Balzac and British Realism: Mid-Victorian Theories of the Novel

Author(s): Walter M. Kendrick

Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 5-24
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3826620
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Walter M. Kendrick

BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISM:

MID-VICTORIAN THEORIES OF THE NOVEL

IN MID-VICTORIAN FICTION, A SURE SIGN OF SOPHISTICATION, ANI) OF QUES-

tionable morals, is the presence of a "French novel" on one's bedside
table. Of all Anthony Trollope's characters, for example, only the very
questionable Lizzie Eustace is brazen enough to display French
novels in the drawing room, and even she is careful to replace them
with a Bible when the respectable Lady Fawn pays a visit (The Eustace
Diamonds, chap. 9). In the twentieth century, Lizzie's hypocrisy has
become a stereotype, according to which Victorian prudery is sup-
posed to have combined with traditional British Francophobia to put
French novels in the same disreputable category which Roderick Ran-
dom and Peregrine Pickle had occupied a century earlier. The only dif-
ference between Lizzie Eustace in 1873 and Lydia Languish in 1775
would be that Lizzie replaces her outrageous reading with a Bible,
while Lydia chooses a copy of Fordyce's Sermons.1
Modern criticism has devoted little attention to the actual role
of French novels in mid-Victorian England, and at least in Balzac's
case, it has allowed this stereotype to stand. Clarence Decker's chapter
on "Balzac in England" defines prudery as the major obstacle to Bal-
zac's acceptance by English readers. Strait-laced Victorianism, accord-
ing to Decker, kept Balzac disreputable until the 187os, and only by
1886 had it loosened enough to let him get "firmly established."2 Re-
cently, D. G. Ellis has modified Decker's judgment to place less em-
phasis on prudery and more on political anxiety. As Ellis correctly
observes, George Sand and Paul de Kock were widely read and ad-

1 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals, act I, sc. 2.

2 Clarence R. Decker, The Victorian Conscience (New York: Twayne, 1952), pp. 56-57.

AUTUMN 1976
6 WalterM. Kendrick

mired despite their risque tendencies. He concludes therefore that

hostility toward Balzac's realism arose from a largely political motive,
"the fear of seeing take place in England what had already taken place
in France."3 While both of these factors did play significant roles in
England's reception of Balzac, the case is neither as simple nor as
typically "Victorian"as Decker and Ellis have made it out to be. Bal-
zac's position in mid-nineteenth-century England was a special one,
and the response of British readers to his extraordinary achievement
was more complex than Lizzie's drawing-room hypocrisy can account
for.
If frequency of translation is one's gauge of popularity, Balzac
lagged far behind Alexandre Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and
Victor Hugo until at least the i88os. Their works were widely avail-
able in English from an early date, but translation of Balzac was un-
common and sporadic. The earliest example was an unacknowledged
translation of the story "La Grande Breteche," which had appeared
before 1836.4 G. W. M. Reynolds translated an excerpt from Annette
et le criminel for his Modern Literature of France in 1839,5 and a trans-
lation of "Les Marana"was included in volume V of the Romancist, and
Novelist's Library in 1842.6 James White translated "Les Deux Reves"
(part III of Sur Catherine de Medicis) for Blackwood's in 1843,7 and
G. H. Lewes collaborated with his wife Agnes on a version of "Le Bal
de sceaux" for Fraser's in 1846.8Except for these and a few other minor
pieces, the English reader whose French was inadequate to Balzac had
no access to him until 1859, when translations of La Recherche de
l'absolu and Eugenie Grandet were published.9 These were the first
of Balzac's novels to be fully translated into English, twenty-five years
after their publication in French. They were followed in 186o by a
translation of Le Pere Goriot,10and by two different versions of Cesar

D. G. Ellis, "Romans frangais dans la prude Angleterre (1830-1870)," Revue de la

litterature comparee, 47 (April-June 1973), 315. My translation.
4This translation is mentioned by John Wilson Croker in "French Novels," Quarterly
Review, 61 (April 1836), 89, and by the reviewer of "Balzac and His Writings,"
Westminster Review, n.s. 4 (July 1853), 201.
5 G. W. M. Reynolds, The Modern Literature of France, 2 vols. (London: George Hen-
derson, 1839), I, 38-78.
6Mother and Daughter; or La Marana. From the French of M. de Balzac (London:
J. Clements, 1842).
' "Two Dreams," Blackwood's, 54 (November 1843), 674-678.
'"The Pride of a Spoiled Beauty. Adapted from the French of Honore de Balzac,"
Fraser's, 33 (January and February 1846), 46-57, 180-194.
"Balthazar; or, Science and Love, translated by William Robson (London: Routledge,
Warnes & Routledge, 1859). Eugenie Grandet (London: Routledge, Warnes & Rout-
ledge, 1859).
"Daddy Goriot; or Unrequited Affection (London: Ward & Lock, 186o).

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISM 7

Birotteau, one published in England and the other in America."ITrans-

lations of Balzac's novels and tales appeared occasionally in the 186os
and 70s, but a reasonably comprehensive English Balzac was not avail-
able until 1899, when the forty-volume Come&liehumaine edited by
George Saintsbury was completed.
Such translations as were made in these earlier years remained
also quite obscure. In 1859 Wilkie Collins claimed to have heard of no
English Balzac at all except the translation of Eugenie Grandet which
he had recently seen advertised.12 And as late as 1879, a reviewer for
the Athenaeum could recall only the Leweses' translation of "Le Bal
de sceaux," published thirty-three years earlier.13 Until at least the
187os, Balzac was available to English readers primarily in snippets,
tucked away here and there in the pages of periodicals which them-
selves had far from general circulation. As Collins complained in 1859,
although Balzac was popular everywhere on the Continent,
there is probably no civilised country in the Old World in which he is so little
known as in England. Among all the readers - a large class in these islands - who
are, from various causes, unaccustomed to study French literature in its native
language, there are probably very many who have never even heard of the name
of HONORS DE BALZAC.

The reason for this obscurity, according to Collins, was simple: "Balzac
is little known because he has been little translated" (Collins, p. 184).
There was no wide popular interest in Balzac, such as Dumas
and Sue enjoyed, until at least the end of the century, and it may in-
deed have been a combination of prudery and fear of revolution which
kept him out of the hands of the common reader. But among un-
common readers - those who could read his French - a thorough
knowledge of Balzac was general in the years of his English obscurity.
English reviewers were taking regular note of Balzac's works from the
early 183os, and the subscribers to the journals in which their re-
views appear are always assumed to know Balzac very well. As early

11 History of the Grandeur and Downfall of Cesar Birotteau, translated by John Hawkins
Simpson (London: Saunders, Otley & Co., 186o). The Greatness and Decline of Cesar
Birotteau, translated by 0. W. Wight and F. B. Goodrich (New York: Rudd & Carleton,
186o). Both of these advertise themselves as the first volumes of projected series. In
his Preface to the former, Simpson promises that "this, the First work of 'the Balzac
series,'" will be followed by "The Countiy Doctor" (evidently Le Mddecin de ca(i-
pagne), but the promise was never fulfilled. Wight and Goodrich produced The Petty
Annoyances of Married Life (Petites misdres de la vie conjugale) in 1861, as the
second volume of the "Novels of M. de Balzac, Library Edition," but the series ap-
parently never had a third volume.
12
Wilkie Collins, "Portrait of An Author, Painted by His Publisher. In Two Sittings,"
All the Year Round, (18 June 1859), 184.
.. "Novels of the Week," Athenaeum, 52 (17 May 1879), 626.

AUTUMN 1976
8 Walter M. Kendrick

as 1833, the Edinburgh Review called him "a man of genius," al-
though it regretted "the want of any regard to decency in his delin-
eations,"'4 and ten years later the same journal compared him fav-
orably to Richardson, Byron, and Shakespeare.15The Monthly Review
observed in 1840 that "this voluminous and beautiful writer" had al-
ready become much more familiar to "English readers of French works"
than he had been two or three years before;16 and in 1847 Blackwoodes
called him, after Sue and Dumas, "the best known, and most read, out
of France, of all the living French novelists"7 - this at a time when
only a half-dozen of his stories had been translated into English.
Among British intellectuals, Balzac was well-known and highly
thought of from an early date. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
shared a fondness for Balzac's works, and their early letters are full
of enthusiastic praise of him. Browning even went to far as to declare
in 1846 that he had bid "the completest adieu" to English novels upon
his introduction to Balzac.18 Balzac's notorious immorality was no
obstacle to Browning's appreciation. He readily admitted that the
Frenchman "has not a fine moral sense at any time, great and gifted
as he is,""1but he and Elizabeth agreed that, in her words, "There is
no writer in France ... at all comparable to Balzac - none - but where
is the reader in England to make the admission? - none, again ... ."20
The Brownings were the most fervent of Balzac's early English ad-
mirers, but they were not alone in praising him. In 1855 John Ruskin
wrote to F. J. Furnivall that Balzac was "an artist of the highest touch,
and a philosopher even in his sensuality,"21 while in the same year
George Eliot expressed the guarded opinion that he was "perhaps the
most wonderful writer of fiction that the world has ever seen," despite
his habit of offending his readers with "scene after scene of unmiti-
gated vice."22

4 Thomas Moore [?], "French Literature- Recent Novels," Edinburgh Review, 57

(July 1833), 357.
5 Abraham Hayward, "Parisian Morals and Manners," Edinburgh Review, 78 (July
1843), 64.
6 "Nouvelles Scenes de la Vie de Province," Monthly Review, 3 (September 1840), 10.
17Frederick Hardman, "Charles de Bernard," Blackwood's, 61 (May 1847),
591.
s8Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 21 April 1846, in Elvan Kintner, ed., The Letters of Robert
Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-1846, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1969), p. 658.
9 Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 5 April 1846, Kintner, p. 590.
20
Letter to Robert Browning, 28 April 1846, Kintner, p. 663.
21 The Works
of John Ruskin, 39 vols. ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderbum,
(London: George Allen, 1903-12), XXXVI, 212.
22"The Morality of Wilhelm Meister," Leader, 6 (21 July 1855); rpt. in Thomas Pinney,
ed., Essays of George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 146.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISM 9

For the next generation of British poets and novelists, these

reservations dropped away, and even Balzac's most controversial pro-
ductions came in for lavish praise. "La Fille aux yeux d'or," which
had long been regarded as the extremity of Balzac's outrageousness,
became the particular favorite of such writers as Swinburne and J. A.
Symonds, who were rather outrageous themselves.23 The most judicious
admirer of Balzac in the latter half of the century was Henry James,
whose first essay on his French predecessor appeared in 1875. In it,
and in the four other essays on Balzac which James published between
1877 and 1913, he unequivocally acknowledged the great debt which
nineteenth-century English literature owed to the master of French
realism. James's essay of 1875 may be taken as marking Balzac's emer-
gence from vaguely disreputable obscurity into the full light of public
praise, but there is no doubt that, for the generation of British writers
which preceded James, Balzac represented a powerful challenge if not
also a model.
Alone among French novelists in the middle years of the nine-
teenth century, Balzac was in the curious position of being highly re-
garded by a limited sector of the British public but virtually unknown
to the majority of English readers. One might be inclined to see in the
lopsidedness of Balzac's English reputation the effect of a sort of in-
formal conspiracy, which allowed the elite who could read him in
French to savor his corruption, while it preserved the mass of readers
from his demoralizing and possibly inflammatory influence. The grad-
ual opening-up of Balzac's closed shelf would then be a symptom of
increasing democracy of culture, a weakening of the hold which the
privileged class had exercised on information in general. Such a view
does not do full justice, however, to the complexities of the case.
Throughout the century even the elite were deeply troubled by an
art which compelled their admiration but turned their artistic morality
inside-out.
The first major English statement on Balzac was John Wilson
Croker's article for the Quarterli Review of 1836. Both Decker and
Ellis draw heavily from this article in support of their respective theses,
and it supports both admirably. Croker's "miserable effusion of bigotry
and spleen," as the Westminster Review called it,24 contains as much

23
Along with "Sarrasine" and "Une Passion dans le desert," "La Fille aux yeux d'or" was
excluded from Saintsbury's edition of the Comedie humaine as containing "inconve-
nient" matters.
24"The Quarterly Review for April, 1836: Article on French Novels," Westminster Re-
view, 25 (July 1836), 300.

AUTUMN 1976
10 WalterM. Kendrick

evidence of Victorian prudery and trembling Francophobia as one

could wish to find. The article became, indeed, something of a cause
celebre in its own time. Eight years after its publication, Lewes ac-
cused it of having made the phrase "French novels" synonymous with
"all that is horrible and blasphemous,"25and in 1847 the Athenaeum
ironically claimed that Croker's rage had led to a boom in the market
for French novels, by tempting "all the curious world to ascertain for
itself whether the charge was true or not."26
For all his anti-French vituperation, however, Croker makes al-
lowances for Balzac which he denies to other French writers. The nov-
els of Hugo, Dumas, and Sand are damned without reserve, but Bal-
zac's occupy a special category:
If we were consideringthe literary merit of these works, we should have much to
say in praise and at least as much in censure of M. de Balsac. . . . But it is only
as evidence of the state of moral feeling and social life in France that we have at
present to deal with M. de Balsac.
(Croker,p. 81).

Eugenie Grandet is exempted from blame altogether. "It is, as it were,

a Dutch picture of an interior," and Balzac's only transgression in it is
that "he too often pushes the minuteness of his local descriptions to
tediousness" (Croker, p. 91). Croker's hysteria makes a limited excep-
tion for Balzac, whose chief sin is to have been born in France, where
a vicious society gives him scenes of viciousness to portray. But in
itself his art is not immoral, and it can depict virtue as brilliantly as
it depicts vice. Indeed, by drawing this distinction for Balzac alone,
Croker pays his realism a significant compliment. So precise and vivid
are Balzac's fictions that they can be taken for truth, and it is that truth
which Croker abhors, not the triumphant realism of its portrayal.
Balzac's unsavory but convincing realism put his early English
critics in an unfamiliar dilemma. The goings-on in his novels were
morally reprehensible, but the skill of their representation was un-
deniably masterful. One could condemn the former, but one had at
least to acknowledge the latter; the result was an uncomfortable vacil-
lation between condemnation of the thing represented and praise of
its representation. The most hostile critics, following Croker's lead,
took Balzac's novels for unretouched pictures of France. They directed
their outrage at the supposed contagion of French degeneracy, and the
fictional aspect of Balzac's accounts was almost wholly ignored. This

"Balzac and George Sand," Foreign Quarterly Review, 32 (July 1844), 161-162.
28 "CousinPons; or the Two Musicians - (Le Cousin Pons; ou Les Deux Musiciens),"
Athenaeum, 20 (31 July 1847), 809.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISM 11

transparent accuracy, however, was itself worthy of praise, and even

the most indignant of Croker's successors reserved compliments for
such things as the maison Vauquer and the character of Vautrin. When
the morally indiscriminate lens of Balzac's art was turned upon objects
which were admirable or at least interesting, the result was commend-
able. But critics were disturbed that a lens of such power should have
so little regard for what it focused on.
Even Balzac's defenders often ignored the art which had been
interposed between British critics and French reality, and the contro-
versy over Balzac's immorality became a simple argument about the
relative decency of England and France. For example, Reynolds's
Modern Literature of France (1839) sets out to show that "the gen-
erality of French novels are anything but licentious and abandoned"
(Reynolds, I, v), but it ends by countering Croker's "illiberal abuse"
with an impassioned defense not of French literature but of France:

Perhaps the critic whose deplorable misrepresentationswe have taken some pains
to correct,is not aware that the average amount of crime in England preponderates
over that in France; and that there are more murders,more robberies,more infan-
ticides, and more unnatural crimes registered in the annals of turpitude and de-
linquency in the former than in the latter country.
(Reynolds, I, vii).

Reynolds's prime instance of British delinquency is "when Cooke at

Leicester murdered Mr. Paas with a log of wood, and then burnt the
body piecemeal on the fire to get rid of all traces that might lead to his
discovery" (Reynolds, I,viii) - a characteristic citation from the future
editor of the London Journal, but one which carries him rather far
from Balzac. Yet for Reynolds as much as for Croker, Balzac's art is
transparent, a medium which allows the reader to make contact with
a world which is just as real as his own. The moral value of Balzac's
fiction can therefore be judged according to the same standard which
one would apply to events in that real world. His art has vanished
between two equal realities.
Many of Balzac's early defenders, however, found that his novels
attained other goals than this, goals which might not be compatible
with the transparency of perfect realism. Balzac was the pre-eminent
"painter of the Flemish school," as the Foreign Quarterly called him
in 1843; joined to his mastery as "a high artist of human passion,"
this skill made a combination which was "rare indeed."27 Croker had

27 "Un Menage de Gargon en Province (A Provincial Bachelor's Household)," Foreign

Quarterly Review, 30 (January 1843), 202.

AUTUMNN 1976
12 WalterM. Kendrick

applied the epithet "Dutch picture" to Eugenie Grandet in 1836, and

it subsequently became the single greatest cliche in both hostile and
friendly British criticism of Balzac. The major artistic flaw in his novels,
for those who favored them, was only the Flemish weakness of exces-
sive devotion to detail. "We grow quite embarrassed with minute de-
tails," complained the Westminster Review in 1838, "as in Dutch pic-
tures, which have, however, their merits."28These merits did not lie
in the elevating subjects of the pictures, but rather in the sheer artistry
which had produced them. Such artistry was purely decorative, how-
ever, as the analogy to Dutch painting implies. None of Balzac's early
British admirers went so far as to suggest that the embellishments of art
had a value which could supplant the value of the reality they adorned.
Nevertheless, even in the 184os and 5os, Balzac was exerting on British
criticism a definite pressure in a new direction - toward the assertion,
which would be widely made later in the century, that his art had posi-
tive moral worth irrespective of what it portrayed.
The most extreme early statement of this kind was made in 1847
by J. L. Motley in an article for the North American Review. Nothing
like Motley's unruffled detachment would be displayed in England for
another thirty years, and his assessment of Balzac strikingly prefigures
James's opinions of 1875 and after. Balzac, according to Motley, "is an
artist. He is neither moral nor immoral, but a calm and profound ob-
server of human society and human passions, and a minute, patient,
and powerful delineator of scenes and characters in the world before
his eyes." Not only does Motley go a step beyond most of his British
contemporaries in calling these passions "human" and not merely
"French," but his conclusion succinctly states what critics in England
perhaps perceived but did not publish. Balzac's readers, Motley de-
cides, "must moralize for themselves." His novels may be "dark,"but
they are nevertheless "truthful copies from human nature," and they
lead Motley to the unheard-of conclusion that "an author is not re-
sponsible for the disorder which he depicts."29 Explicit statements
like this would not be frequent in British criticism until the i88os, but
Motley's exceptionality lies only in his unequivocal declaration, with
apparent approval, of a fact about Balzac which had troubled English
readers from their first experience of him.
Even the most devoted of Balzac's early British defenders never
went so far as to condone an amoral art, but the marked discrepancy
between his disreputable subjects and his commendable treatment

3 "The Philosophy of Fiction," Westminster Review, 31 (April 1838), 94.

:' "The Novels of Balzac," North American Review, 65 (July 1847), 87.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISM 13

of them led to a provocative ambivalence in their response. Of all

Balzac's critics during the 184os and 5os, Lewes most clearly demon-
strates the doublemindedness of educated British opinion. Lewes
thought highly enough of Balzac to collaborate on a translation of "Le
Bal de sceaux" in 1846, and to "adapt"in 1851, under the title The Game
of Speculation, the "posthumous work" Mercadet "by the celebrated
H. DE BALZAC.":3" In 1850, he unsettled Charlotte Bronte by sending
her copies of Modeste Mignon and Illusions perdues, with the evident
expectation that she would share his enthusiasm for Balzac, who was
"quite a new author" to her.3: In his public comments, however, Lewes
was much more cautious, wavering between the two poles of response
which marked the range of British criticism. His 1847 review of Le
Cousin Pons projects this ambivalence upon the novel itself. The first
half of the novel splendidly exhibits "that minuteness of detail, that
prodigality of observation," and that "patient power of depicting what
he observes"32which are the special achievements of "this Dutch painter
in prose." But the second half goes all downhill: "it is as untrue,
though full of true details, and as inartistic, as the first is simple, true,
healthy, and agreeable" (Lewes, "Recent Novels," p. 695). The cumu-
lative tragedy of the novel, the gradual piling-up of evil about the help-
lessly innocent Pons and Schmucke, is lost upon Lewes, for whom the
novel falls apart into two discreet halves, one of which illustrates the
good Balzac while the other is given over to the bad.
In Lewes's 1844 article on "Balzac and George Sand," these two
Balzacs blend together in an argument which begins in condemnation
and ends in lavish praise. Lewes's declared intention is to show that the
verdict which finds Balzac admirable and George Sand "unclean"ought,
"in justice, to be reversed." Balzac is really "a very dangerous writer,"
whose works, with few exceptions, "should be strictly forbidden to
young women" ("Balzac and George Sand," p. 149). Balzac's undue
concentration on adultery is an aesthetic as well as a moral fault; he
absolutely "deserves our contempt as an immoral writer" (p. 147), and,
to make matters worse, he has "a prosaic mind" (p. 152). After so much
abuse, there would hardly seem to be anything to save, but Lewes finds
it in Balzac's "delineation of character." "It is Balzac's forte. It endows
his works with a value which no faults can depreciate; it is a merit so
rare, and so largely possessed by him, that it overcomes all the objec-

3"Slingsby Lawrence, Esq.," The Game of Speculation. A Coined!, in Three Acts

(London: Lacy's Acting Editions, n.d.), p. 2.
n She did not. Her reply was polite but concluded bluntly: "Truly I like George Sand
better." Muriel Spark, ed., The Bronte Letters (London: Peter Nevill, 1954), p. 178.
3' "Recent Novels- French and English," Fraser's, 36 (December 1847), 694.

AUTUMIN 1976
14 WalterM. Kendrick

tions raised against his tendency, style, and want of narrative power"
(p. 154). Lcwes's final judgment is nearly the reverse of his initial one.
Balzac has merits which Sand cannot pretend to, and "his merits are
great enough and rare enough to outweigh his faults" (p. 16o). The
morally worst of novelists is artistically almost the best, and Lewes can-
not resolve the problem of to what degree art in its own right can sup-
plant the moral values of its represented world.
This is among the central problems of British criticism in the
middle years of the nineteenth century, and both Lewes and George
Eliot, the one as a critic, the other as a practicing novelist, were vitally
concerned with it. Art and society seemed to possess independent stan-
dards of value, both of which had to coexist somehow in any work of art
which set out to portray society. So long as the novel restricted itself
to subjects which were socially unobjectionable - as the contemporary
English novel for the most part did - the potential contradiction did
not become troublesome. But such restriction was not intrinsic to the
art of novel-writing, and as soon as that art crossed society's moral line
- as it was able to do in France - it came into conflict with a standard
incommensurate with its own. Balzac's novels were the pre-eminent
embodiments of this conflict. They left British critics in the impossible
position of having to judge how much art makes up for how much im-
morality of subject. No doubt a great deal of art was required to redeem
a continuous dose of adultery, but Lewes was inclined, despite his own
protestations, to consider Balzac's debt paid.
Eliot shared some of Lewes's ambivalence about the value of
Balzac's work, but her judgment, more forcefully than his, tended to be
harsh. Her letters reveal an easy familiarity with Balzac from as early as
1854, but in her journal for 1859, a passage later reprinted in Cross's
Life, she dismisses Le Pere Goriot succinctly as "a hateful book."33
When Henry James reviewed the Cross biography in 1885, he picked
out this apparently insensitive comment for special notice. From
James's point of view, Eliot's disapproval of Balzac revealed the cen-
tral flaw in her own art. For her, James remarked, the novel "was not
primarily a pictutre of life, capable of deriving a high value from its
form, but a moralized fable, the last word of a philosophy endeavoring
to teach by example."34This venerable conception of the social role
of fiction had come to seem woefully old-fashioned to the avant-garde

33
J. W. Cross, ed., George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, 3 vols.
(1885; rpt. Grosse Pointe, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1968), II, io6.
34
Atlantic Monthly, 55 (May 1885); rpt. in David Carroll, ed., George Eliot: The Criti-
cal Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 497.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISM 15

James of 1885, as it had to many of his contemporaries in the genera-

tion after Eliot's. As James saw, Balzac was the barometer of this
change in the British attitude toward fiction in general: the most strik-
ing difference between the English writers of 1859 and those of 1885
was that the latter were eager to learn the lesson which Balzac had
always been ready to teach them.
As I have shown, however, the mid-Victorian understanding of
Balzac was never quite as naive as James would make it. Eliot, like
Lewes, was deeply concerned with the possible conflict between the
moral and the aesthetic values of art, and she saw in Balzac a case of
the conflict destructively resolved. The problem was urgently relevant
to her own art as well. When in 1858 John Blackwood wrote to request
an outlinle of Adam Bede, on which she was then at work, she declined
to provide one and gave a provocative reason:
The soul of art lies in its treatment and not in its subject. If a dramatist were to
tell a manager that he had a fine tragedy in preparation, the subject of which
was a man with a sore foot on a desert island, it is probable the manager would
not feel any very brilliant hopes. Yet the Philoctetes is one of the finest dramas in
the world.

The "subject" of Adam Bede, baldly stated, would look unpromising

enough, but the subject is not the whole novel:
The mere skeleton of my story would probably give rise in your mind to objections
which would be suggested by the treatment other writers have given to the same
tragic incidents in the human lot - objections which would be far away from my
treatment. The Heart of Midlothian would probably have been thought highly
objectionable if a skeleton of the story had been given by a writer whose reputa-
tion did not place him above question, and the same story told by a Balzacian
French writer would probably have made a book that no young person could read
without injury. .. .35

For Eliot, Balzac was neither a magic-lantern show of France, as he

was for those who condemned him absolutely, nor an amoral practi-
tioner of form for its own sake, as he became for James's generation.
She saw in him rather a demonstration of the dangers which lay in
the attribution of an independeiit moral value to art itself, apart from
the world it represents and in which it must take its place.
For Eliot, as in varying degrees for all the great mid-Victorian
realists, the art of the novel was primarily one of transmission. The
final goal of fiction was that the reader should take its represented
world as continuous in all ways with his own. He should be brought

'> Letter to John Blackwood, 1 April 1858, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. I
am grateful to Gordon S. Haight for permission to quote from this unpublished letter,
which will appear in volume VIII of the George Eliot Letters.

AUTUMNI 1976
16 WalterM. Kendrick

to regard a novel's characters as living beings, their trials and adven-

tures as experiences which he himself might share, their joys and sor-
rows as emotions which merit his sympathy. The novelist had the duty
to place his reader in immediate contact with a fictional world to which
he would respond as if it were no fiction. The mere fact that a scene
had been artistically represented could add nothing to its value; the
artist might discover value in what he portrayed, and he might point
out that discovery to the reader, but the value was not contributed
by the portrayal. The world at large was moral, and the novelist's art
was no less so, but artistic morality was always the servant of the
world.
It would be a mistake to follow the late-Victorian avant garde
in condemning this theory of realism as necessarily less sophisticated
than the more overtly self-conscious theories which succeeded it. Far
from discounting the importance of "form,"as James contends, Eliot's
realism makes the novelist's art almost purely formal. It is an art of
arrangement and clarification, not content merely to present the in-
choate real, but bound to make it give up its meaning. And the "fables"
which such realism spins are not "moralized"- they are not made moral
in the telling but are moral in their nature. James and his generation
drastically misunderstood the accomplishments of their predecessors
and denigrated them for a naivete which they had not possessed. But
this denigration, like the corresponding elevation of Balzac, was the
consequence of a general shift in aesthetic sensibility which went be-
yond mere theorizing or the changing preferences of the avant garde.
Implicit in the mid-Victorian conception of realism is the no-
tion that fiction ought to strive for a kind of transparency, that between
the reader's world and that of the novel the artist should stand only as
a medium which is good to the degree that it is clear. This clarity
was itself a moral imperative. As Eliot declares in the famous opening
to chapter 17 of Adam Bede:
My strongest effort is . . . to give a faithful account of men and things as they
have mirroredthemselves in my mind. The mirroris doubtless defective; the out-
lines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as
much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were
in the witness-box narratingmy experience on oath.

Such direct addresses to the reader are a distinctive feature of mid-

Victorian realism, and they might seem, like this one, to damage clarity
in the act of asserting it. James repeatedly condemned the practice,
calling it a "pernicious trick" which provides a novelist the "suicidal
satisfaction" of admitting that his story is "only, after all, a make-

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISMI 17

believe."36 But for Eliot, Trollope, Thackeray, and the other novelists
who indulged the habit, these interruptions of the narrative illusion
do not compromise the reality or the value of what is portrayed.
Reader, writer, and fictional characters share a continuous real world,
and the writer's art is subordinate to its subject and to its audience.
This art is a vehicle, valuable only according to its success in
transmitting moral truth from one aspect of the real world to another.
Art is the servant of meaning; apart from its function as a medium it
can have, like Dutch pictures, only decorative merit. As R. H. Hutton
remarked in an essay on "George Eliot as Author" in 1887:

The only moralin a fictitiousstorywhich can properlybe demandedof writers

of genius,is not to shapetheirtale this way or that,whichthey may justlydecline
to do on artisticgrounds,but to discriminateclearlythe relativenobilityof the
charactersthey do conceive.. . . An artistwho leaves it doubtfulwhetherhe
recognisesthe distinctionbetweengood and evil at all, or who detectsin all his
characters so muchevil thatthe readers'sympathiesmusteitherbe entirelypassive
or side with what is evil, is blind to artisticas well as morallaws.37

Hutton's opinions were old-fashioned in 1887, but they summarize well

the doctrine of continuous interaction between art and life which
guided the realistic novelists of his and Eliot's generation. Art is an
activity in the world like any other, and its productions are to be
judged by the same standards which govern the world at large.

Moreover,I think it may be said, that in paintinghumannaturean artist is

boundto give due weight to the motiveswhich would claim authorityover him
in otheracts of his life; and as he wouldbe boundat any time and in any place
to do anythingin his powerto makeclearthe relationbetweengood and evil, the
samemotiveoughtto inducehim neverto omit in his drawingto put in a light
or a shadowwhichwouldadd to the moraltruthfulnessof the picture.
(Hutton,pp. 186-187).

It is this relation of art to the real world which governed the work of
the great mid-Victorian realists, and which their novels proudly pro-
claim. It is this subordination of craft to conveyance which the next
generation rejected as a crime against art itself, and which they sought
to rectify by the cultivation of an art which asserts itself as a separate
category from that of merely living in the world.
The most extreme advocate of the mid-Victorian conception of
artistic morality, and the one who suffered most when that conception

' "Anthony Trollope: A Partial Portrait," Century, n.s. 4 (July 1883), 385-395; rpt. in
Donald Smalley, ed., Trollope: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1969), p. 535.
· Richard Holt Hutton, Essays on Some of the Modern Guides of English Thought in
Matters of Faith (London: Macmillan, 1887), p. 186.

AUTUMN 1976
18 WalterM.Kendrick

fell out of favor, was Anthony Trollope, whose theory of art stands
in total opposition to that embodied in the works of Balzac. The fullest
exposition of Trollope's untheoretical theory is his Autobiography,
posthumously published in 1883. There Trollope clearly states his
notion of the novelist's social duty. It is to teach "lessons of virtue,"
to make "virtue alluring and vice ugly," and to do so "while he charms
his reader instead of wearying him."38This ancient double imperative
breeds its own contradictions, but the Balzacian duality of subject
and treatment is not one of them. For Trollope, the triumph of tech-
nique is its disappearance. The highest compliment which can be paid
a novelist is that which Nathaniel Hawthorne once paid him: that his
novels are "just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of
the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going
about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being
made a show of" (quoted in Autobiography, chap. 8). This transpar-
ency, according to Trollope, was always his own artistic aim, and it
has guaranteed the wholesomeness of the great tradition of English
fiction, from the novels of Austen and Scott to Thackeray's, Eliot's, and
Trollope's own (Autobiography, chap. 12). There is, in Trollope's
understanding, no value in treatment apart from subject, and no way
in which the one, which vanishes in proportion to its success, can re-
deem or repair the faults of the other. Fictional morality is identical
to social morality, and the artist lives at such peace with the world
about him that his art can disappear in the continuum of the repre-
sented and the real.
Trollope's artistic theory, such as it is, leaves in obscurity a great
number of questions about the relation between fiction and fact. The
significance of the theory, however, lies not in its shortcomings but in
the fact that Trollope saw no shortcomings in it. More plainly than
the works of Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, or any other eminent mid-
Victorian, Trollope's novels represent the culmination of what James
called the "moralized fable," that long-standing British tradition which
made the artist a secular preacher and his art a serviceable article like
well-made shoes.39 The history of Balzac's advancing English repu-
tation is also the history of Trollope's decline. The 187os, which saw
Balzac's emergence from English obscurity, saw the first signs of
decay in Trollope's critical and popular esteem. And by the i88os, as
Balzac became at last firmly established in England, Trollope's repu-

", An Autobiography (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons,

1883), chap. 12.
*9 These comparisons are Trollope's own. See Autobiography, Chaps. 7 and 12.

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISM 19

tation reached its lowest point. A major cause of Trollope's disrepute

among late-Victorian critics was the Autobiography, with its placid
declaration of an outmoded faith. For those who admired Balzac, and
who saw in his self-committed artistry a model for the novelist's re-
lation to the world, the Trollopian shoemaker-novelist looked like a
degradation and a betrayal.
As this essay has attempted to show, however, late-Victorian
critics did not discover excellences in Balzac which had been hidden
from their grandparents. Neither did they all at once become aware
of faults in Trollope which earlier readers had missed. From as early
as the 183os, British readers had been giving Balzac his due, and no
critic had ever suggested that Trollope's fiction could match Balzac's
in style or power. Rather, it was the approved model of the artist which
changed - from that of the Trollopian shoemaker, who merged with-
out a tremor into the society he portrayed, to that of the Balzacian
scientist-historian, who stood apart from society and practiced an art
with its own set of rules and standards. As James remarks in his "Par-
tial Portrait" ( 1883), Trollope "never took himself seriously as an
artist." He "went in, as they say, for having as little form as possible;
it is probably safe to affirm that he had no 'views' whatever on the sub-
ject of novel-writing" (Critical Heritage, p. 526). Without such views,
according to James, no novelist can have "the smallest locus standi,"
and the sharpest possible contrast to Trollope's artless art is offered
by "the magnificent historical tone of Balzac" (Critical Heritage,
P. 536).
The triumph of Balzac over Trollope represents the emergence
in England of a new conception of the novelist as an artist, and of
the novel as an art form with intrinsic values apart from its effective-
ness as a moral instructor. One should not be tempted, however, to
follow the late Victorians in regarding Balzac's art as more "advanced"
than Trollope's. In comparison with Balzac's air of relentlessly system-
atic thoroughness, Trollope's novelistic stance does look lax and casual.
He wove, as James remarked, a "loose web" in contrast to Balzac's taut
density.40 But in Trollope's novels, no less than in Balzac's, there are
sufficient indications of the relation which his art takes toward the world
which it portrays and in which it places itself. It is the contrast between
these two ways of relating fiction to life, these two implicit portraits
of the artist and his work, which makes the crucial distinction be-

40
"Honore de Balzac," in French Poets and Novelists (1878; rpt. New York: Grosset &
Dunlap, 1964), p. 75.

AUTUMN 1976
20 Walter M. Kendrick

tween Balzac's French realism and the British tradition epitomized

by Trollope.
An important term in this regard, for both writers, is "poetry,"
a word which the nineteenth century nearly wore out by over-extension.
Both Balzac and Trollope use "poetry"to signify a good deal more than
metrical composition; each makes of it an indicator of the value of art
in his artistic world, and of the relation between that fictional world
and the reality of the reader's experience. In Trollope's novels, "poetry"
is less an occupation or a pastime than a state of mind. It is "the poeti-
cal" far more than it is poems. Poetical feelings may be brought on by
any sort of impressive landscape or event, but they are always marked
as exceptions from life's standard - pleasant, perhaps, but temporary.
Amid the moonlit ruins of Matching Priory, for example, Lady Glen-
cora Palliser gets the poetical feeling:

"Is it not beautiful!" said Glencora. "I do love it so! . . . But I suppose
that's nonsense,"she added after a pause.
"Not more so than what people are supposed to talk by moonlight."
"That's unkind. I'd like what I say on such an occasion to be more
poetical or else more nonsensical than what other people say under the same
circumstances."
(Can You Forgive Her?, chap. 27).

Poetry and nonsense, as Lady Glencora is clearly aware, are very

closely related.
Poetical moonlight and romantic poetry share in Trollope's nov-
els the same airy irrelevance. Both lead away from the real scene of
human life, and both are foreign to the world of the realistic novel.
As an older, chastened Lady Glencora declares in Phineas Redux:
Romance and poetry are for the most part lies . . . and are very apt to bring
people into difficulties. I have seen something of them in my time, and I much
prefer downright honest figures. Two and two make four; idleness is the root of
all evil; love your neighbour like yourself, and the rest of it.
(chap. 76).

Trollope's novels define their territory by the exclusion of this vaguely

literary romanticism, which they set up as the far extreme from the
real Trollopian world. That world is down-to-earth and solid; it is the
reader's world unadorned by artistic flights and flourishes. It is also
the traditional world of the English novel, a tradition to which Trol-
lope's novels proudly join themselves. The English novel has always
fostered, according to Trollope's 1870 lecture on the subject, a view
of life which is "realistic, practical, and, though upon the whole service-

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISM 21

able, upon the whole also unpoetical rather than romantic."41This tra-
dition has striven, as Trollope's novels do, to be perceived as if it were
unliterary, a realm apart from the self-conscious extravagance of po-
etry and romance. The greatest success which a novel can achieve is
to be read as if it were no work of art at all but rather, as in Haw-
thorne's figure, a lucid pane of glass, through which the reader gains
access to living people like himself. The consequence of this anti-
literary view of the novel is the denigration of all such literary forms as
poetry, which exploit language for its own sake; and Trollope's novels
wage a steady campaign against any form of reading which is not, like
themselves, absolutely representational. The campaign is naive, per-
haps, in its conception of the nature of language, but Trollope's novels
demonstrate to what an amazing degree of sophisticated practice a
naive theory may lead.
In contrast to Trollope's artless English society, the population
of the Com6die humaine includes a large number of poets and artists
of all sorts. Yet in the Trollopian sense - that is, as living objects of
evaluation and sympathy - Balzac's artists would hardly give the
reader an exalted opinion of their profession. Despite such apprecia-
tive portrayals as that of the painter Joseph Bridau (La Rabouilleuse)
and the novelist Camille Maupin (Beatrix), Balzac's artists are gen-
erally a sorry lot, ranging from the pathetic sculptor Steinbock of La
Cousine Bette to the venal "poet" Lucien de Rubempre of Illusions
perdues and Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes. The Trollopian
design for reading does not work when it is applied to Balzac - or, if
it is applied to him, as it was by his hostile English critics, the result
is a view of "France" as a terrifying slough of degeneracy and corrup-
tion. But Balzac's novels do not strive for such moral transparency.
Between the reader and the represented world they impose a self-
conscious narrative full of far-ranging speculations, disquisitions on
theoretical subjects from aesthetics to geology, and an elaborate array
of rhetorical figures, all of which act to place the reader at a judicious
distance from the characters and their deeds. Sometimes this distinc-
tively Balzacian narrative is merely digressive, but most often Balzac's
facts and figures are precisely calculated to place the fictional world
in context, to make it not so much real as representative. The reader
does not gaze upon Balzac's world through a pane of glass; he takes it

41 "On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement," in Morris L. Parrish, ed., Four
Lectures (London: Constable, 1938), p. 112.

AUTUMIN 1976
 WalterM. Kendrick

as a figure for the real, an artfully constructed thing which asserts the
value of its own artfulness.
The assertion is most prominently visible in Balzac's analogies
from the arts, and particularly from poetry. Like Trollope, Balzac uses
the term "poetry" in a general sense which has apparently little to do
with metrics. "Every suicide," comments the narrator of La peau de
chagrin, "is an awful poem of sorrow" (I, 10) .42 Later in the
same novel, a rustic hut is described as having "a charm like that of
poetry in it" - "it was a spontaneous growth, a masterpiece due to
chance" (I, 221). In Ferragus, a woman's undergarments, carelessly
strewn about the room, are "disiecta membra poetae" (XXXV, 36);
and Cousin Pons yearns pathetically for "certain creams - surely the
poetry of cookery!" (XXIX, 61). Literally anything, from suicide
to dessert, can make a "poem" for Balzac. He is capable of jumbling
all the arts together to form a grotesque Gesamtkunstwerk like this
amazing figure from Le Cousin Pons: "Every line shone out brilliantly,
every object threw in its phase in a harmony of masterpieces arranged
by two musicians- both of whom alike had attained to be poets"
(XXIX, 89). But, for all its indiscriminate application, Balzacian
"poetry" never quite loses touch with literary composition. A poem,
for Balzac, is anything which achieves a state of pure identity, stand-
ing forth as its own quintessence. Such purity is necessarily expressive:
it tells itself. It is characteristic of Balzac's novels that they find other
narratives everywhere in the animate and inanimate world. The highest
degree of truth which anything in the Comedie humaine can reach is
that at which it tells its own story. All the other arts, all human pas-
sions and occupations, are subordinate in value to story-telling, and it
is Balzac's novels themselves which tell the stories of them all.
Balzac's "poems," for all their miscellaneous variety, are lyrical
compositions in the romantic mode, unpremeditated expositions of self-
hood. Unlike Trollope's poetical romance, which leads outward into
alien territory, Balzac's poems mark the central points of his world,
from which the narratives of the self radiate outward. The Balzacian
poem also presupposes an audience - it must be read. The narrator of
Balzac's novels is the reader of the world's poems; he comes between
the world and the novel reader as the necessary interpreter of what the
world has to say. The world's poetry is embodied in faces, scenes, and

42 Page references to the Comedie humaine are to the translation edited by George
Saintsbury, 40 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1895-99).

VICTORIAN STUDIES
BALZAC AND BRITISH REALISMI 23

furniture, but the narrator turns them into language. As, for example,
in this poetic moment from Le Pere Goriot:
The convict's prison, its language and customs, its sudden sharp transitions from
the humorous to the horrible, its appalling grandeur, its triviality and its dark
depths, were all revealed in turn by the speaker'sdiscourse; he seemed to be no
longer a man, but the type and mouthpiece of a degenerate race, a brutal, supple,
clear-headedrace of savages. In one moment Collin became the poet of an inferno,
wherein all thoughts and passions that move human nature (save repentance)
find a place.
(VIII, 217).
Rastignac, at whom Vautrin directs this eloquence, reads in it only
their "kinship claimed by crime"; but the narrator can read, and trans-
mit to his readers, the whole unspoken tale in Vautrin's words. The
most significant character in the Comedie humaine is its narrator, and
the act of reading poetry, and turning it into novels, is the highest
activity which can be engaged in.
It is this implicit glorification of novel writing, its assertion as
the greatest of the arts and the generator of its own sovereign values,
which most sharply distinguishes Balzac's aesthetic from that of the
Trollopian realist. This aspect of Balzac's novels made him particularly
appealing to Henry James and the late-century British avant garde;
it also endeared him to Emile Zola and the French "naturalists,"whose
novels aroused in England the same sort of controversy which Balzac's
had stimulated a generation earlier. For Zola, Balzac was, triumphantly,
the first "naturalist."43A novel like La Cousine Bette deserves to be
called "experimental," as Zola called his own novels, because it is not
content with mere photographic reproduction of phenomena but goes
on to "produce and direct" them. The honor of the novelist "grows
singularly" when he takes up the naturalist stance,44 and his art be-
comes the noblest of human endeavors.

I do not know, I repeat, of a more noble work, nor of a grander application.

To be the master of good and evil, to regulate life, to regulate society, to solve in
time all the problems of socialism, above all, to give justice a solid foundation by
solving through experiment the questions of criminality-is not this being the
most useful and the most moral worker in the human workshop?
("The ExperimentalNovel," p. 26).

For Zola, experimentation is more valuable than observation because

it controls life instead of merely portraying it, and the worth of a novel

4"Naturalism on the Stage," in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, translated by
Belle M. Sherman (New York: Haskell House, 1964), p. 117.
44 Novel,"in Sherman,p. 11.
"TheExperimental

AUTUMN 1976
24 Walter M. Kendrick

varies directly according to its mastery over the merely real. Such mas-
tery was to be exercised still more flamboyantly by J. K. Huysmans in
France and by Oscar Wilde and his fellow aesthetes in England. For
them, and still later for Stephen Dedalus, whose ideal artist pares his
nails in sublime aloofness from the world he has created, the foremost
predecessor remained Balzac, who was responsible only to his art and
not to the world's disorder.
The fortunes of naturalism in England lie beyond the scope of
this essay, as do the rise of aestheticism and the permutations of art
for art's sake. All, however, were consequences of the same shift in
sensibility which made Balzac respectable and threw the realism of
Trollope and George Eliot into disfavor. The social role of fiction
changed radically in the last decades of the nineteenth century, from
that of verbal picture-making to that of a craft of language which has
values apart from those of what it points to in the world. The change
reveals a broadening of moral tolerance and an increased sophistication
on the part of writers and readers alike, but at the same time the novel
lost what for the mid-Victorian realists had been its greatest glory -
the unequalled power to make an immediate moral impact on its
readers' lives. This was the glory of the "moralized fable," and the
novel has never since regained it.

Fordham University

VICTORIAN STUDIES