heart came out in not a few experiences of his life; but deeper than these ephemeral bursts of generosity were selfishnesses that were enormous and persistent. The impulsive energy, the huge boyishness, the appetites physical and mental that age never trained nor chastened were phenomena that all his friends noted, though the manifestations differed.
Some lines of Gozlan’s in his Balzac in Slippers, form a good sequel to Werdet’s account of the Gargantuan dinner. “Balzac drank nothing but water,” says Gozlan, but this must have been on Fridays; “and ate but little meat. On the other hand, he consumed great quantities of fruit.... His lips palpitated, his eyes lit up with happiness, at the sight of a pyramid of pears or fine peaches. Not one remained to go and relate the rout of the others. He devoured them all. He was superb in vegetable Pantagruelism, with his cravat taken off, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his fruit-knife in hand, laughing, drinking water, carving into the pulp of a doyenne pear. I should like to add — and talking. But Balzac talked only little. He let others talk, laughed at intervals, silently, in the savage manner of Leather-stocking, or else, he burst out like a bomb, if the sentence pleased him. It needed to be pretty broad, and was never too broad. He melted with pleasure, especially at a silly pun inspired by his wines, which were delicious.”
Another portrait drawn of the novelist by a contemporary, interpreting the inner man, but less flattering to the great delineator of character, is not free from satire and narrowness; but some of the traits it outlines are closely and accurately observed. In his Histoire du Quarante et Unieme (Academy) Fauteuil, Arsene Houssaye wrote: “Monsieur de Balzac — that haughty rebel who would fain have been a founder, that refined Rabelais who discovered a woman where Rabelais had discovered only a bottle — Monsieur de Balzac dreamed of the gigantic, yet without being an architect of Cyclopean times. Consequently, when he tried to build his temple of Solomon, he had neither marble nor gold enough to his hand. For his human comedy he often lacked actors, and had to resign himself frequently to making the understudies play. It is the fashion to-day to raise Balzac to the level of the dominating geniuses of the world, such as Homer, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare and Moliere; but for the mind that has accurate vision, how many rocks are overturned on this Enceladus, what staircases are forgotten in his Tower of Babel, as in his Jardies house! Balzac was half a woman, as George Sand was half a man. He had a woman’s curiosities, he had also her contradictions. Balzac believed himself religious; but his church was the witches’ sabbath, and his priest was not Saint Paul but Swedenborg, if not Mesmer; his Gospel was the conjuror’s book, perhaps that of Pope Honorius — Honorius de Balzac. He believed himself a politician, and endeavoured to continue de Maistre; he fancied he was glorifying authority, whereas he realized the perpetual apotheosis of force; his heroes were named indifferently Moses or Attila, Charlemagne or Tamerlane, Ricci, the General of the Jesuits, or Robespierre, the profaner of the sanctuary, Napoleon or Vautrin. The History of the Thirteen will remain as the grandiose and monstrous defence of personal force defying the social. But will it not remain also, by the side of Hegel’s philosophy, as an eloquent codicil to those testaments of individual sovereignty signed by Aristophanes, Montaigne, and Voltaire? He believed himself a spiritualist, and, sublime sawbones, he studied only in the medical amphitheatre. He entered a drawing-room only through the kitchen and the dressing-room. He was always ignorant of that fine saying of Hemsterhuys: ‘This world is not a machine but a poem.’ He believed himself a painter of manners, and he invented the manners. His women who are so vividly alive, Madame de Langeais or La Torpille, have never been intimate with any other company than that of Monsieur de Balzac. As other great artists, he created his world, a strange world which has consoled and welcomed all the outcasts of the real world, an impossible world which has more than once painted the actual one in its likeness. What charming women of the provinces have since developed into a Eugenie Grandet, a Madame de Mortsauf, a Madame Claes!... What was wanting to Balzac in the hell of life, whose every spiral he descended, was virginity in love and ingenuousness in poetry. He always lost himself in the difficult places of style; and himself wept over the lack. When he wrote the Search for the Absolute, he was in quest of the ideal; but the ideal is that which one had inside one’s self, just as love is. The studies of the chemist and alchemist, of the doctor and jurist, do not light the flame of Prometheus.”
The quotations do not exhaust the list of portraits emanating from Balzac’s fellows, but they adequately illustrate the varying views, which were many. Indeed, like the sculptor who produces several studies of the same model and shows a different interpretation each time, critics have presented us, in more than one instance, with descriptions of the novelist, at an earlier and a later date, that contain important discrepancies.
Balzac was an enigma because he was not always the same personality to himself. Both his energies and his desires carried him outside the limits in which a man’s individuality is usually manifested. Despite Monsieur Houssaye, one may even sympathize, though incredulous, with admirers that would have him to be a universal genius, unfortunately thwarted by fate — one who else might have opened up all the avenues of knowledge that humanity can ever penetrate. This persuasion was undoubtedly his own; and it partly explains his Faustus curiosities leading him now and again into illegitimate and unwholesome experiments, of which we get some glimpse in his books and correspondence.
That he could have succeeded in other careers, the medical one, for example, the painter’s or sculptor’s perhaps, or the mechanical inventor’s, seems likely; but his impulsiveness, his exuberance, and his poor............