ART. IV. Les Euvres de M. DE BALZAC. — 1. Annette et le Criminel. 2. Le Vicaire des Ardennes. ans. 3. Physiologie du Mariage. 4. Les Derniers Chou- THE noise made by M. de Balzac and his cane seems to have subsided in Paris. The novelist, who was more prolific than Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and the cane which was as celebrated as her tomtit, seem to be both growing as unfashionable as the deceased author of the still more deceased Grand Cyrus, Clelia, and other interminable romances. We have heard of no new book by M. de Balzac since his disastrous retreat from Russia, and no later romance upon his walking-stick, the very fashion of which has passed away, than La Canne de Balzac, by a female admirer, published some dozen years ago in Paris. Perhaps he may be only diving very deep, and staying under very long, in some very remote and profound ocean, to come up all fresh and dripping again, with his hands full of pearls. At any rate, he has performed this trick more than once already, and he may be again searching for something new and startling, to awaken the public who have gone astray after Eugene Sue, George Sand, Alexander Dumas, and other strange gods. If he were an Englishman, we might think that he had "written himself out"; but a Frenchman never writes himself out, and if he writes himself down, he is sure to find some means of writing himself up again. If his eyes are out, he will scratch them in again. Balzac, moreover, has been all his life the most indomitable of Frenchmen and romancers. Since he was one-and-twenty he has been writing romances, and now, like Lear's friend Kent, he "hath years on his back exactly forty-eight"; like Cromwell, he is just one year older than his century, having been born in Tours, in Touraine, in the year 1799. Now, as he himself expresses great confidence in the "Cinquantaine," and, in fact, in the Physiologie du Mariage, distinctly fixes upon fifty-two as the most captivating, brilliant, and effective epoch of a gentleman's existence, we may suppose that he VOL. LXV.No. 136. 8 has not yet the slightest intention of abandoning the field and joining the melancholy troop of the devastés. Perhaps, then, before he blazes upon the world in some new phases, this may be a favorable moment for casting a glance at his works, or rather at his "work,' for M. de Balzac is fond of denominating his eighty volumes his "œuvre." With all his faults, Balzac is essentially an artist, and not a mechanic. It is, perhaps, a result of this very quality that he has found himself growing less popular. He has been unable to sympathize with the sudden moral movement of the French mind. The late rush into morality has been terrific in Paris. Those volatile gentlemen, the feuilletonistes, have, as it were, discovered it all at once. Morality is like the mines of Mexico to them, and they are all hammering, digging, and picking, with might and main. The sudden demand for works of an elevating, humanizing, intensely moral fabric, which has sprung up in Paris since the great success of Mr. Dickens in English literature, has been partially supplied by Eugene Sue, George Sand, and others; but Balzac has not set himself to the work. Nothing, by the way, illustrates more aptly the great fertility and versatility of the French literary mind of the present day, than this sudden change in their style of writing and thinking. The feuilletonistes, like manufacturers, watch the popular taste, and they are all at this moment working double speed, and turning off morality, and democracy, and philanthropy, and articles of that nature, by the yard, like so much mousseline de laine, because they happen just now to be popular. After publishing legions of books of the most unblushing immorality, they are all at once grown as unblushingly moral. There is a change in the fashion. Now it strikes us that Balzac has been writing out of himself all his life, working up the stuff which is in him, but that he is too idiosyncratic to fall in with this sudden revolution in literature. He has been very popular in France, but he has been little translated, and is but little known in England or America. We are not surprised at this, but upon the whole, if there is to be so large an infusion of French novels into our literature, we should rather recommend Balzac than either Sue or Sand. The writers who have been naturalized in this country are worse, because they are both socially and politically disorganizing. Balzac, on the con trary, is an artist. He is neither moral nor immoral, but a calm and profound observer of human society and human passions, and a minute, patient, and powerful delineator of scenes and characters in the world before his eyes. His readers must moralize for themselves. There is no doubt that the audacity of the modern French literature gives an author an advantage which the squeamishness of the English denies. French imaginative literature, that portion of it, for example, which may be represented by Balzac, is able to anatomize society more boldly and scientifically, because less trammelled by prudery. The strict administration of justice in the concluding portions of every English novel, where the characters are all drawn up, as on the day of judgment, in two lines, the vicious all whipped and the virtuous all married (that being considered the highest earthly reward of virtue); where, in the last chapter, a great Christmas pie is regularly served up to the meritorious, each one of whom puts in his thumb and pulls out a plum, and says, What a good boy am I while the villains look on and gnash their teeth in despair, this sort of romantic jurisprudence, with which even Scott, while he ridiculed it, was often forced to comply, has been out of date in France since the days of the Grand Cyrus. It is odd, and a good subject to be pondered upon, if we had the time and space, the striking contrast sometimes presented between the character of an age and its literature. Ninon de l'Enclos, Bussy, Maréchal de Bassompierre, would hardly be cited for their austere morality; Cardinal de Retz was not exclusively addicted to the practice of all the cardinal virtues; yet De Retz, Bassompierre, Ninon, and their friends and contemporaries, would tolerate no romances but the "severely proper" and ponderous productions of Scudéry. They order matters differently in France at the present day. It is very certain, that De Balzac has not yet, like Charles Lamb, found himself a disreputable personage. Nobody in Paris ever dreamed of his being immoral. He is, as we before observed, essentially an artist, and deals with materials which society affords him. If his pictures be dark, they are none the less truthful copies from human na If they reveal a vicious or disorderly condition of society, society, and not the artist, is reprehensible. An author is not responsible for the disorders which he depicts. In certain parts of China, where the population is redundant, we think we have heard that infanticide is considered rather an amiable foible than a crime. Pictures of such a state of society would not be necessarily immoral, and the author who should deal with such a state of things as a proper matter for his art, would not necessarily be in favor of a general introduction of infanticide into more correct countries. Balzac's pictures of society are like daguerreotypes rather than paintings. There is the same painful and indisputable resemblance, the same accurate delineation of the most minute characteristics and infinitesimal blemishes; and there is the same sombre hue and slightly distorted expression. Moreover, a casual observer might not immediately discover their extraordinary merit. Like the daguerreotypes, they must be held in a certain light, and curiously pondered, or the shifting but striking portraits will not reveal themselves to the observation. We have said, that we consider Balzac as eminently an artist, and not an artisan. It is for this reason that we have thought his books worthy of serious examination. The first romance which we ever read from his hand seized upon us with hooks of steel. It was impossible to struggle with the fascination. We felt ourselves in the power of an enchanter whom it was useless to resist. The impression made by the first was continued by every subsequent romance which we read from his pen; and although we soon became aware of some of his tricks, and soon opened our eyes to many of his foibles, yet we felt more and more convinced, that, with all his sins, we had met with a powerful, original mind, and with a consummately artistic hand. Balzac is an artist, and only an artist. In his tranquil, unimpassioned, remorseless diagnosis of moral phenomena, in his cool method of treating the morbid anatomy of the heart, in his curiously accurate dissection of the passions, in the patient and painful attention with which, stethoscope in hand, finger on pulse, eye everywhere, you see him watching every symptom, alive to every sound and every breath, and in the scientific accuracy with which he portrays the phenomena which have been the subject of his investigation, in all this calm and conscientious study of nature, he often reminds us of Goethe. Balzac, however, is only an artist. He walks through the world to observe, but he observes phenomena Goethe we have al only to furnish materials for his art. ways considered a great naturalist. His pursuit is always truth, natural truth, which he delights to track, through all its external manifestations, up to its living principles. He, too, was no moralist, but a student of universal nature, both physical and metaphysical, who watched the sprouting of a hyacinth or a passion, the combination of an alkali and an acid, and the conflict of the affections, the efflorescence of a carnation, the revolution of a people, the eruption of a volcano, all with equal attention, and classed them all as natural phenomena, each as worthy to be studied as the others. To your true physician, the development of a cancer is as beautiful as the flowering of a rose. To Goethe, all manifestations of nature were interesting, for he studied truth. He gave to the world the results of his investigations with the most scrupulous fidelity to truth, so far as he could reach it, and let consequences take care of themselves. It is for this reason, among others, that many people have discovered that he is a very immoral writer. The same persons should denounce the immorality of Professor Agassiz, because, for instance, he informed the respectable people of Boston, that, in a certain family of the Radiata, every female always marries her grandfather. The impropriety, if it be one, belongs to Nature, and not to her student. Balzac stops short of Goethe, however. He is no naturalist, except to serve the purposes of his art. His object in observing nature is to furnish himself with material in his profession. Like a painter, he will stop under a porte cochère in a shower, and sketch you a beggar's head with the most striking accuracy, not knowing whether it is to serve at some future time for Belisarius or Judas Iscariot. Take for instance, in the Histoire des Treize, the following description of Ferragus. It is impossible not to believe that it is an actual portrait from nature. "A personage leaning very carelessly against the wall opposite to M. de Maulincour, like a fantasy sketched by a skilful artist on the reverse of some canvas in his studio. It was a long, dry man, whose leaden visage betrayed a profound and icy thought. He dried up pity in the hearts of those who observed him, by an attitude full of irony and a dark glance, which announced his pretension to treat with them upon an equal footing. His face was of a dirty white, and his wrinkled skull, destitute of hair, had |