Honoré de Balzac: His Life and Writings | Page 4

the play; or, on the other hand, his sanguine temperament would

cause him to overlook the drawbacks, and to think only of the
enthusiasm with which the first four acts had been received. Neither of
these two things took place. Balzac "n'y pensait deja plus." He talked
with the greatest eagerness of the embellishments he had proposed to
M. Decazes for his palace, and especially of a grand spiral staircase,
which was to lead from the centre of the Luxembourg Gardens to the
Catacombs, so that these might be shown to visitors, and become a
source of profit to Paris. But of his play he said nothing.
The reader of "Lettres a l'Etrangere," which are written to the woman
with whom Balzac was passionately in love, and whom he afterwards
married, may, perhaps, at first sight congratulate himself on at last
understanding in some degree the great author's character and mode of
life. If he dives beneath the surface, however, he will find that these
beautiful and touching letters give but an incomplete picture; and that,
while writing them, Balzac was throwing much energy into schemes,
which he either does not mention to his correspondent, or touches on in
the most cursory fashion. Therefore the perspective of his life is
difficult to arrange, and ordinary rules for gauging character are at fault.
We find it impossible to follow the principle, that because Balzac
possessed one characteristic, he could not also show a diametrically
opposite quality--that, for instance, because tenderness, delicacy of
feeling, and a high sense of reverence and of honour were undoubtedly
integral parts of his personality, the stories told by his contemporaries
of his occasional coarseness must necessarily be false.
His own words, written to the Duchesse d'Abrantes in 1828, have no
doubt a great element of truth in them: "I have the most singular
character I know. I study myself as I might study another person, and I
possess, shut up in my five foot eight inches, all the incoherences, all
the contrasts possible; and those who think me vain, extravagant,
obstinate, high-minded, without connection in my ideas,--a fop,
negligent, idle, without application, without reflection, without any
constancy; a chatterbox, without tact, badly brought up, impolite,
whimsical, unequal in temper,--are quite as right as those who perhaps
say that I am economical, modest, courageous, stingy, energetic, a
worker, constant, silent, full of delicacy, polite, always gay. Those who

consider that I am a coward will not be more wrong than those who say
that I am extremely brave; in short, learned or ignorant, full of talent or
absurd, nothing astonishes me more than myself. I end by believing
that I am only an instrument played on by circumstances. Does this
kaleidoscope exist, because, in the soul of those who claim to paint all
the affections of the human heart, chance throws all these affections
themselves, so that they may be able, by the force of their imagination,
to feel what they paint? And is observation a sort of memory suited to
aid this lively imagination? I begin to think so."[*]
[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 77.
Certainly Balzac's character proves to the hilt the truth of the rule that,
with few exceptions in the world's history, the higher the development,
the more complex the organisation and the more violent the clashing of
the divers elements of the man's nature; so that his soul resembles a
field of battle, and he wears out quickly. Nevertheless, because
everything in Balzac seems contradictory, when he is likened by one of
his friends to the sea, which is one and indivisible, we perceive that the
comparison is not inapt. Round the edge are the ever-restless waves; on
the surface the foam blown by fitful gusts of wind, the translucent play
of sunbeams, and the clamour of storms lashing up the billows; but
down in the sombre depths broods the resistless, immovable force
which tinges with its reflection the dancing and play above, and is the
genius and fascination, the mystery and tragedy of the sea.
Below the merriment and herculean jollity, so little represented in his
books, there was deep, gloomy force in the soul of the man who, gifted
with an almost unparalleled imagination, would yet grip the realities of
the pathetic and terrible situations he evolved with brutal strength and
insistence. The mind of the writer of "Le Pere Goriot," "La Cousine
Bette," and "Le Cousin Pons," those terrible tragedies where the Greek
god Fate marches on his victims relentlessly, and there is no staying of
the hand for pity, could not have been merely a wide, sunny expanse
with no dark places. Nevertheless, we are again puzzled, when we
attempt to realise the personality of a man whose imagination could
soar to the mystical and philosophical conception of "Seraphita," which

is