Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A - Z | Page 5

a narrator of nightmares. He was
preserved from the fantastic by another gift which seems contradictory
to the first. This visionary was in reality a philosopher, that is to say, an
experimenter and a manipulator of general ideas. Proof of this may be
found in his biography, which shows him to us, during his college days
at Vendome, plunged into a whirl of abstract reading. The entire
theological and occult library which he discovered in the old Oratorian
institution was absorbed by the child, till he had to quit school sick, his
brain benumbed by this strange opium. The story of Louis Lambert is a
monograph of his own mind. During his youth and in the moments
snatched from his profession, to what did he turn his attention? Still to
general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker at the quarrel of
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself about the
hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with mysticism;
and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not one of his
works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the hundreds.
If he describes, as in The Vicar of Tours, the woes of an old priest, he
profits by the opportunity to exploit a theory concerning the
development of sensibility, and a treatise on the future of Catholicism.
If he describes, as in The Firm of Nucingen, a supper given to Parisian
blases, he introduces a system of credit, reports of the Bank and Bureau
of Finance, and--any number of other things! Speaking of Daniel
d'Arthez, that one of his heroes who, with Albert Savarus and Raphael,
most nearly resembles himself, he writes: "Daniel would not admit the
existence of talent without profound metaphysical knowledge. At this
moment he was in the act of despoiling both ancient and modern
philosophy of all their wealth in order to assimilate it. He desired, like
Moliere, to become a profound philosopher first of all, a writer of
comedies afterwards." Some readers there are, indeed, who think that
philosophy superabounds with Balzac, that the surplus of general
hypotheses overflows at times, and that the novels are too prone to
digressions. Be that as it may, it seems incontestible that this was his
master faculty, the virtue and vice of his thought. Let us see, however,
by what singular detour this power of generalization--the antithesis, one
might say, of the creative power--increased in him the faculty of the

poetic visionary.
It is important, first of all, to note that this power of the visionary could
not be put directly into play. Balzac had not long enough to live. The
list of his works, year by year, prepared by his sister, shows that from
the moment he achieved his reputation till the day of his death he never
took time for rest or observation or the study of mankind by daily and
close contact, like Moliere or Saint-Simon. He cut his life in two,
writing by night, sleeping by day, and after sparing not a single hour
for calling, promenades or sentiment. Indeed, he would not admit this
troublesome factor of sentiment, except at a distance and through
letters--"because it forms one's style"! At any rate, that is the kind of
love he most willingly admitted--unless an exception be made of the
mysterious intimacies of which his correspondence has left traces.
During his youth he had followed this same habit of heavy labor, and as
a result the experience of this master of exact literature was reduced to
a minimum; but this minimum sufficed for him, precisely because of
the philosophical insight which he possessed to so high a degree. To
this meagre number of positive faculties furnished by observation, he
applied an analysis so intuitive that he discovered, behind the small
facts amassed by him in no unusual quantity, the profound forces, the
generative influences, so to speak.
He himself describes--once more in connection with Daniel d'Arthez
--the method pursued in this analytical and generalizing work. He calls
it a "retrospective penetration." Probably he lays hold of the elements
of experience and casts them into a seeming retort of reveries. Thanks
to an alchemy somewhat analogous to that of Cuvier, he was enabled to
reconstruct an entire temperament from the smallest detail, and an
entire class from a single individual; but that which guided him in his
work of reconstruction was always and everywhere the habitual process
of philosophers: the quest and investigation of causes.
It is due to this analysis that this dreamer has defined almost all the
great principles of the psychological changes incident to our time. He
saw clearly, while democracy was establishing itself with us on the
ruins of the ancient regime, the novelty of the sentiments which these

transfers from class to class were certain to produce.