574
PARTISAN REVIEW
would have had his work cut out for him here. For with the other
novelists, one loves them in submitting oneself to them; one receives
the truth from a Tolstoy as from someone of greater scope and
stature than oneself. With Balzac, we know all his vulgarities, and
at first were often repelled by them; then we began to love him,
when we smiled at all those sillinesses which are so typical of him;
we love him, with a little dash of irony mixed in our affection; we
know his aberrations, his shabby little tricks, and because they are
so like him we love them.
Because in some respects Balzac is a slapdash writer, one might
suppose that he did not trouble to make his characters talk like them–
selves, or that if he had tried to, he would not have been able to
resist drawing attention to it at every tum. However, it is quite
the opposite: the man who artlessly reels out his views on history,
art,
and so forth, keeps the most deep-laid schemes under cover, and
leaves the truth of the dialogue to speak for itself, without attempting
to underline what he does so artfully that it might go unnoticed.
When he makes the lovely Mme. de Roguin, that born Parisian whom
Tours knew as the country prefect's wife, talk about how the Rogrons
have furnished their house, how infallibly all those sallies are
hers,
not Balzac's! Lucien de Rubempre has, even in his asides, exactly
the animal high spirits, the aroma of raw youth, that Vautrin would
be attracted by. "'Aha!' thought Lucien, 'he plays
bouillote.'
'I've
caught him.' 'What an oriental nature,' Lucien said to himself. 'I'll
make him show what he is.' 'This is a lascar who's no more a priest
than I am.' " And as it happened, Vautrin was not the only one to
love Lucien. Oscar W'ilde, whom life, alas, would teach that there
are sorrows more piercing than those we get from books, said in his
first period (the period of his remark: "Before the Lake poets there
were no fogs on the Thames"), "The greatest grief of my life? The
death of Lucien de Rubempre in
Splendeurs et Miseres des Cour–
tisanes."
There is besides something particularly dramatic about Os–
car Wilde in his most brilliant days having been drawn to Lucien
de Rubempre, and moved by his death. No doubt like every reader
he grieved over it because he saw it from Vautrin's point of view,
which was Balzac's. And it was a point of view, too, which he as
a reader was peculiarly fitted and marked out to adopt more whole–
heartedly than most readers could. But one can't help thinking how
