Romantic Ethics
No text influenced early Romantic thinkers and poets in Germany more than Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. In that work the philosopher had given a real content to the self, which had been missing in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason the self had appeared as no more than the “unity of apperception,” that is, the synthesizing function that unifies the data presented by sense intuitions and imagination, while in the second half the idea of the self appears as a regulative concept, the real content of which must remain unknown, since the human mind possesses no intellectual intuitions. In the Critique of Practical Reason, however, Kant claimed that in the voice of conscience, the human mind does have an intuitive knowledge of the moral obligation to follow the commands of reason. The individual thereby attains the spiritual level of personhood as free, responsible being. An ethical quality, then, belongs to the very essence of the person.1
When reading the second Critique, the young Schelling had exclaimed: “From Kant’s practical philosophy I expect an intellectual revolution in Germany!” The idea of freedom became the manifesto of a new humanism. It inspired Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Fichte concluded from it that a person’s moral attitude, conceived as the degree of his awareness of freedom, defined his way of thinking and being. The starting point of Fichte’s theory of knowledge is that even to one who had never meditated on his own moral vocation—even for him, his sensuous world and his belief in its reality arise in no other manner than from his ideas of a moral world.
THE MORAL IDEALS OF EARLY GERMAN ROMANTICS
Schiller had been and always remained a fervent supporter of the political principles of the French Revolution. Yet after the human abuses that had accompanied it, he realized that political freedom required a moral education. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters he denounced the moral immaturity of the revolutionaries. “Man has roused himself from his long indolence and self-deception and, by an impressive majority, is demanding restitution of his inalienable rights. . . . There seems to be a physical possibility of setting law upon the throne, of honoring man at last as an end in himself, and making true freedom the basis of political association. Vain hope! The moral possibility is lacking, and a moment so prodigal of opportunity finds a generation unprepared to receive it” (V, 2).2 He attributes the failure to the mistake of regarding the principles of abstract reason as the shortest way to human emancipation. “That Enlightenment of the mind, which is the not altogether groundless boast of our refined classes, has had on the whole so little of an ennobling influence on feeling and character that it has tended rather to bolster up depravity by providing it with the support of precepts.” Instead, he argues that a cultivation of the aesthetic sense would be a more effective preparation for moral and civic virtue.
Even Kant’s noble philosophy of freedom had failed by neglecting to take our sensuous nature into account. Freedom, Schiller argues, requires the cooperation of the two main drives that move a human being: the sensuous and the spiritual. The instinct of self-preservation inspires the sensuous one. The spiritual drive impels humans to seek eternal truths and permanent values. Rationalist morality sacrifices the sensuous drive to the law of reason. The morally noble person succeeds in holding the two in balance. In the central Letters X–XV, Schiller holds that nothing can teach this balance as effectively as a developed aesthetic sense. Nor, he claims, is that sense difficult to develop. The mind spontaneously attains a momentary balance between the two drives each time it moves from sense perception to intellectual conceptualization or from sensuous desire to rational decision. “The transition from a passive state of feeling to an active one of thinking and willing cannot take place except via a middle state of aesthetic freedom” (XXIII, 2). If the mind lingers in this middle state for the sake of experiencing the balance between sense and reason, it remains in the aesthetic sphere, an essential passage to the ethical.
In the final Letters XXVI–XXVII, Schiller returns to the question he had raised in the beginning: Why are the sensuous and intellectual drives no longer in harmony? The ideal of Greek paideia had consisted in reaching an equilibrium between the two. As education became more one-sidedly intellectual, it began to neglect man’s sensuous needs. Schiller does not regard this modern situation as one of complete loss. We have become more self-conscious than the Greeks. Still, a greater openness to the beauty of nature and art would restore a more balanced state of mind. The aesthetic attitude requires a temporary suspension of our concern with objective reality and leads the mind to concentrate on the appearance, or the semblance (Schein), of things. The mind achieves this neither in abstract thought nor in blind desire but in feeling, the fundamental state of mind, which precedes the mind’s split into sensuous and intellectual, appetitive and cognitive, functions.3
Fichte, in his early writings on ethics, preserved a Kantian austerity and never mentioned a need for the kind of aesthetic preparation that Schiller considered indispensable. Nevertheless, he admitted that the moral impulse first becomes manifest in the form of feeling, the least specific mode of consciousness. He referred to the awakening of a yet undetermined desire of freedom as sehnen (longing)—a term eagerly adopted by the German Romantics. It urges the self to move beyond its natural drives yet without presenting it with any specific goal. A person has no control over this primary feeling. “Although I am a free being, I am not the ground of my [primary] impulse, nor of the feeling that accompanies it. It does not depend on my freedom how I feel.”4 In his System der Sittenlehre nach den Principien der Wissenschaftslehre (System of Moral Doctrine according to the Principles of the Theory of Knowledge) (1798), Fichte further conceded that a passive element continues to be present even in the actual practice of freedom. Before being able to assert my freedom, I find myself to be placed in an environment and provided with natural powers over which I had no control. This idea inspired Jean-Paul Sartre to define the self as establishing itself through free choice, even though the conditions of my choosing are predetermined by a given situation. Freedom demands that I include and freely accept this natural givenness within my choice.
Any moral theory must come to terms with evil, the negative counterpart of the moral good. Fichte’s attempt to do so is more consistent than Kant’s. According to the Jena philosopher, as humans develop, their moral consciousness ought to grow. If they continue to follow their natural impulses, that growth becomes arrested at an early stage. If they do so deliberately, their conduct must be considered evil. However, a great deal of moral ambiguity surrounds the moral condition of the immature or uncritical person. His external actions may hardly seem to differ from those of the morally committed one. They may even have been performed in response to what the person felt to be a moral urge. Yet such actions lack a proper moral motivation. Feelings of human sympathy may have induced the person to act with kindness, while unwittingly he may have been trying to make others dependent on him. The morally immature person may even be prepared to make sacrifices for a moral cause, without realizing that he is doing so to assert an imagined moral superiority. What motivates many warriors, conquerors, or political leaders more than a desire to surpass others? Even those who act out of a genuine sense of duty often allow their moral attention to slip, or they come to regard the demands of duty as “ideals” rather than obligations. Everywhere in their attitude a mauvaise foi (in Sartre’s vocabulary) prevails.
Only in the final chapter of the Sittenlehre does Fichte discuss the concrete rules of moral action. To the disappointment of the reader, the ideal of freedom, the guiding principle of Fichte’s ethics, is here reduced to the conventional code of conduct of the German middle class. The code corresponds to a society dominated by civil servants, teachers, and religious ministers, and ruled by the ultimate authority of the Gelehrten (scholars). There is not one word about the need to bring a society that is stagnating in a tradition of inherited privilege into accordance with the social principles of freedom, as Fichte was so strongly to affirm in The Vocation of Man.5 In that popular work, written only two years after the Sittenlehre, Fichte presented an inspiring, prophetic vision of a better world. He proclaimed that drastic changes in the social order were an “absolute demand.” Society, as he knew it, still condemned the larger part of humanity to severe toil in order to serve and nourish the idle part. Fichte hoped that scientific progress, by a wise exploitation of nature, would eventually put an end to inhumane labor. Still, he did not think that science alone would solve social problems. The most intractable ones are caused not by nature but by human abuse. “Man is the cruelest enemy of man” (Werke, 2:269; Vocation, 104). Fichte predicted that in the not too distant future a social revolution would eliminate the gulf between rich and poor. “At last oppression shall reach its limit and become wholly unsupportable, and despair [will] give back to the oppressed that power, which their courage, extinguished by centuries of tyranny, could not procure for them” (Werke, 2:273; Vocation, 108). These words may have inspired Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
In the 1812 edition of the Sittenlehre we notice a further change in Fichte’s moral ideal. The emphasis shifts from acts that promote the self’s independence to attitudes whereby the moral person increasingly becomes obedient to a transcendent ideal. The purpose of moral striving here no longer consists in building a highly individualized personality, but rather in acquiring an attitude of service to the common good. In a stunning reversal of his early ideal, Fichte now writes that the moral person must have no self (Werke, 11:86). The new rules of morality must be derived from the highest ideals of humanity: universal love, total truth, and steadfast simplicity (Werke, 11:92–101). This final shift in Fichte’s moral doctrine may have been due to the religious metaphysics of his later years.
Fichte’s system of moral philosophy, however, both the early and the later versions, remained subjectivist. Although he was the great social prophet who assisted Germany in shedding its political lethargy and becoming a leading European nation in the nineteenth century, his appeals always aimed at a reform of the individual conscience. Even social ethics, for him, remained primarily a matter of changing the moral dispositions of the community’s members. This was the issue on which Hegel, his greatest admirer, fundamentally disagreed with him. Already in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and more strongly in his later works, Hegel distinguished objective ethics from subjective morality. The former depended on laws and institutions promoting equitable relations in marriage, in business, and in all that pertains to an orderly society. Institutions constantly need correction, and this requires more than a change in moral attitudes. Although the objective social order ultimately aims at establishing some sort of spiritual community, it may come into conflict with the inner laws of conscience, as Sophocles had shown in the tragedy of Antigone. Should the state’s laws be obeyed when they offend the inner law of conscience, which the individual holds most sacred?
The section that Hegel devotes to Kant’s and Fichte’s concepts of morality in his Phenomenology of Spirit consists almost entirely of a critique of their Romantic subjectivism. He rejects Kant’s theory of the moral intention as well as Fichte’s ideal of moral attitudes. The attempts of early Romantics to restore a concrete content to the moral act, Hegel argues, had actually become stranded in a morality of pure intention. What Kant had introduced to save the seriousness of morality, the Romantics had reduced to a total subjectivism, thereby creating a worse problem than the one they had tried to solve. The Romantic concept of freedom merely replaced a rational ideal of freedom with one that was bound neither by reason nor by law. What emerged was an emotional, sentimental drift, such as we find in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde—a work scandalous more by its moral hypocrisy than by the proclaimed “immorality” of its subject. Hegel primarily criticizes the principles that lead to this hypocrisy. The early Romantic attempts to restore the firmness of Kant’s moral imperative by giving it a concrete context in the mind’s real life had in fact resulted in an effect opposite of the one intended. The Romantics had been right in claiming that a principle of duty expressed in an abstract moral imperative fails to take account of the concrete experience of the natural or social world where that duty is to be fulfilled, thereby creating a divorce between the inner world of obligation and the external one in which the obligation is to be realized. Yet the way in which Romantic interpretations attempted to overcome this conflict was through the sleight of hand of the self-proclaimed innocence of the “beautiful soul.” The intellectual deceit here consists in pretending that the obscurity of the world does not affect the purity of the moral soul. The moral agent simply raises the moral ideal beyond realization and assumes that only that ideal morally matters, whereas the multiple demands of the real world belong to a lesser, flexible moral realm. J.B. Baillie, the translator of the first English version of the Phenomenology, translates Hegel’s term Verstellung (replacement) as dissemblance, a term that appropriately suggests the deceitful nature of this attempt to conceal the real world.6
Another Romantic illusion exposed by Hegel is not due to a separation between a noble yet empty ideal and an always imperfect reality, but rather to an optimistic interpretation of the actual experience of conscience. In conscience, at least, the argument goes, the mind is “sure of itself” (as the term Gewissen implies), and the moral agent feels safe to rely on this inner certainty. The conscientious person knows that what the inner voice tells him or her is right. In this certainty the moral act appears to acquire a solid foothold. The moral law ceases to be an abstraction: it has become a concrete imperative within the self. However, Hegel points out, a merely subjective certainty of conscience hides the complexity of the act. To the agent, it suffices that the action appears moral. “Spirit certain of itself is at rest within itself in the form of conscience, and its real universality, its duty, lies in its pure conviction concerning duty” (Phänomenologie, 452–53; Baillie trans., 653; cf. Miller trans., 643). Upon reflection, however, it should be evident that this immediate moral certainty may actually be no more than an illusion. By uncritically trusting the certainty of conscience, the subjective mind has, in fact, emptied the notion of moral duty of all objective content. As spirit certain of itself, conscience claims to possess the moral truth within itself. It blindly trusts its moral feelings and fails to consider the possibility of objective arguments conflicting with this trust. “Conscience, then, in its majestic sublimity above any specific law and every content of duty, puts whatever content it pleases into its knowledge and willing. It is the moral genius which knows the inner voice of its immediate knowledge to be a voice divine” (Phänomenologie, 460; Baillie trans., 663; cf. Miller trans., 655).
Others, and eventually the agent himself, will question what the objective content is of a “duty” that rests on the subjective certainty of conscience alone. That had been the problem of the beautiful soul, a concept floating through much early Romantic literature ever since Rousseau’s Julie and his Confessions. Goethe’s captivating portrayal of it almost seemed to justify the attitude. Yet, as Hegel cautions us, the divine voice that speaks to the beautiful soul may be none other than the soul’s own.
A very different voice in the German discussion of Romantic morality was that of Arthur Schopenhauer. He derived all reality from a primeval, blind will, which rules all living beings through an irresistible desire to live. The will to live (Spinoza’s conatus essendi) persists, even though we know that we soon will die and that this short life is full of suffering. Since human desires exceed their actual needs, they surpass those of all other animals and make us the most unhappy beings of creation. We compete with one another in a never-ending struggle for what we do not need. Frustrated in our pursuit of ever postponed satisfactions and exhausted by the persistent struggle to obtain them, Schopenhauer claims, we take refuge in imaginary superstitions. Only those who are educated may find some temporary relief in the contemplation of beauty.
In the end, Schopenhauer’s moral theory may owe more to Plato, the Upanishads, or Buddhism than to German Idealism. His primary moral question was, as it had been for the Buddha: How can I avoid the suffering caused by desire, disappointment, and the fear of death? If I attempt to satisfy my desires, my satisfaction can never be more than short-lived and occasional. If I attain a state of indifference, happiness will last longer, yet require a lifetime of virtue and abstinence. Neither attitude will permanently deliver me from suffering. The principle of individuation, the main obstacle to happiness, resists any kind of competition. “Just as a sailor sits in a boat trusting to his frail bark in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with the howling mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual man sits quietly, supported by and trusting to the principle of individuation.”7 For Schopenhauer, the first step in overcoming unhappiness consists in ignoring the dictates of that malicious principle. Being good means, in concrete terms, being generous to others, being ready to sacrifice personal interests to common benefit. The most consistent abdication of selfishness is that of the ascetic, who voluntarily embraces poverty and celibacy and, as much as possible, abandons any self-will (§66; Parker trans., 274). Beauty alone may be pursued without restriction, as the only source of satisfaction that leaves no disappointment.
Schopenhauer’s moral views met with little acceptance in his lifetime but became quite influential after his death. Nietzsche in his formative years became an ardent follower of his principles. He shared Schopenhauer’s pessimism but rejected his Eastern pantheism. In her well-known work on the sovereignty of the good, Iris Murdoch, like Schopenhauer and ultimately like Plato, considered the contemplation of beauty the most effective means for overcoming the selfishness of human nature.8 It compels us to move beyond the narrow restrictiveness of our individual existence and to enlarge the capacity of our senses and imagination.
Few Romantics chose to follow Schopenhauer on the austere road of resignation. They attempted to bridge the gap between our high ideals and our mediocre achievements in a more comfortable way, namely, by means of irony. According to tradition, it was Socrates who taught us this art of reconciling our ideals with the reality of life. In Plato’s Apology, after he is sentenced to death, Socrates continues to banter with his judges about the prize he deserves for his patriotic conduct. In this high-stake game, his inner confidence in a rationally uncertain immortality prevails over the fear of a certain death. In his Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard observes: “What we see in Socrates is the infinitely exuberant freedom of subjectivity.”9 Socrates’ irony, according to Kierkegaard, is grounded in an existential religious trust. Romantic writers, however, practiced a different, purely self-reflective kind of irony, which Kierkegaard calls “a subjectivity of subjectivity, corresponding to a reflection on reflection” (Concept of Irony, 260), an interpretation that had first appeared in Hegel’s critique of Romantic irony in the Lectures on Aesthetics. Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck had correctly seen that subjectivity is void of content and therefore that trusting it completely undermines all objectivity of thought and value. Several Romantics adopted an ironical attitude even toward their own writings, as did Heinrich Heine, who liked to destroy through irony in the final verses of his poems the very effects that had moved the reader to admire the earlier verses. In some, the spiritual emptiness that followed resulted in a Sehnsucht for a more substantial reality. Several ironists, among them Friedrich Schlegel, Brentano, and Heine, later converted to religion. Others continued to nourish the desire for its own sake.10
Romantic irony basically replaced an ethical attitude by an aesthetic one. Schlegel’s Lucinde, a novel considered “obscene” at the time, might serve as a test case. Those who defended it, including the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, claimed that the author’s intention had been moral. In fact, it was neither immoral nor moral, but rather amoral, aesthetic. The novel presents Julius, a young man who has completely withdrawn from studies, work, and social obligations and who experiences life as a succession of fragments in a story of which he ignores the plot. Fallen into despair, he meets Lucinde. She also has broken all attachments to ordinary life but has found a new balance in a purely sensuous existence. She draws Julius into her own world. His irony had consisted in dissembling one part of his vacuous life through the other part: his outward life was no more than a projection of his inner life, yet that inner life lacked any moral content. Kierkegaard in his Diary of a Seducer modeled his own seducer after Julius, whose life he described as arrested at an aesthetic stage of existence.11 The refusal to lead a structured life based on binding decisions, Kierkegaard argues, inevitably leads to despair, which the aesthete hides in ironic wit. To survive spiritually, he has no choice but to accept his own despair. By doing so, however, he moves out of the aesthetic into an ethical stage of life. The young Schlegel and other early Romantics, by refusing to accept the limits of nature, reduce life to a hypothetical existence.12 Existence becomes authentically human only, Kierkegaard argues in Either-Or, by committing one’s life to a finite task. True irony, then, is for Kierkegaard only the Socratic one, which smiles at all finite achievements yet fulfills its finite obligations within an infinite perspective.
Kierkegaard admits that if one defines the self in purely finite, ethical terms, one ignores the infinite subjectivity of the spirit. In an “Ultimatum” added to Either-Or, he states that directing one’s life only by ethical standards fails to satisfy the spirit’s innate desire for the Absolute. In a concluding discourse entitled “The Edification Implied in the Thought that against God We Are Always in the Wrong,” he argues that even the most perfect ethical life falls short of expressing the mind’s internal relation to the Absolute. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard therefore concludes that ethics must be intrinsically related to an Absolute that surpasses it, meaning that it must contain a confession of insufficiency. This fundamentally transforms the nature of the ethical choice. Hence, an act of obedience to this transcendent may even conflict with moral rules, as it does in the biblical story where God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Kierkegaard recognizes the danger of a religious attitude that either surpasses or fully transcends the ethical stage, in order to establish a direct relation to the Absolute: it risks ending up with the delusory infinite of the mind’s own subjectivity.
BRITAIN’S MORAL PROPHET: CARLYLE
I had never thought of ranking Samuel Taylor Coleridge among Britain’s moral prophets. Yet after reading Thomas Pfau’s analysis of Coleridge’s moral theory as it appears in the poet’s unpublished papers, especially in the unfinished Opus Maximum, I had to change my mind. It was too late to incorporate here the conclusions of Pfau’s study Minding the Modern. But it may be necessary to take them into account for a balanced view of the Romantic moral consciousness.
Conscience, the awareness of a person’s moral position, is not a contingent byproduct of self-consciousness: it is an antecedent condition of self-consciousness. Nor does it, in contrast to Kant’s theory, consist of an intuitive knowledge of certain abstract principles that are inherent in the nature of a rational being. It includes a concrete awareness of social relations, which alone make a human being into a person. Personhood, then, is not a value-neutral concept that may be defined in unchanging, universal terms. It depends on being recognized by others, and it imposes on me the obligation to acknowledge in others what I recognize in myself. Without acknowledging the dignity that all persons possess through their rational nature, the individual has not fully actualized the potentiality of his or her personhood. In addition, conscience reveals the presence of a transcendent authority within the self, a sign of its vertical dependence on an absolute power. Only in and through conscience does the person become aware of the self’s essential “participation in a normative realm.” Person, then, is a moral concept both insofar as it ontologically relates to the absolute Good, and insofar as it stands under an obligation to strive for the realization of a moral ideal.
The strongest voices to challenge the utilitarian morality of nineteenth-century Britain were those of Samuel Coleridge and of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). The young Carlyle never succeeded in selecting a suitable field of studies while attending the University of Edinburgh. He taught mathematics for a while and then returned to Edinburgh to study law. More important than his professional education, however, was the extensive literary and philosophical education he acquired by reading German Romantics and idealist philosophers. He translated Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1824) and wrote a Life of Friedrich Schiller (1828). From the ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, he built an eclectic philosophy, which he integrated with a sturdy yet undogmatic Calvinism. As a writer of considerable power and originality, Carlyle, like a biblical prophet, inveighed against the hedonism of his age. As Johann Georg Hamann had done with the German language and Kierkegaard with Danish, he reshaped English into a tool for a unique kind of personal communication. He offered Sartor Resartus, a romanticized story of his religious conversion, to a number of publishing houses in Scotland and England. Most editors felt little attraction for this apocalyptic account written in a religious-burlesque language. They did what editors in our time would have done: they turned it down. When the author finally succeeded in having it published, it aroused an outcry of indignation in Britain. Only Americans were able to stomach its rough message. In his later, historical works Carlyle softened his irony but not his moral principles. His remarkably well-informed, three-volume French Revolution (1837) reads like a moral tale of crime and punishment. His six-volume History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858–65) mixes the account of a cultural transformation achieved by surpassing personal and military power with caustic reports on the low schemes and moral vulgarity of the Prussian Court.
Sartor Resartus (A Tailor Retailored) pretends to be a history of clothing conceived by one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a professor in the science of everything, who is the subject as well as the narrator of much of the story.13 Counselor (Hofrath) Heuschrecke (Grasshopper), the Boswell of this Prussian Johnson, collects every word uttered by his master. The book, presented as an unconventional commentary on a verse of Psalm 102, “As vesture shall you change them,” parallels its apocalyptic theme with a mystical-symbolic one: God’s garment is humanity. Fantasy and the power of speech enable a person to reach the invisible through the visible and to view not only himself but the entire universe as God’s living garment. The task of prophets is to teach us the language of symbols. To Carlyle, each poet is a prophet. Novalis had written, “There is but one temple in the world, and that temple is the body of man” (quoted by Carlyle, III, 6, 190). But Carlyle added, the person could be an emblem of God only if “no devilish passion any longer lodges in him.” Since this never occurs in the present life, the author of Sartor thought it more appropriate to look for the image of God in man’s empty clothes. “What still dignity dwells in a suit of cast clothes! How meekly it bears its honors! No haughty looks, no scornful gestures: silent and serene it fronts the world, neither demanding worship nor afraid to miss it” (III, 6, 192).
In Book II, Heuschrecke takes over the role of narrator, starting with a biography of Teufelsdröckh. The story of his birth and early education is inspired by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Jean Paul’s Titan. It turns somewhat more serious when the professor’s beloved, Blumine, leaves him for another young man. The disappointed lover wanders the world, first visiting cities and later withdrawing into a wilderness. After he has lost all hope and has shouted “question after question into the sibyl-cave of destiny,” he suddenly asks himself: “What art thou afraid of?” With these self-challenging words he enters the land of Everlasting No, the dark birthplace of wars, duels, and other absurdities of modern life. “To me also, entangled in the enchanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and sound, it was given after weariest wanderings to work out my way into the higher sunlit slopes—of that mountain which has no summit” (II, 9, 147). Having realized the insignificance of the cause of his unhappiness, Teufelsdröckh is ready to enter the land of Everlasting Yea, resting on acceptance and belief. He learns renunciation and abandons the deceitful principle that happiness is the purpose of life, which, in its utilitarian form, reduces the person to “a dead iron-balance for weighing pains and pleasures on” (III, 3, 176). Instead, he proposes a “natural supernaturalism” (III, 8, 202). He calls it “natural” because he is unwilling to replace Kant’s moral autonomy with a dogmatic theology of divine law. But he believes that nature has a supernatural destination. The modern historical critique of the Bible has not affected the transcendent dimension of existence, he argues. Voltaire’s irony and biblical critique were necessary, but they are limited, and now their task is done.
Carlyle’s critique goes well beyond the absence of private morality. He attacks the power of an unregulated economy over social life and condemns a society in which “the poor [are] perishing of hunger and overwork; the rich still more wretchedly, of idleness, satiety and overgrowth” (III, 5, 185–86). Young Teufelsdröckh, on being invited to compose a Latin epitaph for the funeral monument of the local squire, sardonically mentions that the squire’s most memorable achievement in life consisted in shooting some five thousand partridges. Carlyle hated turmoil and innovation, yet he firmly opposed a political conservatism aimed at the continued exploitation of the poor by the rich. “There is a noble conservatism as well as an ignoble. Would to heaven, for the sake of conservatism itself, the noble alone were left, and the ignoble . . . were ruthlessly lopped away.”14
In 1842 a number of social rebellions broke out in Manchester, Wales, and Scotland. They were directed primarily against the English Corn Laws, which, by imposing a stiff tariff on imported grain, had caused bread prices to rise to unprecedented heights. In Past and Present (1843), Carlyle sharply criticizes the landed aristocracy, which profited from the inflated grain prices. But he was equally severe about the rising industrial class, which made workers slave for long hours in the inhumane conditions prevailing in mines and factories. A year later, Friedrich Engels confirmed Carlyle’s report in his study On the Condition of the Working Class in England (1844). Carlyle considered overproduction a moral issue before being an economic one: the employer ought to secure continued employment for his workers. Of course, he knew that economic crises could not be remedied by moral slogans. They required a drastic overhaul of the entire economic system, which early capitalism was incapable of providing without abandoning the system itself.
The transition from a pastoral, agrarian, and manufacturing economy to an industrial one had abruptly changed the meaning of exchange, money, and banking. Logically, the system seemed infallible, humanly it was horrible. Elementary social protections were left to the inventiveness and goodwill of the industrialist. A few of them succeeded in installing some restrictions. Robert Owen, notably, excluded children from his factories and opened schools for them. One of the most intractable problems concerned the rights of rent-payers versus owners of property. Years after Carlyle’s criticism, David Ricardo and Karl Marx were still struggling with this problem. Carlyle attempted to balance the ancient right of landed property with the rights of those who worked the land. Landowners appealed to their titles of property. But, he argued, an earlier right preceded them. “Who made the land of England? You did not make the land of England, and by the possession of it, you are bound to furnish guidance and governance to England! That is the law of your position on this God’s earth” (III, 8, 176). Carlyle reminded his readers of what had happened in France, where landowners continued to collect the high rent of their properties until the day of reckoning. “Yes, my rosy fox-hunting brothers, a terrible Hippocratic look [the shrunken face at the imminence of death] reveals itself through those fresh buxom countenances of yours” (III, 8, 178).
The introduction of political rights does not suffice for solving the social crisis. “Liberty when it becomes the ’liberty to die by starvation’ is not so great” (III, 13, 212). Furthermore, how could democracy, the rule of an ignorant mass, remedy a situation that requires intelligent, strong leaders? “Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented[ly] putting up with the want of them” (III, 13, 215). Past and Present leads to the conclusion that no adequate solution can be found for the current social ills within the existing system. Carlyle calls for applying moral restrictions to laissez-faire capitalism. “If the convulsive struggles of the last half-century have taught poor struggling convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be this as the essence of innumerable others: that Europe requires a real aristocracy, a real priesthood, or it cannot continue to exist” (IV, 1, 241). By a “real” aristocracy, Carlyle obviously understands not the do-nothing class he has criticized throughout his text, but rather a new one that through heroism and virtue has shown itself fit to govern others.
Carlyle’s moral models all belong to the small elite he praises in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Only a moral nobility will lead a country out of its economic oppression and return its people to a sober work ethic. To him, true work is the highest form of religious worship, as it still is, he claims, in monasteries. All of this appears to be far off the mark that the author had set himself at the beginning of his book: to present an alternative to the social conditions of the economic society of his day. It might seem as if his alternative consisted in abandoning the present form of production altogether and returning to an earlier one. This, however, is not the case. He was fully aware that the industrial society was here to stay. Without “Manchester cotton trades, Birmingham iron trades, American commonwealths, Indian empires, steam mechanisms, and Shakespeare dramas” (IV, 1, 249), Western society would have looked like a Tibetan monastery. The epic of our time, he thought, ought to be entitled Tools and the Man.
In Carlyle, we encounter an aspect of Romantic ethics that substantially differs from the theoretical speculations of the German idealists as well as from the moral feelings of a number of Romantic poets (Victor Hugo being a major exception). The strong social concern expressed in his works introduces a new dimension into the political struggle for freedom and emancipation. It was to lead to the new science of sociology inaugurated by Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, and other French socialists. German communists radicalized it. But they no longer belong to the Romantic epoch, either in time—Marx’s Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848—or in spirit. Communist writings claimed to be scientific and ridiculed Romanticism as an escapist dream.
ROMANS DE MOEURS IN FRANCE
France has a long tradition of communicating moral ideas in aphoristic writings. The term moraliste may apply to one who observes and analyzes the mores of his time, as did seventeenth-century aphorists such as La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld, or it may refer to one who proposes theories about good and evil. By the end of the eighteenth century the moralist literature in France had been enlarged by novels: romans de moeurs and romans philosophiques. Stendhal and Balzac were masters in the former class.
In a long chapter of Mimesis, his classic study on the representation of reality in Western literature, Erich Auerbach has shown that Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir reflects the social and political circumstances of the period in which the story takes place. The author himself draws attention to the critical character of his novel by giving it the subtitle Chronique de 1830. The atmosphere in France around 1830 was filled with fear of a return to the horrors of 1793–94. Caution, hypocrisy, and pragmatism prevailed. Stendhal’s story itself closely follows the report of a strange incident in the Journal des Tribunaux. According to the newspaper account, an ex-seminarian in Rennes, who was serving as a teacher in a private home, had become the lover of his employer’s wife. He eventually returned to the seminary, but his superiors did not allow him to continue his studies. Having taken another position, as preceptor with a noble family, he was then dismissed for seducing their daughter. He returned to his former lover, whom he suspected of having betrayed him to his new employers, and shot her. Stendhal borrowed the plot of his Le Rouge et le Noir almost entirely from this report yet recreated it into a work of art.
The hero of the novel, the low-born Julien Sorel, embodies the type of social climber who is ready to trample over anyone standing in his way, and who had become typical of the period. Respect for the red military uniforms in France had ended with the fall of Napoleon, while a career in a black cassock, now that the Catholic Church had been restored to many of her privileges, seemed to offer the best chances for social success. Consequently, Julien decides to become a priest, although everything makes him unfit for this vocation, not least his total lack of faith. Despite his cynicism, the young Sorel distinguishes himself so well in his seminary studies that his superiors soon allow him to accept a temporary position as secretary to a successful businessman. He considers it part of his upward-bound career to gain the favors of his employer’s young wife, in which he succeeds beyond expectation. Yet her love is an obstacle to his career in the Church. Remembering that he is born to greater things, he leaves his lover to enter a major seminary, where he is to complete advanced theological studies. His standing with the president again becomes rewarded with a secretarial position, this time in an aristocratic family. He instantly becomes aware of the danger but also the challenge lurking in the daughter’s beautiful eyes. The rustic but intelligent secretary fascinates Mathilde, and they become lovers. Yet no sooner have they spent a night together than she begins to despise herself for having allowed such intimacy with a person far below her social class. Although deeply humiliated, Julien still manages to work himself back into her bedroom, and the cycle of ecstasy and contempt recommences. Eventually, Mathilde becomes pregnant and confronts her unhappy father with the decision to marry her improper suitor.
When inquiring about Julien’s conduct at his earlier place of employment, the father receives a devastating report written by Julien’s former lover. Informed of its content, Julien travels back to her town and shoots her while she is attending Mass. In prison he learns that she has not died. She even sufficiently recovers to visit him in prison. She confesses that, having become very pious after his departure, she allowed a young priest to dictate the fatal letter to Mathilde’s father. A hostile jury sentences Julien to death, and Mathilde urges him to appeal the politically inspired verdict. Yet now that he has understood the basic fallacy on which he has built his life and ruined the lives of those who loved him, Julien no longer wishes to live. He realizes that, in spite of his relentless striving, he has remained the same vulgar person he was at the start. Stendhal intended his story to be a mirror of the moral cynicism of his time. In this respect it greatly differs from the psychological La Chartreuse de Parme.
No French novelist has more deservedly been called a moraliste in both meanings of the term than Balzac. He prominently painted the urban society of his age as well as the kind of persons it produced. Yet he also set up typically Romantic standards of moral value. Histories of French literature tend to classify him as a “realist,” a forerunner of Flaubert, the brothers de Goncourt, and Émile Zola. He certainly influenced all of them, but his novels, especially the earlier ones, were as Romantic as Hugo’s and more so than de Vigny’s. No other novelist wrote with more Romantic excess and Rabelaisian exuberance of names and objects than Balzac. Everything in his stories is overstated, overcolored, and overdescribed. Next to these Baroque qualities, he also possessed an uncanny sense of the strange, the mysterious, even the supernatural. In Sèraphita we recognize the ideas of Swedenborg, while his Louis Lambert shows the influence of the illuminist Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin.15 His work evokes the presence of evil, of crime, and of passion, but also of generous charity and heroic self-sacrifice. He was the poet of Romantic love in all its varieties: sensuous, erotic, compassionate, and religious. In his personal life, as in the lives of his heroes and heroines, generosity dominated. I limit the following observations to the period before 1840, when he published his most Romantic novels.
Balzac learned his trade while writing for a factory of pulp novels. His stories appeared either anonymously or under a pseudonym. They tend to focus on the evil that hides in respectable society. One valuable remnant of that period was a “code” book on marriage, which he later revamped into La physiologie du marriage (1829). Unlike what its prurient title suggests, it was a book of anecdotal recipes for not losing one’s wife in the frivolous world of Paris. Les Chouans (1829), the first novel Balzac published under his own name, was a dramatic love story between two leaders of opposite camps during the Vendée rebellion. It was his one fully historical novel. Yet Balzac conceived many of his later works as essentially related to a particular period of history. Thus, during the Restoration and the subsequent reign of Louis-Philippe, when most of his stories take place, the events reflect the commercial freedom and intense financial activity typical of that period. A collection of short stories under the title Scènes de la vie privée, also published in 1829, stresses the social setting of his writings. In each of them a difference in class causes a marital drama. In “Une double vie” a Parisian magistrate marries a woman who is to inherit a large fortune. After the wedding, she turns out to be a Jansenist femme dévote, unfit to fulfill the social obligations of her position. The unhappy husband sets up a second household with a young woman whose home he passes on his way to work. The arrangement causes a disaster for both parties. The author’s intention is not to expose the adulterer’s punishment but to show the restrictions of a society that creates such problems. In “La maison du chat qui pelote” (published in English as “At the Sign of the Cat and Racquet”), a mésalliance leads to a similar tragic ending. A young aristocrat marries the daughter of a well-to-do mercer. Because she is slow in adopting the manners of her new social class, he exiles her to the kitchen. Yet the young woman, Augustine, although unable to imitate her husband’s style and language, is a woman of natural sensitivity. She stoically accepts her fate and tries to find some consolation at the home of her parents and that of her sister, who married an ordinary man of her own class. But she realizes that she has become estranged from her former home as well as from her current one. For all her loneliness, she feels unable to return to her past.
Although these stories were well told, Balzac aimed at more substantial targets. With his first full-length moral parable of 1831, La peau de chagrin (English title: The Shagreen Skin), he scored a critical as well as a popular success. Everything in this tale symbolizes a world clearly divided between good and evil. This Manichean dualism became typical of Balzac’s later works. Moreover, the evil, which seems supernatural in origin, is surrounded by an ominous aura of mystery. In this story an unidentified young man, obviously in dire financial straits, enters a gambling den in what appears to be a final effort to restore his fortune. The den exudes the sullen solemnity of a place where people, after a ritualized attempt to lose their possessions, prepare for suicide. Like a Masonic temple, it is full of symbols. An evil-looking old attendant takes the patrons’ hats: “a pale shadow, crouching behind his barricade as though lying in wait for victims, a Cerberus-like watchdog of the nether regions.”16 Having gambled away his last funds, the young man crosses the Seine and prepares to plunge into the water. But a charwoman at Les Halles warns him that it is awfully dirty and cold. Postponing his suicidal plans, he enters an antique shop full of strange objects. A sinister old sales clerk sells him an untreated donkey skin, which, he claims, will grant him his wishes. Yet after each wish, it will shrink, and when it is finally consumed, he will die.
Only now the author reveals the identity of the central figure: Raphael de Valentin, who moved to Paris in order to become rich but has become destitute. Two recent acquaintances take him to a gigantic banquet given by a nouveau riche acquaintance. The banquet includes all forms of excess: over-indulgence, debauchery, waste, and destruction. The author is obviously fascinated by whatever exceeds measure and reason. Balzac in his novels, like Hugo in his tragedies, aims at absolutes, whether negative or positive. The attempts of his characters to attain these extremes always end in failure. This fateful tendency here first appears in Valentin’s pursuit of the ideal woman: each time she turns out to be an insensitive femme sans coeur. Only after he has seen the auspices of his imminent death in the donkey skin’s shrinkage, and its warning has become confirmed by the blood he has been coughing, does Valentin come to his senses. Accepting his condition, he moves in with a humble family in the Auvergne Mountains and belatedly finds the happiness he has wasted his life in seeking. What makes this moral fable powerful is the haunting presence of mysterious, supernatural forces of good and evil striving for absolute control. Psychology plays almost no role in this struggle among superhuman powers. Balzac later incorporated La peau de chagrin among his Études philosophiques, tales that interpret what occurs in the romans de moeurs.
Amazingly, a year after the complex and obscure La peau de chagrin, Balzac published the marvelously simple short novel Le curé de Tours (1832). Originally he had entitled it Célibataires, a title that suggests the moral of the story. Two priests live at a pension kept by an elderly woman near the cathedral of Tours, in which both officiate. The quiet Abbé Birotteau inhabits the comfortable apartment of his deceased predecessor, whose magnificent library and furniture he has inherited. Abbé Troubert, a more severe type with a whiff of Jansenism, resides in a humid, dark apartment below the ground floor. Both seem satisfied with their quarters. Troubert faithfully participates in the Sunday whist evenings set up by Mlle Gamard, the landlady; Birotteau does not. Mlle Gamard does not appreciate this neglect and in a number of petty ways begins to make the quiet priest’s life unpleasant. Hoping that a short absence will make her anger subside, he decides to leave the house for a time. While he is on vacation, however, a lawyer presents him with a document for his signature, in which he declares that he will not return to the apartment. Preferring peace of mind to physical comfort, Birotteau signs. When he returns to retrieve his possessions, he finds Troubert firmly installed in his apartment. In addition, Mlle Gamard informs him that his furniture has become her property to compensate for the low rent he paid.
Juridically and psychologically, the story is hardly credible. The characters are drawn too small, but they suffice for a moral tale. Balzac explains their meaning in the course of the novel: “The Church is no longer a political power capable of absorbing the potential of solitary men. Celibacy, then, accomplishes nothing more than that it induces the capital vice of converging the celibate person’s qualities on a single passion, namely, egoism. It renders celibates harmful and useless, whereas in the past it freed them to be more generous for the common good.” Most celibates today, in Balzac’s opinion, possess neither the vision nor the will to use their freedom for a noble purpose. Instead they spend their time and energy fretting and plotting small schemes. The two abbés, as well as Mlle Gamard, probably started their lives inspired by some high ideal, but a succession of insignificant events soon converted their sacrifice of celibacy into bitterness and resentment.
In a later novel, La recherche de l’absolu (1834), the search for the absolute consists in a pursuit of the alchemist dream. Balthasar Claes, a rich immigrant from Flanders, ruins his family fortune in years of fruitless efforts to produce gold. Similarly, in the story “Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” (The Unknown Masterpiece) (1831), Frenhofer, an excellent painter, becomes obsessed by the ambition to paint an absolute masterpiece. It takes him years to execute his project, and when he finally unveils his work, nothing but a canvas filled with wild colors emerges. Peter Brooks pertinently describes this outcome as a defeat in “the fight to redo the creation in a secular way, and a sacrilegious imitatio dei, which entails the destruction of the very sign-system, in which he must embody his dream.”17 Balzac had barely completed these early writings when he started writing yet another étude philosophique, his Louis Lambert (1832–34), in which a gifted young man, while attempting to attain consummate knowledge through mental concentration, loses his mind. In no other novel did Balzac invest more of his fascination with a borderland between the mind and a mysterious goal that it relentlessly pursues, yet ultimately misses. This strange novel, on which he worked longer than on any previous one, mixes scientism, spiritism, and psychology. Swedenborg’s thought holds it all together. According to the letters the young Lambert writes to his uncle, the Swedish sage “includes all religions, or rather, he presents the religion of humanity.”
In a dream the young Louis Lambert actually sees the castle that his school is going to visit the next day. From this inner experience he concludes that he is able to attain any knowledge by intensely concentrating on the object. After he and the narrator, a schoolmate, complete their studies, they lose contact with one another. Some years later, the schoolmate meets his friend’s uncle and learns that Louis had fallen in love with a rich heiress but had lapsed into insanity the day before the wedding. His fiancée has remained faithful to him, nursing him in her castle and insisting that his mind is sound but absorbed in deep meditation. Has Louis descended into an abyss as profound as the summit he had once reached? Balzac surmises that at the root of consciousness is a desire of the infinite that remains untranslatable into words. Some appear to reach this core of knowledge by utter detachment from space and time. Balzac himself is wary of such strivings for the absolute as Louis Lambert, Balthasar Claes, and the painter Frenhofer practised. All of them paid for their ambition with a total loss of talent and possessions. Still, he remains fascinated by them. In Louis Lambert he appears to caution himself to be prudent in attempting to reach his own goal, which consisted in comprehending all aspects of the society of his time.
Much of the attraction of Balzac’s novels is due to his talent in making the environment of his stories actively contribute to the turn of the plot and the moods of the characters. In Le curé de Tours, the cathedral confines the entire existence of the two priests: they live in its shadow, spend most of their time inside, and project all their aspirations onto their rank in its small hierarchy. Physical surroundings always play a major role in Balzac’s novels. Thus, Ferragus (1884), the mysterious tale of a former convict, begins with a report on the moral physiognomy of the streets of Paris: “In Paris certain streets are as dishonored as a person guilty of an infamy would be. There are also noble streets, and streets that are merely respectable. On the morality of more recent ones, the public has not yet formed an opinion. . . . Some are always clean and others always dirty. In short, the streets of Paris possess human qualities, and their physiognomy forces upon us certain impressions against which we remain defenseless.” The decay of Balthasar Claes’s beautiful house becomes a symbol of the family’s decline in La recherche de l’absolu. The novel Eugénie Grandet (1833) also conveys an intense feeling of connaturality between its young heroine and the place she occupies: the bench in the window of the dark house and the little seat near the crumbling wall in the yard, where both she and her mother spend a large part of their melancholy lives. The environment symbolizes the moral tone of Balzac’s stories.
The writer does with time what he did with space. He sketches, often at great length, the moral climate of the period in which the events take place. Usually it consists of a historical or social description, which becomes slowly charged with mystery. The reader senses that tragic events are about to take place, even before knowing the hero or the victim who is to act or to suffer. Thus, in La fille auxyeux d’or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes) (1834–35), the first fifteen pages evoke the chaos of conflicts, desires, ambitions, and cruelties that live and thrive in the heads of the nameless masses of Paris. “Who dominates this place without morality, without faith, and without feeling, yet from which all feelings, all morality, and all faith come and to which they return? Gold and pleasure.” Balzac’s descriptions of time and place set the stage for future events. They suggest the good or evil present in the hearts of those who live in them and somehow justify the events that follow. Similarly, before introducing the heroine of La Duchesse de Langeais (1834), Balzac devotes many pages to the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the young duchess grew up, and which is “ni un quartier, ni un secte, ni une institution, ni rien qui se puisse nettement exprimer” (neither neighborhood, nor sect, nor institution, nor anything that can be properly expressed).
Balzac was rarely successful when writing about an exclusively “moral” subject, as he did in Le médecin de campagne (The Country Doctor) (1833), the story of a physician who dedicates his life to the care of the poor inhabitants of a mountainous region. An army captain who visits the area and spends some days with him wonders what the secret is of this man’s devotion. After some two hundred pages of unimaginative prose, we finally read Dr. Benassis’s “confession.” As a young man he had seduced a girl and abandoned her. Before her death she begged him to adopt the child of their love. He consents, but the child dies. When he begins to court another woman, her parents reject him because of his dubious past. He then decides to become a country doctor in one of the poorest areas of France as an act of atonement. This simple story of sin, repentance, and charity was meant to serve as a moral example, but, poorly motivated as it is, it turned out to be Balzac’s least satisfactory work. Nonetheless, the author expected that it would convert his political losses at the elections of Angoulême and Chinon (where he stood as a political candidate) into a literary triumph. He took excessive pride in having presented his moral ideal of service. “Upon my soul, I think I can die in peace; I think I have done a great thing for my country. To my mind, this book is worth more than laws and victorious battles. It is the gospels in action!”18 But morality and politics by themselves do not make great literature. Beset by defeats and trouble, enormous debts, fights with his two publishers, health problems caused by overwork and critical disapproval of what he claimed to be his masterpiece, he dropped everything and traveled to Neufchatel to meet l’étrangère, his “unknown, female admirer,” the Polish countess, Eveline Hanska.
Balzac took with him his resentment over a recent amorous defeat. Some months earlier, the Marquise de Castries, who admired his work, had invited him to visit her, and even to accompany her on a journey to Italy. She encouraged his affection but kept him at arm’s distance and granted him “only those favors which were tolerated in her own circle where they wanted everything of love except that which certified love.”19 Now stationed in a Geneva hotel near his new love, the woman he was to marry sixteen years later, Balzac began writing a melodramatic novel of revenge, La Duchesse de Langeais (1834). In the story, a French officer, after a heroic expedition to Africa, returns to Paris covered with glory. A beautiful duchess, estranged from her aged husband, falls in love with him. Yet once he begins to return her love, she coyly assumes an air of innocence. Humiliated by her behavior, the officer withdraws, and when the Duchess tries to make him return, he no longer responds. Finally, she informs him that if he does not receive her, she will disappear from the world. Through an accident he misses the appointment and finds that she is gone. Years later, during a military operation in Spain, he discovers that she lives in a convent on an island near the Andalusian coast. Pretending to be her brother, he succeeds in entering the cloister and, speaking through a grilled window, invites her to leave the convent with him. When she refuses to break her vows, the officer decides to take her away by force. With a few soldiers, he invades the walled garden, but just as they enter the building, a tolling bell announces her death. Balzac later read the novel to the Marquise de Castries. She liked it but never understood the hint.
This story concluded Balzac’s early period. It was followed by a series of masterpieces. Eugénie Grandet (1833) had already appeared while he was still working on La Duchesse de Langeais. This relatively short comédie de moeurs ranks among the greatest prose works of the Romantic period. Once again, the novel starts with an elaborate portrait of French society during the early years of the Restoration. The aristocracy, even the more recent Napoleonic aristocracy, is vanishing both as a class and as a paragon of society. Finance rules all facets of social life. Grandet, a miserly old cooper, has made a fortune by buying up aristocratic and ecclesiastical possessions soon after they were nationalized during the Revolution. His greed has created an emotional vacuum around him, symbolized by the bare, sunless house, where his long-suffering wife and his lonely daughter Eugénie live their lives of gray monotony. Two families in Saumur vie with each other for the privilege of attaching the future heiress of Grandet’s wealth to their clan. To Eugénie, their prospects come to a halt with the visit of her cousin Charles. A quiet idyll develops between the two. After Charles learns that his father has committed suicide following his bankruptcy (caused by his greedy brother), he decides to emigrate to America and, after making a fortune, to marry Eugénie. She helps him to pay for the journey with the gold coins that her father had given her on her birthdays. She keeps waiting for his return, while her youth passes by. At last, after her father’s death, Charles returns, intending to marry another woman, one with both a title and some wealth. Yet the wedding falls through when the family of the bride learns that his father died in bankruptcy. Eugénie, however, pays all of her uncle’s debts in order to make Charles’s marriage possible. At the advice of a priest, who is related to one of her persistent suitors, she then consents to marry an unlovely local boy on the condition that she will never have anything to do with him. Her life resumes its tedious, downcast course in the old family house. This novel displays the distinctive qualities of its Romantic author to their greatest advantage: a capacious imagination, and a refined sensitivity. Seldom has a moral lesson been made with more elegance than in this story. Which reader could ever forget that greed is destructive?
No sooner had Balzac finished the novel than his debts forced him to start another one. Slaving away at the same relentless pace, he completed it in forty days in order to meet the deadline agreed on with the Revue de Paris. This book, Le Père Goriot (1834), became his most famous one. It stands out for its complexity, since it contains three interrelated moral dramas. The principal one occurs between old Goriot and his daughters. The generous old man has ruined himself for the benefit of his two daughters, who are now famously married but constantly in debt. They visit their father only when they need money. The second drama centers around the ambitious Rastignac, a young man recently arrived in Paris and in a hurry to become rich and famous. Will he follow the model of the ex-convict Vautrin or of the generous Goriot? The evil progress of Vautrin is the center of the third moral drama, which never reaches its conclusion, because Balzac needed him and Rastignac to reappear in later novels. All three are lodged in the modest pension of Mme Vauquer. With these and a few other characters, Balzac lays the foundation for the virtual world of the comédie Humaine, in which the same persons occasionally reappear. Le Père Goriot is not a psychological drama; we learn little about its characters’ motives or feelings. Barely identified as individuals, they are moral types of Parisian society, who represent universal virtues and vices. In a letter to Mme Hanska, Balzac explains that in his Études de moeurs, only individualités typifiées appeared, whereas the Études philosophiques presented types individualisés. To the latter class belong Raphael Valentin in La peau de chagrin, Balthasar Claes in La recherche de l’absolu, and Louis Lambert in the novel that bears his name. Balzac’s moral typology differs from Stendhal’s psychological one. In Le Rouge et le Noir Stendhal also had presented a young arriviste, Julien Sorel, who claws his way to the top of a society that produces such types. But, unlike Balzac, he analyzes the psychic stages of his character’s moral degradation, while Balzac was more concerned with eternal forces of good and evil that hover over this world like spectral realities. Still, Balzac’s moral types are never abstract. Albert Béguin in his Balzac Visionnaire (1946) praises “the eternal victory of his imagination” over the abstractness of common moral types, whether individualized or not.
Nowhere does the trans-psychological character of Balzac’s novels appear more obvious than in the small masterpiece, Le Colonel Chabert (1832). If any of his novels ever turn around psychic problems, certainly this one does. Yet the author, who hardly discusses them, immediately raises the story to a universally moral level. A poorly dressed old man walks into a lawyer’s office and asks to see Mr. Derville. One of the clerks, while writing down his name, mockingly inquires whether he is perhaps the great colonel Chabert, the hero of the battle of Eylau (who was assumed to have been killed in the attack). The poor man responds, “I am indeed the self-same, Monsieur.” The lawyer, in spite of this surprising statement, agrees to meet with Chabert, who reports that a wound to the head destroyed his memory. He has spent most of the years after the battle in an asylum. In the meantime, his wife has remarried. After a thorough investigation, the lawyer finds that the facts confirm the old man’s story. He summons Chabert’s wife to court, confronts her with her husband, and notices that she recognizes him, although she denies it. Poor Chabert, moved by his remaining love for her, gives up the idea of legal proceedings and promises that he will not disturb her any further. Some years later, Derville finds Chabert in an almshouse, where he is spending his final days, lapsed “into a second childhood” and begging a coin for buying tobacco. Samuel Rogers, in his excellent study of Balzac, concludes: “In a way Le Colonel Chabert is a psychological story, for its center is what goes on in Chabert’s mind. Yet the manner of telling is not psychological. . . . It is as if Balzac cast a needle of light across Chabert’s consciousness, like the beam of a lighthouse that picks out wave or cliff from the surrounding blackness, and then leaves the reader free to create most of what is there from his own imagination.”20 Balzac’s avoidance of psychological interpretations is more than a naturalistic style procedure. Rather than attempting to render the story psychologically credible, the author tries to remove it from the plane of ordinary human behavior and instead to highlight the presence of superhuman forces, such as the one that induces Chabert not to pursue his quest for recognition because of his love for the woman she once was. A similar, but negative, force drives his wife to prefer a comfortable social position to fidelity to a husband who is willing to sacrifice his identity to her ease. Again, Balzac confronts us with the transcendent struggle between good and evil.
Balzac the moralist neither preaches nor proves. He merely shows the oppositions between the powers of good and evil as they affect us. In a preface to the collection Scènes de la vie privée, he claims that his entire work had been “dedicated to morality.” Yet his morality had nothing in common with the rationalist ethic of the eighteenth century or with the utilitarian one of the nineteenth. Nor did his ideal coincide with that of personal or social freedom, as it does in other Romantics. It centers on the successes or failures of people in measuring up to moral absolutes. Some of his characters do measure up, such as Dr. Benassis, Eugénie Grandet, and Père Goriot. Others, like Seraphita or Louis Lambert, stand out by their keen awareness of the mysterious presence of an unknown absolute. Perhaps the initial ideals of Balthasar Claes or of the painter Frenhofer should also be seen in that light. Even the excess and debauchery of the banquet attended by Raphael de Valentin and Vautrin’s mysterious pursuit of evil for evil’s sake are negative ways of seeking the absolute. Whether in describing an ascent to a higher or a descent to a lower moral state, Balzac always surpasses the limits of the ordinary. “Once we have entered La Comédie Humaine . . . we are aware of a continual struggle between good and evil, a struggle which often seems to involve powers greater and more mysterious than the consciences of the protagonists.”21