BALZAC, barzak', lIoxont DE ( 1799-1850). The greatest novelist of France, and, according to some critics, of the world, if we regard at once the quantity of his work, the multitude and variety of his creations of character, his coordi nation of them into a microcosmic picture of the society of his time, and the scope and depth of his insight into the sordid ambitions and ideal impulses that actuate human life. His own career had given him a varied and acute experi ence. He was born at Tours. Nay 16, 1799, the first of four children of well-to-do bourgeois, self-indulgent, a little Rabelaisian, and not at all literary. His infancy was passed with a foster-mother in the country. He showed no cleverness in his studies, and found no apprecia tion at home, hut he was a diligent pupil of the 'truant school.' His wanderings along the vine yards of the Loire and in the noisy cooper-shops of the suburbs of Tonrs have left picturesque traces throughout his work, especially in the routes Drolatiques, and he has borne an eloquent witness to the pathos of his school life in Louis Lambert.
Balzae had very early what his sympathetic sister Laura calls the intuition of renown.' A family misfortune was to him a kind providence, for it brought him at nineteen to Paris and stimulated his literary activity by contact with Guizot, Villemain, and Cousin. His novels, especially Cesar Birottean, attest his three years' study of law; but he refused to practice. and in spite of discouragements, domestic and public, he devoted himself to literature, doubting some times his power, hut never his vocation. It took him ten years (1819-29) to learn his trade, the management of his novelistic tools. His work in this period ranks with that of Pigault-Lebrun. Only in the light of the future can it be said to show even promise of the kind of excellence which he was to realize. llarassed by poverty, op pressed by debts due to caprice and bad judg ment, he worked indefatigably, and at last pro duced in Lrs Chouaus (1829) a story of Brittany in 1799, one of the first and best of the his torical novels of France. though its attempted imitation of Scott is more obvious than snccess 1111. What follows Les Chomp's, good and bad, was admitted by Balzae to a place in his works; what went before, he ignored. The next six years were years of marvelous fertility, sus tained excellence, and progressing power, fos tered by intercourse with Hugo, Vigny, La martine, and George Sand. He made useful aristocratic acquaintances also, the Duchesse d'Abrantes and Madame de Castries, his Dnch esse de Langeais. Then he fell under the spell of a Polish lady, Madame Hanska, whom he had met some years before, and till the death of M. Hanska, in 1842, his production and develop ment suffer some cheek, to revive again for the complete flowering of his genius for five years (1842-47). After that he became more and more absorbed in plans for marriage with Madame Ilanska, and hindered from work by ill ness and by visits to the Russian estates of his betrothed. whom he married there a few months
before his death. Balzac's correspondence with his sister and his recently published letters to Madame Banska are a sufficient revelation of his character. To an intense imagination that made him at times a visionary, he joined an intense application that made him at times a recluse. In thought, the child was a man; in action the man was a child, capricious and prodigal, full of schemes that made others rich and kept him pour; restless, passionate, morbid sometimes, especially in the hope deferred of his unfortunate relation to Madame Hanska, but never forfeiting sympathy, because always frank and almost childlike in his broad lmmanity. There was something awesome in the intensity with which he lived out his fifty years. lingo expressed this when he said at his grave in Pere Lachaise that "such coffins proclaim immortality. We feel the divine destiny of that intellect which has trav ersed earth to suffer and be purified. So great a genius in his life cannot but be a great spirit hereafter." In any survey of Balzac's work it is well to consider first what he tried to do. He explains this in the preface to his novels collected under the title La Coniedie Homaine. He says his thought was to do for human nature what had recently been done for zoology—to show that all society was bound together by a unity of com position, diversified by evolution in varied en vironments, so that there were species of men as of animals. The soldier, the lawyer, the work man, the scholar, the statesman, would show as distinct and abiding characteristics as the wolf, the shark, the ass, the raven, and the sheep. But this, he continues, would require several thou sand characters; and how should he give unity to his creations? He would let society tell its own story. He would be its secretary, draw up an inventory of its virtues and vices, gather the facts of its passions, compose types for it by uniting homogeneous natures, and so produce a history of manners from the point of view of a conservative, a Christian, and a monarchist, who knew through friends the Old Ri-gime and the Republic, and had lived under the Empire, the Bourbons, and the democratic monarchy of July. Ilis novels were to be as a secretary's minutes, ideal in conception, but real in detail, shrinking front neither vice nor passion, because these are the motive forces that melt and recast human nature, but giving to religion its due place, and making virtue not only lovable but interesting. That is what he undertook to do, and though his work is incomplete, he left no part unessayed. Ile has a right to ask that his work be judged as a whole, by the good as well as by the evil. Like that other Comedy of Dante, his Human Comedy has its Hell, but it has also its Purga tory and its Paradise. Balzac is by some con sidered immoral ; others pronounce his work as a whole serious in purpose, high and edifying in tone.