568
PARTISAN REVIEW
records its outward habiliments and judges very acutely on what lies
beneath, when its interest as a novel is exhausted, it begins a new
life as a historical document. As the
Aeneid,
just where poets find
it boring, can be enthralling to mythologists, so when Peyrade, Felix
de Vandenesse, and the like, don't seem to us to have much life in
them, Albert Sorel tells us that it is in them we must s.tudy the
police system of the Consulate or the politics of the Bourbon Res–
toration. The novel is itself a gainer by this. As with those people
whom one makes friends with on a holiday and is about 'to take
leave of when one learns that they are catching the same train and
may be re-met in Paris, so at the depressing moment when we must
say good-by to a Balzac character-a moment that Balzac had put
off as long as he could by making him reappear in other novels–
just when he is abou't to disappear and be no more than a dream,
Sorel says to us: "Not at all. This isn't a dream. Study them, it's
authentic, it's part of history."
So in reading Balzac we can still feel and almost gratify those
cravings which great literature ough't 'to allay in us. With Tolstoy,
the account of an evening party in high society is dominated by the
mind of the author, and, as Aristotle would say, we are purged of
our worldliness while we read it; with Balzac, we feel almost a
worldly satisfaction at taking part in
it.
His very titles carry the
stamp of actuality. While with many writers the title is more or less
of a symbol, an emblem that must be understood in a wider and
more poetical sense than a reading of the book would warrant, with
Balzac it is more apt to be the other way about. To read through
that wonderful book called
Les IUusions Perdues,
clips the wings,
rather than not, of that lovely title,
Lost Illusions,
and brings it to
earth. The title means that on going to Paris Lucien de Rubempre
discovered that Mme. de Bargeton was absurd and provincial, that
journalists were rascals, that life was hard. They are quite personal,
quite arbitrary illusions, and the loss of them can drive him to despair,
while the nature of them gives the book a powerful stamp of reality,
but they slightly abate the transcendentalism of the title. So each
title should be taken literally:
Un Grand Homme de Province
a
Paris, Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, A Combien l'Amour
Revient aux Vieillards,
etc.
In
La Recherche de l'Absolu,
the abso–
lute has more the nature of a formula, an alchemical rather than a
