The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Balzac was a Stendhalian Young Man from the Provinces. There is a famous scene at the end of Pиre Goriot: The ambi- tious young Rastignac looks down on the lights of Paris and cries "Between us henceforth the battle is joined.^,, There was plenty of Rastignac in Balzac. Once as a young man he seized a pencil and, under a picture of the Little Corporal, wrote: "What Napoleon could not achieve with his sword I shall accomplish with my pen."

With this ideal of conquest always before him, Balzac lived like a madman and died exhausted at fifty-one, perhaps, as has been said, as the result of drinking fifty thousand cups of cof- fee. He engaged in frenzied financial operations for which he had no talent. He wasted time on one of the most absurd love affairs in literary history. He piled up huge debts. And always he wrote, wrote, wrote, through the night, incessantly for twenty years and more, sometimes from fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Only the scholars know exactly how many books he turned out, perhaps over 350 in ali, with perhaps 100 mak- ing up what he called his "Human Comedy.^,, Here is his description of this manic, comprehensive design: "The immea- surable scope of a plan which embraces not only a history and criticism of society, but also an analysis of its evils and an expo- sition of its principies, justifies me, so I believe, in giving my work the title. . . The Human Comedy.^,, The implied compari- son is, of course, with a man he resembled in virtually no way—Dante [30].

Balzac did not live to complete his vast picture of the French society of his day. Le Pиre Goriot, Eugйnie Grandet, and La Cousine Bette are merely three bricks of this unfin- ished edifice. The first is a study in irrational passion, the unre- quited love of a father for his two daughters, a kind of middle- class Lear minus Cordelia [39]. The second is a study in avarice. The third is a portrait of female vindictiveness. Ali three deal with monomanias, as do so many of Balzac's fictions.

These three novйis, one drawn from the worldly life of Paris, the others picturing provincial manners, have what is found in ali his work—force, vivid detail, a talent that makes him the father of a certain school of modern realism. Finally, they ali expose Balzacs major obsession, which was money. He lived in a period, like our own, of money-making, money- losing, money-loving; a period in which the greatest sin was not treachery but bankruptcy. No other novelist before him under- stood the world of money as did Balzac. Thus he may be con- sidered the ancestor of ali our contemporary novelists of busi­ness and finance.

These are not inconsiderable qualities. To them we must add a demonic power of static characterization. Mme. Marneffe, Grandet, Gobseck, Goriot, Cйsar Birotteau—if not complex creations, these are solid ones. And when one looks at the mere formidable bulk of his work, so firm in its grasp of reality, so loaded with hard, vivid detail, so close to so many kinds of life, it is difficult not to take off one's hat to this flawed titan.

C.F.

69

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1803-1882 Selected Works

Thoreau^ influence over us has incrйased as his friend Emerson^ has declined. Thoreau [80], reaping the reward of greater daring and a firmer grasp on rude fact, casts the longer shadow. Yet Emerson, for ali his gassiness and repetitiousness, was, in the first place, one of the central American thinkers of his century; secondly, a formulator of certain attitudes that seem permanently American; and finally a writer, at his best, of remarkable force, wit, homely vividness, and freshness— surely one of the finest epigrammatists in English. For these reasons we read him. But beware of overlarge doses. At times he offers fine words in lieu of thoughts, and he never under- stood how to organize or compress large masses of material.

Emerson was the leader of the Concord transcendentalist school, which taught a curious hodgepodge of fashionable ide- alisms. After graduation from Harvard, he became a teacher,

then a preacher. When he found that he "was not interested" in the rite of Communion, he left the ministry. He never ceased, however, to be both teacher and preacher, developing into a kind of benevolent pastor without portfolio, dispensing spiritual goods without benefit of theology and indeed without the support of any concrete idea of God. As itinerant lecturer and unsystematic sage, he purified the moral atmosphere of his restless, expansive era more effectively than did ali the ordained ministers combined.