18

IN THE HÔTEL DE LA MOLE

JULIEN SOREL, the hero of Stendhal’s novel Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), an ambitious and passionate young man, son of an uneducated petty bourgeois from the Franche-Comté, is conducted by a series of circumstances from the seminary at Besançon, where he has been studying theology, to Paris and the position of secretary to a gentleman of rank, the Marquis de la Mole, whose confidence he gains. Mathilde, the Marquis’s daughter, is a girl of nineteen, witty, spoiled, imaginative, and so arrogant that her own position and circle begin to bore her. The dawning of her passion for her father’s domestique is one of Stendhal’s masterpieces and has been greatly admired. One of the preparatory scenes, in which her interest in Julien begins to awaken, is the following, from volume 2, chapter 14:

Un matin que l’abbé travaillait avec Julien, dans la bibliothèque du marquis, à l’éternel procès de Frilair:

—Monsieur, dit Julien tout à coup, dîner tous les jours avec madame la marquise, est-ce un de mes devoirs, ou est-ce une bonté que l’on a pour moi?

—C’est un honneur insigne! reprit l’abbé, scandalisé. Jamais M. N… l’académicien, qui, depuis quinze ans, fait une cour assidue, n’a pu l’obtenir pour son neveu M. Tanbeau.

—C’est pour moi, monsieur, la partie la plus pénible de mon emploi. Je m’ennuyais moins au séminaire. Je vois bâiller quelquefois jusqu’à mademoiselle de La Mole, qui pourtant doit être accoutumée à l’amabilité des amis de la maison. J’ai peur de m’endormir. De grâce, obtenez-moi la permission d’aller dîner à quarante sous dans quelque auberge obscure.

L’abbé, véritable parvenu, était fort sensible à l’honneur de dîner avec un grand seigneur. Pendant qu’il s’efforçait de faire comprendre ce sentiment par Julien, un léger bruit leur fit tourner la tête. Julien vit mademoiselle de La Mole qui écoutait. Il rougit. Elle était venue chercher un livre et avait tout entendu; elle prit quelque considération pour Julien. Celui-là n’est pas né à genoux, pensa-t-elle, comme ce vieil abbé. Dieu! qu’il est laid.

A dîner, Julien n’osait pas regarder mademoiselle de La Mole, mais elle eut la bonté de lui adresser la parole. Ce jour-là, on attendait beaucoup de monde, elle l’engagea à rester. …

(One morning while the Abbé was with Julien in the Marquis’s library, working on the interminable Frilair suit:

“Monsieur,” said Julien suddenly, “is dining with Madame la Marquise every day one of my duties, or is it a favor to me?”

“It is an extraordinary honor!” the Abbé corrected him, scandalized. “Monsieur N., the academician, who has been paying court here assiduously for fifteen years, was never able to manage it for his nephew, Monsieur Tanbeau.”

“For me, Monsieur, it is the most painful part of my position. Nothing at the seminary bored me so much. I even see Mademoiselle de la Mole yawning sometimes, yet she must be well inured to the amiabilities of the guests of this house. I am in dread of falling asleep. Do me the favor of getting me permission to eat a forty-sou dinner at some inn.”

The Abbé, a true parvenu, was extremely conscious of the honor of dining with a noble lord. While he was trying to inculcate this sentiment into Julien, a slight sound made them turn. Julien saw Mademoiselle de la Mole listening. He blushed. She had come for a book and had heard everything; she began to feel a certain esteem for Julien. He was not born on his knees, like that old Abbé, she thought. God, how ugly he is!

At dinner Julien did not dare to look at Mademoiselle de la Mole, but she condescended to speak to him. A number of guests were expected that day, she asked him to stay. …)

The scene, as I said, is designed to prepare for a passionate and extremely tragic love intrigue. Its function and its psychological value we shall not here discuss; they lie outside of our subject. What interests us in the scene is this: it would be almost incomprehensible without a most accurate and detailed knowledge of the political situation, the social stratification, and the economic circumstances of a perfectly definite historical moment, namely, that in which France found itself just before the July Revolution; accordingly, the novel bears the subtitle, Chronique de 1830. Even the boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of this noble house is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates, among its adherents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere of pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom, against which the intelligence and good will of the persons involved are powerless. In these salons the things which interest everyone—the political and religious problems of the present, and consequently most of the subjects of its literature or of that of the very recent past—could not be discussed, or at best could be discussed only in official phrases so mendacious that a man of taste and tact would rather avoid them. How different from the intellectual daring of the famous eighteenth-century salons, which, to be sure, did not dream of the dangers to their own existence which they were unleashing! Now the dangers are known, and life is governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated. As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in any public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip. In addition, they are obliged to accept as allies snobbish and corrupt people from among the newly-rich bourgeoisie, who, with the unashamed baseness of their ambition and with their fear for their illgotten wealth, completely vitiate the atmosphere of society. So much for the pervading boredom.

But Julien’s reaction, too, and the very fact that he and the former director of his seminary, the Abbé Pirard, are present at all in the house of the Marquis de la Mole, are only to be understood in terms of the actual historical moment. Julien’s passionate and imaginative nature has from his earliest youth been filled with enthusiasm for the great ideas of the Revolution and of Rousseau, for the great events of the Napoleonic period; from his earliest youth he has felt nothing but loathing and scorn for the piddling hypocrisy and the petty lying corruption of the classes in power since Napoleon’s fall. He is too imaginative, too ambitious, and too fond of power, to be satisfied with a mediocre life within the bourgeoisie, such as his friend Fouquet proposes to him. Having observed that a man of petty-bourgeois origin can attain to a situation of command only through the all-powerful Church, he has consciously and deliberately become a hypocrite; and his great talents would assure him a brilliant intellectual career, were not his real personal and political feelings, the direct passionateness of his nature, prone to burst forth at decisive moments. One such moment of self-betrayal we have in the passage before us, when Julien confides his feelings in the Marquise’s salon to the Abbé Pirard, his former teacher and protector; for the intellectual freedom to which it testifies is unthinkable without an admixture of intellectual arrogance and a sense of inner superiority hardly becoming in a young ecclesiastic and protégé of the house. (In this particular instance his frankness does him no harm; the Abbé Pirard is his friend, and upon Mathilde, who happens to overhear him, his words make an entirely different impression from that which he must expect and fear.) The Abbé is here described as a true parvenu, who knows how highly the honor of sitting at a great man’s table should be esteemed and hence disapproves of Julien’s remarks; as another motive for the Abbé’s disapproval Stendhal could have cited the fact that uncritical submission to the evil of this world, in full consciousness that it is evil, is a typical attitude for strict Jansenists; and the Abbé Pirard is a Jansenist. We know from the previous part of the novel that as director of the seminary at Besançon he had had to endure much persecution and much chicanery on account of his Jansenism and his strict piety which no intrigues could touch; for the clergy of the province were under the influence of the Jesuits. When the Marquis de la Mole’s most powerful opponent, the Abbé de Frilair, a vicar-general to the bishop, had brought a suit against him, the Marquis had made the Abbé Pirard his confidant and had thus learned to value his intelligence and uprightness; so that finally, to free him from his untenable position at Besançon, the Marquis had procured him a benefice in Paris and somewhat later had taken the Abbé’s favorite pupil, Julien Sorel, into his household as private secretary.

The characters, attitudes, and relationships of the dramatis personae, then, are very closely connected with contemporary historical circumstances; contemporary political and social conditions are woven into the action in a manner more detailed and more real than had been exhibited in any earlier novel, and indeed in any works of literary art except those expressly purporting to be politico-satirical tracts. So logically and systematically to situate the tragically conceived life of a man of low social position (as here that of Julien Sorel) within the most concrete kind of contemporary history and to develop it therefrom—this is an entirely new and highly significant phenomenon. The other circles in which Julien Sorel moves—his father’s family, the house of the mayor of Verrières, M. de Rênal, the seminary at Besançon—are sociologically defined in conformity with the historical moment with the same penetration as is the La Mole household; and not one of the minor characters—the old priest Chélan, for example, or the director of the dépôt de mendicité, Valenod—would be conceivable outside the particular historical situation of the Restoration period, in the manner in which they are set before us. The same laying of a contemporary foundation for events is to be found in Stendhal’s other novels—still incomplete and too narrowly circumscribed in Armance, but fully developed in the later works: in the Chartreuse de Parme (which, however, since its setting is a place not yet greatly affected by modern development, sometimes gives the effect of being a historical novel), as also in Lucien Leuwen, a novel of the Louis Philippe period, which Stendhal left unfinished. In the latter, indeed, in the form in which it has come down to us, the element of current history and politics is too heavily emphasized: it is not always wholly integrated into the course of the action and is set forth in far too great detail in proportion to the principal theme; but perhaps in a final revision Stendhal would have achieved an organic articulation of the whole. Finally, his autobiographical works, despite the capricious and erratic “egotism” of their style and manner, are likewise far more closely, essentially, and concretely connected with the politics, sociology, and economics of the period than are, for example, the corresponding works of Rousseau or Goethe; one feels that the great events of contemporary history affected Stendhal much more directly than they did the other two; Rousseau did not live to see them, and Goethe had managed to keep aloof from them.

To have stated this is also to have stated what circumstance it was which, at that particular moment and in a man of that particular period, gave rise to modern tragic realism based on the contemporary; it was the first of the great movements of modern times in which large masses of men consciously took part—the French Revolution with all the consequent convulsions which spread from it over Europe. From the Reformation movement, which was no less powerful and which aroused the masses no less, it is distinguished by the much faster tempo of its spread, its mass effects, and the changes which it produced in practical daily life within a comparatively extensive territory; for the progress then achieved in transportation and communication, together with the spread of elementary education resulting from the trends of the Revolution itself, made it possible to mobilize the people far more rapidly and in a far more unified direction; everyone was reached by the same ideas and events far more quickly, more consciously, and more uniformly. For Europe there began that process of temporal concentration, both of historical events themselves and of everyone’s knowledge of them, which has since made tremendous progress and which not only permits us to prophesy a unification of human life throughout the world but has in a certain sense already achieved it. Such a development abrogates or renders powerless the entire social structure of orders and categories previously held valid; the tempo of the changes demands a perpetual and extremely difficult effort toward inner adaptation and produces intense concomitant crises. He who would account to himself for his real life and his place in human society is obliged to do so upon a far wider practical foundation and in a far larger context than before, and to be continually conscious that the social base upon which he lives is not constant for a moment but is perpetually changing through convulsions of the most various kinds.

We may ask ourselves how it came about that modern consciousness of reality began to find literary form for the first time precisely in Henri Beyle of Grenoble. Beyle-Stendhal was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and, despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity. There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuation between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject. But, such as he was, he offered himself to the moment; circumstances seized him, tossed him about, and laid upon him a unique and unexpected destiny; they formed him so that he was compelled to come to terms with reality in a way which no one had done before him.

When the Revolution broke out Stendhal was a boy of six; when he left his native city of Grenoble and his reactionary, solidly bourgeois family, who though glumly sulking at the new situation were still very wealthy, and went to Paris, he was sixteen. He arrived there immediately after Napoleon’s coup d’état; one of his relatives, Pierre Daru, was an influential adherent of the First Consul; after some hesitations and interruptions, Stendhal made a brilliant career in the Napoleonic administration. He saw Europe on Napoleon’s expeditions; he grew to be a man, and indeed an extremely elegant man of the world; he also became, it appears, a useful administrative official and a reliable, cold-blooded organizer who did not lose his calm even in danger. When Napoleon’s fall threw Stendhal out of the saddle, he was in his thirty-second year. The first, active, successful, and brilliant part of his career was over. Thenceforth he has no profession and no place claims him. He can go where he pleases, so long as he has money enough and so long as the suspicious officials of the post-Napoleonic period have no objection to his sojourns. But his financial circumstances gradually become worse; in 1821 he is exiled from Milan, where he had first settled down, by Metternich’s police; he goes to Paris, and there he lives for another nine years, without a profession, alone, and with very slender means. After the July Revolution his friends get him a post in the diplomatic service; since the Austrians refuse him an exequatur for Trieste, he has to go as consul to the little port of Cività Vecchia; it is a dreary place to live, and there are those who try to get him into trouble if he prolongs his visits to Rome unduly; to be sure, he is allowed to spend a few years in Paris on leave—so long, that is, as one of his protectors is Minister of Foreign Affairs. Finally he falls seriously ill in Cività Vecchia and is given another leave in Paris; he dies there in 1842, smitten by apoplexy in the street, not yet sixty. This is the second half of his life; during this period, he acquires the reputation of being a witty, eccentric, politically and morally unreliable man; during this period, he begins to write. He writes first on music, on Italy and Italian art, on love; it is not until he is forty-three and is in Paris during the first flowering of the Romantic movement (to which he contributed in his way) that he publishes his first novel.

From this sketch of his life it should appear that he first reached the point of accounting for himself, and the point of realistic writing, when he was seeking a haven in his “storm-tossed boat,” and discovered that, for his boat, there was no fit and safe haven; when, though in no sense weary or discouraged, yet already a man of forty, whose early and successful career lay far behind him, alone and comparatively poor, he became aware, with all the sting of that knowledge, that he belonged nowhere. For the first time, the social world around him became a problem; his feeling that he was different from other men, until now borne easily and proudly, doubtless now first became the predominant concern of his consciousness and finally the recurring theme of his literary activity. Stendhal’s realistic writing grew out of his discomfort in the post-Napoleonic world and his consciousness that he did not belong to it and had no place in it. Discomfort in the given world and inability to become part of it is, to be sure, characteristic of Rousseauan romanticism and it is probable that Stendhal had something of that even in his youth; there is something of it in his congenital disposition, and the course of his youth can only have strengthened such tendencies, which, so to speak, harmonized with the tenor of life of his generation; on the other hand, he did not write his recollections of his youth, the Vie de Henri Brulard, until he was in his thirties, and we must allow for the possibility that, from the viewpoint of his later development, from the viewpoint of 1832, he overstressed such motifs of individualistic isolation. It is, in any case, certain that the motifs and expressions of his isolation and his problematic relation to society are wholly different from the corresponding phenomena in Rousseau and his early romantic disciples.

Stendhal, in contrast to Rousseau, had a bent for practical affairs and the requisite ability; he aspired to sensual enjoyment of life as given; he did not withdraw from practical reality from the outset, did not entirely condemn it from the outset—instead he attempted, and successfully at first, to master it. Material success and material enjoyments were desirable to him; he admires energy and the ability to master life, and even his cherished dreams (le silence du bonheur) are more sensual, more concrete, more dependent upon human society and human creations (Cimarosa, Mozart, Shakespeare, Italian art) than those of the Promeneur Solitaire. Not until success and pleasure began to slip away from him, not until practical circumstances threatened to cut the ground from under his feet, did the society of his time become a problem and a subject to him. Rousseau did not find himself at home in the social world he encountered, which did not appreciably change during his lifetime; he rose in it without thereby becoming happier or more reconciled to it, while it appeared to remain unchanged. Stendhal lived while one earthquake after another shook the foundations of society; one of the earthquakes jarred him out of the everyday course of life prescribed for men of his station, flung him, like many of his contemporaries, into previously inconceivable adventures, events, responsibilities, tests of himself, and experiences of freedom and power; another flung him back into a new everyday which he thought more boring, more stupid, and less attractive than the old; the most interesting thing about it was that it too gave no promise of enduring; new upheavals were in the air, and indeed broke out here and there even though not with the power of the first.

Because Stendhal’s interest arose out of the experiences of his own life, it was held not by the structure of a possible society but by the changes in the society actually given. Temporal perspective is a factor of which he never loses sight, the concept of incessantly changing forms and manners of life dominates his thoughts—the more so as it holds a hope for him: In 1880 or 1930 I shall find readers who understand me! I will cite a few examples. When he speaks of La Bruyère’s esprit (Henri Brulard, chapter 30), it is apparent to him that this type of formative endeavor of the intellect has lost in validity since 1789: L’esprit, si délicieux pour qui le sent, ne dure pas. Comme une pêche passe en quelques jours, l’esprit passe en deux cents ans, et bien plus vite, s’il y a révolution dans les rapports que les classes d’une société ont entre elles. The Souvenirs d’égotisme contain an abundance of observations (for the most part truly prophetic) based on temporal perspective. He foresees (chapter 7, near the end) that “at the time when this chatter is read” it will have become a commonplace to make the ruling classes responsible for the crimes of thieves and murderers; he fears, at the beginning of chapter 9, that all his bold utterances, which he dares put forth only with fear and trembling, will have become platitudes ten years after his death, if heaven grants him a decent allowance of life, say eighty or ninety years; in the next chapter he speaks of one of his friends who pays an unusually high price for the favors of an honnête femme du peuple, and adds in explanation: cinq cents francs en 1832, c’est comme mille en 1872—that is, forty years after the time at which he is writing and thirty after his death.

It would be possible to quote many more passages of the same general import. But it is unnecessary, for the element of time-perspective is apparent everywhere in the presentation itself. In his realistic writings, Stendhal everywhere deals with the reality which presents itself to him: Je prends au hasard ce qui se trouve sur ma route, he says not far from the passage just quoted: in his effort to understand men, he does not pick and choose among them; this method, as Montaigne knew, is the best for eliminating the arbitrariness of one’s own constructions, and for surrendering oneself to reality as given. But the reality which he encountered was so constituted that, without permanent reference to the immense changes of the immediate past and without a premonitory searching after the imminent changes of the future, one could not represent it; all the human figures and all the human events in his work appear upon a ground politically and socially disturbed. To bring the significance of this graphically before us, we have but to compare him with the best-known realistic writers of the pre-Revolutionary eighteenth century: with Lesage or the Abbé Prévost, with the preeminent Henry Fielding or with Goldsmith; we have but to consider how much more accurately and profoundly he enters into given contemporary reality than Voltaire, Rousseau, and the youthful realistic work of Schiller, and upon how much broader a basis than Saint-Simon, whom, though in the very incomplete edition then available, he read assiduously. Insofar as the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving—as is the case today in any novel or film—Stendhal is its founder.

However, the attitude from which Stendhal apprehends the world of event and attempts to reproduce it with all its interconnections is as yet hardly influenced by Historism—which, though it penetrated into France in his time, had little effect upon him. For that very reason we have referred in the last few pages to time-perspective and to a constant consciousness of changes and cataclysms, but not to a comprehension of evolutions. It is not too easy to describe Stendhal’s inner attitude toward social phenomena. It is his aim to seize their every nuance; he most accurately represents the particular structure of any given milieu, he has no preconceived rationalistic system concerning the general factors which determine social life, nor any pattern-concept of how the ideal society ought to look; but in particulars his representation of events is oriented, wholly in the spirit of classic ethical psychology, upon an analyse du cœur humain, not upon discovery or premonitions of historical forces; we find rationalistic, empirical, sensual motifs in him, but hardly those of romantic Historism. Absolutism, religion and the Church, the privileges of rank, he regards very much as would an average protagonist of the Enlightenment, that is as a web of superstition, deceit, and intrigue; in general, artfully contrived intrigue (together with passion) plays a decisive role in his plot construction, while the historical forces which are the basis of it hardly appear. Naturally all this can be explained by his political viewpoint, which was democratic-republican; this alone sufficed to render him immune to romantic Historism; besides which the emphatic manner of such writers as Chateaubriand displeased him in the extreme. On the other hand, he treats even the classes of society which, according to his views, should be closest to him, extremely critically and without a trace of the emotional values which romanticism attached to the word people. The practically active bourgeoisie with its respectable money-making, inspires him with unconquerable boredom, he shudders at the vertu républicaine of the United States, and despite his ostensible lack of sentimentality he regrets the fall of the social culture of the ancien régime. Ma foi, l’esprit manque, he writes in chapter 30 of Henri Brulard, chacun réserve toutes ses forces pour un métier qui lui donne un rang dans le monde. No longer is birth or intelligence or the self-cultivation of the honnête homme the deciding factor—it is ability in some profession. This is no world in which Stendhal-Dominique can live and breathe. Of course, like his heroes, he too can work and work efficiently, when that is what is called for. But how can one take anything like practical professional work seriously in the long run! Love, music, passion, intrigue, heroism—these are the things that make life worthwhile. …

Stendhal is an aristocratic son of the ancien régime grande bourgeoisie, he will and can be no nineteenth-century bourgeois. He says so himself time and again: My views were Republican even in my youth but my family handed down their aristocratic instincts to me (Brulard, ch. 14); since the Revolution theater audiences have become stupid (Brulard, ch. 22); I was a liberal myself (in 1821), and yet I found the liberals outrageusement niais (Souvenirs d’égotisme, ch. 6); to converse with a gros marchand de province makes me dull and unhappy all day (Egotisme, ch. 7 and passim)—these and similar remarks, which sometimes also refer to his physical constitution (La nature m’a donné les nerfs délicats et la peau sensible d’une femme, Brulard, ch. 32), occur plentifully. Sometimes he has pronounced accesses of socialism: in 1811, he writes, energy was to be found only in the class qui est en lutte avec les vrais besoins (Brulard, ch. 2). But he finds the smell and the noise of the masses unendurable, and in his books, outspokenly realistic though they are in other respects, we find no “people,” either in the romantic “folk” sense or in the socialist sense—only petty bourgeois, and occasional accessory figures such as soldiers, domestic servants, and coffee-house mademoiselles. Finally, he sees the individual man far less as the product of his historical situation and as taking part in it, than as an atom within it; a man seems to have been thrown almost by chance into the milieu in which he lives; it is a resistance with which he can deal more or less successfully, not really a culture-medium with which he is organically connected. In addition, Stendhal’s conception of mankind is on the whole preponderantly materialistic and sensualistic; an excellent illustration of this occurs in Henri Brulard (ch. 26): J’appelle caractère d’un homme sa manière habituelle d’aller à la chasse du bonheur, en termes plus claires, mais moins qualificatifs, l’ensemble de ses habitudes morales. But in Stendhal, happiness, even though highly organized human beings can find it only in the mind, in art, passion, or fame, always has a far more sensory and earthy coloring than in the romanticists. His aversion to philistine efficiency, to the type of bourgeois that was coming into existence, could be romantic too. But a romantic would hardly conclude a passage on his distaste for money-making with the words: J’ai eu le rare plaisir de faire toute ma vie à peu près ce qui me plaisait (Brulard, ch. 32). His conception of esprit and of freedom is still entirely that of the pre-Revolutionary eighteenth century, although it is only with effort and a little spasmodically that he succeeds in realizing it in his own person. For freedom he has to pay the price of poverty and loneliness and his esprit easily becomes paradox, bitter and wounding: une gaité qui fait peur (Brulard, ch. 6). His esprit no longer has the self-assurance of the Voltaire period; he manages neither his social life nor that particularly important part of it, his sexual relations, with the easy mastery of a gentleman of rank of the ancien régime; he even goes so far as to say that he cultivated esprit only to conceal his passion for a woman whom he did not possess—cette peur, mille fois répétée, a été, dans le fait, le principe dirigeant de ma vie pendant dix ans (Égotisme, ch. 1). Such traits make him appear a man born too late who tries in vain to realize the form of life of a past period; other elements of his character, the merciless objectivity of his realistic power, his courageous assertion of his personality against the triviality of the rising juste milieu, and much more, show him as the forerunner of certain later intellectual modes and forms of life; but he always feels and experiences the reality of his period as a resistance. That very thing makes his realism (though it proceeded, if at all, to only a very slight degree from a loving genetic comprehension of evolutions—that is, from the historistic attitude) so energetic and so closely connected with his own existence: the realism of this cheval ombrageux is a product of his fight for self-assertion. And this explains the fact that the stylistic level of his great realistic novels is much closer to the old great and heroic concept of tragedy than is that of most later realists—Julien Sorel is much more a “hero” than the characters of Balzac, to say nothing of Flaubert.

That the rule of style promulgated by classical aesthetics which excluded any material realism from serious tragic works was already giving way in the eighteenth century is well known; we have discussed the matter in the two preceding chapters. Even in France the relaxation of this rule can be observed as early as the first half of the eighteenth century; during the second half, it was Diderot particularly who propagated a more intermediate level of style both in theory and in practice, but he did not pass beyond the boundaries of the bourgeois and the pathetic. In his novels, especially in the Neveu de Rameau, characters from everyday life and of intermediate if not low station are portrayed with a certain seriousness; but the seriousness is more reminiscent of the moralistic and satirical attitudes of the Enlightenment than of nineteenth-century realism. In the figure and the work of Rousseau there is unmistakably a germ of the later evolution. Rousseau, as Meinecke says in his book on Historism (2, 390), was able “even though he did not attain to complete historical thinking, to help in awakening the new sense of the individual merely through the revelation of his own unique individuality.” Meinecke is here speaking of historical thinking; but a corresponding statement may be made in respect to realism. Rousseau is not properly realistic; to his material—especially when it is his own life—he brings such a strongly apologetic and ethico-critical interest, his judgment of events is so influenced by his principles of natural law, that the reality of the social world does not become for him an immediate subject; yet the example of the Confessions, which attempts to represent his own existence in its true relation to contemporary life, is important as a stylistic model for writers who had more sense of reality as given than he. Perhaps even more important in its indirect influence upon serious realism is his politicizing of the idyllic concept of Nature. This created a wish-image for the design of life which, as we know, exercised an immense power of suggestion and which, it was believed, could be directly realized; the wish-image soon showed itself to be in absolute opposition to the established historical reality, and the contrast grew stronger and more tragic the more apparent it became that the realization of the wish-image was miscarrying. Thus practical historical reality became a problem in a way hitherto unknown—far more concretely and far more immediately.

In the first decades after Rousseau’s death, in French pre-romanticism, the effect of that immense disillusionment was, to be sure, quite the opposite: it showed itself, among the most important writers, in a tendency to flee from contemporary reality. The Revolution, the Empire, and even the Restoration are poor in realistic literary works. The heroes of pre-romantic novels betray a sometimes almost morbid aversion to entering into contemporary life. The contradiction between the natural, which he desired, and the historically based reality which he encountered, had already become tragic for Rousseau; but the very contradiction had roused him to do battle for the natural. He was no longer alive when the Revolution and Napoleon created a situation which, though new, was, in his sense of the word, no more “natural” but instead again entangled historically. The next generation, deeply influenced by his ideas and hopes, experienced the victorious resistance of the real and the historical, and it was especially those who had fallen most deeply under Rousseau’s fascination, who found themselves not at home in the new world which had utterly destroyed their hopes. They entered into opposition to it or they turned away from it. Of Rousseau they carried on only the inward rift, the tendency to flee from society, the need to retire and to be alone; the other side of Rousseau’s nature, the revolutionary and fighting side, they had lost. The outward circumstances which destroyed the unity of intellectual life, and the dominating influence of literature in France, also contributed to this development; from the outbreak of the Revolution to the fall of Napoleon there is hardly a literary work of any consequence which did not exhibit symptoms of this flight from contemporary reality, and such symptoms are still very prevalent among the romantic groups after 1820. They appear most purely and most completely in Sénancour. But in its very negativeness the attitude of the majority of pre-romantics to the historical reality of their time is far more seriously problematic than is the attitude of the society of the Enlightenment. The Rousseauist movement and the great disillusionment it underwent was a prerequisite for the rise of the modern conception of reality. Rousseau, by passionately contrasting the natural condition of man with the existing reality of life determined by history, made the latter a practical problem; now for the first time the eighteenth-century style of historically unproblematic and unmoved presentation of life became valueless.

Romanticism, which had taken shape much earlier in Germany and England, and whose historical and individualistic trends had been long in preparation in France, reached its full development after 1820; and, as we know, it was precisely the principle of a mixture of styles which Victor Hugo and his friends made the slogan of their movement; in that principle the contrast to the classical treatment of subjects and the classical literary language stood out most obviously. Yet in Hugo’s formula there is something too pointedly antithetical; for him it is a matter of mixing the sublime and the grotesque. These are both extremes of style which give no consideration to reality. And in practice he did not aim at understandingly bestowing form upon reality as given; rather, in dealing both with historical and contemporary subjects, he elaborates the stylistic poles of the sublime and the grotesque, or other ethical and aesthetic antitheses, to the utmost, so that they clash; in this way very strong effects are produced, for Hugo’s command of expression is powerful and suggestive; but the effects are improbable and, as a reflection of human life, untrue.

Another writer of the romantic generation, Balzac, who had as great a creative gift and far more closeness to reality, seized upon the representation of contemporary life as his own particular task and, together with Stendhal, can be regarded as the creator of modern realism. He was sixteen years younger than Stendhal, yet his first characteristic novels appeared at almost the same time as Stendhal’s, that is, about 1830. To exemplify his method of presentation we shall first give his portrait of the pension-mistress Madame Vauquer at the beginning of Le Père Goriot (1834). It is preceded by a very detailed description of the quarter in which the pension is located, of the house itself, of the two rooms on the ground floor; all this produces an intense impression of cheerless poverty, shabbiness, and dilapidation, and with the physical description the moral atmosphere is suggested. After the furniture of the dining room is described, the mistress of the establishment herself finally appears:

Cette pièce est dans tout son lustre au moment où, vers sept heures du matin, le chat de Mme Vauquer précède sa maîtresse, saute sur les buffets, y flaire le lait que contiennent plusieurs jattes couvertes d’assiettes et fait entendre son ronron matinal. Bientôt la veuve se montre, attifée de son bonnet de tulle sous lequel pend un tour de faux cheveux mal mis; elle marche en traînassant ses pantoufles grimacées. Sa face vieillotte, grassouillette, du milieu de laquelle sort un nez à bec de perroquet; ses petites mains potelées, sa personne dodue comme un rat d’église, son corsage trop plein et qui flotte, sont en harmonie avec cette salle où suinte le malheur, où s’est blottie la spéculation, et dont Mme Vauquer respire l’air chaudement fétide sans en être écœurée. Sa figure fraîche comme une première gelée d’automne, ses yeux ridés, dont l’expression passe du sourire prescrit aux danseuses à l’amer renfrognement de l’escompteur, enfin toute sa personne explique la pension, comme la pension implique sa personne. Le bagne ne va pas sans l’argousin, vous n’imagineriez pas l’un sans l’autre. L’embonpoint blafard de cette petite femme est le produit de cette vie, comme le typhus est la conséquence des exhalaisons d’un hôpital. Son jupon de laine tricotée, qui dépasse sa première jupe faite avec une vieille robe, et dont la ouate s’échappe par les fentes de l’étoife lézardée, résume le salon, la salle à manger, le jardinet, annonce la cuisine et fait pressentir les pensionnaires. Quand elle est là, ce spectacle est complet. Agée d’environ cinquante ans, Mme Vauquer ressemble à toutes les femmes qui ont eu des malheurs. Elle a l’œil vitreux, l’air innocent d’une entremetteuse qui va se gendarmer pour se faire payer plus cher, mais d’ailleurs prête à tout pour adoucir son sort, à livrer Georges ou Pichegru, si Georges ou Pichegru étaient encore à livrer. Néanmoins elle est bonne femme au fond, disent les pensionnaires, qui la croient sans fortune en l’entendant geindre et tousser comme eux. Qu’avait été M. Vauquer? Elle ne s’expliquait jamais sur le défunt. Comment avait-il perdu sa fortune? “Dans les malheurs,” répondait-elle. Il s’était mal conduit envers elle, ne lui avait laissé que les yeux pour pleurer, cette maison pour vivre, et le droit de ne compatir à aucune infortune, parce que, disait-elle, elle avait souffert tout ce qu’il est possible de souffrir.

(The room is at its brilliant best when, about seven in the morning, Madame Vauquer’s cat enters before its mistress, jumps up on the buffet, sniffs at the milk which stands there in a number of bowls covered over with plates, and emits its matutinal purring. Presently the widow appears, got up in her tulle bonnet, from beneath which hangs an ill-attached twist of false hair; as she walks, her wrinkled slippers drag. Her oldish, fattish face, from the middle of which juts a parrot-beak nose, her small, plump hands, her figure as well filled out as a churchwarden’s, her loose, floppy bodice, are in harmony with the room, whose walls ooze misfortune, where speculation cowers, and whose warm and fetid air Madame Vauquer breathes without nausea. Her face, as chilly as a first fall frost, her wrinkled eyes, whose expression changes from the obligatory smile of a ballet-girl to the sour scowl of a sharper, her whole person, in short, explains the pension, as the pension implies her person. A prison requires a warder, you could not imagine the one without the other. The short-statured woman’s blowsy embonpoint is the product of the life here, as typhoid is the consequence of the exhalations of a hospital. Her knitted wool petticoat, which is longer than her outer skirt (made of an old dress), and whose wadding is escaping by the gaps in the splitting material, sums up the drawing-room, the dining room, the little garden, announces the cooking and gives an inkling of the boarders. When she is there, the spectacle is complete. Some fifty years of age, Madame Vauquer resembles all women who have had troubles. She has the glassy eye, the innocent expression of a bawd who is about to make a scene in order to get a higher price, but who is at the same time ready for anything in order to soften her lot, to hand over Georges or Pichegru if Georges or Pichegru were still to be handed over. Nevertheless, she is a good woman at heart, the boarders say, and they believe, because they hear her moan and cough like themselves, that she has no money. What had Monsieur Vauquer been? She never gave any information about the deceased. How had he lost his money? “In troubles,” she answered. He had acted badly toward her, had left her nothing but her eyes to weep with, this house for livelihood, and the right to be indulgent toward no manner of misfortune because, she said, she had suffered everything it is possible to suffer.)

The portrait of the hostess is connected with her morning appearance in the dining-room; she appears in this center of her influence, the cat jumping onto the buffet before her gives a touch of witchcraft to her entrance; and then Balzac immediately begins a detailed description of her person. The description is controlled by a leading motif, which is several times repeated—the motif of the harmony between Madame Vauquer’s person on the one hand and the room in which she is present, the pension which she directs, and the life which she leads, on the other; in short, the harmony between her person and what we (and Balzac too, occasionally) call her milieu. This harmony is most impressively suggested: first through the dilapidation, the greasiness, the dirtiness and warmth, the sexual repulsiveness of her body and her clothes—all this being in harmony with the air of the room which she breathes without distaste; a little later, in connection with her face and its expressions, the motif is conceived somewhat more ethically, and with even greater emphasis upon the complementary relation between person and milieu: sa personne explique la pension, comme la pension implique sa personne; with this goes the comparison to a prison. There follows a more medical concept, in which Madame Vauquer’s embonpoint blafard as a symptom of her life is compared to typhoid as the result of the exhalations in a hospital. Finally her petticoat is appraised as a sort of synthesis of the various rooms of the pension, as a foretaste of the products of the kitchen, and as a premonition of the guests; for a moment her petticoat becomes a symbol of the milieu, and then the whole is epitomized again in the sentence: Quand elle est là, ce spectacle est complet—one need, then, wait no longer for the breakfast and the guests, they are all included in her person. There seems to be no deliberate order for the various repetitions of the harmony-motif, nor does Balzac appear to have followed a systematic plan in describing Madame Vauquer’s appearance; the series of things mentioned—headdress, false hair, slippers, face, hands, body, the face again, eyes, corpulence, petticoat—reveal no trace of composition; nor is there any separation of body and clothing, of physical characteristics and moral significance. The entire description, so far as we have yet considered it, is directed to the mimetic imagination of the reader, to his memory-pictures of similar persons and similar milieux which he may have seen; the thesis of the “stylistic unity” of the milieu, which includes the people in it, is not established rationally but is presented as a striking and immediately apprehended state of things, purely suggestively, without any proof. In such a statement as the following, ses petites mains potelées, sa personne dodue comme un rat d’église … sont en harmonie avec cette salle où suinte le malheur … et dont Mme Vauquer respire l’air chaudement fétide … the harmony-thesis, with all that it includes (sociological and ethical significance of furniture and clothing, the deducibility of the as yet unseen elements of the milieu from those already given, etc.) is presupposed; the mention of prison and typhoid too are merely suggestive comparisons, not proofs nor even beginnings of proofs. The lack of order and disregard for the rational in the text are consequences of the haste with which Balzac worked, but they are nevertheless no mere accident, for his haste is itself in large part a consequence of his obsession with suggestive pictures. The motif of the unity of a milieu has taken hold of him so powerfully that the things and the persons composing a milieu often acquire for him a sort of second significance which, though different from that which reason can comprehend, is far more essential—a significance which can best be defined by the adjective demonic. In the dining-room, with its furniture which, worn and shabby though it be, is perfectly harmless to a reason uninfluenced by imagination, “misfortune oozes, speculation cowers.” In this trivial everyday scene allegorical witches lie hidden, and instead of the plump sloppily dressed widow one momentarily sees a rat appear. What confronts us, then, is the unity of a particular milieu, felt as a total concept of a demonic-organic nature and presented entirely by suggestive and sensory means.

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:

Les époques déteignent sur les hommes qui les traversent. Ces deux personnages prouvaient la vérité de cet axiome par l’opposition des teintes historiques empreintes dans leurs physionomies, dans leurs discours, dans leurs idées et leurs coutumes.

(Periods rub off on the men who pass through them. These two personages proved the truth of this axiom by the contrast in the historical coloring imprinted upon their physiognomies, their talk, their ideas, and their clothes.)

And in another passage from the same novel, in reference to a house in Alençon, he speaks of the archétype which it represents; here we have not the archetype of a nonhistorical abstraction but that of the maisons bourgeoises of a large part of France; the house, whose piquant local character he has previously described, deserves its place in the novel all the more, he says, qu’il explique des mœurs et représente des idées. Despite many obscurities and exaggerations, biological and historical elements are successfully combined in Balzac’s work because they are both consonant with its romantic-dynamic character, which occasionally passes over into the romantic-magical and the demonic; in both cases one feels the operation of irrational “forces.” In contrast, the classically moralistic element very often gives the impression of being a foreign body. It finds expression more especially in Balzac’s tendency to formulate generalized apophthegms of a moral cast. They are sometimes witty as individual observations, but for the most part they are far too generalized; sometimes too they are not even witty; and when they develop into long disquisitions, they are often—to use the language of the vulgar—plain “tripe.” I will quote some brief moralizing dicta which occur in Père Goriot:

Le bonheur est la poésie des femmes comme la toilette en est le fard.—(La science et l’amour…) sont des asymptotes qui ne peuvent jamais se rejoindre.—S’il est un sentiment inné dans le cœur de l’homme, n’est-ce pas l’orgueil de la protection exercé à tout moment en faveur d’un être faible?—Quand on connaît Paris, on ne croit à rien de ce qui s’y dit, et l’on ne dit rien de ce qui s’y fait.—Un sentiment, n’est-ce pas le monde dans une pensée?

(Happiness is the poetry of women as get-up is their rouge.—[Science and love …] are asymptotes which can never meet.—If there is a sentiment innate in the heart of man, is it not pride in protection perpetually exercised in behalf of a weak creature?—When one knows Paris, one believes nothing that is told there and tells nothing that is done there.—Is not a sentiment a world in a thought?)

At best one can say of such apophthegms that they do not deserve the honor bestowed upon them—that of being erected into generalizations. They are aperçus produced by the momentary situation, sometimes extremely cogent, sometimes absurd, not always in good taste. Balzac aspires to be a classical moralist, at times he even echoes La Bruyère (e.g., in a passage from Père Goriot where the physical and psychological effects of the possession of money are described in connection with the remittance Rastignac receives from his family). But this suits neither his style nor his temperament. His best formulations come to him in the midst of narrative, when he is not thinking about moralizing—for example when in La vieille Fille he says of Mademoiselle Cormon, directly out of the momentary situation: Honteuse elle-même, elle ne devinait pas la honte d’autrui.

On the subject of his plan for the entire work, which gradually took shape in him, he has other interesting statements, particularly from the period when he finally saw it whole—in his letters of ca. 1834. In this self-interpretation three motifs are especially to be remarked; all three occur together in a letter to the Countess Hanska (Lettres à l’Etrangère, Paris 1899, letter of Oct. 26, 1834, pp. 200-206), where (p. 205) we find:

Les Etudes de Moeurs représenteront tous les effets sociaux sans que ni une situation de la vie, ni une physionomie, ni un caractère d’homme ou de femme, ni une manière de vivre, ni une profession, ni une zone sociale, ni un pays français, ni quoi que ce soit de l’enfance, de la vieillesse, de l’âge mûr, de la politique, de la justice, de la guerre ait été oublié.

Cela posé, l’histoire du cœur humain tracée fil à fil, l’histoire sociale faite dans toutes ses parties, voilà la base. Ce ne seront pas des faits imaginaires; ce sera ce qui se passe partout.

(The Studies of Manners will represent all social effects, without forgetting a single situation in life, a physiognomy, a man’s or woman’s character, a way of life, a profession, a social zone, a part of France, or anything of childhood, old age, maturity, politics, law, war.

This established, the history of the human heart traced thread by thread, social history set down in all its parts—there is the foundation. It will not be imaginary facts; it will be what happens everywhere.)

Of the three motifs to which I have referred, two are immediately apparent; first, the universality of his plan, his concept of his work as an encyclopedia of life; no part of life is to be omitted. Second, the element of random reality—ce qui se passe partout. The third motif lies in the word histoire. This histoire du cœur humain or histoire sociale is not a matter of “history” in the usual sense—not of scientific investigation of transactions which have already occurred, but of comparatively free invention; not, in short, of history but of fiction; is not, above all, a matter of the past but of the contemporary present, reaching back at most only a few years or a few decades. If Balzac describes his Études de Mœurs au dix-neuvième siècle as history (just as Stendhal had already given his novel Le Rouge et le Noir the subtitle Chronique du dix-neuvième siècle), this means, first, that he regards his creative and artistic activity as equivalent to an activity of a historical-interpretative and even historical-philosophical nature, as his Avant-propos in itself makes it possible to deduce; secondly, that he conceives the present as history—the present is something in the process of resulting from history. And in practice his people and his atmospheres, contemporary as they may be, are always represented as phenomena sprung from historical events and forces; one has but to read over, say, the account of the origin of Grandet’s wealth (Eugénie Grandet), or that of Du Bousquier’s life (La vieille Fille) or old Goriot’s, to be certain of this. Nothing of the sort so conscious and so detailed is to be found before the appearance of Stendhal and Balzac, and the latter far outdoes the former in organically connecting man and history. Such a conception and execution are thoroughly historistic.

We will now return to the second motif—ce ne seront pas des faits imaginaires; ce sera ce qui se passe partout. What is expressed here is that the source of his invention is not free imagination but real life, as it presents itself everywhere. Now, in respect to this manifold life, steeped in history, mercilessly represented with all its everyday triviality, practical preoccupations, ugliness, and vulgarity, Balzac has an attitude such as Stendhal had had before him: in the form determined by its actuality, its triviality, its inner historical laws, he takes it seriously and even tragically. This, since the rise of classical taste, had occurred nowhere—and even before then not in Balzac’s practical and historical manner, oriented as it is upon a social self-accounting of man. Since French classicism and absolutism, not only had the treatment of everyday reality become much more limited and decorous, but in addition the attitude taken toward it renounced the tragic and problematic as it were in principle. We have attempted to analyze this in the preceding chapters: a subject from practical reality could be treated comically, satirically, or didactically and moralistically; certain subjects from definite and limited realms of contemporary everyday life attained to an intermediate style, the pathetic; but beyond that they might not go. The real everyday life of even the middle ranks of society belong to the low style; the profound and significant Henry Fielding, who touches upon so many moral, aesthetic, and social problems, keeps his presentation always within the satiric moralistic key and says in Tom Jones (book 14, chapter 1): “… that kind of novels which, like this I am writing, is of the comic class.”

The entrance of existential and tragic seriousness into realism, as we observe it in Stendhal and Balzac, is indubitably closely connected with the great romantic agitation for the mixture of styles—the movement whose slogan was Shakespeare vs. Racine—and I consider Stendhal’s and Balzac’s form of it, the mixture of seriousness and everyday reality, far more important and genuine than the form it took in the Hugo group, which set out to unite the sublime and the grotesque.

The newness of this attitude, and the new type of subjects which were seriously, problematically, tragically treated, caused the gradual development of an entirely new kind of serious or, if one prefers, elevated style; neither the antique nor the Christian nor the Shakespearean nor the Racinian level of conception and expression could easily be transferred to the new subjects; at first there was some uncertainty in regard to the kind of serious attitude to be assumed.

Stendhal, whose realism had sprung from resistance to a present which he despised, preserved many eighteenth-century instincts in his attitude. In his heroes there are still haunting memories of figures like Romeo, Don Juan, Valmont (from the Liaisons dangereuses), and Saint-Preux; above all, the figure of Napoleon remains alive in him; the heroes of his novels think and feel in opposition to their time, only with contempt do they descend to the intrigues and machinations of the post-Napoleonic present. Although there is always an admixture of motifs which, according to the older view, would have the character of comedy, it remains true of Stendhal that a figure for whom he feels tragic sympathy, and for whom he demands it of the reader, must be a real hero, great and daring in his thoughts and passions. In Stendhal the freedom of the great heart, the freedom of passion, still has much of the aristocratic loftiness and of the playing with life which are more characteristic of the ancien régime than of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.

Balzac plunges his heroes far more deeply into time-conditioned dependency; he thereby loses the standards and limits of what had earlier been felt as tragic, and he does not yet possess the objective seriousness toward modern reality which later developed. He bombastically takes every entanglement as tragic, every urge as a great passion; he is always ready to declare every person in misfortune a hero or a saint; if it is a woman, he compares her to an angel or the Madonna; every energetic scoundrel, and above all every figure who is at all sinister, he converts into a demon; and he calls poor old Goriot ce Christ de la paternité. It was in conformity with his emotional, fiery, and uncritical temperament, as well as with the romantic way of life, to sense hidden demonic forces everywhere and to exaggerate expression to the point of melodrama.

In the next generation, which comes on the stage in the fifties, there is a strong reaction in this respect. In Flaubert realism becomes impartial, impersonal, and objective. In an earlier study, “Serious Imitation of Everyday Life,” I analyzed a paragraph from Madame Bovary from this point of view, and will here, with slight changes and abridgements, reproduce the pages concerned, since they are in line with the present train of thought and since it is unlikely, in view of the time and place of their publication (Istanbul, 1937), that they have reached many readers. The paragraph concerned occurs in part 1, chapter 9, of Madame Bovary:

Mais c’était surtout aux heures des repas qu’elle n’en pouvait plus, dans cette petite salle au rez-de-chaussée, avec le poêle qui fumait, la porte qui criait, les murs qui suintaient, les pavés humides; toute l’amertume de l’existence lui semblait servie sur son assiette, et, à la fumée du bouilli, il montait du fond de son âme comme d’autres bouffées d’affadissement. Charles était long à manger; elle grignotait quelques noisettes, ou bien, appuyée du coude, s’amusait, avec la pointe de son couteau, de faire des raies sur la toile cirée.

(But it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few hazel-nuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the point of her table-knife.)

The paragraph forms the climax of a presentation whose subject is Emma Bovary’s dissatisfaction with her life in Tostes. She has long hoped for a sudden event which would give a new turn to it—to her life without elegance, adventure, and love, in the depths of the provinces, beside a mediocre and boring husband; she has even made preparations for such an event, has lavished care on herself and her house, as if to earn that turn of fate, to be worthy of it; when it does not come, she is seized with unrest and despair. All this Flaubert describes in several pictures which portray Emma’s world as it now appears to her; its cheerlessness, unvaryingness, grayness, staleness, airlessness, and inescapability now first become clearly apparent to her when she has no more hope of fleeing from it. Our paragraph is the climax of the portrayal of her despair. After it we are told how she lets everything in the house go, neglects herself, and begins to fall ill, so that her husband decides to leave Tostes, thinking that the climate does not agree with her.

The paragraph itself presents a picture—man and wife together at mealtime. But the picture is not presented in and for itself; it is subordinated to the dominant subject, Emma’s despair. Hence it is not put before the reader directly: here the two sit at table—there the reader stands watching them. Instead, the reader first sees Emma, who has been much in evidence in the preceding pages, and he sees the picture first through her; directly, he sees only Emma’s inner state; he sees what goes on at the meal indirectly, from within her state, in the light of her perception. The first words of the paragraph, Mais c’était surtout aux heures des repas qu’elle n’en pouvait plus … state the theme, and all that follows is but a development of it. Not only are the phrases dependent upon dans and avec, which define the physical scene, a commentary on elle n’en pouvait plus in their piling up of the individual elements of discomfort, but the following clause too, which tells of the distaste aroused in her by the food, accords with the principal purpose both in sense and rhythm. When we read further, Charles était long à manger, this, though grammatically a new sentence and rhythmically a new movement, is still only a resumption, a variation, of the principal theme; not until we come to the contrast between his leisurely eating and her disgust and to the nervous gestures of her despair, which are described immediately afterward, does the sentence acquire its true significance. The husband, unconcernedly eating, becomes ludicrous and almost ghastly; when Emma looks at him and sees him sitting there eating, he becomes the actual cause of the elle n’en pouvait plus; because everything else that arouses her desperation—the gloomy room, the commonplace food, the lack of a tablecloth, the hopelessness of it all—appears to her, and through her to the reader also, as something that is connected with him, that emanates from him, and that would be entirely different if he were different from what he is.

The situation, then, is not presented simply as a picture, but we are first given Emma and then the situation through her. It is not, however, a matter—as it is in many first-person novels and other later works of a similar type—of a simple representation of the content of Emma’s consciousness, of what she feels as she feels it. Though the light which illuminates the picture proceeds from her, she is yet herself part of the picture, she is situated within it. In this she recalls the speaker in the scene from Petronius discussed in our second chapter; but the means Flaubert employs are different. Here it is not Emma who speaks, but the writer, Le poêle qui fumait, la porte qui criait, les murs qui suintaient, les pavés humides—all this, of course, Emma sees and feels, but she would not be able to sum it all up in this way. Toute l’amertume de l’existence lui semblait servie sur son assiette—she doubtless has such a feeling; but if she wanted to express it, it would not come out like that; she has neither the intelligence nor the cold candor of self-accounting necessary for such a formulation. To be sure, there is nothing of Flaubert’s life in these words, but only Emma’s; Flaubert does nothing but bestow the power of mature expression upon the material which she affords, in its complete subjectivity. If Emma could do this herself, she would no longer be what she is, she would have outgrown herself and thereby saved herself. So she does not simply see, but is herself seen as one seeing, and is thus judged, simply through a plain description of her subjective life, out of her own feelings. Reading in a later passage (part 2, chapter 12): jamais Charles ne lui paraissait aussi désagréable, avoir les doigts aussi carrés, l’esprit aussi lourd, les façons si communes …, the reader perhaps thinks for a moment that this strange series is an emotional piling up of the causes that time and again bring Emma’s aversion to her husband to the boiling point, and that she herself is, as it were, inwardly speaking these words; that this, then, is an example of erlebte Rede. But this would be a mistake. We have here, to be sure, a number of paradigmatic causes of Emma’s aversion, but they are put together deliberately by the writer, not emotionally by Emma. For Emma feels much more, and much more confusedly; she sees other things than these—in his body, his manners, his dress; memories mix in, meanwhile she perhaps hears him speak, perhaps feels his hand, his breath, sees him walk about, good-hearted, limited, unappetizing, and unaware; she has countless confused impressions. The only thing that is clearly defined is the result of all this, her aversion to him, which she must hide. Flaubert transfers the clearness to the impressions; he selects three, apparently quite at random, but which are paradigmatically taken from Bovary’s physique, his mentality, and his behavior; and he arranges them as if they were three shocks which Emma felt one after the other. This is not at all a naturalistic representation of consciousness. Natural shocks occur quite differently. The ordering hand of the writer is present here, deliberately summing up the confusion of the psychological situation in the direction toward which it tends of itself—the direction of “aversion to Charles Bovary.” This ordering of the psychological situation does not, to be sure, derive its standards from without, but from the material of the situation itself. It is the type of ordering which must be employed if the situation itself is to be translated into language without admixture.

In a comparison of this type of presentation with those of Stendhal and Balzac, it is to be observed by way of introduction that here too the two distinguishing characteristics of modern realism are to be found; here too real everyday occurrences in a low social stratum, the provincial petty bourgeoisie, are taken very seriously (we shall discuss the particular character of this seriousness later); here too everyday occurrences are accurately and profoundly set in a definite period of contemporary history (the period of the bourgeois monarchy)—less obviously than in Stendhal or Balzac, but unmistakably. In these two basic characteristics the three writers are at one, in contradistinction to all earlier realism; but Flaubert’s attitude toward his subject is entirely different. In Stendhal and Balzac we frequently and indeed almost constantly hear what the writer thinks of his characters and events; sometimes Balzac accompanies his narrative with a running commentary—emotional or ironic or ethical or historical or economic. We also very frequently hear what the characters themselves think and feel, and often in such a manner that, in the passage concerned, the writer identifies himself with the character. Both these things are almost wholly absent from Flaubert’s work. His opinion of his characters and events remains unspoken; and when the characters express themselves it is never in such a manner that the writer identifies himself with their opinion, or seeks to make the reader identify himself with it. We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no opinion and makes no comment. His role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language; and this is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do. Upon this conviction—that is, upon a profound faith in the truth of language responsibly, candidly, and carefully employed—Flaubert’s artistic practice rests.

This is a very old, classic French tradition. There is already something of it in Boileau’s line concerning the power of the rightly used word (on Malherbe: D’un mot mis en sa place enseigna le pouvoir); there are similar statements in La Bruyère. Vauvenargues said: Il n’y aurait point d’erreurs qui ne périssent d’elles-mêmes, exprimées clairement. Flaubert’s faith in language goes further than Vauvenargues’s: he believes that the truth of the phenomenal world is also revealed in linguistic expression. Flaubert is a man who works extremely consciously and possesses a critical comprehension of art to a degree uncommon even in France; hence there occur in his letters, particularly of the years 1852-1854 during which he was writing Madame Bovary (Troisième Série in the Nouvelle édition augmentée of the Correspondance, 1927), many highly informative statements on the subject of his aim in art. They lead to a theory—mystical in the last analysis, but in practice, like all true mysticism, based upon reason, experience, and discipline—of a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality which transforms them (par une chimie merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to mature expression. In this fashion subjects completely fill the writer; he forgets himself, his heart no longer serves him save to feel the hearts of others, and when, by fanatical patience, this condition is achieved, the perfect expression, which at once entirely comprehends the momentary subject and impartially judges it, comes of itself; subjects are seen as God sees them, in their true essence. With all this there goes a view of the mixture of styles which proceeds from the same mystical-realistic insight: there are no high and low subjects; the universe is a work of art produced without any taking of sides, the realistic artist must imitate the procedures of Creation, and every subject in its essence contains, before God’s eyes, both the serious and the comic, both dignity and vulgarity; if it is rightly and surely reproduced, the level of style which is proper to it will be rightly and surely found; there is no need either for a general theory of levels, in which subjects are arranged according to their dignity, or for any analyses by the writer commenting upon the subject, after its presentation, with a view to better comprehension and more accurate classification; all this must result from the presentation of the subject itself.

It is illuminating to note the contrast between such a view and the grandiloquent and ostentatious parading of the writer’s own feelings, and of the standards derived from them, of the type inaugurated by Rousseau and continued after him; a comparative interpretation of Flaubert’s Notre cœur ne doit être bon qu’à sentir celui des autres, and Rousseau’s statement at the beginning of the Confessions, Je sens mon cœur, et je connais les hommes, could effectually represent the change in attitude which had taken place. But it also becomes clear from Flaubert’s letters how laboriously and with what tensity of application he had attained to his convictions. Great subjects, and the free, irresponsible rule of the creative imagination, still have a great attraction for him; from this point of view he sees Shakespeare, Cervantes, and even Hugo wholly through the eyes of a romanticist, and he sometimes curses his own narrow petty-bourgeois subject which constrains him to tiresome stylistic meticulousness (dire à la fois simplement et proprement des choses vulgaires); this sometimes goes so far that he says things which contradict his basic views: … et ce qu’il y a de désolant, c’est de penser que, même réussi dans la perfection, cela [Madame Bovary] ne peut être que passable et ne sera jamais beau, à cause du fond même. Withal, like so many important nineteenth-century artists, he hates his period; he sees its problems and the coming crises with great clarity; he sees the inner anarchy, the manque de base théologique, the beginning menace of the mob, the lazy eclectic Historism, the domination of phrases, but he sees no solution and no issue; his fanatical mysticism of art is almost like a substitute religion, to which he clings convulsively, and his candor very often becomes sullen, petty, choleric, and neurotic. But this sometimes perturbs his impartiality and that love of his subjects which is comparable to the Creator’s love. The paragraph which we have analyzed, however, is untouched by such deficiencies and weaknesses in his nature; it permits us to observe the working of his artistic purpose in its purity.

The scene shows man and wife at table, the most everyday situation imaginable. Before Flaubert, it would have been conceivable as literature only as part of a comic tale, an idyl, or a satire. Here it is a picture of discomfort, and not a momentary and passing one, but a chronic discomfort, which completely rules an entire life, Emma Bovary’s. To be sure, various things come later, among them love episodes; but no one could see the scene at table as part of the exposition for a love episode, just as no one would call Madame Bovary a love story in general. The novel is the representation of an entire human existence which has no issue; and our passage is a part of it, which, however, contains the whole. Nothing particular happens in the scene, nothing particular has happened just before it. It is a random moment from the regularly recurring hours at which the husband and wife eat together. They are not quarreling, there is no sort of tangible conflict. Emma is in complete despair, but her despair is not occasioned by any definite catastrophe; there is nothing purely concrete which she has lost or for which she has wished. Certainly she has many wishes, but they are entirely vague—elegance, love, a varied life; there must always have been such unconcrete despair, but no one ever thought of taking it seriously in literary works before; such formless tragedy, if it may be called tragedy, which is set in motion by the general situation itself, was first made conceivable as literature by romanticism; probably Flaubert was the first to have represented it in people of slight intellectual culture and fairly low social station; certainly he is the first who directly captures the chronic character of this psychological situation. Nothing happens, but that nothing has become a heavy, oppressive, threatening something. How he accomplishes this we have already seen; he organizes into compact and unequivocal discourse the confused impressions of discomfort which arise in Emma at sight of the room, the meal, her husband. Elsewhere too he seldom narrates events which carry the action quickly forward; in a series of pure pictures—pictures transforming the nothingness of listless and uniform days into an oppressive condition of repugnance, boredom, false hopes, paralyzing disappointments, and piteous fears—a gray and random human destiny moves toward its end.

The interpretation of the situation is contained in its description. The two are sitting at table together; the husband divines nothing of his wife’s inner state; they have so little communion that things never even come to a quarrel, an argument, an open conflict. Each of them is so immersed in his own world—she in despair and vague wish-dreams, he in his stupid philistine self-complacency—that they are both entirely alone; they have nothing in common, and yet they have nothing of their own, for the sake of which it would be worthwhile to be lonely. For, privately, each of them has a silly, false world, which cannot be reconciled with the reality of his situation, and so they both miss the possibilities life offers them. What is true of these two, applies to almost all the other characters in the novel; each of the many mediocre people who act in it has his own world of mediocre and silly stupidity, a world of illusions, habits, instincts, and slogans; each is alone, none can understand another, or help another to insight; there is no common world of men, because it could only come into existence if many should find their way to their own proper reality, the reality which is given to the individual—which then would be also the true common reality. Though men come together for business and pleasure, their coming together has no note of united activity; it becomes one-sided, ridiculous, painful, and it is charged with misunderstanding, vanity, futility, falsehood, and stupid hatred. But what the world would really be, the world of the “intelligent,” Flaubert never tells us; in his book the world consists of pure stupidity, which completely misses true reality, so that the latter should properly not be discoverable in it at all; yet it is there; it is in the writer’s language, which unmasks the stupidity by pure statement; language, then, has criteria for stupidity and thus also has a part in that reality of the “intelligent” which otherwise never appears in the book.

Emma Bovary, too, the principal personage of the novel, is completely submerged in that false reality, in la bêtise humaine, as is the “hero” of Flaubert’s other realistic novel, Frédéric Moreau in the Éducation sentimentale. How does Flaubert’s manner of representing such personages fit into the traditional categories “tragic” and “comic”? Certainly Emma’s existence is apprehended to its depths, certainly the earlier intermediate categories, such as the “sentimental” or the “satiric” or the “didactic,” are inapplicable, and very often the reader is moved by her fate in a way that appears very like tragic pity. But a real tragic heroine she is not. The way in which language here lays bare the silliness, immaturity, and disorder of her life, the very wretchedness of that life, in which she remains immersed (toute l’amertume de l’existence lui semblait servie sur son assiette), excludes the idea of true tragedy, and the author and the reader can never feel as at one with her as must be the case with the tragic hero; she is always being tried, judged, and, together with the entire world in which she is caught, condemned. But neither is she comic; surely not; for that, she is understood far too deeply from within her fateful entanglement—though Flaubert never practices any “psychological understanding” but simply lets the state of the facts speak for itself. He has found an attitude toward the reality of contemporary life which is entirely different from earlier attitudes and stylistic levels, including—and especially—Balzac’s and Stendhal’s. It could be called, quite simply, “objective seriousness.” This sounds strange as a designation of the style of a literary work. Objective seriousness, which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved—this is an attitude which one expects from a priest, a teacher, or a psychologist rather than from an artist. But priest, teacher, and psychologist wish to accomplish something direct and practical—which is far from Flaubert’s mind. He wishes, by his attitude—pas de cris, pas de convulsion, rien que la fixité d’un regard pensif—to force language to render the truth concerning the subjects of his observation: “style itself and in its own right being an absolute manner of viewing things” (Corr. 2, 346). Yet this leads in the end to a didactic purpose: criticism of the contemporary world; and we must not hesitate to say so, much as Flaubert may insist that he is an artist and nothing but an artist. The more one studies Flaubert, the clearer it becomes how much insight into the problematic nature and the hollowness of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture is contained in his realistic works; and many important passages from his letters confirm this. The demonification of everyday social intercourse which is to be found in Balzac is certainly entirely lacking in Flaubert; life no longer surges and foams, it flows viscously and sluggishly. The essence of the happenings of ordinary contemporary life seemed to Flaubert to consist not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in demonic men and forces, but in the prolonged chronic state whose surface movement is mere empty bustle, while underneath it there is another movement, almost imperceptible but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic, and social subsoil appears comparatively stable and at the same time intolerably charged with tension. Events seem to him hardly to change; but in the concretion of duration, which Flaubert is able to suggest both in the individual occurrence (as in our example) and in his total picture of the times, there appears something like a concealed threat: the period is charged with its stupid issuelessness as with an explosive.

Through his level of style, a systematic and objective seriousness, from which things themselves speak and, according to their value, classify themselves before the reader as tragic or comic, or in most cases quite unobtrusively as both, Flaubert overcame the romantic vehemence and uncertainty in the treatment of contemporary subjects; there is clearly something of the earlier positivism in his idea of art, although he sometimes speaks very derogatorily of Comte. On the basis of this objectivity, further developments became possible, with which we shall deal in later chapters. However, few of his successors conceived the task of representing contemporary reality with the same clarity and responsibility as he; though among them there were certainly freer, more spontaneous, and more richly endowed minds than his.

The serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation, on the one hand; on the other, the embedding of random persons and events in the general course of contemporary history, the fluid historical background—these, we believe, are the foundations of modern realism, and it is natural that the broad and elastic form of the novel should increasingly impose itself for a rendering comprising so many elements. If our view is correct, throughout the nineteenth century France played the most important part in the rise and development of modern realism. What the situation was in Germany, we discussed at the end of the last chapter. In England, though the development was basically the same as in France, it came about more quietly and more gradually, without the sharp break between 1780 and 1830; it began much earlier and carried on traditional forms and viewpoints much longer, until far into the Victorian period. Fielding’s art (Tom Jones appeared in 1749) already shows a far more energetic contemporary realism of life in all its departments than do the French novels of the same period; even the fluidity of the contemporary historical background is not entirely lacking; but the whole is conceived more moralistically and sheers away from any problematic and existential seriousness; on the other hand, even in Dickens, whose work began to appear in the thirties of the nineteenth century, there is, despite the strong social feeling and suggestive density of his milieux, almost no trace of the fluidity of the political and historical background. Meanwhile Thackeray, who places the events of Vanity Fair (1847-48) most concretely in contemporary history (the years before and after Waterloo), on the whole preserves the moralistic, half-satirical, half-sentimental viewpoint very much as it was handed down by the eighteenth century. We must, unfortunately, forego discussing the rise of modern Russian realism (Gogol’s Dead Souls appeared in 1842, his short story “The Cloak” as early as 1835) even in the most general way; for our purpose, this is impossible when one cannot read the works in their original language. We shall have to rest content with discussing the influence which it later exercised.