Masters of the English Novel Part 6

Nor will it do to claim that he succeeds with his Deans and fails with women of regal type: his Marys and Elizabeth Tudors.

In such portrayals it seems to me he is pre-eminently fine: one cannot understand the critics who see in such creations mere stock figures supplied by history not breathed upon with the breath of life. Scott had a definite talent for the stage-setting of royalty: that is one of the reasons for the popularity of "Kenilworth." It is, however, a true discrimination which finds more of life and variety in Scott's princ.i.p.al women than in his men of like position. But his Rob Roys, Hatteraicks and Dalgettys justify all praise and help to explain that t.i.tle of Wizard of the North which he won and wore.

In nothing is Scott stronger than in his environments, his devices for atmosphere. This he largely secures by means of description and with his wealth of material, does not hesitate to take his time in building up his effects. Perhaps the most common criticism of him heard to-day refers to his slow movement. Superabundance of matter is accompanied by prolixity of style, with a result of breeding impatience in the reader, particularly the young. Boys and girls at present do not offer Scott the unreserved affection once his own, because he now seems an author upon whom to exercise the gentle art of skipping. Enough has been said as to Scott's lack of modern economy of means. It is not necessary to declare that this juvenile reluctance to his leisurely manner stands for total depravity. The young reader of the present time (to say nothing of the reader more mature) is trained to swifter methods, and demands them. At the same time, it needs to be a.s.serted that much of the impressiveness of Scott would be lost were his method and manner other than they are: nor will it do harm to remind ourselves that we all are in danger of losing our power of sustained and consecutive attention in relation to literature, because of the sc.r.a.p-book tendency of so much modern reading. On the center-table, cheap magazines; on the stage, vaudeville--these are habits that sap the ability for slow, ruminative pleasure in the arts. Luckily, they are not the only modern manifestation, else were we in a parlous state, indeed!

The trouble with Scott, then, may be resolved in part into a trouble with the modern folk who read him.

When one undertakes the thankless task of a.n.a.lyzing coldly and critically the style of Scott, the faults are plain enough. He constantly uses two adjectives or three in parallel construction where one would do the work better. The construction of his sentences loses largely the pleasing variation of a richly articulated system by careless punctuation and a tendency to make parallel clauses where subordinate relations should be expressed. The unnecessary copula stars his pages. Although his manner in narration rises with his subject and he may be justly called a picturesque and forceful writer, he is seldom a distinguished one. One does not turn to him for the inevitable word or phrase, or for those that startle by reason of felicity and fitness. These strictures apply to his descriptive and narrative parts, not to the dialogue: for there, albeit sins of diffuseness and verbosity are to be noted--and these are modified by the genial humanity they embody--he is one of the great masters. His use of the Scotch dialect adds indefinitely to his attraction and native smack: racy humor, sly wit, canny logic, heartful sympathy--all are conveyed by the folk medium.

All subsequent users of the people-speech pay toll to Walter Scott. Small courtesy should be extended to those who complain that these idioms make hard reading. Never does Scott give us dialect for its own sake, but always for the sake of a closer revelation of the human heart--dialect's one justification.

At its worst, Scott's style may fairly be called ponderous, loose, monotonous: at its finest, the adequate instrument of a natural story-teller who is most at home when, emerging from his longueur, he writes of grand things in the grand manner.

Thus, Sir Walter Scott defined the Romance for modern fiction, gave it the authority of his genius and extended the gamut of the Novel by showing that the method of the realist, the awakening of interest in the actualities of familiar character and life, could be more broadly applied. He opposed the realist in no true sense: but indicated how, without a lapse of art or return to outworn machinery, justice might yet be done to the more stirring, large, heroic aspects of the world of men: a world which exists and clamors to be expressed: a world which readers of healthy taste are perennially interested in, nay, sooner or later, demand to be shown. His fiction, whether we award it the somewhat grudging recognition of Carlyle or with Ruskin regard its maker as the one great novelist of English race, must be deemed a precious legacy, one of literature's most honorable ornaments--especially desirable in a day so apparently plain and utilitarian as our own, eschewing ornament and perchance for that reason needing it all the more.

CHAPTER VII

FRENCH INFLUENCE

In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction stood at the parting of the ways. Should it follow Scott and the romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday life? Should it adopt that form of story-making which puts stress on action and plot and is objective in its method, roaming all lands and times for its material; or, dealing with the familiar average of contemporary society, should it emphasize character a.n.a.lysis and choose the subjective realm of psychology for its peculiar domain? The pen dropped from the stricken hand of Scott in 1832; in that year a young parliamentary reporter in London was already writing certain lively, closely observed sketches of the town, and four years later they were to be collected and published under the t.i.tle of "Sketches by Boz," while the next year that incomparable extravaganza, "The Pickwick Papers," was to go to an eager public. English fiction had decided: the Novel was to conquer the romance for nearly a century. It was a victory which to the present day has been a dominant influence in story-making; establis.h.i.+ng a tendency which, until Stevenson a few years since, with the gaiety of the inveterate boy, cried up Romance once more, bade fair to sweep all before it.

Before tracing this vigorous development of the Novel of Reality with d.i.c.kens, Thackeray and Eliot (to name three great leaders), it is important to get an idea of the growth on French soil which was so deeply influential upon English as well as upon other modern fiction. Nothing is more certain in literary evolution than the fact that the French Novel in the nineteenth century has molded and defined modern fiction, thus repaying an earlier debt owed the English pioneers, Richardson and Fielding.

English fiction of our own generation may be described as a native variation on a French model: in fact, the fictionists of Europe and the English-speaking lands, with whatever divergencies personal or national, have derived in large measure from the Gaul the technique, the point of view and the choice of theme which characterizes the French Novel from Stendhal to Balzac, from Zola to Guy de Maupa.s.sant.

I

The name of Henri Beyle, known to literature under the sobriquet of Stendhal, has a meaning in the development of the modern type of fiction out of proportion to the intrinsic value of his stories.

He was, of course, far surpa.s.sed by mightier followers like Balzac, Flaubert and Zola; yet his significance lies in the very fact that they were followers. His is all the merit pertaining to the feat of introducing the Novel of psychic a.n.a.lysis: of that persistent and increasingly unpleasant bearing-down upon the darker facts of personality. Hence his "Rouge et Noir,"

dated 1830 and typical of his aim and method, is in a sense an epoch-making book.

Balzac was at the same time producing the earlier studies to culminate in that Human Comedy which was to stand as the chief accomplishment of his nation in the literature of fiction. But Stendhal, sixteen years older, began to print first and to him falls the glory of innovation. Balzac gives full praise to his predecessor in his essay on Beyle, and his letters contain frequent references to the debt he owed that curious bundle of fatuities, inconsistencies and brilliancies, the author of "The Chartreuse de Parme." Later, Zola calls him "the father of us all," meaning of the naturalistic school of which Zola himself was High Priest. Beyle's business was the a.n.a.lysis of soul states: an occupation familiar enough in these times of Hardy, Meredith and Henry James. He held several posts of importance under Napoleon, wors.h.i.+ped that leader, loved Italy as his birthplace, loved England too, and tried to show in his novels the result of the inactive Restoration upon a generation trained by Napoleon to action, violence, ambition and pa.s.sion.

Read to-day, "Le Rouge et Noir," which it is sufficient to consider for our purposes, seems somewhat slow in movement, struggling in construction, meticulous in manner. At times, its interminability recalls "Clarissa Harlowe," but it possesses the traits' which were to mark the coming school of novel-writing in France and hence in the modern world: to wit, freedom in dealing with love in its irregular relation, the tendency towards tragedy, and that subtlety of handling which makes the main interest to depend upon motive and thought rather than upon the external action itself. "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,"--that might be the motto. The young quasi-hero is Julian, an ambitious worldling of no family, and his use of the Church as a means of promotion, his amours with several women and his death because of his love for one of them, are traced with a kind of tortuous revelation of the inner workings of the human heart which in its way declares genius in the writer: and which certainly makes a work disillusioning of human nature. Its more external aspect of a study of the politic Church and State, of the rivalry between the reds and the blacks of the state religion, is entirely secondary to this greater purpose and result: here, for the first time at full length, a writer shows the possibility of that realistic portrayal sternly carried through, no matter how destructive of romantic preconceptions of men and women. It is the method of Richardson flowering in a time of greater freedom and more cynical questioning of the G.o.ds.

II

But giving Stendhal his full mint and c.u.mmin of praise, he yet was but the forerunner of a mightier man. Undoubtedly, he prepared the soil and was a necessary link in the chain of development wherewith fiction was to forge itself an unbreakable sequence of strength. Balzac was to put out his lesser light, as indeed the refulgence of his genius was to overs.h.i.+ne all French fiction, before and since. It would be an exaggeration to say that the major English novelists of the middle nineteenth century were consciously disciples of Balzac--for something greater even than he moved them; the spirit of the Time. But it is quite within bounds to say that of all modern fiction he is the leader and shaper. Without him, his greatest native follower, Zola, is inconceivable. He gathers up into himself and expresses at its fullest all that was latent in the striking modern growth whose banner-cry was Truth, and whose method was that of the social scientist. Here was a man who, early in his career, for the first time in the history of the Novel, deliberately planned to const.i.tute himself the social historian of his epoch and race: and who, in upwards of a hundred remarkable pieces of fiction in Novel form executed that plan in such fulness that his completed work stands not only as a monument of industry, but as perhaps the most inspiring example of literary synthesis in the history of letters. In bigness of conception and of construction--let alone the way in which the work was performed--the Human Comedy is awe-begetting; it drives one to Shakspere for like largeness of scale. Such a performance, ordered and directed to a foreseen end, is unique in literature.

As Balzac thus gave birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention, to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite intention: to become the Secretary of an Age of which he declared society to be the historian. He wished to exhibit man in his species as he was to be seen in the France of the novelist's era, just as a naturalist aims to study beast-kind, segregating them into cla.s.ses for zoological investigation.

Later, Balzac's great successor (as we shall see) applied this a.n.a.logy with more rigid insistence upon the scientific method which should obtain in all literary study. The survey proposed covered a period of about half a century and included the Republic, the Empire and the Restoration: it ranged through all cla.s.ses and conditions of men with no appearance of prejudice, preference or parti-pris (this is one of the marvels of Balzac), thus gaining the immense advantage of an apparently complete and catholic comprehension of the human show. Of all modern novelists, Balzac is the one whose work seems like life instead of an opinion of life; he has the objectivity of Shakspere. Even a Tolstoy set beside him seems limited.

This idea of a plan was not crystallized into the famous t.i.tle given to his collective works--La Comedie Humaine--until 1842, when but eight years of life remained to him. But four years earlier it had been mentioned in a letter, and when Balzac was only a little over thirty, at a time when his better-known books were just beginning to appear, he had signified his sense of an inclusive scheme by giving such a running t.i.tle to a group of his stories as the familiar "Scenes from Private Life"--to which, in due course, were added other designations for the various parts of the great plan. The encyclopedic survey was never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation of an almost incredible amount of human data. As for finis.h.i.+ng the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects its place in literature. Neither Spenser's "Faery Queen" nor Wordsworth's "The Excursion" was completed, and, per contra, it were as well for Browning if "The Ring and the Book" had not been. In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one recognizes Hercules from the feet. Had this mighty story-teller and student of humanity carried out his full intention there would have been nearly 150 pieces of fiction; of the plan-on-paper he actually completed ninety-seven, two-thirds of the whole, and enough to ill.u.s.trate the conception. And it must be remembered that Balzac died at fifty. One result of the incompletion, as Brunetiere has pointed out, is to give disproportionate treatment to certain phases of life, to the military, for instance, for which Balzac has twenty-four stories on his list, whereas only two, "The Chouans" and "A Pa.s.sion in the Desert," were executed. But surely, sufficient was done, looking to the comedy as a whole, to force us to describe the execution as well as the conception as gigantic. Had the work been more mechanically pushed to its end for the exact plan's sake, the perfection of scheme might have been attained at the expense of vitality and inspiration. Ninety-seven pieces of fiction, the majority of them elaborate novels, the whole involving several thousand characters, would be impressive in any case, but when they come from an author who marvelously reproduces his time and country, creating his scenes in a way to afford us a sense of the complexity of life--its depth and height, its beauty, terror and mystery--we can but hail him as Master.

And in spite of the range and variety in Balzac's unique product, it has an effect of unity based upon a sense of social solidarity. He conceives it his duty to present the unity of society in his day, whatever its apparent cla.s.s and other divergencies. He would show that men and women are members of the one body social, interacting upon each other in manifold relations and so producing the dramas of earth; each story plays its part in this general aim, ill.u.s.trating the social laws and reactions, even as the human beings themselves play their parts in the world. In this way Balzac's Human Comedy is an organism, however much it may fall short of symmetry and completion.

In the outline of the plan we find him separating his studies into three groups or cla.s.ses: The Studies of Manners, the Philosophical Studies, and the a.n.a.lytic Studies. In the first division were placed the related groups of scenes of Private life, Provincial life, Parisian life, Political life, Military life and Country life. It was his desire, as he says in a letter to Madame Hanska, to have the group of studies of Manners "represent all social effects"; in the philosophic studies the causes of those effects: the one exhibits individualities typified, the other, types individualized: and in the a.n.a.lytic Studies he searches for the principles. "Manners are the performance; the causes are the wings and the machinery. The principles--they are the author.... Thus man, society and humanity will be described, judged, a.n.a.lyzed without repet.i.tion and in a work which will be, as it were, 'The Thousand and One Nights' of the west."

The scheme thus categorically laid down sounds rather dry and formal, nor is it too easy to understand. But all trouble vanishes when once the Human Comedy itself, in any example of it, is taken up; you launch upon the great swollen tide of life and are carried irresistibly along.

It is plain that with an author of Balzac's productive powers, any attempt to convey an idea of his quality must perforce confine itself to a few representative specimens. A few of them, rightly chosen, give a fair notion of his general interpretation. What then are some ill.u.s.trative creations?

In the case of most novelists, although of first rank, it is not as a rule difficult to define their cla.s.s and name their tendency: their temperaments and beliefs are so-and-so, and they readily fall under the designation of realist or romanticist, pessimist, or optimist, student of character or maker of plots.

This is, in a sense, impossible with Balzac. The more he be read, the harder to detect his bias: he seems, one is almost tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind.

Persons read two or three--perhaps half a dozen of his books--and then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been a.s.similated, it will be realized that but a phase of Balzac had been seen.

When the pa.s.sion of creation, the birth-throes of a novel were on him, he became so immersed in the aspect of life he was depicting that he saw, felt, knew naught else: externally this obsession was expressed by his way of life and work while the story was growing under his hand: his recluse habits, his monkish abstention from worldly indulgences, the abnormal night hours of activity, the loss of flesh, so that the robust man who went into the guarded chamber came out at the end of six weeks the shadow of himself.

As a consequence of the consecration to the particular task (as if it embraced the one view of existence), the reader perhaps experiences a shock of surprise in pa.s.sing from "The Country Doctor" to "Pere Goriot." But the former is just as truly part of his interpretation as the latter. A dozen fictions can be drawn from the body of his production which portray humanity in its more beautiful, idealistic manifestations. Books like "The Country Doctor" and "Eugenic Grandet" are not alone in the list.

And how beautiful both are! "The Country Doctor" has all the idyllic charm of setting which a poetic interpretation of life in a rural community can give. Not alone Nature, but human nature is hymned. The kindly old physician, whose model is the great Physician himself, is like Chaucer's good parson, an unforgettable vision of the higher potentialities of the race.

Such a novel deserves to be called quite as truly romance and prose poem, save that Balzac's vraisemblance, his gift for photographic detail and the contemporaneousness of the setting, make it modern. And thus with "Eugenie Grandet" the same method applied in "The Country Doctor" to the study of a n.o.ble profession in a rural atmosphere, is here used for the portrait of a good woman whose entourage is again that of simple, natural conditions. There is more of light and shade in the revelation of character because Eugenie's father, the miser--a masterly sketch--furnishes a dark background for her radiant personality.

But the same effect is produced, that of throwing into bold relief the sweet, n.o.ble, high and pure in our common humanity.

And in this case it is a girl of humble station far removed from the shams and shameful pa.s.sions of the town. The conventional contrast would be to present in another novel some woman of the city as foul as this daughter of Grandet is fair. Not so Balzac.

He is too broad an observer of humanity, and as artist too much the master for such cheap effects of chiaroscuro. In "The d.u.c.h.ess De Langeais" e sets his central character amidst the frivolities of fas.h.i.+on and behold, yet another beautiful type of the s.e.x! As Richardson drew his Pamela and Clarissa, so Balzac his Eugenie and the d.u.c.h.ess: and let us not refrain from carrying out the comparison, and add, how feeble seems the Englishman in creation when one thinks of the half a hundred other female figures, good and bad, high and low, distinctly etched upon the memory by the mordant pen of the Frenchman!

Then if we turn to that great tragedy of family, "Pere Goriot,"

the change is complete. Now are we plunged into an atmosphere of greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the bourgeois street air of Paris. In this tale of thankless daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet fascinated eye. The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame Vautrin's boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells!

Compare it with d.i.c.kens' Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius.

Suppose, now, the purpose be to reveal not a group or community, but one human soul, a woman's this time: read "A Woman of Thirty" and see how the novelist,--for the first time--and one is inclined to add, for all time,--has pierced through the integuments and reached the very quick of psychologic exposure.

It is often said that he has created the type of young-old, or old-young woman: meaning that before him, novelists overlooked the fact that a woman of this age, maturer in experience and still ripe in physical charms, is really of intense social attraction, richly worth study. But this is because Balzac knows that all souls are interesting, if only we go beneath the surface. The only work of modern fiction which seems to me so nakedly to lay open the recesses of the human spirit as does "A Woman of Thirty" is Meredith's "The Egoist"; and, of course, master against master, Balzac is easily the superior, since the English author's wonderful book is so mannered and grotesque.

Utter sympathy is shown in these studies of femininity, whether the subject be a harlot, a saint or a patrician of the Grande Monde.

If the quest be for the handling of mankind en ma.s.se, with big effects of dark and light: broad brush-work on a canvas suited to heroical, even epic, themes,--a sort of fiction the later Zola was to excel in--Balzac will not fail us. His work here is as noteworthy as it is in the fine detailed manner of his most realistical modern studies--or in the searching a.n.a.lysis of the human spirit. "The Chouans" may stand for this cla.s.s: it has all the fire, the color, the elan that emanate from the army and the call of country. We have flashed before us one of those reactionary movements, after the French Revolution, which take on a magic romanticism because they culminate in the name of Napoleon. While one reads, one thinks war, breathes war--it is the only life for the moment. Just ahead a step, one feels, is the "imminent deadly breach"; the social or business or Bohemian doings of later Paris are as if they did not exist. And this particular novel will achieve such a result with the reader, even although it is not by any means one of Balzac's supreme achievements, being in truth, a little aside from his metier, since it is historical and suggests in spots the manner of Scott. But this power of envisaging war (which will be farther realized if such slighter works as "A Dark Affair" and "An Episode Under the Terror" be also perused), is only a single manifestation of a general gift. Suppose there is desired a picture very common in our present civilization--most common it may be in America,--that of the country boy going up to the city to become--what? Perhaps a captain of commerce, or a leader of fas.h.i.+on: perhaps a great writer or artist; or a politician who shall rule the capitol. It is a venture packed full of realistic experience but equally full of romance, drama, poetry--of an epic suggestiveness. In two such volumes as "A Great Provincial Man in Paris" and "Lost Illusions," all this, with its dire chances of evil as well as its roseate promise of success, has been wonderfully expressed. So cogently modern a motive had never been so used before.

Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and back-side of some certain section of life: as in "Cousin Pons"

and "Cousine Bette."--The corner of Paris where artists, courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity, picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of mankind,--this he paints so that we do not so much look on as move amidst the throng. In the first-named novel, a.s.suredly a very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one of fiction's superlative successes: to know him is to love him in all his weakness. In the second book, Bette is a female vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is heart-warming and sweet. And you know that both are true, true as they would not have been apart: "helpless each without the other."

Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces, "Caesar Birotteau." We can see in it the prototype of much that comes later in French fiction: Daudet's "Risler Aine et Froment Jeune" and Zola's "L'Argent," to name but two. Such a story sums up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.

Nor should it be forgotten that this close student of human nature, whose work appears so often severely mundane, and most strong when its roots go down into the earth, sometimes seeming to prefer the rankness and slime of human growths,--can on occasion soar into the empyrean, into the mystic region of dreams and ideals and all manner of subtle imaginings. Witness such fiction as "The Magic Skin," "Seraphita," and "The Quest of the Absolute." It is hard to believe that the author of such creations is he of "Pere Goriot" or "Cousine Bette." But it is Balzac's wisdom to see that such pictures are quite as truly part of the Human Comedy: because they represent man giving play to his soul--exercising his highest faculties. Nor does the realistic novelist in such efforts have the air of one who has left his true business in order to disport himself for once in an alien element. On the contrary, he seems absolutely at home: for the time, this is his only affair, his natural interest.

And so with ill.u.s.trations practically inexhaustible, which the long list prodigally offers. But the scope and variety have been already suggested; the best rule with Balzac is, each one to his taste, always remembering that in a writer so catholic, there is a peculiar advantage in an extended study. Nor can from twenty to twenty-five of his best books be read without a growing conviction that here is a man of genius who has done a unique thing.

It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before. But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half.

In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac's recipe. English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence. We shall see in dealing with d.i.c.kens how definitely the English writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and sympathetic to d.i.c.kens' own nature.

As to the accuracy with which he gave a representation of contemporary life--thus deserving the name realist--considerable may be said in the way of qualification. Much of it applies with similar force to Zola, later to be hailed as a king among modern realists in the naturalistic extreme to which he pushed the movement. Balzac, through his remarkable instinct for detail and particularity, did introduce into nineteenth century fiction an effect of greater truth in the depiction of life. n.o.body perhaps had--n.o.body has since--presented mis-en-scene as did he. He builds up an impression by hundreds of strokes, each seemingly insignificant, but adding to a totality that becomes impressive.

Moreover, again and again in his psychologic a.n.a.lysis there are home-thrusts which bring the blood to the face of any honest person. His detail is thus quite as much subjective as external.

It were a great mistake to regard Balzac as merely a writer who photographed things outside in the world; he is intensely interested in the things within--and if objectivity meant realism exclusively, he would be no realist at all.

But farther than this; with all his care for minute touches and his broad and painstaking observation, it is not so much life, after all, as a vision of life which he gives. This contradicts what was said early in the present chapter: but the two statements stand for the change likely to come to any student of Balzac: his objective personality at last resolves itself into a vividly personal interpretation. His breadth blinds one for a while, that is all. Hence Balzac may be called an incurable romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist. Like all first-cla.s.s art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction. He said in the Preface to "Pere Goriot" that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but "a possibly better world." He has done so. The most untrue thing in a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life? Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer than truth. Balzac understood this, remembered it in his heart.

He is too big as man and artist to be confined within the narrow realistic formula. While, as we have seen, he does not take sides on moral issues, nor allow himself to be a special pleader for this or that view, his work strikes a moral balance in that it shows universal humanity--not humanity tranced in metaphysics, or pathologic in a.n.a.lysis, or enmeshed in sensualism. In this sense, Balzac is a great realist. There is no danger of any novelist--any painter of life--doing harm, if he but gives us the whole. It is the story-teller who rolls some prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him: he who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his audience. Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of representing things as they are. But this matters not, if only a writer's nature be large and vigorous enough to report of humanity in a trustworthy way. Balzac was much too well endowed in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual meaning.

In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty of the social historian was more than to give a statement of present conditions--the social doc.u.ments of the moment,--variable as they might be for purposes of deduction. He insisted that the coming,--perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be prophesied;--those future ameliorations, whether individual or collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast. Let me again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man who is called arch-realist of his day: "The novelist should depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better world." In the very novel where he said it ("Pere Goriot") he may seem to have violated the principle: but taking his fiction in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the p.r.o.nunciamento exemplifies his practice.