with relentless energy, the absence of all that is spontaneous and delicate, of the persuasiveness which belongs to the highest genius, are traits common to both. Expect neither poetry nor chivalry in such men; they know that strength, of the head and the muscles, will make its way with the many. But they have not learnt the secret of weakness, the charm of sympathy, the fascination which subdues by yielding. With clamour and the breaking of shields they advance, as it seems to them, on the high road of victory; and the great calm world, the order of nature keeping its eternal course, is hidden from them. The noise of battle is not progress, as Napoleon discovered in good time. And the drama of adultery,' the 'world of passions and interests,' is not life, but only the material of it.

Here is pretty much all the evidence bearing on the relation of Balzac to the school of Realism; and, if we examine it impartially, we shall find that, while he has contributed certain elements of great importance to it as a movement, he remains detached from it by an originality of aim and a mode of artistic composition which none of his successors have rivalled. In Balzac the details are photographed, the material atmosphere is given, and the persons are treated as centres of force acting on one another according to their degree of energy. So much would be sufficient, if it were all, to produce as a natural consequence what M. Zola means by his novel of experience not a transcript of the facts of life, but a presentation of such of them as will most easily be rendered in the language and on the theory of materialism. But Balzac has not stopped at this point. He has shown us characters, which, instead of being melted into the stream of sensations, are constant to themselves, unyielding even to the extent of monomania, and which develop their phases by an inward law. They know nothing, indeed, of free-will, but they are fixed natures, species, not accidental gatherings of refuse to be scattered by the next flood, which is M. Zola's conception of human beings. For Balzac there do exist true individuals, whose nature is their destiny. And thus he intends his stories to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the Romantic period, tragedies were wrought out by the combination of a high divine or demonic element with the human, Schicksal und eigene Schuld. Balzac interprets 'Fate' by character, as well as by environment. But M. Zola, following, as he supposes, the prophets of evolution, can find no 'species,' no fixed quantities whatever in the universe at large. It is to him a perpetual flux, and the one way to render it is by the photography of the moment.' Now, there is in Balzac not a single character which we could justly call a photograph.

They

They are concrete types, abounding in capricious and grotesque traits, larger than human, and never commonplace. Set one of them alive on the Boulevards, and he would be, like Peter Schlemihl, the man without a shadow, something portentous or uncanny. The romantic ichor mingled with their blood gives them an air as from another world; and to another world than that of the pavement or the police-court they belong, to the planet Balzac,' which has its own laws and peculiarities,—and again to literature with its necessary conventions, which can be transgressed only by the destruction of the art itself. For when Aristotle says that poetry is an imitation of nature, he implies that it cannot be identical with nature, else it would cease to be imitation.

Upon which, taking up the challenge that Balzac would not perhaps have accepted, comes forward a true but most perverse and misleading genius, in the person of the renowned Gustave Flaubert, who boldly undertakes to write 'objective fiction,' wherein there shall be as little of intention' or of 'final causes as he admitted in Nature itself. And he produces one masterpiece, Madame Bovary;' various splendid failures,—we mean Salammbò' and 'La Tentation de Saint Antoine ;'-and two unimaginable compositions, the better known of which, 'L'Éducation Sentimentale,' we take to be the dullest book that a man of genius ever inflicted on our race. We have read it, and we survive, but not 'to tell the tale.' Let that be undertaken by some limited company where each reader shall be answerable only for what he has got through. Flaubert attempted the impossible; and, as M. de Calonne would have said, he achieved it. But he did not reach an 'objective art' in the sense he proposed, and for very good reasons. What he did, amongst other things, was to help forward the Realism of which he has judged so contemptuously.

We have come to a place where many roads meet, and where the affinities between the kinds of the modern French novel, how unlike soever, begin to appear. In the very height of the Romantic movement, as we have observed, Balzac, with his army of stage carpenters and scene-painters, had set up a theatre of his own, where, if the action was fanciful or melodramatic, the local colour, costumes, and language, were taken from the street. The Romanticist understood by 'reality' something primeval and infinite, the unfathomable world which we call Nature,' the mighty monster full of beauty and terror 'ever living, never advancing,' and though strangely silent in man's presence yet somehow akin to him: this, on the one hand; and, on the other, that inward existence, all thought and passion,

which burns up in its flame the bonds of society as though they were threads of flax. In the Comédie Humaine,' however, we see not the individual in his solitary greatness, but the city or class to which he belongs, and him struggling with it,—not the sky and the wilderness, but the haunts of men sheltered from the sun and the elemental powers. Yet a third influence may be discerned in 1833, which, though it held of the Romantic school, was fated to mingle with the current of Realism lower down. If the motto of Victor Hugo and George Sand was 'Nature,' that of Balzac's 'Comédie' was 'Life.' And the third school, represented by Théophile Gautier, we may distinguish as that of 'Art.' We have all read the praise of 'Mademoiselle de Maupin' in Mr. Swinburne's sonnet as 'the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty. And to the general public, Gautier is known simply as its author. But he has written many other volumes, including 'Le Capitaine Fracasse' and Le Roman de la Momie,' which allow a juster estimate of his powers than this idle piece of schoolboy wickedness, with its sham picturesque and its scarcely more real erotics. A consummate master of French, endowed with a colour-sense which would not have disgraced Titian, and careless of the meaning of life, he was the very man to found a school of 'Decadence,' in which sensuous feeling and artistic insouciance should be all in all. Why must Art be subservient to ends beyond itself? Why not paint for painting's sake, and 'in the dense, dim air of life,' seek after 'beauty's excellence' without reference to any other, and especially with deliberate contempt for the 'moral journalist, who has a wife and daughters;' in short, for M. Prudhomme, as the French have it, or, as we say in England, for Mrs. Grundy? In the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin' from which we are quoting, the author amusingly describes his unsanctified procedure as Romanticist shamelessness.' But there is a strong family likeness between that and the certainly not more repulsive kind which exists in the works of M. Zola, and even of M. Paul Bourget. The cultivation of form, without regard to matter, has invariably degenerated into the worship of the five senses. 'Art for Art' is, in the strictest meaning of the word, idolatry, the taking of shadow for substance and resting in phenomena. It has not learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession;' or 'to use the beauties of earth as steps along which to mount upward from fair forms to fair practices,' in the contemplation of beauty absolute.' Théophile Gautier might despise the 'rehabilitation of virtue undertaken by the newspapers;' but these are not the words of a 'moral journalist with a family of daughters.' They

6

were

*

were spoken by a certain Diotima to the old man Socrates, and occur in a dialogue which M. Prudhomme has probably never read. The notion of Art for Art's sake is by no means Platonic; it belongs to an age the mark of which is utter disbelief in all that the senses cannot grasp. But thus it came about that Gautier, being enamoured of sounds, and lights, and colours, and having an exquisite perception of beauty of form,-was anticipating, sixty years back, the time in which decadence' would seem natural, putrefaction the chief condition of life, and perverted instincts the true humanity.

To Gautier's idolatry of the outward shows of things, no less than to the harmonious rhetoric of Chateaubriand, Flaubert was indebted for examples which he outstripped. In the technique of composition he holds a place apart, and-why should we not be generous and add?—supreme. He is not one of the greatest masters of literature; but he is of writing. When the Romantic school had as good as come to an end, Madame Bovary' appeared; and there is hardly a volume of note in French fiction since that time which has not shown a trace of its influence. That influence has even made its way into English and American literature, as we may convince ourselves by reading, for instance, the opening of Mr. Howell's 'A Foregone Conclusion.' And not altogether undeservedly. In M. Brunetière's unsparing but impartial account of French 'Naturalism,' the tribute paid to Flaubert's extraordinary grasp of certain methods, and to his enlargement or novel application of the procedures of his Romanticist predecessors, is no less handsome than instructive.t But as Don Quixote' may be said to have killed chivalry, though its author was full of the chivalric spirit, so Madame Bovary' was a deadly satire upon Romanticism. Yet Flaubert, by the incurable magnificence of his language, by his love for the strange and the eccentric, and by his disdain of middle-class vulgarity, betrayed affinities: which he did not care to own. In the effort to become a Realist, he literally killed himself, falling dead against his writing-desk while intent upon a work which should bear no token of its author's feelings. It could not be done. But the subjective, the personal style might be transformed, by skill or violence, into another, so much more akin to science than to art that, in comparison, it would deserve to be called objective and neutral. It is a style desperately fatiguing, impassively cruel, and in its hard coldness, far more 'Satanic' than the excited rhapsodies of a

Lélia or a Manfred. The passions no longer move at the command of virtue,' as in the sentimental days of Richardson. They move at the command of the physiologist who has taken out his note-book and is preparing a memoir for the Academy of Scientific Questions. The place and the time of the experiment are carefully chosen. It is Balzac's 'environment' (milieu) over again, but the details which make it have ceased to be capricious or highly coloured. It is Gautier's manner, without his flush of impassioned hues, his purple and ivory, his wine and sunlight. The form, the form alone is eloquent;' but then, as a corrective, the real is the commonplace; and there is no other real. Or, if there is a depth below the surface of things, it is unknown and unknowable. For Gustave Flaubert the spiritual world of faith or philosophy does not exist; it is a chimera. Things themselves are but an illusion; the relations between them are all we can lay hold of. And the laws of those relations make the drama.* In these confessions, we have travelled an immense distance from Balzac's monomaniac characters; as for free-will, it has sunk to depths in the sky where no instrument can discern a trace of it, not one streak of nebula in the boundless azure. 'I believe,' wrote Flaubert, that great art is scientific and impersonal.' What else could it be, on his principles? For he read the universe, not as a Divine hieroglyphic, but like a modern newspaper, its sense complete and trivial. Death,' he said, 'has, perhaps, no more to reveal than life.'

Like Brisset, in La Peau de Chagrin,' he was a doctor of the materialist school, who refused under any circumstances to believe that the spirit could modify its surroundings. He was also of Obermann's way of thinking, and found a terrible silence in the Heavens. To him religion, as it appears in history, was a succession of blood-stained or hysterical illusions. The most powerful emotions he calls forth are physical disgust, of which 'Salammbò' is full to overflowing,-terror, and a sense of the strain of life which lingers without expectation of a morrow. In work such as Flaubert's-and the remark holds good of George Eliot-there is a decreasing vitality, due, as we feel convinced, to the hopelessness which eats away its heart. Balzac appealed frankly to sensation; and though he created an imaginary world, it rested on the real, and in his eyes was appetizing enough. He did not more than half despise the creatures by whom it was tenanted; he had a fellowfeeling, not only for the Daniel d'Arthez and the Paulines, but

*Lettres à George Sand,' Introd. p. xv.

for