Criticism and Fiction | Page 7

century, when romance was making the same fight against effete
classicism which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism,
the Italian poet Monti declared that "the romantic was the cold grave of
the Beautiful," just as the realistic is now supposed to be. The romantic
of that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same.
Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds
of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape
from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it
remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability
of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature. It is
not a new theory, but it has never before universally characterized
literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps
up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will
perish too. Every true realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps
the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to
express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of overmoralizing. In life
he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and character;
nothing that God has made is contemptible. He cannot look upon
human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, any
more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath
the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the equality of things
and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and
shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives. In
criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods and
misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grown
people would still like to play with. He cannot keep terms with "Jack
the Giant-killer" or "Puss-in-Boots," under any name or in any place,

even when they reappear as the convict Vautrec, or the Marquis de
Montrivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen Noblemen. He must say to himself
that Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Balzac, he was
Dumas; he was not realistic, he was romanticistic.

III
Such a critic will not respect Balzac's good work the less for
contemning his bad work. He will easily account for the bad work
historically, and when he has recognized it, will trouble himself no
further with it. In his view no living man is a type, but a character; now
noble, now ignoble; now grand, now little; complex, full of vicissitude.
He will not expect Balzac to be always Balzac, and will be perhaps
even more attracted to the study of him when he was trying to be
Balzac than when he had become so. In 'Cesar Birotteau,' for instance,
he will be interested to note how Balzac stood at the beginning of the
great things that have followed since in fiction. There is an interesting
likeness between his work in this and Nicolas Gogol's in 'Dead Souls,'
which serves to illustrate the simultaneity of the literary movement in
men of such widely separated civilizations and conditions. Both
represent their characters with the touch of exaggeration which typifies;
but in bringing his story to a close, Balzac employs a beneficence
unknown to the Russian, and almost as universal and as apt as that
which smiles upon the fortunes of the good in the Vicar of Wakefield.
It is not enough to have rehabilitated Birotteau pecuniarily and socially;
he must make him die triumphantly, spectacularly, of an opportune
hemorrhage, in the midst of the festivities which celebrate his
restoration to his old home. Before this happens, human nature has
been laid under contribution right and left for acts of generosity
towards the righteous bankrupt; even the king sends him six thousand
francs. It is very pretty; it is touching, and brings the lump into the
reader's throat; but it is too much, and one perceives that Balzac lived
too soon to profit by Balzac. The later men, especially the Russians,
have known how to forbear the excesses of analysis, to withhold the
weakly recurring descriptive and caressing epithets, to let the characters
suffice for themselves. All this does not mean that 'Cesar Birotteau' is

not a beautiful and pathetic story, full of shrewdly considered
knowledge of men, and of a good art struggling to free itself from
self-consciousness. But it does mean that Balzac, when he wrote it, was
under the burden of the very traditions which he has helped fiction to
throw off. He felt obliged to construct a mechanical plot, to surcharge
his characters, to moralize openly and baldly; he permitted himself to
"sympathize" with certain of his people, and to point out others for the
abhorrence of