What I am saying applies especially
to the French realists who are more logical in their disillusion than
the men of other nations. They often establish the material environment
of their heroes with photographic literalness, but in their dealings
with what should be the specifically human side of these characters
they often resemble Rousseau at his worst: they put pure logic into the
service of pure emotion, and this is a way of achieving, not the real,
but a maximum of unreality. The so-called realistic writers abound in
extreme examples of the romantic imagination. The peasants of Zola
are not real, they are an hallucination. If a man is thus to let his
imagination run riot, he might, as Lemaître complains, have imagined
something more agreeable.
The same kinship between realism and romanticism might be brought out
in a writer whom Zola claimed as his master--Balzac. I do not refer
to the side of Balzac that is related to what the French call _le
bas romantisme_--his lapses into the weird and the melodramatic, his
occasional suggestions of the claptrap of Anne Radcliffe and the Gothic
romance--but to his general thesis and his handling of it. Balzac’s
attitude towards the society of his time is, like the attitude of
Rousseau towards the society of his time, satirical, but on entirely
different grounds: he would show the havoc wrought in this society
by its revolutionary emancipation from central control of the kind
that had been provided traditionally by the monarchy and the Catholic
Church, and the consequent disruption of the family by the violent and
egoistic expansion of the individual along the lines of his ruling
passion. But Balzac’s imagination is not on the side of his thesis;
not, that is, on the side of the principle of control; on the contrary,
it revels in its vision of a world in which men are overstepping all
ethical bounds in their quest of power and pleasure, of a purely
naturalistic world that is governed solely by the law of cunning and
the law of force. His imagination is so fascinated by this vision that,
like the imagination of Rousseau, though in an entirely different way,
he simply parts company with reality. Judged by the ultimate quality of
his imagination, and this, let me repeat, is always the chief thing to
consider in a creative artist, Balzac is a sort of inverted idealist.
Compared with the black fictions he conjures up in his painting of
Paris, the actual Paris seems pale and insipid. His Paris is not real
in short, but an hallucination--a lurid land of heart’s desire. As
Leslie Stephen puts it, for Balzac Paris is hell, but then hell is the
only place worth living in. The empire of chimeras over which he holds
sway is about as far on one side of reality as George Sand’s kingdom of
dreams is on the other. George Sand, more perhaps than any other writer
of her time, continues Rousseau in his purely idyllic manner. Her
idealized peasants are not any further from the truth and are certainly