ART. III.*-1. H. de Balzac, La Comédie Humaine. Paris, 1883. 2. De Stendhal, Euvres Complètes. Paris, 1889. 3. G. Flaubert, Œuvres Complètes. Paris, 1885. 4. G. Flaubert, Lettres à George Sand. Paris, 1884. 8. P. Loti, Pêcheur d'Islande, etc. Paris, 1888. 9. H. Taine, Nouveaux Essais de Critique et d'Histoire. Paris, 1860. 10. F. Brunetière, Le Roman Naturaliste. Paris, 1884. 11. E. Tissot, Les Évolutions de la Critique Française. Paris, 1890. WHO HO was the father of French Realism? Are we to go back as far as Diderot, the painter of a world of rascaldom, and herald of the great secret, as he deemed it, that good and evil are, like words in the philosophy of Bacon, the counters of wise men, but the money of fools'? Or shall we be content with Balzac as the head and front of the movement,Balzac, in whose romances it is neither easy nor of much consequence to strike upon the trace of Diderot? What part, again, had Flaubert, that astonishing victim of his own style, in creating a manner he detested? And where does Gautier, true artist of the Decadence, come in upon the line of march? These, like the enigmas with which Tiberius plied his mathematici, are puzzling questions. They have been as hotly debated as the existence of Homer's Troy,' the authorship of Junius,' or the drift of Mr. Gladstone's most eloquent speeches. And critics who are at all competent to speak on the subject, greatly differ in their conclusions. To some it appears as false as it certainly is degrading to couple Balzac with the author of 'La Bête Humaine' and 'La Terre.' On the other hand, 6 6 M. Zola, though content as Napoleon was to be his own ancestor, holds that from Balzac and Diderot he is assuredly descended. And for the spirit, if not the letter of this conclusion, he may appeal to the high authority of M. Taine, whose study of the Saint Simon of the populace,' though now more than a quarter of a century old, is still the most pregnant word that has been uttered about him.† But perhaps the * See Quarterly Review,' No. 340: The Modern French Novel.' Taine,Nouveaux Essais,' pp. 63-170. See also Zola, 'Le Roman Expérimental,' passim. manner manner in which the filiation must be established has more interest for the student of French life and character than the verdict of the Court as to the fact itself. For, granting that Balzac has had the widest influence on later schools, it remains true that he did not so much invent as apply a method which was destined to prevail in literature as soon as it had become dominant in science the method, we mean, of dissection and of vivisection. M. Zola has every claim to be heard when he describes his own volumes as 'physiological romance.' That repulsive term-fit title of a Chamber of Horrors which has doors leading into the shambles, the surgeon's hall of 'demonstration,' the house of shame, the prison, the pawnshop, and the reeking tavern-will, it must be allowed, not seem wholly out of place as we turn over the pages of the 'Comédie Humaine' and scan its two thousand figures. Whatever else may be found in Balzac, this element and atmosphere are not wanting. M. Zola has perhaps taken from the immense quarry only what suited his purpose; and that purpose may make all the difference. But to think of Balzac is to be reminded of physiology as of much else that is akin to it. Nor can we make an easier descent into our subject than on this side. First, however, let us distinctly state what that subject is. We have not proposed, either in this or in the preceding article, to guide our readers through the miles on miles of picture gallery which are filled with the masterpieces, the failures, and the mediocrities, of French fiction, as though every well-known author deserved at least a moment's attention from us. That would be impossible in the space at our disposal; and it is not unlikely that the reader, as in that Italian legend, would prefer the galleys to Guicciardini or a dissertation on Egyptian Chronology to so bewildering a survey. But wherever laws or tendencies assert themselves, it is enlightening to follow them. The 'great divide' in modern French literature is between Romanticism and Realism. When, however, we compare that literature with English, German, or Greek, it seems to us clear that one name may not inaptly be applied to the whole of it. Call it the Romantic tendency in Victor Hugo and his. imitators, the Naturalistic in Balzac and Flaubert and Zola, the Pessimist in Daudet, Bourget, Pierre Loti, and others of the latest time, it is, after all, an identical instinct which these men obey. They reject the spiritual philosophy, whether of the House of Socrates' or of the Christian teaching, and they follow materialist and physiological methods. Not, as will be apparent from the names we have thrown together, that sub-varieties including large mental distinctions can be over looked ;. looked; we should be the last to imagine it. But there is 'Ne quicunque Deus, quicunque adhibebitur heros, Or, to translate with the help of a modern instance,' the question is, whether Victor Hugo's preterhuman characters. should degenerate into boon companions of Coppeau and Mes Bottes in L'Assommoir.' But now it is time to hear the evidence, concerning these rags of Telephus, and who first canonized them in the novels of the century. Balzac, surely, will be the answer. If Romanticism means selective art, the revelation of the ideal in Nature as a. living whole, it is manifest that the author of 'Le PèreGoriot' and Illusions Perdues' was no Romanticist. For to him Nature was a mere bundle of forces which might be pulled out and examined like so many nervous filaments. In 'Louis Lambert,' which contains Balzac's philosophy, substance is only matter, the human will a voltaic pile, and God Himself a luminous fluid. Everywhere, from La Peau de Chagrin to that most desolate and unethical of tragedies, 'Le Cousin Pons,' we see the individual, however strongly drawn, at the mercy of his surroundings and of his nature. Hence the environment is described in microscopic detail, stone fitted into stone as in a mosaic, and the joints visible. man's mind was a collection of bric-à-brac. In the graphic outward presentment of things inanimate, of houses, doors, staircases, chairs and curtains, old lumber-chests, pictures,. furniture in general, and every kind of decay, he has no rival The but. but Dickens. On all these objects he bestows a phantom existence, and they stand bewitched and diabolic in the deep Rembrandt shadows which he affects. He took for his province the anatomy of social phenomena,-the study, so he calls it in Les Employés,' of human insect-life. And he found indispensable for his purpose the technique of trade and manufacture, terms borrowed from the kitchen, the stable, the shop, the counting-house. Long before George Eliot, he invented scientific metaphor. The only style he does not practise, even in Les Paysans,' is the rustic, not permissible in academic ears. But M. Taine has sketched, with great humour, the consternation of the French scholar and gentleman moulded on academic traditions, who should attempt, for the first time, to read the Babylonish jargon which Balzac has substituted for the clear analytic language of the eighteenth century. If he has certain of the qualities of Dickens, and is grotesque, prolific, and in secret alliance with the powers of night; if his affection for villains male and female is akin to Thackeray's paternal devotion to Becky Sharp and Barry Lyndon; if his want of reticence rises almost to Swiftean grandeur,—there is also something of Thomas Carlyle in the splashes of significant paint which he hurls at his canvas, and in the spasmodic dialect that seems natural to him. Each had genius without the corresponding talents, and we assent when biographers tell us that both these singular 'Impressionists' stumbled into literature rather than found it their vocation. The born artist is known by his creative instinct. Balzac and Carlyle do not so much create as literally 'compose.' With never-ending struggles they add sentence to sentence, tearing them (if one may employ a harsh illustration) out of their very vitals. And when the work is done, the author lies half dead. He has little joy in his gifts, for the inductive method, wholly intent on the succession of particulars, affords no outlook to the soul; neither does it ascend to the Pisgah heights where the Promised Land with its glad rivers and golden harvests reaches from the mountains to the mighty sea, in distant yet clear perspective. But the method was adapted to the age; and perhaps no other, in France at any rate, would have succeeded in the delineation of what was to be recorded for posterity. In this sense, Balzac may be named with Tacitus. It has been pertinently remarked that his world is made up of passions and interests; that principle has hardly a place in it, and that his characters are always intrinsically vicious. To blunt the edge of this criticism would be difficult. Granting that man The very is a bundle of forces, they will appear in a civilization like the Parisian, either as passions thwarted by interests, or as interests receiving a double momentum from passion. And should higher aspirations be found there by happy accident, a writer who worships brute strength will show us virtue defeated, aspirations fooled, and innocence put up for sale. It is the moral again and again implied in the story of Rastignac, of Lucien de Rubempré, of Madame Hulot, of Pons and Schmucke, of the poor imbecile Curé de Tours. It is Vautrin's philosophy, which, to no small extent, was Balzac's own. defects which repel and dishearten us in this bourgeois genius were in a wonderful degree potent to create the impression he aimed at. We must not look to him for a picture of the movements in Germany, England, or Italy. Though he knew a little of foreign countries, it was only as we know the planets. Mars and Venus, or the cloud-bands in Jupiter. The dolorous valley of the Seine' was wide enough for him. As Dr. Johnson could not live away from Fleet Street, so Balzac was ever returning to the beloved mud and dust, the rain and flickering lights, the crowd on the Boulevards, and the loneliness of those dismal cut-throat streets which he has shown as in a stereoscope at the beginning of the 'Histoire des Treize.' 'O Paris!' he exclaims with enthusiasm, 'he that has not admired thy sombre landscapes, thy broken jets of light, thy deep and silent alleys without issue; he that has not listened to thy murmurs between midnight and two hours after, knows nothing of the true poetry which is in thee, or of thy large and curious contrasts.' And he proceeds to sketch the Rue Soly in colours at once ignoble and overpowering. Ignoble! It is the proper word for Balzac's subject-matter, though unjust if applied to the man. He displays too vast an energy, too extensive a knowledge of human nature, to be thrust outside the Temple of Fame on the score of his illmanners. But the sculptor is more than the anatomist; and the question of Realism must be decided by contrasting the Venus of Milo with Balzac's supreme creation, the Venus of the Père la Chaise. For it is in consummating the type of the ignoble, or even of the cadaverous, that he excels. The Comédie Humaine' is, then, chiefly a chronicle of Paris from 1815 to 1850, with a thousand illustrations in colour, by one who was modern and Parisian to the core. It is the world of the noblesse and the money market; of journalism, art, and fashion; of political religion and religious politics; of pleasure, intrigue, crime, adultery, and universal dissipation. It shows us the military hardness of the Empire ; the |