Balzac | Page 7

of the /regime/ was the practical nature
of the public works executed--the railway system with its
transformation of trade, the fortification of the capital, the
commencement of popular education, and the renovation of decayed or
incompleted edifices. Unfortunately, the rapidity of the development
and the rush of speculation prevented any co-ordinating method in the
effort, so that the epoch was poor in its architectural achievement
compared with what had been produced in the past. Even other
branches of art were greatest in satire. Daumier's /Robert Macaire/
sketches and the /Mayeux/ of Travies had large material supplied them
in the various types of citizen, greedy of pleasure and gold. The /mot/:
"Enrichissez-vous," attributed to Guizot, was the axiom of the time,
accepted as the /nec plus ultra/ by the vast majority of people. It
invaded all circles with its lowering expedience; and he who was to
depict its effects most puissantly did not escape its thrall.
* * * * *
When Balzac began to write, no French novelist had a reputation as

such that might be considered great. Up to the epoch of the Restoration,
the novel had been declared to be an inferior species of literature, and
no author had dreamed of basing his claims to fame on fiction. Lesage
had been and was still appreciated rather on the ground of his satire;
and the Abbe Prevost, his slightly younger contemporary, received but
little credit in his lifetime for the /Manon Lescaut/ that posterity was to
prize. Throughout the eighteenth century, he was chiefly regarded as a
literary hack who had translated Richardson's /Pamela/ and done things
of a similar kind to earn his livelihood. Rousseau too was esteemed less
for his /Nouvelle Heloise/ than for his political disquisitions. No
novelist since 1635 had ever been elected to the French Academy on
account of his stories. Jules Sandeau was the first to break the tradition
by his entrance among the Immortals in 1859, to be followed in 1862
by Octave Feuillet.
Lesage was the writer who introduced into France with his /Gil Blas/
what has been called the personal novel--in other words, that story of
adventures of which the narrator is the hero, the aim of the story being
to illustrate first and foremost the vicissitudes of life in general and
those of a single person in particular. The subsequent introduction of
letters into the personal novel, which allowed more than one character
to assume the narrator's role, brought about a change which those who
initiated it scarcely anticipated. Together with the larger interest, due to
there being several narrators, came a tendency to introspection and
analysis, diminishing the prominence of the facts and enhancing the
effect produced by these facts on the thoughts and feelings of the
characters. It was this development of the personal novel at the
commencement of the nineteenth century, exhibited in Chateaubriand's
/Rene/, Madame de Stael's /Corinne/, Benjamin Constant's /Adolphe/,
George Sand's /Indiana/, and Sainte- Beuve's /Volupte/, which
contributed so much to create and establish the Romantic School of
fiction with its egoistic lyricism.
The historical novel, which more commonly is looked upon as having
been the principal agent in the change, gave, in sooth, only what
modern fiction of every kind could no longer do without, namely, local
colour. The so-styled historical novels of Madame de la Fayette--

/Zayde/ and the /Princesse de Cleves/--in the seventeenth century, and
those of Madame de Tencin and Madame de Fontaines in the
eighteenth, were simply historic themes whereon the authors
embroidered the inventions of their imaginations, without the slightest
attention to accuracy or attempt at differentiating the men and minds of
one age from those of another; nor was it till the days of Walter Scott
that such care for local colour and truth of delineation was manifested
by writers who essayed to put life into the bones of the past.
Even Lesage, so exact in his description of all that is exterior, lacked
this literary truthfulness. His Spain is a land of fancy; his Spaniards are
not Spanish; /Gil Blas/, albeit he comes from Santillana, is a
Frenchman. Marivaux was wiser in placing his /Vie de Marianne/ and
his /Paysan parvenu/ in France. His people, though modelled on stage
pattern, are of his own times and country; and, in so far as they reveal
themselves, have resemblances to the characters of Richardson.
To the Abbe Barthelemy, Voltaire, and Rousseau the novel was a
convenient medium for the expression of certain ideas rather than a
representation of life. The first strove to popularize a knowledge of
Greek antiquity, the second to combat doctrines that he deemed
fallacious, the third to reform society. However, Rousseau brought
nature into his /Nouvelle Heloise/, and, by his accessories of pathos and
philosophy, prepared the way for a bolder and completer treatment of