The Human Comedy: Introductions and Appendix | Page 7

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 generally agreed that these singular /Oeuvres de Jeunesse/ were of
service to Balzac as exercise, and no doubt they were so; but I think
something may be said on the other side. They must have done a little,
if not much, to lead him into and confirm him in those defects of style

and form which distinguish him so remarkably from most writers of his
rank. It very seldom happens when a very young man writes very much,
be it book-writing or journalism, without censure and without "editing,"
that he does not at the same time get into loose and slipshod habits.
And I think we may set down to this peculiar form of apprenticeship of
Balzac's not merely his failure ever to attain, except in passages and
patches, a thoroughly great style, but also that extraordinary method of
composition which in after days cost him and his publishers so much
money.
However, if these ten years of probation taught him his trade, they
taught him also a most unfortunate avocation or by-trade, which he
never ceased to practise, or to try to practise, which never did him the
least good, and which not unfrequently lost him much of the not too
abundant gains which he earned with such enormous labor. This was
the "game of speculation." His sister puts the tempter's part on an
unknown "neighbor," who advised him to try to procure independence
by /une bonne speculation/. Those who have read Balzac's books and
his letters will hardly think that he required much tempting. He began
by trying to publish--an attempt which has never yet succeeded with a
single man of letters, so far as I can remember. His scheme was not a
bad one, indeed it was one which has brought much money to other
pockets since, being neither more nor less than the issuing of cheap
one-volume editions of French classics. But he had hardly any capital;
he was naturally quite ignorant of his trade, and as naturally the
established publishers and booksellers boycotted him as an intruder. So
his /Moliere/ and his /La Fontaine/ are said to have been sold as waste
paper, though if any copies escaped they would probably fetch a very
comfortable price now. Then, such capital as he had having been
borrowed, the lender, either out of good nature or avarice, determined
to throw the helve after the hatchet. He partly advanced himself and
partly induced Balzac's parents to advance more, in order to start the
young man as a printer, to which business Honore himself added that of
typefounder. The story was just the same: knowledge and capital were
again wanting, and though actual bankruptcy was avoided, Balzac got
out of the matter at the cost not merely of giving the two businesses to
a friend (in whose hands they proved profitable), but of a margin of

debt from which he may be said never to have fully cleared himself.
He had more than twenty years to live, but he never cured himself of
this hankering after /une bonne speculation/. Sometimes it was ordinary
stock-exchange gambling; but his special weakness was, to do him
justice, for schemes that had something more grandiose in them. Thus,
to finish here with the subject, though the chapter of it never actually
finished till his death, he made years afterwards, when he was a
successful and a desperately busy author, a long, troublesome, and
costly journey to Sardinia to carry out a plan of resmelting the slag
from Roman and other mines there. Thus in his very latest days, when
he was living at Vierzschovnia with the Hanska and Mniszech
household, he conceived the magnificently absurd notion of cutting
down twenty thousand acres of oak wood in the Ukraine, and sending it
/by railway/ right across Europe to be sold in France. And he was rather
reluctantly convinced that by the time a single log reached its market
the freight would have eaten up the value of the whole plantation.
It was perhaps not entirely chance that the collapse of the printing
scheme, which took place in 1827, the ninth year of the Wanderings in
the Wilderness, coincided with or immediately preceded the conception
of the book which was to give Balzac passage into the Promised Land.
This was