Balzac | Page 8

life in fiction. Different from these was Restif de la Bretonne, who
applied Rousseau's theories with less worthy aims in his /Paysan
perverti/ and /Monsieur Nicolas, ou Le Coeur humain devoile/. If
mention is made of him here, it is because he was a pioneer in the path
of realism, which Balzac was to explore more thoroughly, and because
the latter undoubtedly caught some of his grosser manner.
The novelists and dramatists whom Balzac made earliest acquaintance
with were probably those whose works were appearing and attracting
notice during his school-days--Pigault-Lebrun, Ducray-Duminil, and
that Guilbert de Pixerecourt who for a third of the nineteenth century
was worshipped as the Corneille of melodrama. These men were
favourite authors of the nascent democracy; and, in an age when

reprints of older writers were much rarer than to-day, would be far
more likely to appeal to a boy's taste than seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century authors. At an after-period only, when he had
definitely entered upon his maturer literary career, was he to take up the
latter and use them, together with Rabelais, La Bruyere, Moliere, and
Diderot, as his best, if not his constant, sources of inspiration. In the
stories of the first of the three above-mentioned modern writers, the
reader usually meets with some child of poor parentage, who, after
most extraordinary and comic experiences, marries the child of a
nobleman. In those of the second, the hero or heroine struggles with
powerful enemies, is aided by powerful friends, and moves in an
atmosphere of blood and mystery until vice is chastized and virtue
finally rewarded. The two writers, however, differ more in their talent
than in their methods, the first having an amount of originality which is
almost entirely wanting to the second. With both, indeed, the main
object is to impress and astonish, and the finer touches of Lesage and
Prevost are seldom visible in either's work. As for Pixerecourt, whose
fame lasted until the Romantic drama of the older Dumas, Alfred de
Vigny, and Victor Hugo eclipsed it, he wrote over a hundred plays,
each of which was performed some five hundred times, while two at
least ran for more than a thousand nights.
If it was natural that Balzac should familiarize himself in his
adolescence with such writers of his own countrymen as every one
discussed and very many praised, it was natural also he should extend
his perusals to the translated works of contemporary novelists on the
further side of the Channel, the more so as the reciprocal literary
influence of the two countries was exceedingly strong at the time,
stronger probably than to-day when attention is solicited on so many
sides. To the novels of Monk Lewis, Maturin, Anne Radcliffe, and
other exponents of the School of Terror, as likewise to the novels of
Godwin, the chief of the School of Theory, he went for instruction in
the profession that he was wishing to adopt. Mrs. Radcliffe's stories he
thought admirable; those of Lewis he cited as hardly being equalled by
Stendhal's /Chartreuse de Parme/; and Maturin--oddly as it strikes us
now--he not only styled the most original modern author that the
United Kingdom could boast of, but assigned him a place, beside

Moliere and Goethe, as one of the greatest geniuses of Europe. And
these eulogiums were not the immature judgements of youth, but the
convictions of his riper age. As will be seen later, the influence
remained with him. In all he wrote there enters some of the material,
native and foreign, out of which Romanticism was made.
To the true masters of English fiction his indebtedness was equally
large, exception made perhaps for Fielding and Smollett; and one
American author should be included in the acknowledgment.
Goldsmith, Sterne, Walter Scott, and Fenimore Cooper were his delight.
The first and last of Richardson's productions he read only when his
own talent was formed. /Pamela/ and /Sir Charles Grandison/ he
chanced upon in a library at Ajaccio; and, after running them through,
pronounced them to be horribly stupid and boring. But /Clarissa
Harlowe/, on the contrary, he highly esteemed. Already in 1821 he had
studied it; and, when composing his /Pierrette/, towards the end of the
thirties, he spoke of it as a magnificent poem, in a passage which
brands the procedure of certain hypocrites, their oratorical precautions,
and their involved conversations, wherein the mind obscures the light it
throws and honeyed speech dilutes the venom of intentions. The phrase,
says Monsieur Le Breton, in his well-reasoned book on Balzac, is that
of a man who was conversant with the patient analysis, the
conscientious and minute realism of this great painter of English life. In
Monsieur Le Breton's opinion, Balzac's long-windedness is, in a
measure, due to Richardson, who reacted upon him by his defects no
less than