ed the name as
little as his own Canalis or his own Rubempre. He was neither a poet nor
a moralist, though the latter title in France is often bestowed upon
him--a fact which strikingly helps to illustrate the Gallic lightness of
soil in the moral region. Balzac was the hardest and deepest of
_prosateurs_; the earth-scented facts of life, which the poet puts under
his feet, he had put above his head. Obviously there went on within him
a vast and constant intellectual unfolding. His mind must have had a
history of its own--a history of which it would be most interesting to
have an occasional glimpse. But the history is not related here, even in
glimpses. His books are full of ideas; his letters have almost none. It
is probably not unfair to argue from this fact that there were few ideas
that he greatly cared for. Making all allowance for the pressure and
tyranny of circumstances, we may believe that if he had greatly cared to
_se recueillir_, as the French say--greatly cared, in the Miltonic
phrase, "to interpose a little ease"--he would sometimes have found an
opportunity for it. Perpetual work, when it is joyous and salubrious, is
a very fine thing; but perpetual work, when it is executed with the
temper which more than half the time appears to have been Balzac's, has
in it something almost debasing. We constantly feel that his work would
have been vastly better if the Muse of "business" had been elbowed away
by her larger-browed sister. Balzac himself, doubtless, often felt in
the same way; but, on the whole, "business" was what he most cared for.
The "Comedie Humaine" represents an immense amount of joy, of
spontaneity, of irrepressible artistic life. Here and there in the
letters this occasionally breaks out in accents of mingled exultation
and despair. "Never," he writes in 1836, "has the torrent which bears me
along been more rapid; never has a work more majestically terrible
imposed itself upon the human brain. I go to my work as the gamester to
the gaming-table; I am sleeping now only five hours and working
eighteen; I shall arrive dead.... Write to me; be generous; take nothing
in bad part, for you don't know how, at moments, I deplore this life of
fire. But how can I jump out of the chariot?" We had occasion in
writing of Balzac in these pages more than a year ago[2] to say that his
great characteristic, far from being a passion for ideas, was a passion
for _things_. We said just now that his books are full of i