XV
As for the peculiar accent and stir of life, the life behind thestory, Balzac's manner of finding and expressing it is alwaysinteresting. He seems to look for it most readily, not in the natureof the men and women whose action makes the story, or not there tobegin with, but in their streets and houses and rooms. He cannot thinkof his people without the homes they inhabit; with Balzac to imagine ahuman being is to imagine a province, a city, a corner of the city, abuilding at a turn of the street, certain furnished rooms, and finallythe man or woman who lives in them. He cannot be satisfied that thetenor of this creature's existence is at all understood without aminute knowledge of the things and objects that surround it. So strongis his conviction upon this point that it gives a special savour tothe many pages in which he describes how the doorway is approached,how the passage leads to the staircase, how the parlour-chairs areplaced, in the house which is to be the scene of his drama. Thesedescriptions are clear and business-like; they are offered as anessential preliminary to the story, a matter that must obviously bedealt with, once for all, before the story can proceed. And hecommunicates his certainty to the reader, he imposes his belief inthe need for precision and fullness; Balzac is so sure that everydetail _must_ be known, down to the vases on the mantelpiece or thepots and pans in the cupboard, that his reader cannot begin toquestion it. Everything is made to appear as important as the authorfeels it to be.
His manner is well to be watched in Eugenie Grandet. That account ofthe great bare old house of the miser at Saumur is as plain andstraightforward as an inventory; no attempt is made to insinuate theimpression of the place by hints and side-lights. Balzac marches up toit and goes steadily through it, until our necessary information iscomplete, and there he leaves it. There is no subtlety in such amethod, it seems; a lighter, shyer handling of the facts, moresuggestion and less statement, might be expected to make a deepereffect. And indeed Balzac's confident way is not one that would give agood result in most hands; it would produce the kind of descriptionthat the eye travels over unperceivingly, the conscientiousintroduction that tells us nothing. Yet Balzac contrives to make ittell everything; and the simple explanation is that he, more thananyone else, _knows_ everything. The place exists in his thought; itis not to him the mere sensation of a place, with cloudy corners,uncertain recesses, which only grow definite as he touches and probesthem with his phrases. A writer of a different sort, an impressionistwho is aware of the effect of a scene rather than of the sceneitself, proceeds inevitably after another fashion; if he attemptedBalzac's method he would have to feel his way tentatively, adding factto fact, and his account would consist of that mechanical sum ofdetails which makes no image. Balzac is so thoroughly possessed of hisimage that he can reproduce it inch by inch, fact by fact, withoutlosing the effect of it as a whole; he can start from the edge of hisscene, from a street of old houses, from the doorstep of one oldhouse, and leave a perfectly firm and telling impression behind him ashe proceeds. When his description is finished and the last detail inits place, the home of the Grandets is securely built for the needs ofthe story, possessing all the significance that Balzac demands of it.
It will presently be seen that he demands a great deal. I said thathis drama has always the benefit of a reserve of force, stored up forit beforehand in the general picture; and though in this picture isincluded the fortunes and characters of the men and women, of theGrandets and their neighbours, a large part of it is the materialscene, the very walls that are to witness the coming events. Thefigure of Grandet, the old miser, is indeed called up and accountedfor abundantly, in all the conditions of his past; but the house too,within and without, is laid under strict contribution, is used to thefull in the story. It is a presence and an influence that countsthroughout--and counts particularly in a matter that is essential tothe book's effect, a matter that could scarcely be provided for inany other way, as it happens. Of this I shall speak in a moment; butat once it is noticeable how the Maison Grandet, like the MaisonVauquer, helps the book on its way. It incarnates all the past of itsold owner, and visibly links it to the action when the story opens.The elaborate summary of Grandet's early life, the scrupulously exactaccount of the building of his prosperity, is brought to an issue inthe image of the "cold, dreary and silent house at the upper end ofthe town," from whence the drama widens again in its turn. How it isthat Balzac has precisely the right scene in his mind, a house thatperfectly expresses his _donnee_ and all its associations--that, ofcourse, is Balzac's secret; his method would be nothing without thequality of his imagination. His use of the scene is another matter,and there it is possible to reckon how much of his general effect, thesense of the moral and social foundation of his story, is given by itsinanimate setting. He has to picture a character and a train of life,and to a great extent he does so by describing a house.
Beyond old Grandet and the kind of existence imposed upon hishousehold, the drama needs little by way of preparation. The miser'sdaughter Eugenie, with her mother, must stand out clearly to the fore;but a very few touches bring these two women to life in their shadowyabode. They are simple and patient and devoted; between the dominanceof the old man and the monotony of the provincial routine Eugenie andher mother are easily intelligible. The two local aspirants to thegirl's fortune, and their supporters on either side--the Cruchotinsand the Grassinistes--are subsidiary figures; they are sufficientlyrendered by their appearance in a flock, for a sociable evening withthe Grandets. The faithful maid-servant, the shrewd and valiant Nanon,is quickly sketched. And there, then, is the picture that Balzacprepares for the action, which opens with the arrival of Charles,Eugenie's young and unknown cousin. Except for Charles, all thematerial of the drama is contained in the first impression of thehousehold and the small country-town; Eugenie's story is implied init; and her romance, from the moment it begins, inherits the realityand the continuity of the experience. Charles himself is so light aweight that in his case no introduction is needed at all; a singleglance at him is enough to show the charm of his airy elegance. Hisonly function in the story is to create the long dream of Eugenie'slife; and for that he needs nothing but his unlikeness to theCruchotins and the Grassinistes. They and Eugenie, therefore, betweenthem, provide for his effect before he appears, they by their dullprovinciality, she by her sensitive ignorance. The whole scene, on theverge of the action, is full of dormant echoes, and the first movementwakes them. The girl placed as she is, her circumstances known as theyare, all but make the tale of their own accord; only the simple factsare wanting, their effect is already in the air.
And accordingly the story slips away from its beginning withouthesitation. In a sense it is a very slight story; there is scarcelyanything in it but Eugenie's quick flush of emotion, and then herpatient cherishing of its memory; and this simplicity may seem todetract, perhaps, from the skilfulness of Balzac's preparation. Wherethere is so little in the way of incident or clash of character toprovide for, where the people are so plain and perspicuous and next tonothing happens to them, it should not be difficult to make anexpressive scene for the drama and its few facts. All that occurs inthe main line of the story is that Eugenie falls in love with hercousin, bids him good-bye when he goes to make his fortune in theIndies, trustfully awaits him for a number of years, and discovers hisfaithlessness when he returns. Her mother's death, and then herfather's, are almost the only events in the long interval of Charles'sabsence. Simple indeed, but this is exactly the kind of story which itis most puzzling to handle. The material is scanty, and yet it coversa good many years; and somehow the narrative must render the length ofthe years without the help of positive and concrete stuff to fillthem. The whole point of the story is lost unless we are made to feelthe slow crawling of time, while Eugenie waited; but what is there inher life to account for the time, to bridge the interval, toillustrate its extent? Balzac has to make a long impression ofvacuity; Eugenie Grandet contains a decidedly tough subject.
In such a case I suppose the first instinct of almost any story
-tellerwould be to lengthen the narrative of her loneliness by elaboratingthe picture of her state of mind, drawing out the record of expectancyand patience and failing hope. If nothing befalls her from without, orso little, the time must be filled with the long drama of herexperience within; the centre of the story would then be cast in herconsciousness, in which there would be reflected the gradual drop ofher emotion from glowing newness to the level of daily custom, andthence again to the chill of disillusion. It is easy to imagine thekind of form which the book would take. In order to assure its fullvalue to Eugenie's monotonous suffering, the story would be given fromher point of view, entirely from hers; the external facts of herexistence would all be seen through her eyes, making substance for herthought. We should live _with_ Eugenie, throughout; we should shareher vigil, morning and evening, summer and winter, while she sat inthe silent house and listened to the noises of life in the street,while the sun shone for others and not for her, while the light waned,the wind howled, the snow fell and hushed the busy town--still Eugeniewould sit at her window, still we should follow the flow of herresigned and uncomplaining meditations; until at last the author couldjudge that five years, ten years, whatever it may be, had beensufficiently shown in their dreary lapse, and that Charles might nowcome back from the Indies. So it would be and so it would have to be,a novelist might easily feel. How else could the due suggestion oftime be given, where there is so little to show for it in dramaticfacts?
But Balzac's treatment of the story is quite unexpected. He lays itout in a fashion that is worth noting, as a good example of thefreedom of movement that his great pictorial genius allowed him. Withhis scene and its general setting so perfectly rendered, the storytakes care of itself on every side, with the minimum of trouble on hispart. His real trouble is over when the action begins; he is not evendisturbed by this difficulty of presenting the sense of time. The planof Eugenie Grandet, as the book stands, seems to have been madewithout any regard to the chief and most exacting demand of the story;where another writer would be using every device he could think of tomark the effect of the succeeding years, Balzac is free to tell thestory as straightforwardly as he chooses. To Eugenie the great andonly adventure of her life was contained in the few days or weeks ofCharles's first visit; nothing to compare with that excitement everhappened to her again. And Balzac makes this episode bulk as largelyin the book as it did in her life; he pauses over it and elaboratesit, unconcerned by the fact that in the book--in the whole effect itis to produce--the episode is only the beginning of Eugenie's story,only the prelude to her years of waiting and watching.
He extends his account of it so far, nevertheless, that he has writtentwo thirds of the book by the time the young man is finally despatchedto the Indies. It means that the duration of the story--and theduration is the principal fact in it--is hardly considered at all,after the opening of the action. There is almost no picture of theslowly moving years; there is little but a concise chronicle of thefew widely spaced events. Balzac is at no pains to sit with Eugenie inthe twilight, while the seasons revolve; not for him to linger, gazingsympathetically over her shoulder, tenderly exploring her sentiments.He is actually capable of beginning a paragraph with the casualannouncement, "Five years went by in this way," as though he belongedto the order of story-tellers who imagine that time may be expressedby the mere statement of its length. Yet there is time in his book, itis very certain--time that lags and loiters till the girl has lost heryouth and has dropped into the dull groove from which she willevidently never again be dislodged. Balzac can treat the story asconcisely as he will, he can record Eugenie's simple experience fromwithout, and yet make the fading of her young hope appear as gradualand protracted as need be; and all because he has prepared in advance,with his picture of the life of the Grandets, a complete and enduringimpression.
His preliminary picture included the representation of time, securedthe sense of it so thoroughly that there is no necessity for recurringto it again. The routine of the Maison Grandet is too clearly known tobe forgotten; the sight of the girl and her mother, leading theirsequestered lives in the shadow of their old tyrant's obsession, is asensation that persists to the end of their story. Their dreary daysaccumulate and fill the year with hardly a break in its monotony; thenext year and the next are the same, except that old Grandet'smeanness is accentuated as his wealth increases; the present is likethe past, the future will prolong the present. In such a sceneEugenie's patient acquiescence in middle age becomes a visible fact,is divined and accepted at once, without further insistence; it islatent in the scene from the beginning, even at the time of the smallromance of her youth. To dwell upon the shades of her longdisappointment is needless, for her power of endurance and herfidelity are fully created in the book before they are put to thetest. "Five years went by," says Balzac; but before he says it wealready see them opening and closing upon the girl, bearing down uponher solitude, exhausting her freshness but not the dumb resignation inwhich she sits and waits. The endlessness, the sameness, the silence,which another writer would have to tackle somehow after disposing ofthe brief episode of Charles's visit, Balzac has it all in hand, hecan finish off his book without long delay. His deliberate approach tothe action, through the picture of the house and its inmates, hasachieved its purpose; it has given him the effect which the actionmost demands and could least acquire by itself, the effect of time.
And there is no doubt that the story immensely gains by being treatedin Balzac's way, rather than as the life of a disappointed girl,studied from within. In that case the subject of the book might easilyseem to be wearing thin, for the fact is that Eugenie has not thestuff of character to give much interest to her story, supposing itwere seen through her eyes. She is good and true and devoted, but shelacks the poetry, the inner resonance, that might make a living dramaof her simple emotions. Balzac was always too prosaic for the creationof virtue; his innocent people--unless they may be grotesque as wellas innocent, like Pons or Goriot--live in a world that is not worththe trouble of investigation. The interest of Eugenie would infalliblybe lowered, not heightened, by closer participation in her romance; itis much better to look at it from outside, as Balzac does for the mostpart, and to note the incidents that befell her, always provided thatthe image of lagging time can be fashioned and preserved. As for that,Balzac has no cause to be anxious; it is as certain that he can dowhat he will with the subject of a story, handle it aright and compelit to make its impression, as that he will fail to understand thesensibility of a good-natured girl.
I cannot imagine that the value of the novelist's picture, aspreparation for his drama, could be proved more strikingly than it isproved in this book, where so much is expected of it. Eugenie Grandetis typical of a natural bent on the part of any prudent writer offiction, the instinct to relieve the climax of the story by taxing itas little as possible when it is reached. The climax ought tocomplete, to add the touch that makes the book whole and organic; thatis its task, and that only. It should be free to do what it mustwithout any unnecessary distraction, and nothing need distract it thatcan be dealt with and despatched at an earlier stage. The climax inGrandet is not a dramatic point, not a single incident; it lies in theslow chill that very gradually descends upon Eugenie's hope. Balzaccarefully refrains from making the book hinge on anything socommonplace as a sudden discovery of the young man's want of faith.The worst kind of disappointment does not happen like that, falling asa stroke; it steals into a life and spreads imperceptibly. Charles'sfinal act of disloyalty is only a kind of coda to a drama that ispractically complete without it. Here, then, is a climax that isessentially pictorial, an impression of change and decay, needing timein plenty above all; and Balzac leads into it so cunningly that ashort summary of a few plain facts is all that is required, when itcomes to the point. He saves his climax, in other words, from theburden of deliberate expatiation, which at first sight it would seembound to incur; he leaves nothing for it to accomplish but just thenecessary touch, the movement that declares and
fulfils the intentionof the book.
There is the same power at work upon material even more baffling,apparently, in La Recherche de l'Absolu. The subject of that perfecttale is of course the growth of a fixed idea, and Balzac was facedwith the task of showing the slow aggravation of a man's ruin througha series of outbreaks, differing in no way one from another, save intheir increasing violence. Claes, the excellent and prosperous youngburgher of Douai, pillar of the old civic stateliness of Flanders, isdragged and dragged into his calamitous experiments by the barefailure (as he is persuaded) of each one in turn; each time hisresearches are on the verge of yielding him the "absolute," thephilosopher's stone, and each time the prospect is more shining thanbefore; success, wealth enough to restore his deepening losses athousand times over, is assured by one more attempt, the money to makeit must be found. And so all other interest in life is forgotten, hispride and repute are sacrificed, the splendid house is graduallystripped of its treasures, his family are thrust into poverty; and hehimself dies degraded, insane, with success--surely, surely success,this time--actually in his grasp. That is all, and on that straight,sustained movement the book must remain throughout, reiterating oneeffect with growing intensity--always at the pitch of high hope andsharp disappointment, always prepared to heighten and sharpen it alittle further. There can be no development through any variety ofincident; it is the same suspense and the same shock, again and again,constantly more disastrous than before.
Here, too, Balzac amasses in his opening picture the reserve of effectthat he needs. He recognizes the ample resource of the dignity, theopulence, the worth, the tradition inherited by families like that ofClaes--merchant-princes of honourable line, rulers of rich cities,patrons of great art. The house of Claes, with its fine architecture,its portraits, its dark furniture and gleaming silver, its garden ofrare tulips--Balzac's imagination is poured into the scene, it isexactly the kind of opportunity that he welcomes. He knows the placeby heart; his description of it is in his most methodical style.Steadily it all comes out, a Holbein-picture with every orderly detailduly arranged, the expression of good manners, sound taste and a solidposition. On such a world, created as he knows how to create it, hemay draw without hesitation for the repeated demands of the story; theprotracted havoc wrought by the man's infatuation is represented, stepby step, as the visible scene is denuded and destroyed. His spirit isworn away and his sanity breaks down, and the successive strokes thatfall on it, instead of losing force (for the onlooker) by repetition,are renewed and increased by the sight of the spreading devastationaround him, as his precious things are cast into the devouring expenseof his researches. Their disappearance is the outward sign of his ownpersonal surrender to his idea, and each time that he is thrown backupon disappointment the ravage of the scene in which he was placed atthe beginning of the book is more evident than before. It spreadsthrough his pictures and treasures to his family, and still furtherinto his relations with the respectable circle about him. His positionis shaken, his situation in that beautiful Holbein-world isundermined; it is slowly shattered as his madness extends. And havingbuilt and furnished that world so firmly and richly, Balzac can lingerupon its overthrow as long as is necessary for the rising effect ofhis story. He has created so much that there is plenty to destroy;only at last, with the man's dying cry of triumph, is the wreckcomplete.
Thus the climax of the story, as in Grandet, is laid up betimes in thedescriptive picture. It is needless, I suppose, to insist on theesthetic value of economy of this kind. Everybody feels the greaterforce of the climax that assumes its right place without an effort,when the time comes, compared with that in which a strain and anexaggerated stress are perceptible. The process of writing a novelseems to be one of continual forestalling and anticipating; far moreimportant than the immediate page is the page to come, still in thedistance, on behalf of which this one is secretly working. The writermakes a point and reserves it at the same time, creates an effect andholds it back, till in due course it is appropriated and used by thepage for which it is intended. It must be a pleasure to the writer, itis certainly a great pleasure to the critic, when the stroke iscleanly brought off. It is the same pleasure indeed; the novelistmakes the stroke, but the critic makes it again by perceiving it, andis legitimately satisfied by the sense of having perceived it withgood artistry. It is spoilt, of course, if the stroke is handledtactlessly and obtrusively; the art of preparation is no art if itbetrays itself at the outset, calling attention to its purpose. Bydefinition it is unrecognizable until it attains its end; it is theart of rendering an impression that is found to have been made, lateron, but that evades detection at the moment. The particular variety Ihave been considering is one of which Balzac is a great master; andperhaps his mastery will appear still more clearly if I look at a bookin which his example is _not_ followed in this respect. It is a finerbook, for all that, than most of Balzac's.