The strain entailed by Balzac's way of living and by his constant mental agitation was such as no constitution — and his was extraordinarily robust — could resist very long. From 1842, or thereabouts, he began to suffer from time to time with heart and lung troubles, and from 1845 onward he was rarely well. It was during his second stay at Vierzschovnian, Mine.
Hanska's property in the Ukraine, that his health began to give serious anxiety. For a time he improved; but the climate, the imcer tanity in which he was kept as to the reward of his long devotion, certain material obstacles to his marriage, the necessity of conducting his literary and other transactions by proxy, the anxieties of the political situation in France, misunderstandings with members of his own family, and the effort to force himself to work when work was beyond his failing physical powers, all hastened his end. His marriage was solemnized at last in March 1850, at Berditchef, in Poland; rather more than two months later Balzac arrived in Paris with his bride. He was a dying man, though he clung almost to the last to the hope of living to finish 'The Human Comedy,) and extinguish what was left of his debts. Victor Hugo was among those who vis ited his deathbed, and the same great poet it was who paid a splendid tribute to his friend and peer at the graveside in Pere Lachaise. Occurring in the midst of a grave political crisis, his death was less noticed than might have been expected; but though widely read and fervently admired among his contempo raries — more especially perhaps in foreign countries —it wanted at least another genera tion to assure his fame; nor (thanks to a com bative spirit and an ingenuous vanity) did he lack enemies; though the mere dedications of his novels are enough to show that his friends were among the elect of his age, and it is im possible to read his correspondence without a feeling of respect, and even of affection, for a personality so rich, so valiant, so tenacious and so kindly.
It is best, in so slight an estimate of Balzac's colossal achievement as can be attempted here, to leave out of account not only the worthless fiction of his nonage but also his plays, of which only one, 'Mercadet,' first called 'Le Faiseur,> and produced with considerable changes after its author's death, can be said to have won or deserved success. An exceptional place belongs to the 'Merry Tales,' not so much in virtue of their notorious, guileless and jovial salacity as because, while the form is more essential there than in anything else he wrote, they are among the very few skilful pastiches in literature — for the lapses they contain from either the language or the atmosphere of the early French Renaissance are astonishingly few — in which the mere erudition does not replace or over shadow other merits. They are memorable for
their genuine zest, inventive vigor and shrewd humanity.
Balzac's glory, of course, is that unfinished series of masterpieces called 'The Human Comedy,' which it is necessary to consider as one work in order to appreciate the audacity and breadth and steadiness of aim which are essential titles to his rank, not merely as the father of the modern novel and the supreme master of the craft, but as a genius of the uni versal order. In its most obvious bearing, it is an imaginative reconstruction of French society in every part and aspect, with all the vicissitudes and variations that affected it between the Revolution and the middle of Louis Philippe's reign: an heroical design, less comprehensive in regard to time and space than that of the Waverley novels, but more consistently and co herently executed out of more copious material. The picturesque, however, was subordinate to the philosoplucal interest, as he conceived it, of Balzac's undertaking. He intended his work for nothing less than a natural history of civilized man, which should illustrate the war between the passions of the individual and the social instinct or the common interest, the differentia tion of types by the action of gregarious lif e, the reflection of personality in matter and the stamp of habits aud calling upon character. The theory outlined by Buffon and bequeathed by Geoffroy Saint Hilaire to the first evolution ists, which supposes a single original pattern of organic creation varied by the mere efforts of environment, fascinated Balzac hy a partly chimerical but, at any rate, suggestive analogy with human existence. gDoes not society>) he asked in his general preface of 1842, amake of man, according to the sphere in which his ac tivity develops, as many different men as there are species in zoology?) This conception is enough to explain one great characteristic of his novels—the importance attributed in them to atmosphere, to local influences, to material conditions, to all that the elder novelists had regarded as accidental and accessory. It is Balzac who set the example of bestowing as much care upon things as upon men in works of fiction. The description of streets, houses, furniture and works of art, of implements and equipages, of dress and pastimes, of customs and offices, business and procedure and, in par ticular, of all that pertains to money, is through out 'The Htunan Comedy,' not only exact and elaborate (sometimes to the point of tedious ness and disproportion), but above all signifi cant Sechard's printing-press and Gaudissart's advertisements, the laboratory of Balthazar Claes, the aroma of Maman Vauquer's dining roorn, are part and parcel of those famous per sonages.