Three Masters E-Book

Zweig Stefan

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 340

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Three Masters is a penetrating literary analysis by Stefan Zweig, in which he reflects on the lives and works of three towering figures of world literature: Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Through this triptych, Zweig explores the psychological depth, imaginative power, and human insight each writer brought to their portrayals of society, offering a profound meditation on the nature of genius and artistic creation. In his portraits, Zweig emphasizes Balzac's encyclopedic vision of society, Dickens's moral fervor and empathy for the underprivileged, and Dostoevsky's exploration of the human soul's darkest and most ecstatic dimensions. Rather than focusing solely on biographical facts, Zweig delves into the inner tensions and creative struggles that shaped their literary identities, presenting them as artists driven by an obsessive need to understand and represent the complexities of existence. Since its publication, Three Masters has been praised for its eloquent prose, psychological insight, and passionate engagement with literature. It stands not only as a tribute to the authors it examines but also as a reflection of Zweig's own humanist worldview—one that values empathy, depth, and the enduring relevance of great art. By intertwining biography with literary criticism, Three Masters invites readers to consider how art emerges from personal experience, cultural forces, and inner conflict. It remains a compelling guide to the timeless influence of literature and the creative spirits who shape our understanding of the human condition.

Leseprobe

Stefan Sweig

THREE MASTERS

Original Title:

Contents

PRESENTATION

INTRODUCTION

THREE MASTERS

BALZAC (1799-1850)

DICKENS (1812-1870)

DOSTOEFFSKY (1821-1880)

PRESENTATION

Stefan Zweig

1881–1942

Stefan Zweigwas an Austrian writer, biographer, and intellectual, widely regarded as one of the most prominent literary figures of early 20th-century Europe. Born in Vienna during the final decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Zweig is celebrated for his psychologically nuanced narratives, historical biographies, and essays that explore the inner lives of his characters and the cultural upheavals of his time. His elegant prose and deep humanism earned him an international readership during his lifetime, and his works remain influential today.

Early Life and Education

Stefan Zweig was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna. His father was a textile manufacturer, and his upbringing in an affluent, culturally rich environment exposed him early to the arts and literature. Zweig studied philosophy and literature at the University of Vienna, earning a doctoral degree in philosophy. During his youth, he traveled extensively across Europe, forming friendships with notable intellectuals and artists, and drawing inspiration from the continent’s diverse cultures and political climates.

Career and Contributions

Zweig’s literary output spans fiction, biography, essays, and plays. He was particularly skilled at psychological portraiture, delving deeply into the emotional and existential struggles of individuals caught in moments of crisis. His novellas, such as Amok (1922), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922), and Fear (1925), reveal his fascination with passion, obsession, and moral conflict. His narrative style is marked by lyrical prose, psychological insight, and dramatic tension.

Beyond fiction, Zweig gained wide acclaim for his historical biographies, including Marie Antoinette (1932), Joseph Fouché (1929), and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1934). These works combine rigorous historical research with literary flair, presenting history through a deeply human lens. Zweig believed in the importance of cultural unity and intellectual cosmopolitanism, ideals that permeate his historical narratives.

His memoir, The World of Yesterday (published posthumously in 1942), is one of his most significant contributions. In it, Zweig reflects on the cultural brilliance and eventual collapse of pre-war Europe, offering a poignant meditation on exile, nostalgia, and the disintegration of humanistic ideals in the face of totalitarianism.

Impact and Legacy

Stefan Zweig was a literary phenomenon in the interwar years, admired across Europe and the Americas for his accessible yet profound storytelling. He was an outspoken pacifist and a staunch defender of European unity, which made him both celebrated and criticized during politically volatile times. With the rise of Nazism, Zweig's works were banned in Germany, and he was forced into exile due to his Jewish heritage and humanist beliefs.

Zweig’s literature, often imbued with melancholy and a longing for a lost world, captures the fragility of civilization and the inner turmoil of individuals navigating cultural and historical ruptures. His writing anticipates many of the crises of identity and displacement that would define the modern era.

Though his reputation waned after his death, there has been a significant revival of interest in Zweig’s work in recent decades. His elegant narratives and historical insights continue to resonate with readers seeking to understand the psychological and cultural dimensions of a turbulent century.

In 1942, overwhelmed by despair over the state of the world and the destruction of European culture, Zweig took his own life in Petrópolis, Brazil, alongside his wife Lotte Altmann. His suicide letter expressed profound sorrow at the collapse of the civilization he cherished and believed he no longer belonged to.

Despite his tragic end, Zweig's literary and cultural legacy endures. His works have been translated into numerous languages and adapted for stage and screen. Today, he is remembered not only as a gifted storyteller but also as a chronicler of Europe's cultural zenith and its tragic descent into darkness. Zweig’s enduring humanism, cosmopolitan spirit, and psychological depth secure his place among the most important writers of the 20th century.

About the work

Three Masters is a penetrating literary analysis by Stefan Zweig, in which he reflects on the lives and works of three towering figures of world literature: Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Through this triptych, Zweig explores the psychological depth, imaginative power, and human insight each writer brought to their portrayals of society, offering a profound meditation on the nature of genius and artistic creation.

In his portraits, Zweig emphasizes Balzac’s encyclopedic vision of society, Dickens’s moral fervor and empathy for the underprivileged, and Dostoevsky’s exploration of the human soul’s darkest and most ecstatic dimensions. Rather than focusing solely on biographical facts, Zweig delves into the inner tensions and creative struggles that shaped their literary identities, presenting them as artists driven by an obsessive need to understand and represent the complexities of existence.

Since its publication, Three Masters has been praised for its eloquent prose, psychological insight, and passionate engagement with literature. It stands not only as a tribute to the authors it examines but also as a reflection of Zweig’s own humanist worldview—one that values empathy, depth, and the enduring relevance of great art.

By intertwining biography with literary criticism, Three Masters invites readers to consider how art emerges from personal experience, cultural forces, and inner conflict. It remains a compelling guide to the timeless influence of literature and the creative spirits who shape our understanding of the human condition.

INTRODUCTION

The three essays which comprise this book were penned at various times in the course of ten years. Yet though they were composed at fairly long intervals, it is in no fit of caprice on the part of the author that they are assembled under one cover. A conviction of their essential uniformity has prompted him to bring these three greatest novelists of the nineteenth century together j to show them as types which, for the very reason that they contrast each with the others, also complete one another in a way which makes them combine to round off our concept of the epic portrayers of the world, the writers of romances.

' When I say that I consider Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century, it must not be thought that I am casting a slur on the achievements of Goethe, Gottfried Keller, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Thackeray, Victor Hugo, and many others. From the works of each of these distinguished men you may select a novel and tell me, with good reason, that it excels any tingle work of my chosen trio — or at any rate any single work by Balzac or Dickens. But this brings me to the distinction I wish to draw between the writer of one (perhaps even more than one) outstanding novel, and what I term a true novelist — an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series of pre-eminent romances. The novelist in this higher sense is endowed with encyclopedic genius, is a universal artist, who constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making, giving it laws of gravitation that apply to it alone, and a starry firmament adorned with planets and constellations. Each figure, each happening, in such a world will be so impressed with the author’s personality, that they not only become typical for him but for us likewise. Indeed, he impregnates characters and things so strongly with his personality, and makes them so amazingly alive, that we come to speak of individuals in the real world as “a Balzac figure,” “a Dickens type,” “a Dostoevsky nature.” These artists build up a law of life and a concept of life by means of the characters in their books, so that we get a picture of a united whole and are given a vision of a new kind of world. My aim in the present study is to lay bare the hidden uniformity of these laws and character formations, and thus to portray “The Psychology of the Novelist.” Indeed, the last five words might well have served as sub-title to my book.

Each of the novelists I have chosen has created his own sphere: Balzac, the world of society} Dickens, the world of the family} Dostoevsky, the world of the One and of the All. A comparison of these spheres only serves to prove their differences. But it has not been my intention to put a valuation on the differences, or to emphasize-the national element in the artist, whether in a spirit of sympathy or antipathy. Every great creator is a unity in himself, a unity with its own boundaries and its own specific gravity. And there is only one specific gravity possible within a single work, and no absolute criterion in the scales of justice.

I take it for granted that the reader is familiar with the writings of the three artists dealt with in this book. My essays are not meant as an introduction but as a sublimation, a condensation, an essence. They are concerned only with what I personally deem indispensable. I regret having to be so concise, more especially in the case of Dostoevsky, for here, as with Goethe, the proportions of the man are so vast that even the widest latitude of depiction proves inadequate to the task

I should gladly have added to these great figures (one a Frenchman, one an Englishman, and one a Russian) the study of a representative German novelist, worthy of the name in the sense I have just explained. But I regret to say I have found none, either in our own time or in the past, who is entitled to take his place beside the present trio. Do I ' -presume too much in the hope that Three Masters may help to evoke a fourth from the womb of the coming time — a German master novelist whose birth I thus greet from afar?

Salzburg, 1919.

THREE MASTERS

BALZAC (1799-1850)

PLASTIC YEARS

Balzac was born at Tours in 1799. He was, therefore, a native of a bountiful province where Rabelais too had found a cheerful home. May 20, 1799; mark well the date! For in the autumn of that same year Napoleon (whom a world already disquieted by his exploits still called Bonaparte) returned from his Egyptian campaign, half victor and half fugitive. He had fought under foreign skies, the pyramids being the stony witnesses of his prowess; then, abandoning his grandiose schemes for Egypt’s betterment, he turned back to the country of his adoption. Setting sail in a little vessel, he eluded Nelson’s watchful eyes, and landed at Frejus on October ninth. Very soon he was able to gather a handful of trusty followers} he cleared out the Directory and the Councils, and at one blow became the leading power in France. Thus, the year of Balzac’s birth was likewise the year when the man who was to found the First Empire made a great stride forward on his path. The new century was no longer to speak of “le petit general”; the “Corsican adventurer” was to be forgotten; soon Bonaparte was to be known as Napoleon, the Emperor of the French. For fifteen years (the years of Balzac’s boyhood) Napoleon’s mighty hands were to hold half Europe in their grip, while his ambitious dreams embraced the world, from the west to the far east, in the orbit of his empire.

To a contemporary of Napoleon, and more especially to a man of Balzac’s disposition, it could not be a matter of indifference that the first sixteen years of his life should have coincided with those of the Consulate and the Empire, perhaps the most fantastical epoch in the world’s history. Early experiences, and that strange thing we speak of as destiny, what are they but the inner and the outer, the sub-jective and the objective, aspects of the same phenomenon? How could the momentous experiences of the time fail to influence a mind of Balzac’s calibre? As he grew up, he learned that a man born in a remote isle of the Mediterranean had come to Paris as a youth — a man without friends or profession or status — and, finding that the reins of power had been dropped, had vaulted into the saddle, had seized them, and had ridden his steed on the curb. With naked hands, the unknown foreigner had conquered Paris, France, the world! The story of this adventurous career did not come to Balzac as an old wives’ tale. It was the story of a man who lived and ruled; it was full of colour and throbbing with actuality. It permeated the boy’s life; flooded his thirsty and receptive senses with kaleidoscopic pictures; peopled the virgin realm of his inner self with tremendous realities. We may well suppose that when Balzac learned to read fluently, it was through reading the Emperor’s manifestoes — those proud, succinct communications which told with Roman simplicity the record of stupendous victories. Can we not see the child’s stubby finger tracing the contours of France upon the map? Can we not follow the boy’s eyes as the frontiers gradually enlarged, to include, at last, the greater part of Europe? Listen, is not this a fairy tale they are telling him? They say that Napoleon has crossed the Great St. Bernard with all his army; another day, he is over the Sierra Nevada; then he is heard of on the farther side of the Rhine, conquering Germany;

athwart the snows and into the heart of Russia; across the sea and fighting (by proxy, this time) at Gibraltar, where his ships are pounded to matchwood by the British guns. Only a short while since, some of these very soldiers were larking with the little fellow in the street, men whose faces were scarred by slashes from the Cossacks’ barbaric swords; many a time he may have been wakened in the night by the clatter of the passing guns as they rumbled on their way to shatter the ice under the Russian cavalrymen at Austerlitz. All his youthful dreams and longings must have been concentred upon one name, one thought, one person: Napoleon.

Leading into the great park which runs from Paris away into the wide universe, is a huge triumphal arch; hereon the names of the conquered cities of half the world have been graven in the marble. What a vast sense of power and dominion this must have conveyed to the lad’s impressionable mind! And what a terrible disappointment this same lad must have suffered on the day when foreign troops, music playing and flags flying, marched through the proud archway! Everything that happened in the outer world soaked into his heart as a fresh and vivid experience. Early in life he had to live through a mighty transvaluation of values, as much in the spiritual as in the material sphere. He saw assignats, whose value under the Republic had been frs. 100 or frs. 1000, thrown away as so much waste paper. The gold coins that passed through his hands were sometimes stamped with the late king’s obese profile, at other times they bore the Jacobin cap of liberty, later the first consul’s Roman effigy, anon Napoleon as emperor. He must soon have learned the purely relative nature of all values, living as he did in an epoch of such amazing change, an epoch during which morals, money, land, laws, and frontiers, everything that for centuries had been dammed back behind solid masonry, suddenly dried up or, breaking through the floodgates, inundated the whole of life. He lived in a veritable whirlpool; and when, giddy and dazed, he looked around in search of some symbol, some constellation, to guide him amid the circling waves, his gaze always encountered this one figure, this epitome of activity, from whom all the shattering and inspiring events emanated.

One day he even saw Napoleon. It was on the occasion of a parade when the great man was surrounded by the creatures he had raised to prominence: Rustan, the Mameluke; Joseph, the brother into whose hands he had committed the destinies of Spain; Murat, to whom he had given Sicily; Bernadotte, the traitor; all those for whom he had provided crowns and had conquered kingdoms, whom he had lifted out of the obscurity and nothingness of their past into the radiant glory of his present. In one short second, an image had been stamped on the boy’s retina, a figure more heroic than any that had hitherto filled the annals of history. The lad had seen the world conqueror! And to a boy, the sight of a great conqueror is surely father to the dream of becoming one himself. True, there were two other world conquerors alive in the opening years of the nineteenth century: one of them dwelt at Konigsberg, the philosopher whose comprehensive insight had helped to simplify the confusions of the universe; and the other at Weimar, the writer whose thought was mastering the world as effectively as Napoleon had mastered it with his armies. But such conquests as these were in a remote sphere as yet, so far as young Balzac was concerned. His discontent with a mere fragment, his craving for the whole, his ambition for all-embracing possession — these he owed to the example of Napoleon.

CHOICE OF PROFESSION

Balzac’s will to world conquest did not at once find a suitable field of operations. He could not make up his mind on the choice of profession. Had he been born two years earlier, he would automatically have entered the Napoleonic armies as soon as he reached his eighteenth year; he might then have fought at Waterloo and faced the fire of the British squares. But history does not recapitulate. Following the storms of the Napoleonic epoch came a period of quiet, warm, summer days. Under Louis XVIII, the sword was no more than an ornament; the soldier, a court-ling; the politician, an orator or the turner of pretty phrases. Public life ran to seed, the foamy torrent of events quieted down to the calm of a mill-pond. The world was no longer to be conquered by feats of arms. Napoleon, the exemplar of the few, had become the bugbear of the many. Art remained. Balzac began to write.

But not like all the others, in order to make money, to amuse people, to fill a shelf with books, to be the talk of the boulevards. He has no desire to earn the field-marshal’s baton of literature: what he has set his heart on is to obtain the imperial throne itself. An attic is the scene of his first literary exploits. As if to test his powers, he writes, at the outset, under an assumed name. War has not yet been declared; these are but manoeuvres, preliminary skirmishes, not yet a battle. Discontented with the result, disillusioned by his lack of success, he flings his work aside, and for three or four years tries his luck at other trades, becomes a lawyer’s clerk, looks around him, observing, enjoying what he sees, penetrating beneath the surface of things and events. Then he starts anew. This time he focuses his energies on the attainment of the goal; with a gargantuan avidity he determines to bring the whole world into the compass of his books. Despising the detail, the isolated phenomenon, the separate instance, he resolves to catch the mysterious complexity of the primal instincts in his embrace, to filter from the brew of occurrences the simple elements, to find harmony in the bustle and the noise, to press the world into his retort and to distil from the overplus of life the pure essence, to create everything anew “en raccourci,” and, once having got all into his power, to animate this Balzacian cosmos with the breath of his own genius and to fashion it with his own hands. Nothing of life’s multiformity is to go astray; yet, in order to enfold the infinite within finite forms, in order to bring the almost unattainable within the range of the humanly possible, he must have recourse to “compression.” He devotes himself heart and soul to the process of sifting phenomena, so that everything irrelevant may be excluded. Having thus extracted the best and finest ingredients, he proceeds to knead them, to mould them with his ardent fingers, until gradually there emerges a co-ordinated system capable of being observed and analysed. In fact, he is a literary Linnaeus, collecting the myriads of plants into a compact classification; or, like a chemist, analysing numberless compounds into their elements. Such is now the goal of his desires.

THE HUMAN COMEDY

Balzac seeks to simplify the world in order to subdue it to his dominion, and to confine it within the walls of his magnificent prison-house, La Comedie Humaine. Thanks to this process of distillation, his characters become types, are always an abridged edition of a plurality from which an implacable artist has shorn everything superfluous or immaterial. Straightforward passion is the motive force, the unmixed type is the actor, an unpretentious environment is the setting, for La comedie humaine. He concentrates, inasmuch as he adapts the centralized administrative system to literary ends. Like Napoleon, he confines the world within the frontiers of France, and makes Paris the centre of the universe. Within this circle, again, in Paris itself, he draws many circles 5 one around the nobility, another around the clergy j others around manual workers, poets, artists, men of science, and so on. Fifty aristocratic salons are potted into one — the salon over which the Prin-cesse de Cadignan reigns as presiding genius. A hundred different bankers are condensed to form Baron de Nu-cingen; an infinity of usurers go to the making of Gobseck; as many physicians, to that of Horace Bianchon. All these people live at closer quarters in his novels than they would in real life, they come more frequently into contact one with the other, combat orie another more vehemently. Where in real life we should find a thousand variants, in his novels we must be content with one sample. He does not recognize mixed types. His world is poorer than the actual world; but it is more intense. For his characters are distillates; the passions he depicts are pure elements; his tragedies are condensations.

Like Napoleon, he begins by conquering Paris. Then he sets about conquering France, province by province. Every department sends its representative, as it were, to Balzac’s parliament. Then, again like a triumphant Consul Bonaparte, he flings his armies across all frontiers into foreign lands. His people go off to the fjords of Norway, or to the scorching tablelands of Spain; they pitch their tents beneath the torrid skies of Egypt, or are in the retreating army forcing a passage across the frozen waters of the Beresina. His urge to world conquest takes him everywhere, just as the same impulse had made his exemplar range far and wide. And, just as Napoleon, taking his ease in the lull between two campaigns, sets to work composing the Code civile, so Balzac, resting for a moment after his conquests in the Come die humaine, produces a Code morale of love and marriage, traces the smiling and merry arabesque of Les cent contes drolatiques.

His wanderings take him into the dwellings where misery abides, into peasant hovels; thence he strolls into the mansions of the mighty at Saint-Germain, and penetrates into the private apartments of Napoleon himself. Wherever he goes, he breaks down the fourth wall, and therewith lays bare the secrets within the closed chamber. He rests among the soldiers under canvas in Brittany; he takes his chances on the stock exchange;; peeps behind the scenes at the theatres; pries into the labours of savants. His wizard’s eye pierces into every nook and cranny. His army is composed of two or three thousand individuals, whom he has conjured out of the earth. Naked they are, when summoned from the void: but their creator throws a few garments over them; gives them title and wealth, as Napoleon did in the case of his marshals. If his whim suggests, he deprives them of all he has bestowed; he plays with them, jostles them one against the other. Events crowd upon us in these books; we view innumerable landscapes which serve as background. The conquest of the world effected in La come die hwnaine is just as unique in the history of literature as Napoleon’s conquests in the history of modern times; Balzac seems to grasp the whole of life in his two hands. As a boy he dreamed of conquering the world, and nothing is more potent than an early resolve which realizes itself in action. The sentence he wrote under a picture of Napoleon was no idle boast in his case: “Ce qu’il n’a pu achever par 1’epee je l’accomplirai par la plume.”

PERSONS OF THE COMEDY

His heroes resemble their progenitor, for they are all inspired with the idea of world conquest. A centripetal force drags them away from provincial life into Paris. The great town is their battlefield. The lure of the metropolis has brought this army thither; virgin souls, untested as yet, full of raw energies for which they seek an outlet. Here, needy but ambitious, they jostle one another, destroy one another, clamber up the social ladder, tumble back again into oblivion. For none is there a place prepared. Each must win his own laurels. Balzac was the first to make it clear that the fight within the circle of civilized social life is no less strenuous than that which takes place upon the battlefield. “My bourgeois novels are more tragical than your tragic dramas,” he once exclaimed to the romanticists.

The first lesson Balzac’s young people have to learn is ruthlessness. They know that their numbers are excessive, and that they must therefore gobble one another up “like spiders in a pot,” as Vautrin observes. The weapon with which their youth has armed them must be tested in the fires of experience; and it is only those who survive the ordeal who are “right.” From all the thirty-two points of the compass they come, like the “sansculottes of the Grand’ Armee”; they kick their shoes out on the march to Paris; the dust of the highway clings to their clothes; their throats are parched with a thirst for enjoyment. They look around them on reaching this new and magical sphere of elegance and wealth and might; they feel they are indeed poorly equipped to set about conquering these palaces, these women, these powers. If they are to make the most of their talents, they must pass them again through the fires, must toughen their youthful energies, must convert common sense into cunning, beauty into vice, boldness into subtlety. Balzac’s heroes, in their avidity, aim at possessing the All; no less will suffice their greed. Like adventures happen to every one of them. A tilbury dashes by, sprinkling them with mud; the driver cracks his whip; in the carriage sits a fair lady, jewels asparkle in her hair. A glance is exchanged; the dame is seductively beautiful, a symbol of pleasure. Instantly the identical thought flashes through the brain of all Balzac’s heroes: Mine! Mine the woman, the carriage, the domestics, the wealth, Paris, the world!, Napoleon’s example, showing that (eVen for the least of men) power is a marketable commodity, has corrupted them. They are no longer content as were their provincial fathers of old to fight for a vineyard, a prefecture, a heritage; what they are after is nothing more than a symbol, it is true, for they strive to gain power, to rise into the august circles where the sun of kingship shines and where streams of money flow freely. Inspired with such ambitious designs, they become those pushing individuals whom Balzac endows with stronger muscles, wilder eloquence, more energetic impulses, and a more rapid and eventful career, than is granted to most mortals. They are beings whose dreams realize themselves in action; they are poets who poetize with the very substance of life. Two methods of approach are available: the man of genius breaks trail for himself; the others make use of the beaten road. If one wishes to attain to power one must devise means of one’s own to get there; failing this, one must follow the trail, must learn the methods approved of by society. If any one stands between you and your goal you must smite him , ruthlessly to earth, or poison him: such is Vautrin’s advice, Vautrin the anarchist, the figure Balzac draws on such a grand scale.

In the Latin Quarter, where Balzac himself started life as a writer, his heroes meet. Here we encounter those ar> chetypes of social life: Desplein, the medical student; Rastignac, the arrivist; Louis Lambert, the philosopher; Bridau, the painter; Rubempre, the journalist; a “cenacle” of young men, inchoate elements, rudimentary characters, and yet — the whole of life, grouped round the dining-table , in that fabulous “Maison Vauquer.” But these people be. come metamorphosed in the great retort of life; they lose . their true essence when the container is boiled in the heat of the passions, when it is suffered to cool again in the icy atmosphere of disappointment, when it is subjected to the ; manifold activities of society — to mechanical friction, magnetic attraction, chemical disintegration, molecular decomposition. Paris, the add of adds,- dissolves them, eats them up, separates them, allows them to disappear; or, , she may crystallize them, harden them, and petrify them. All the activities of change, colouring, and unification, are brought to completion in them; and out of the combined elements new complexes arise. Thus, ten years later, the survivors, those who have been transformed in the crud-bles, meet upon the mountain tops of life, and greet one another with augur smiles: Desplein, the celebrated phy-i* sidan; Rastignac, the minister of State; Bridau, the famous 1 painter; whereas Louis Lambert and Rubempre have been crushed beneath the wheels of fete.

Balzac made good use of his knowledge of chemistry, and of the work of his beloved authors Cuvier and Xavoi-sier. The complicated process of action and reaction, of affinities, of attraction and repulsion, of separation and systematization, of disintegration and crystallization, this atomistic simplification of combinations, seemed to him to give a better picture of social cohesion than any other. The idea — which he christened “Lamarckism,” and which Taine was later to petrify into a formula — that every multiplicity reacts upon a unity with no less vigour than does a unity upon a multiplicity, that each individual is a product of climate, of the society in which he is reared, of customs, of chance, of all that fate has brought his way, ' that each individual absorbs the atmosphere by which he ' is surrounded as he grows to adulthood and in his turn J radiates an atmosphere which others will absorb; this universal influence of the world within and the world without upon the formation of character, became an axiom with * Balzac. Everything flows into everything else; all forces are mobile, and not one of them is free — such was his view.

Unrestricted relativism makes continuity impossible, even the continuity of character. Balzac always allows the figures in his books to form themselves upon events. They are modelled by the hand of fate as clay is moulded by the potter. Their very names embody a transformative process, and are nowise unified. The Baron de Rastignac, a peer of France, marches through twenty of the books. One fondly imagines one knows him, that one can recognize the ruthless arrivist as he saunters along the street, or dominates a social gathering, or appears in a newspaper; that one identifies this prototype of the brutal, pitiless striver amid the Parisian world of fashion; that one is acquainted with the creature who slips like an eel through the clutches of the law, and who incorporates the morality of a corrupt society. Yet in one of the books we are presented with another Rastignac, a poor young man of aristocratic birth, whom his parents have sent to Paris with little money but high hopes, a gentle, quiet, modest, sentimental creature. We are shown how he comes to be in the Maison Vauquer, in that witch’s cauldron of contending characters.

Here, with one of those marvellous condensations in which Balzac excels, he displays the whole gamut of temperaments and characters within the four walls of a modest dwelling. The young nobleman witnesses a tragedy, like ” ' that of King Lear, in the person of le Pere Goriot; sees how the tinsel princess of the Faubourg Saint-Germain robs her father of everything he once possessed; contemplates the vileness of society and its culmination in catastrophe. And when, in the end, he follows the coffin of the all too kindly old man to the grave, a lonely mourner, he is temporarily filled with scorn for Paris. He sees the town as a dirty yellow an  malignant sore spread out at the foot of the hill on which is the cemetery of Pere Lachaise. At that moment he is informed with all the knowledge of life, and he hears the voice of Vautrin whispering in his ear: You have to use men as post-horses, harnessing them to your chariot and whipping them forward on their way, to let them founder at the winning post. At that minute the gentle youth is transformed into the Baron de Rastignac of the other books, the relentless, ruthless hustler, the pair de France.

All Balzac’s heroes experience such a crisis on their march through life. Every one of them becomes a soldier in the war of all against all, pressing eagerly forward over the bodies of the slain. Each has to cross the Rubicon,each has to experience his Waterloo. Balzac shows us that the same fights take place no matter where we are, whether in palaces or in huts or in taverns; that under the garments of priests, doctors, soldiers, lawyers, the same impulses rage. This is well known to Vautrin, who plays so many parts in Balzac’s works, and who is nevertheless always the same, always consciously the same. Beneath the smooth surface of modern life, the old struggles persist Beneath the semblance of equality, the envious longing for predominance is still at work. Since no place is now reserved as of old for the king, the nobility, and the priesthood, since all have a right to everything, everyone strives with tenfold vigour to capture the position which his sense of self-importance assigns to him. The curtailing of possibilities stimulates the craving to make the most of those that remain.

It is precisely this murderous and suicidal warring of energies which stimulates Balzac to the exercise of his art. To depict energy, striving towards a goal, as the expression of a conscious and vital will, not in its effect but in its essence — such is the passion that possesses him. So long as this energy is intensive, he cares little or not at all whether it be good or bad, whether it be wasted energy or energy turned to good account. Intensity of purpose, will, these are everything, because they are the inherent qualities of man: success and feme are nothing, for they are subject to chance. The petty thief who, hungry and full of fear, sneaks a loaf of bread from the baker’s, is merely a bore; the thief on the large scale, the professional miscreant, who steals, not because he is in want, but because he is filled with the desire to grapple everything to himself, such a one cuts a grand figure.

In Balzac’s view, to measure the actual effects is the duty of the historian; to exhibit the causes, and to depict intensity, fall to the lot of the imaginative writer. Power becomes tragical only if it does not reach the goal. Balzac * portrays the “heros oublies,” since every epoch has not one Napoleon alone, has not only the Napoleon of the historians, the man who conquered the world between the years 1796 and 1815, but four or five others whose deeds are not inscribed upon the pages of history. One, whose, name was Desaix, may have fallen at Marengo; another may have been sent to Upper Egypt by the real Napoleon, sent far away from the actual happenings of the day; a third may have passed through the greatest of all tragedies, may have been a Napoleon who never reached a battlefield but was condemned to live out his life in some hidden corner of a remote province. Yet such men as these did not expend less energy than Napoleon, even though they were forced to expend it on minor issues.

Balzac shows us women who by their devotion and their beauty would have become celebrities under the Roi Soleil, whose names would have been as bright with glory as that of Pompadour or of Diane de Poitiers; he talks of poets whose talents run to seed because the times are unfavorable to their development, whom fame has passed by unnoticed, and whom the poets of a later day must crown ^ with laurels. He knows that every second of life witnesses ' a tremendous wastage of energy. He knows that Eugenie-Grandet, the sentimental country lass, at the moment when she tremblingly gives the purse of money to her cousin before the very eyes of her avaricious father, is no less ''-heroic than Jeanne d’Arc whose effigy in marble is to be found in wellnigh every marketplace of France. Success cannot blind the biographer of a thousand careers, cannot deceive one who has analysed all the ingredients of the social compost.

Balzac’s incorruptible eyes, concentrated upon the detection of energy, perceive amid the whirligig of actualities only that which is living tension. In the stampede on the banks of the Beresina, for instance, when Napoleon’s disrupted army is struggling to cross the river, when the despair and the villainy and the heroism of a hundred similar scenes are compressed into a second, he selects, as the truly great heroes of the occasion, the forty sappers, whose names no one can tell, who for three days together stand breastdeep in the numbing water and amid the drifting ice, in order to bridge the current by which half of the Grand Army is subsequently swept to destruction. He knows that behind the curtained windows of Parisian houses tragedies occur every minute, catastrophes which are no less overwhelming than Juliet’s suicide, Wallenstein’s murder, or Lear’s madness and despair. Always he is ready to reiterate his own words: “My bourgeois -novels are more tragical ('than your tragic dramas!” For his romances are not concerned with mere externals. Vautrin, for all that he is dressed like an ordinary citizen of the modern world, is no less impressive a figure than Quasimodo, the quaintly clad bellringer in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame; nor are the arid, rocky landscapes of the soul, the undergrowth of passion and greed which cumber the breast of this supreme arrivist, less terrible than the awful abysses in the mind of Han d’Islande.

Balzac does not depend upon drapery for his effects, any more than he has recourse to the exotic or to the remote annals of history for his settings. What he relies upon is the super-dimensional, the enhanced intensity of an emotion unified through singleness of purpose. He realizes that a feeling does not become important until it can remain unimpaired, in its full force; that a man is great only in so | far as he concentrates on a goal, does not fritter away his energies on incidental desires, but allows his ruling passion to imbibe the juices of all the other emotions, growing strong through robbery and a fierce disregard of conflicting claims — just as a branch will become more robust if the gardener lops off subsidiary branches.

It is such (nonomaniacs of passion whom Balzac has portrayed; persons who conceive of the world under the aspect of one single symbol, who are constant to one aim amid the great whirl.

The basic axiom of his theory of energetics is a kind of mechanics of the passions: the belief that every life expends an equal sum of energy, no matter upon what illusions it dissipates the volitional appetite; no matter whether it uses them up slowly in the course of a thousand excitements, or cherishes them thriftily for a time, in order to lavish them on one headlong ecstasy; no matter whether the fire of life burns quietly and steadily, or flames up in an explosion. He who lives quicker does not live a shorter time, ' any more than one who lives in harmony with himself forgoes the multiplicity of experience. For a work which aims at the depiction of types, at the presentation of none but pure elements, monomaniacs are alone of importance. The feeble among mankind are of no interest to our author. He -cares only for people who cling to their life illusion with । every nerve and muscle of their bodies; who concentrate all their thoughts upon it, whether that illusion be love or ; art, avarice or self-sacrifice, courage or indolence, politics i or friendship. Whatever the symbol may be, they must embrace it wholeheartedly.