The Human Comedy: Introductions and Appendix | Page 6

little better in it than if it had not been his vocation at all. The singular tentatives which, after being allowed for a time a sort of outhouse in the structure of the /Comedie Humaine/, were excluded from the octavo /Edition Definitive/ five-and-twenty years ago, have never been the object of that exhaustive bibliographical and critical attention which has been bestowed on those which follow them. They were not absolutely unproductive--we hear of sixty, eighty, a hundred pounds being paid for them, though whether this was the amount of Balzac's always sanguine expectations, or hard cash actually handed over, we cannot say. They were very numerous, though the reprints spoken of above never extended to more than ten. Even these have never been widely read. The only person I ever knew till I began this present task who had read them through was the friend whom all his friends are now lamenting and are not likely soon to cease to lament, Mr. Louis Stevenson; and when I once asked him whether, on his honor and conscience, he could recommend me to brace myself to the same effort, he said that on his honor and conscience he must most earnestly dissuade me. I gather, though I am not sure, that Mr. Wedmore, the latest writer in English on Balzac at any length, had not read them through when he wrote.
Now I have, and a most curious study they are. Indeed I am not sorry, as Mr. Wedmore thinks one would be. They are curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad. Couched for the most part in a kind of Radcliffian or Monk-Lewisian vein--perhaps studied more directly from Maturin (of whom Balzac was a great admirer) than from either--they often begin with and sometimes contain at intervals passages not unlike the Balzac that we know. The attractive title of /Jane la Pale/ (it was originally called, with a still more Early Romantic avidity for /baroque/ titles, /Wann-Chlore/) has caused it, I believe, to be more commonly read than any other. It deals with a disguised duke, a villainous Italian, bigamy, a surprising offer of the angelic first wife to submit to a sort of double arrangement, the death of the second wife and first love, and a great many other things. /Argow le Pirate/ opens quite decently and in order with that story of the /employe/ which Balzac was to rehandle so often, but drops suddenly into brigands stopping diligences, the marriage of the heroine Annette with a retired pirate marquis of vast wealth, the trial of the latter for murdering another marquis with a poisoned fish-bone scarf-pin, his execution, the sanguinary reprisals by his redoubtable lieutenant, and a finale of blunderbusses, fire, devoted peasant girl with /retrousse/ nose, and almost every possible /tremblement/.
In strictness mention of this should have been preceded by mention of /Le Vicaire des Ardennes/, which is a sort of first part of /Argow le Pirate/, and not only gives an account of his crimes, early history, and manners (which seem to have been a little robustious for such a mild-mannered man as Annette's husband), but tells a thrilling tale of the loves of the /vicaire/ himself and a young woman, which loves are crossed, first by the belief that they are brother and sister, and secondly by the /vicaire/ having taken orders under this delusion. /La Derniere Fee/ is the queerest possible cross between an actual fairy story /a la/ Nordier and a history of the fantastic and inconstant loves of a great English lady, the Duchess of "Sommerset" (a piece of actual /scandalum magnatum/ nearly as bad as Balzac's cool use in his acknowledged work of the title "Lord Dudley"). This book begins so well that one expects it to go on better; but the inevitable defects in craftsmanship show themselves before long. /Le Centenaire/ connects itself with Balzac's almost lifelong hankering after the /recherche de l'absolu/ in one form or another, for the hero is a wicked old person who every now and then refreshes his hold on life by immolating a virgin under a copper-bell. It is one of the most extravagant and "Monk-Lewisy" of the whole. /L'Excommunie/, /L'Israelite/, and /L'Heritiere de Birague/ are mediaeval or fifteenth century tales of the most luxuriant kind, /L'Excommunie/ being the best, /L'Israelite/ the most preposterous, and /L'Heritiere de Birague/ the dullest. But it is not nearly so dull as /Dom Gigadus/ and /Jean Louis/, the former of which deals with the end of the seventeenth century and the latter with the end of the eighteenth. These are both as nearly unreadable as anything can be. One interesting thing, however, should be noted in much of this early work: the affectionate clinging of the author to the scenery of Touraine, which sometimes inspires him with his least bad passages.
It is