XIX

BALZAC

LITTLE theoretical certainty is to be found in French literary criticism, because in France, differently from Italy and Germany, the theory of art, understood philosophically, has had little development. Notwithstanding this, I place the French psychological or impressionistic critics before the doctrinaire and systematic critics, Sainte-Beuve and Lemaître before Taine and Brunetière. These latter are certainly theoretical, but dominated by that intellectualistic and dogmatic spirit which forms an obstacle to the comprehension of art. One should read Brunetière's volume on Balzac, lately reprinted in an almost popular edition, in order to see how his theories have obscured even those evident truths which are to be found in popular consciousness, and are again to be found, let us say, in Le Breton's modest and diligent study of the same author. Let us pass over (in order not to repeat a criticism which would henceforth be too obvious in Italy) the premiss of the "literary class," certainly not invented by Brunetière, but treated by him with absurd rigidity and in virtue of which the problem of his criticism appears as that of the class of "romance," and of Balzac as of the writer who confers autonomy upon this form, carries out the "true romance" and observes the boundaries which are not to be crossed. But what has he seen of what is romance, or, to limit

ourselves to what is particularly in question, the "historical" and "social" romance? And what has he understood of the spiritual disposition of Balzac, both in regard to "historical romance" and to art?

If Brunetière had not lacked both æsthetic culture and philosophical training, it would not have been difficult for him to discover that the "social novel " can indeed be regarded as a form differing from the other forms of art, as an "autonomous class," not because it is a form of art (in which case and when it is such, the distinction shows itself to be altogether empirical and arbitrary), but because, on the contrary, in its origin and proper quality it is not at all a form of art, but simply a didactic scheme. When in Greece the religious, poetical and mythical impetus came to an end and gave place to the work of research and criticism, comedy also, in the imaginative and brilliantly capricious form given to it by Aristophanes, became converted into the comedy of Menander, upon which (as Vico was perhaps the first to note and Nietzsche the last to bring into the sphere of general knowledge) had blown the breath of the Socratic philosophy. Thereupon playwrights and moralists joined hands, and comedy availed itself of the characterology of the philosophers, and the philosophers adopted and developed the discussion of types of character which had been formed in the theatre. It is well known that the framework of Menander sufficed writers of comedy for centuries, that is to say, not only the Romans, but also the Italians of the Renaissance and the French of the Classical period. Its characters became fixed and conventionalized as those of the old man, the lover, the young girl, the astute slave, the

miser, the boaster, and so forth, and if some variety and some accretions came to be added in course of time, yet it never or hardly ever broadened beyond the study and representation of man in general and of human vices and weaknesses.

But between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, social struggles and changes and increased interest in history on the one hand reacted also upon comedy and caused it to represent definite social and historical environments, and on the other took possession of the prose of the novels and turned it in the direction of the "historical" and the "social" novel. Balzac's preface to the Comédie humaine is a good instance of this renovation of the programmes of Menander and of Theophrastus: a Menander who has behind him the French Revolution and before him the rule of the middle-class, and is itself revolutionary and middleclass in its own way, or counter-revolutionary and anti-middle-class; a Theophrastus who has learned something about the new historical philosophy and the new science of nature. Balzac, in fact, rallied to the doctrine of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and to the literary model offered by Buffon. He asked himself, seeing that at every period " des espèces sociales, comme il y a des espèces zoologiques," why something similar should not be done for society to what Buffon had achieved in his magnificent work, "en essayant de représenter dans un livre l'ensemble de la zoologie." The work which he desired to write was to possess a triple content : "les hommes, les femmes et les choses, c'est à dire les personnes, et la représentation matérielle qu'ils donnent de leur pensée: enfin, l'homme et la vie." He did not propose to restrict himself to simple

observation, but to rise to the sphere of the reason or law of social facts, and from this to proceed yet further to the principles of judgment or of the ideals of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The reference to Walter Scott is also noteworthy, and the demand that history should be " social," that is to say, no longer human in general, as in the individualism and pragmatism of the preceding century.

Balzac's proposal, like those of others who both with, before and after him pointed to social and historical romance as the successor of the Græco-Roman comedy that had disappeared, is not a directly artistic proposal, but is historical, sociological and philosophical, and in so far as those writers wished to avail themselves of the imagination in order to summarize and to expose their observations and theories, they aimed, as I have said, at nothing other than a didactic scheme. But since science and imagination were placed side by side and the fusion of the two turned out to be impossible, two things happened: either the poetical element affirmed itself to be the true centre of the work and enslaved the scientific elements, reducing them to its tones and colours, and a purely poetical work was the result, ascending to the pinnacle of Manzoni's romance-poem, which has been justly described as the concrete historical form of the same author's Inni sacri; or the scientific interest declared itself to be the centre of the work, and then the poetical elements were in their turn enslaved and turned to account as supplying the popular and imaginative appeal of the theme in question. This second course has been usually adopted by those of mediocre talents, compilers of books of instruction and vulgarity, because anyone possessing truly original capacity as an observer

and a philosopher is not satisfied to compose fables and apologies and to cut up his images into little pieces, but quickly grasps the good sword of scientific, historical and polemical prose. Artists unendowed with certain gifts proper to critics and thinkers, or a certain tendency towards observation and meditation, have never gone beyond a certain point in the development of such capacities, and have either found expression for their thought and conceptions in living representations, cancelling their properly scientific side, or they have left them scattered in notes, diaries and little essays, without subjecting them to truly systematic treatment.

It is not astonishing that Brunetière paid no attention to this difference of relation between the didactic scheme of the novel and art and poetry, and to the various solutions to which it gives rise, because, as has been observed, he cultivated an intellectualistic conception both of art itself and of poetry. But what seems to me to be a proof of singular blindness, a result of false theory, is his insistence upon considering Balzac as the incarnation of the very idea of the novel (Balzac, c'est le roman même), as creator of the book of objective social observation, which should possess the essential characteristic of "rassemblance avec la vie," and be composed with "l'entière soumission de l'observateur à l'objet de son observation," thus adopting the method "qui a renouvelé la science," and which cannot ever be judged in itself, but only "en le comparant avec la vie." This is tantamount to saying that one set of observations must be controlled by comparing it with new observations and experiments. Now anyone who has examined, I do not say the entire works of Balzac, but has tested some