Mimesis (81 page)

The next part of our passage, in which the harmony-motif is not again mentioned, pursues Madame Vauquer’s character and previous history. It would be a mistake, however, to see in this separation of appearance on the one hand and character and previous history on the other a deliberate principle of composition; there are physical characteristics in this second part too (
l’œil vitreux
), and Balzac very frequently makes a different disposition, or mingles the physical, moral, and historical elements of a portrait indiscriminately. In our case his pursuit of her character and previous history does not serve to clarify either of them but rather to set Madame Vauquer’s darkness “in the right light,” that is, in the twilight of a petty and trivial demonism. So far as her previous history goes, the pension-mistress belongs to the category of women of fifty or thereabouts
qui ont eu des malheurs
(plural!); Balzac enlightens us not at all concerning her previous life, but instead reproduces, partly in
erlebte Rede
, the formless, whining, mendaciously colloquial chatter with which she habitually answers sympathetic inquiries. But here again the suspicious plural occurs, again avoiding particulars—her late husband had lost his money
dans les malheurs
—just as, some pages later, another suspicious widow imparts, on the subject of her husband who had been a count and a general, that he had fallen on
LES
champs de bataille
. This conforms to the vulgar demonism of Madame Vauquer’s character; she seems
bonne femme au fond
, she seems poor, but, as we are later told, she has a very tidy little fortune and she is capable of any baseness in order to improve her own situation a little—the base and vulgar narrowness of the goal of her egoism, the mixture of stupidity, slyness, and concealed vitality, again gives the impression of something repulsively spectral; again there imposes itself the comparison with a rat, or with some
other animal making a basely demonic impression on the human imagination. The second part of the description, then, is a supplement to the first; after Madame Vauquer is presented in the first as synthesizing the milieu she governs, the second deepens the impenetrability and baseness of her character, which is constrained to work itself out in this milieu.

In his entire work, as in this passage, Balzac feels his milieux, different though they are, as organic and indeed demonic unities, and seeks to convey this feeling to the reader. He not only, like Stendhal, places the human beings whose destiny he is seriously relating, in their precisely defined historical and social setting, but also conceives this connection as a necessary one: to him every milieu becomes a moral and physical atmosphere which impregnates the landscape, the dwelling, furniture, implements, clothing, physique, character, surroundings, ideas, activities, and fates of men, and at the same time the general historical situation reappears as a total atmosphere which envelops all its several milieux. It is worth noting that he did this best and most truthfully for the circle of the middle and lower Parisian bourgeoisie and for the provinces; while his representation of high society is often melodramatic, false, and even unintentionally comic. He is not free from melodramatic exaggeration elsewhere; but whereas in the middle and lower spheres this only occasionally impairs the truthfulness of the whole, he is unable to create the true atmosphere of the higher spheres—including those of the intellect.

Balzac’s atmospheric realism is a product of his period, is itself a part and a result of an atmosphere. The same intellectual attitude—namely romanticism—which first felt the atmospheric unity-of-style of earlier periods so strongly and so sensorily, which discovered the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well as the historical idiosyncrasy of foreign cultures (Spain, the Orient)—this same intellectual attitude also developed organic comprehension of the atmospheric uniqueness of its own period in all its manifold forms. Atmospheric Historism and atmospheric realism are closely connected; Michelet and Balzac are borne on the same stream. The events which occurred in France between 1789 and 1815, and their effects during the next decades, caused modern contemporaneous realism to develop first and most strongly there, and its political and cultural unity gave France, in this respect, a long start over Germany; French reality, in all its multifariousness, could be comprehended as a whole. Another romantic current which contributed, no less than did romantic penetration into the total atmosphere
of a milieu, to the development of modern realism, was the mixture of styles to which we have so often referred; this made it possible for characters of any station, with all the practical everyday complications of their lives—Julien Sorel as well as old Goriot or Madame Vauquer—to become the subject of serious literary representation.

These general considerations appear to me cogent; it is far more difficult to describe with any accuracy the intellectual attitude which dominates Balzac’s own particular manner of presentation. The statements which he himself makes on the subject are numerous and provide many clues, but they are confused and contradictory; the richer he is in ideas and inspirations, the less is he able to separate the various elements of his own attitude, to channel the influx of suggestive but vague images and comparisons into intellectual analyses, and especially to adopt a critical attitude toward the stream of his own inspiration. All his intellectual analyses, although full of isolated observations which are striking and original, come in the end to a fanciful macro-scopy which suggests his contemporary Hugo; whereas what is needed to explain his realistic art is precisely a careful separation of the currents which mingle in it.

In the
Avant-propos
to the
Comédie humaine
(published 1842) Balzac begins his explanation of his work with a comparison between the animal kingdom and human society, in which he accepts the guidance of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s theories. This biologist, under the influence of contemporary German speculative natural philosophy, had upheld the principle of typal unity in organization, that is, the idea that in the organization of plants (and animals) there is a general plan; Balzac here refers to the systems of other mystics, philosophers, and biologists (Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, Leibnitz, Buffon, Bonnet, Needham) and finally arrives at the following formulation:

Le créateur ne s’est servi que d’un seul et même patron pour tous les êtres organisés. L’animal est un principe qui prend sa forme extérieure, ou, pour parler plus exactement, les différences de sa forme, dans les milieux où il est appelé à se développer …

(The creator used but one and the same pattern for all organized creatures. The animal is a principle which takes its external form, or, to put it more precisely, the differences of its form, from the milieux in which it is called upon to evolve …)

This principle is at once transferred to human society:

La Société [with a capital, as Nature shortly before] ne faitelle pas de l’homme, suivant les milieux où son action se déploie, autant d’hommes différents qu’il y a de variétés en zoologie?

(Does not Society make of man, according to the milieux in which his activity takes places, as many different men as there are varieties in zoology?)

And then he compares the differences between a soldier, a workman, an administrative employee, an idler, a scholar, a statesman, a shopkeeper, a seaman, a poet, a pauper, a priest, with those between wolf, lion, ass, raven, shark, and so on.

Our first conclusion is that he is here attempting to establish his views of human society (typical man differentiated by his milieu) by biological analogies; the word milieu, which here appears for the first time in the sociological sense and which was to have such a successful career (Taine seems to have adopted it from Balzac), he learned from Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who for his part had transferred it from physical science to biology; now it makes its way from biology to sociology. The biologism present in Balzac’s mind, as may be deduced from the names he cites, is mystical, speculative, and vitalistic; however, the model-concept, the principle “animal” or “man,” is not taken as immanent but, so to speak, as a real Platonic idea. The various genera and species are only
formes extérieures
; furthermore, they are themselves given not as changing within the course of history but as fixed (a soldier, a workman, etc., like a lion, an ass). The particular meaning of the concept milieu, as he uses it in practice in his novels he here seems not to have fully realized. Not the word, but the thing—milieu in the social sense—existed long before him; Montesquieu unmistakably has the concept; but whereas Montesquieu gives much more consideration to natural conditions (climate, soil) than to those which spring from human history, and whereas he attempts to construe the different milieux as unchanging model-concepts to which the appropriate constitutional and legislative models can be applied, Balzac in practice remains entirely within the orbit of the historical and perpetually changing structural elements of his milieux; and no reader arrives unassisted at the idea which Balzac appears to maintain in his
Avant-propos
, that he is concerned only with the type “man” or with generic types (“soldier,” “shopkeeper”); what we see is the concrete individual figure with its own physique and its own history, sprung from the immanence of the historical, social, physical, etc. situation;
not “the soldier” but, for example, Colonel Brideau, discharged after the fall of Napoleon, ruined and leading the life of an adventurer in Issoudun (
La Rabouilleuse
).

After his bold comparison of zoological with sociological differentiation, however, Balzac attempts to bring out the distinguishing characteristics of
la Société
as against
la Nature
; he sees them above all in the far greater multifariousness of human life and human customs, as well as in the possibility—nonexistent in the animal kingdom—of changing from one species to another (“the grocer … becomes a Peer of France, and the nobleman sometimes sinks to the lowest rank of society”); furthermore, different species mate (“the wife of a merchant is sometimes worthy to be the wife of a prince …; in Society, a woman does not always happen to be the female of a male”); he also refers to dramatic conflicts in love, which seldom occur among animals, and the different degrees of intelligence in different men. The epitomizing sentence reads: “The social State has risks which Nature does not permit herself, for it is Nature plus Society.” Inaccurate and macroscopic as this passage is, badly as it suffers from the
proton pseudos
of the underlying comparison, it yet contains an instinctive historical insight (“customs, clothing, modes of speech, houses … change in accordance with civilizations”); there is much, too, of dynamism and vitalism (“if some scientists do not yet admit that Animality floods over into Humanity by an immense current of life”). The particular possibilities of comprehension between man and man are not mentioned—not even in the negative formulation that, as compared with man, the animal lacks them; on the contrary, the relative simplicity of the social and psychological life of animals is presented as an objective fact, and only at the very end is there any indication of the subjective character of such judgments: “the habits of each animal are, to our eyes at least, constantly similar at all times.”

After this transition from biology to human history, Balzac continues with a polemic against the prevailing type of historical writing and reproaches it with having long neglected the history of manners; this is the task he has set himself. He does not mention the attempts at a history of manners which had been made from the eighteenth century on (Voltaire); hence there is no analysis setting forth the distinction between his presentation of manners and that of his possible predecessors; only Petronius is named. Considering the difficulties of his task (a drama with three or four thousand characters), he feels encouraged by the example of Walter Scott’s novels; so here we are
completely within the world of romantic Historism. Here too clarity of thought is often impaired by striking and fanciful formulations; for example
faire concurrence à l’Etat-Civil
is equivocal, and the statement
le hasard est le plus grand romancier du monde
requires some explanation if it is to tally with its author’s historical attitude. But a number of important and characteristic motifs emerge successfully: above all the concept of the novel of manners as philosophical history, and, in general, Balzac’s conception (which he upholds energetically elsewhere) of his own activity as the writing of history, to which we shall later return; also his justification of all stylistic genres and levels in works of this nature; finally his design of going beyond Walter Scott by making all his novels compose a single whole, a general presentation of French society in the nineteenth century, which he here again calls a historical work.

But this does not exhaust his plan; he intends also to render a separate account of
les raisons ou la raison de ces effets sociaux
, and when he has succeeded in at least investigating
ce moteur social
, his final intention is “to meditate upon natural principles and see wherein Societies depart from or approach the eternal rule, the true, the beautiful.” We need not here discuss the fact that it was not given to him to make a successful theoretical presentation outside the frame of a narrative, that hence he could only attempt to realize his theoretical plans in the form of novels; here it is only of interest to note that the “immanent” philosophy of his novels of manners did not satisfy him and that in the passage before us this dissatisfaction, after so many biological and historical expositions, induces him to employ classical model-concepts (
la règle éternelle, le vrai, le beau
)—categories which he can no longer utilize practically in his novels.

All these motifs—biological, historical, classically moralistic—are in fact scattered through his work. He has a great fondness for biological comparisons; he speaks of physiology or zoology in connection with social phenomena, of the
anatomie du cœur humain
; in the passage commented on above he compares the effect of a social milieu to the exhalations which produce typhoid, and in another passage from
Père Goriot
he says of Rastignac that he had given himself up to the lessons and the temptations of luxury “with the ardor which seizes the calix of a female date-palm for the fecundating dusts of its nuptials.” It is needless to cite historical motifs, for the spirit of Historism with its emphasis upon ambient and individual atmospheres is the spirit of his entire work; I will, however, quote at least one of many passages
to show that historical concepts were always in his mind. The passage is from the provincial novel
La vieille Fille
; it concerns two elderly gentlemen who live in Alençon, the one a typical
ci-devant
, the other a bankrupt Revolutionary profiteer: