La Comédie humaine

“ For this reason it is that, regarded as an aggregate, the Comedie Humaine can be admired only as one may admire a forceful mass of things, when it is looked at from afar, through an atmosphere that softens outlines, hides or transforms detail, adds irreality. In such an ambience certain novels that by themselves would shock, gain a sort of appropriateness, and others that are trivial or dull serve as foils. ”

“ Not only does individuation now have its innings but the distractions from passion, the lust for wealth and power, and in general the struggle for place and fame, have abated and in their stead comes, normally, not only a philosophic calm but a desire to draw from accumulated experience and knowledge the ultimate, and especially the moral, lessons of life—in a word, to sum up in a broader view the net results of all we have learned of the comédie humaine. ”

“ If one may hazard a guess at the reasons that convinced the older school of playwrights of their error, there are two by which they must have been struck—the artistic possibilities of the real suggested by the Comedie Humaine, and the prescience—one might say the intuition —it exhibited of things that were destined to reveal themselves more prominently in the latter half of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Takes its place among the masterpieces which are not of a time or a locality."—Boston Transcript.
"A work splendid in observation, marvelous in the artistry of exclusion, yet of democratic inclusiveness, piercingly analytic of character, of plastic facility of handling, sympathetic underneath irony, humorous, pathetic, tragic, comic, particular yet universal—a Comedie Humaine—a creation of a whole community of personalities."—William Marion Reedy.
"We find a strange impressiveness, akin to greatness, in the 'Spoon River Anthology' of Edgar Lee Masters.... ”

“ The foremost literary critic of the century was running about the sands of Boulogne, or perhaps wandering often along the ramparts of the old town, introspective even then, with something of that rare and insatiable curiosity which we all now recognise as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve. Again, the greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at Tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the Comédie Humaine. ”

“ Balzac tried to rise, but could not; his face was purple, and his eyes alone had life in them. Now that happiness in his married life had failed him, his mind had reverted to the yet unfinished "Comedie Humaine"; and he talked long and sadly of projected herculean labours, and of the fate of his still unpublished works. "Although my wife has more brains than I, who will support her in her solitude, she whom I have accustomed to so much love?" "Certainly," Victor Hugo remarks drily, "she was crying a great deal." ”

“ He gives us this contradiction that human thought is at once the grandeur and destruction of life—an opinion imbued with ecclesiasticism, confusing thought with passion. It is passion alone which disintegrates; and, in the Comedie Humaine, such monomaniacs as Grandet, Claes, and Hulot are destroyed not by their thought but their desire.
Balzac's pessimism is not philosophic. ”

“ Even if we grant that the plan of the Comedie Humaine existed in the novelist's mind from the commencement, obscurely at first, more clearly afterwards, the plan itself was not artistic in the sense that an image in the architect's mind is artistic when he designs on paper the edifice he purposes to construct, or in the painter's mind when he chooses the subject and details of his picture, or in the sculptor's mind when he arranges his group of statuary, or in the musician's mind when he conjures up his opera or oratorio. Balzac's plan was one of numbers or logic merely. ”

“ In your mind's eye has the map of France ever appeared to be divided into as many provinces as the /Comedie Humaine/ has stories? Has Tours stood for Birotteau, La Gamard, for the formidable Abbe Troubert; Douai, Claes; Limoges, Madame Graslin; Besancon, Savarus and his misguided love; Angouleme, Rubempre; Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye; Alencon, that touching, artless old maid to whom her uncle, the Abbe de Sponde, remarked with gentle irony: "You have too much wit. You don't need so much to be happy"? ”

“ How much one could wish that, instead of producing more, Balzac should have produced less. With a man of his native power and perseverance, what greater perfection there might have been! Certainly, no defect is more patent in the Comedie Humaine than the trail of hasty workmanship, the mark of being at so much a line. Strangely, the speed with which he wrote furnished him with a cause for boasting. More properly, it ought to have filled him with humiliation. Many litterateurs are compelled to drive and overdrive their pens. ”

“ It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive influences. It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central portions of the nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread the Comedie Humaine. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe for this Repertory. ”

“ Man, the new philosophy taught, is essentially good; human nature is of itself inclined to virtue; if it strays through force of circumstance into vice or folly, should not its errors be viewed with sympathy, with tenderness? Thus comedy grew serious, and tragedy put off its exalted airs; the genius of tragedy and the genius of comedy were wedded, and the comédie larmoyante, which might be named more correctly the bourgeois drama, was born of this union. ”

“ With his professed interest in the theatre—one of those deep subjections that, in men of "taste," the Comédie Française used in old days to conspire for and some such odd and affecting examples of which were to be noted—he yet offers her his hand and an introduction to the very best society if she will leave the stage. The power—and her having the sense of the power—to "shine" in the world is his highest measure of her, the test applied by him to her beautiful human value; just as the manner in which she turns on him is the application of her own standard and touchstone. ”

“ In comedy we have a vision of the victory of the intrinsically assured stability of the wholly personal soul-life, the laughter of which resolves everything through the medium and into the medium of such life. ”

“ As then Comedy must place the spectator in a point of view altogether different from that of moral appreciation, with what right can moral instruction be demanded of Comedy, with what ground can it be expected? ”

“ Gobilleur, m. (thieves’) , juge d’instruction, a magistrate who instructs cases, and privately examines prisoners before trial.
Gobseck, m. (familiar) , miser, “skinflint,” or “hunks.” One of the characters of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine.
Godaille, f. (popular) , amusement; indulgence in eating and drinking.
On doit travailler, ça ne fait pas un doute: seulement quand on se trouve avec des amis, la politesse passe avant tout. Un désir de godaille les avait peu à peu chatouillés et engourdis tous les quatre.—Zola, L’Assommoir. ”

“ I am in the midst of a beautiful comedy—with a sense of latent tears—and the dramatic situations work out delightfully. The rest are only actors; I am actor and spectator as well, and I delight in contriving effective exits. The world is of gold and ivory. ”

“ In high comedy the social refinement of the nation affords great advantages to their actors. But with respect to tragical composition, the art of the actor should also accommodate itself to the spirit of the poetry. ”

“ So long as the dramatists were not hampered by demands from the audience to have its social, political, or æsthetic fancies humoured, and from the actor to have his egotism flattered, the drama flourished as an art as well as a business. ”

“ The comedy of human life is admirable when one is a spectator; but ah! the actors know they are acting, and have to mask their faces with smiles, restrain the tears which they would fain let flow, and mouth witty sayings with breaking hearts. ”

“ He that beholds with understanding eyes can see beneath the thin veil of the commonplace, the romance, the tragedy and the broad comedy that is being played upon the world’s stage by the actors great and little who tread the boards of the Theater of the Universe. ”

“ It must not, therefore, be imagined that it was without the knowledge and will of the poet that a heroic drama turns out a comedy in his hands, and ends in the manner of Comedy with a marriage of convenience. ”

“ It must be remembered that owing to shortness of life, lateness of beginning, and the diversion of the author to other work, the Comedie is the production, and not the sole production, of some seventeen or eighteen years at most. Not a volume of it, for all that failure to reach the completest perfection in form and style which has been acknowledged, can be accused of thinness, of scamped work, of mere repetition, of mere cobbling up. ”

“ My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. ”

“ Comedy demands action vitalized by a plot that is capable of revealing the social significance of the individual: an action of sufficient scope and reality to display the spirit of society in individual types and manners, or in character and sentiment; a plot sufficiently urgent to interest us, not only in the phenomena, in the concomitants, of every deed, but in its motive and inherent passion. ”

“ Consequently, the stories entitled The Exiles, About Catherine de Medici, Maitre Cornelius, The Unknown Masterpiece, The Elixir of Life, Christ in Flanders, which antedate the eighteenth century, and Seraphita, which deals with the supernatural, are omitted, together with the Analytical Studies. But The Hated Son furnishes some indispensable information concerning a few biographies. The Dramas are outside the action of the Comedie, so contribute no names. ”

“ Has he maintained the dignity of the drama? He will answer, "Of course! We are living in the era of progression. Comedy is a success! All the world is laughing! Success! Success! We are superior to those who have gone before! We make the world laugh!" ”

“ The hundreds, and almost thousands, of persons who form the company of the Comédie—their frequently recurring parts adjusted with extraordinary, though by no means obtrusive or offensive, consistency to the enormous world of detail and scenery and general "surroundings" in which their parts are played—are never interfered with by the pointing-stick or the prompter. They are there; they can't help being there, and you have to make the best or the worst of them as you can. ”

“ But is pleasure all that we expect to find? What we should look for above everything in a comedy or a drama is a representation, exact as possible, of the manners and characters of the dramatis persona of the play ”

“ His comedies offer elaborate and subtle—even tender—pictures of human character in its eternal types, lively sketches of social follies and literary extravagances, and broad appeals to the ordinary sources of vulgar merriment. Light and perspicuous in construction, he is master of the delicate play of irony, the penetrating force of wit, and the expansive gaiety of frolicsome fun. ”

“ And the comedy at the close is added by way of counterpiece to the light, delicate fancies of the dream. It is the thoughts we have thought, the painfully-wrought products of the waking mind, given in a sparkle of mocking laughter against the background of nightly visions. ”

“ Taken all in all, the sounding profession, the bustling search, and the studied concealment, make a drama, half comedy and half tragedy, the like of which this generation has not seen till now, but the like of which it and its successors may see many times, if the audience does not hiss the play, and remit the actors to the streets. ”

“ But as they vary in function and result, so these kinds of comedy differ in the quality of action which each may present. The play of convention and manners can use only the externals of action, actions that neither strike deep nor spring from the depths, for such a play aims to reproduce appearances or merely to re-create them—to criticise and correct rather than construct. The play of character and passion, not the so-called realistic, but idealistic, selects for presentation actions whose springs are in the inner life ”

“ Generosity, enthusiasm, sensibility, true and ready sympathy—all are taken, leaving the man, in many instances nothing but a skilful actor, who apes all the emotions while feeling none. And the comedy is none the less repugnant to me because it is played through with a solemn face, and the actors are richly recompensed. ”

“ We recognize the relative insignificance of the individual drama, but its reality holds us. Its characters may be few, its scenery bare, its action trite and simple to other eyes, yet each of us, as the leading actor, finds in the development of a human soul a part which fascinates him, and lends itself to the finest shades of expression. ”

“ But how could such a drama, with the four or five thousand persons which society offers, be made interesting? How, at the same time, please the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry and philosophy under striking imagery? Though I could conceive of the importance and of the poetry of such a history of the human heart, I saw no way of writing it; for hitherto the most famous story-tellers had spent their talent in creating two or three typical actors, in depicting one aspect of life. ”