Honoré de Balzac and the “Genius” of Walter Scott: Debt and Denial

“Si vous voulez ne pas être le singe de Walter Scott, il faut créer une manière différente, et vous l’avez imité.”

Balzac, Illusions perdues (1837) ¹

There was no other author in the history of literature to whom the French realist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) owed more than the historical novelist Walter Scott (1771–1832). Indeed, in terms of both subject matter and narrative technique, Scott’s Waverley Novels provided Balzac with an important and inexhaustible stimulus. Ample testimony of this debt is found throughout Balzac’s many novels, letters, and literary reviews. Despite such evident admiration, however, his relation to Scott is a subject which has remained relatively unexplored by literary history. ² And in those instances where it is treated, it is generally done so in a manner which simply rehearses the terms Balzac himself employs to speak of that debt, notably in reference to Scott’s “génie” and the docile and overly puritan aspects of his characters. Ernst Robert Curtius’ Balzac (1951), for example, can be considered typical of this inability to think beyond the categories which Balzac first proposed. This is evident near the end of his study, when he asserts that “it is impossible to describe Scott’s relationship to Balzac better than he himself did so. The truth of life, the reality of human nature—these were things which the great Scott did not possess. He did not know passion . . . . He is a puritan.” ³ And H. J. Garnard in his The Influence of Walter Scott on the Works of Balzac (1971) evokes this same general tendency when he argues that “whatever there is of Scott, Cooper, or other writers admired by Balzac, it is overwhelmingly overshadowed by the Frenchman’s genius” (132). Remarks such as these, however, find their original source in Balzac, and despite the general commendation with which they are often mixed, they introduce conceptual categories whose terms function to underscore Balzac’s own incomparable genius to the detriment of Scott. As such, they must be read with a good deal of suspicion; for while they do avow a debt too obvious to ignore, they ultimately serve to belittle the Waverley Novels’ demonstrable importance to the various texts which compose La Comédie humaine.

What is of interest in Balzac’s many references to the “génie” of Scott—and to the lesser talents of his contemporaries—is the way in which this category is defined and developed. For as one gleans from Balzac’s comments, this is a notion consonant with Scott’s innovative ability to collect and organize the random details of reality within a comprehensive vision which was able to provide both conceptual stability and narrative coherence. As such, Balzac considers Scott’s project to be identical with his own desire to present the unifying illusion of an objective, realistic “world,” whose very completeness was capable of subsuming the otherwise destabilizing forces of ideological contradiction and social contestation which were central to La Comédie humaine’s plots and intrigues.

There are countless examples of this central idea in Balzac’s many references to Scott. In an 1838 letter to his future wife Madame Hanska, for example, he praises Kenilworth (1821) as “le plus grand, le plus complet, le plus extraordinaire” of Scott’s texts, and compares it to St. Ronan’s Well (1824) in terms of its “détail” and “patience du fini.” ⁴ He continues by claiming that all of Scott’s novels have “un mérite particulier” and that “le génie est partout.” And in these same terms he then denigrates the greatness of Byron in comparison to Scott’s creativity, arguing that the latter “grandira, et Byron tombera, l’un a toujours été lui, l’autre a créé!” In the July, 1840 issue of his ill-fated Revue Parisienne, Balzac undertakes a similar criticism of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder (1840). He argues here that Cooper’s use of comic devices is particularly “inférieur à Walter Scott,” and that the latter, as “un homme de génie,” excelled in “l’invention [de ces] circonstances et . . . traits caractéristiques” in which “le génie . . . moderne . . . se révèle.” This form of genius, so Balzac, “consiste à faire jailler [dans] chaque situation les mots par lesquels le caractère des personnages se déploie, et non à affubler le personnage d’une phrase qui s’adapte à chaque situation,” which all too often occurs in the novels of Cooper. It is precisely the feeling of harmonious coherence in Scott, where the whole appears greater than the sum of its parts, which makes him a genius; it is that impression produced upon the reader when, “l’œuvre une fois lue, l’âme regarde en arrière pour embrasser l’ensemble.” And as if to underscore the terms on which his admiration is based, namely Scott’s (Al)mighty ambition and procreative ability to order the otherwise random details of reality, Balzac writes that “l’Eccossais enfante ses œuvres, l’Américain est le fils des siennes.” ⁵

In the preface to the first edition of Les Employées (1838), Balzac alludes similarly to the Waverley Novels as comprehensive and seemingly objective products of that “beau génie dans l’ordre spirituel,” who

retournait les pierres des chemins sous lesquelles gisaient des âmes . . . . il écoutait les délicieux bavardages . . . et les reproduisait . . ., en longs préparifs, . . . qui doivent ennuyer des esprits superficiels, mais où chaque détail est si essentiel, que les personnages, les événements seraient incompréhensibles si l’on retranchait la moindre page. . . . il pensait que les choses étaient bien comme il les produisait, et il avait raison. ⁶

Scott’s genuis, Balzac continues, allowed him to “mûrir ses plans” in such a way that he was able to “les composer de manière à y sertir les belles pierres précieuses trouvées durant l’execution” (881). Interesting to note here, however, is that the reference to “les pierres” as figures for “la vérité minutieuse,” namely the details of reality which his novels purportedly depict in all their truthfulness, is borrowed from the conclusion of Scott’s Waverley (1814). ⁷ This image suggests a similar approach to realistic writing as an unproblematic process of selection and ordering, whereby images and ideas transparently present themselves to the observational genius of the collector/author for their “insertion” within his comprehensive vision. And in accord with such a notion, Balzac argues that Scott depicts, “à grands traits, son pays à toutes les époques” as he “regarde en arrière pour embrasser l’ensemble”(881). This notion is likewise apparent in his 1840 review of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme:

Certaines gens complets, certaines intelligences bifron, embrassent tout, et veulent le lyrisme et l’action, le drame et l’ode, en croyant que la perfection exige une vue totale des choses. Cette école qui serait l’Eclectisme littéraire demande une représentation du monde comme il est: les images et les idées, l’idée dans l’image ou l’image dans l’idée, le mouvement et la rêverie. Walter Scott a entièrement satisfait ces natures éclectiques. ⁸

Thus it was Scott’s successful fusion of the minute and seemingly random particulars of reality within a vision which faithfully represented the transparent totality of the “monde comme il est” that justifies Balzac’s reference to him as a genius of the highest order.

Balzac’s emphasis of Scott’s genius is even more emphatically formulated in the “Avertissement du Gars,” the preliminary announcement for the novel which was eventually to become Les Chouans (1829), the first novel to which Balzac signed his name. It is here, in the guise of the fictitious author Victor Morillon, that he rehearses his habitual praise of Scott in terms of his ability to “peintre” and “sertir” a comprehensive picture of man and society. Likewise evident, however, is Balzac’s often encountered qualification of Scott’s greatness in terms of his inability to “chanter l’amour”:

Quant à moi, . . . je ne prétends attaquer en aucune manière sir Walter Scott. C’est pour moi un homme de génie, il connaît le coeur humain, et s’il manque à sa lyre cordes sur lesquelles on peut chanter l’amour qu’il nous présente tout venu et qu’il ne montre jamais naissant et grandissant, l’histoire devient domestique sous ses pinceaux; après l’avoir lu, on comprehend mieux un siècle, il en évoque l’espirit et dans une seule scène en exprime le génie et la physionomie. . . . comme créateur d’un genre, . . . sa manière est une heureuse mosaïque, le peintre était en lui supérieur à l’ouvrier et il a laissé d’admirables tableaux—les couleurs sont là pour tout le monde, car, après tout l’homme ne peut mettre que la nature en œuvre et le problème résolu qui constitue l’homme de génie, est de sertir mieux que les autres. ⁹

If we are to follow Balzac’s reasoning here, it is Scott’s ability to conflate his oeuvre with “la nature,” and thereby to resolve the potential gap arising between reality and its (re)presentation, which accounts for Scott’s essential genius. Yet Balzac’s allusion to a natural realm which lies beyond contradiction and contestation is based on a notion of reality which is disingenuously considered to be transparently accessible to consciousness. If that reality is, however, available for all to observe, the question thereby arises as to what authorizes Balzac to refer to Scott as a “génie,” that is, what insight or vision (social, political, or otherwise) enabled him to use his “pinceaux” to depict a reality which was essentially different from other possible depictions. And as can be shown, it is just this paradox which produces a certain instability in Balzac’s own justification of his desire to present a credible and all-encompassing picture of 19th-century French society. ¹⁰ Likewise of interest in this context is how Balzac contrasts Scott’s project, and by implication his own, to the works of such writers as Cooper and Byron. For as his comments show, it was his belief that these latter authors had produced narratives which were essentially aberrations from the “true” perspective of which only he and Scott (though to a lesser degree) had been capable—that of a totalizing, Natural History whose realization required the God-like talents of a visionary creator. It is precisely this ability which makes the visionary novelist more than just a novelist; it is that which raises him to the inimitable status of a philosopher whose ruminations aspire to truth itself.

Despite Balzac’s overwhelming admiration for the Waverley Novels, one cannot help but notice a certain ambivalence in his remarks on Scott; for the very invocation of the latter’s name was a reminder of a formidable literary authority, an authority which implicitly subverted his desire to subsume his disparate literary production under the legitimizing rubric of his own incomparable genius. As such, his references to Scott are marked by a certain tendency to displace and undermine a reputation whose very fame was not suited to outright attack. This tendency is of course explicit in the above allusion to Scott’s perceived failure in his novels to “chanter l’amour.” And it is certainly the case that such seemingly marginal criticisms of Scott’s deficiencies are no minor qualifications. For although they are tucked away amid tributes and honors, they ultimately serve to lessen Scott’s stature in regard to Balzac’s own more insightful ability to give voice to the emotional states of his characters. What is important to note in such remarks, however, is that Balzac nowhere implies that Scott’s genius was qualitatively different from his own; rather, he conceives of his oeuvre as a completion of the philosophical project which Scott first undertook. It is here that the double functioning of Balzac’s development of the notion of genius becomes apparent. For in regard to the visionary qualities which he considers to share with Scott, it is precisely this notion which serves as a natural link between the two, like some Nietzschean meeting between great minds through the ages; yet it is also the manner in which this singular positing occurs (namely in regard to the necessity to depict “l’amour” contained within a given character’s “cœur”) which allows Balzac to argue for his own works as even more complete and systematically executed, and thus of an even superior order of credibility and authority.

As already alluded, Balzac’s belief in the superior vraisemblance of his narratives is most thoroughly developed in regard to what he considers Scott’s inability to depict “la passion” in his novels. In the review of The Pathfinder cited above, for example, he criticizes Cooper for sharing Scott’s “cold heart” (“l’un et l’autre ont le cœur froid”), and continues by arguing that “ils n’ont pas voulu admettre la passion: cette émanation divine, supérieure à la vertu que l’homme a faite pour la conservation de ses sociétés, ils l’ont supprimée” (76). A similar qualification of Scott’s greatness can be found in an 1843 letter to Madame Hanska, written during the period when Balzac was revising Les Chouans for its republication as one of the works to appear under the grandiose and authorizing rubric of La Comédie humaine:

C’est décidément un magnifique poème; je ne l’avais jamais lu. Dix ans se sont écoulés depuis que je l’ai corrigé et publié en 2me édition. J’ai eu le plaisir de lire enfin mon ouvrage et de le juger. Il y a là tout Cooper et tout Walter Scott, plus une passion et un esprit qui n’est chez aucun d’eux. La passion y est sublime et je comprends maintenant ce qui vous a fait vouer une espèce de culte à ce livre. Le pays et la guerre y sont dépeints avec une perfection et un bonheur qui m’ont surpris. En somme, je suis content! ¹¹

This critique of Scott’s inability to depict passion is not confined to Balzac’s letters and reviews alone. In Illusions perdues, for example, D’Arthez, who is often the spokesman for Balzac’s ideas, warns Lucien to avoid the major weakness of Scott:

Walter Scott est sans passion, il l’ignore, ou peut-être lui était-elle interdite par les moeurs hypocrites de son pays. Pour lui, la femme est le devoir incarné. A de rares exceptions près, ses héroïnes sont absolument les mêmes, il n’a eu pour elles qu’un seul pontif, selon l’expression des peintres. . . . La femme porte le désordre dans la société par la passion. La passion a des accidents infinis. Peignez donc les passions, vous aurez les ressources immenses dont s’est privé ce grand génie pour être lu dans toutes les familles de la prude Angleterre. ¹²

Such criticisms of Scott’s lack of passion are, however, less interesting in there own right, that is, in terms of their truth or falsity, than is their relation to that which they are designed to mask: i.e., Balzac’s tremendous anxiety at being considered “le singe de Walter Scott” and the potentially detrimental effect such a perception posed to his literary reputation. For while Stendhal in a letter to Balzac spoke of Scott as “notre père” (Gordon 108), and while there is no evidence that Balzac openly objected to this designation, its connotations are at odds with the belief in his own unrivaled genius. Balzac’s ambivalent attitude toward Scott would thus seem to be dictated by his avowed debt to the latter, and within his development of the concept of genius: i.e., a concept which entails a lone creator working without precedents, the necessary denial of debt, of patron, of “father.” And it is precisely in terms of his references to Scott’s failure to depict characters of passionate (and hence, more realistic) proportions that Balzac seeks to move beyond his otherwise compromising acknowledgment of Scott’s importance. Indeed, it is his presumed ability to render the passion and seductive charms of his characters even more convincingly than Scott, and thereby to complete the vacuum left by the latter, by which Balzac justifies his own superior literary gifts. ¹³ This gesture allows him to posit a genius of an even higher order, thereby conferring a legitimacy on La Comédie humaine which is even greater than that of the Waverley Novels.

Nowhere does Balzac speak at greater length about his relation to Scott, and nowhere does he appear more determined to qualify that debt, than in the “Avant-Propos” (1842) to La Comédie humaine. Like its putative predecessor, Scott’s “General Preface” to the 1829 edition of the Waverley Novels, the “Avant-Propos” can be considered what Gérard Genetter refers to as a liminal text, ¹⁴ for it, too, seeks to subsume his novels by means of a text which controls and limits the range of their potential readings. It is here as well that Scott’s panoramic depiction of Scottish history finds its analogue in Balzac’s expressed desire to present an all-encompassing “histoire naturelle” of nineteenth-century French society. This aspiration is apparent in Balzac’s abundant though more or less obtuse references to genetic theories and pseudo-scientific hypotheses which draw from the work of Leibnitz, Buffon and Charles Bonnet, men to whom Balzac refers as “les plus beaux génies en histoire naturelle” (226). ¹⁵ Buttressing his arguments with references to such natural scientists, Balzac states that it was precisely his intention in his novels to represent the various social species (of which there are “trois ou quatre mille”—a number which in itself asserts a limit, the possibility of finitude) in terms of the natural affinities between “l’Humanité et l’Animalité”:

Pénétré de ce système bien avant les débats auxquels il a donné lieu, je vis que, sous ce rapport, la Société ressemblait à la Nature. La Société ne fait-elle pas de l’homme, suivant les milieux où son action se déploie, autant d’hommes différents qu’il y a de variétés en zoologie?

(227)

Having introduced this grand analogy, however, Balzac then adds an important qualification of the grounds for his comparison: “Mais la Nature a posé, pour les variétés animales, des bornes entre lesquelles la Société ne devait pas se tenir” (227). Several lines further on, he then states that ‘ L’Etat Social a des hasards que ne se permet pas la Nature, car il est la Nature plus la Société” (228). ¹⁶ Yet if indeed society and nature are different, as such qualifications would seem to indicate, one is thus left to ask on what basis Balzac’s analogy of humanity and animality has validity. And in its provocation of this question, the “Avant-propos” enacts here not only the first in a series of untenable analogies and arguments in support of the presumed realism of La Comédie humaine, ¹⁷ but also a closely associated ambivalence concerning his questionable distancing from Scott.

The power inherent in Balzac’s appeal to “la Nature” lies not in its evocation of some inviolable truth, but in its disingenuousness—it seeks to obscure any inquiry into the ideological imperatives which govern the production of realistic discourse by masking the precariousness of certain tacitly accepted assumptions about the “real” of society. This appeal is essentially a masquerade whereby “human society . . . is divinely installed . . . as a natural ‘imaging’, rather than a conventional signifying, of thoughts and objects.” ¹⁸ As such, rather than perform what it professes to undertake—to recount the objective, scientific bases upon which Balzac grounds his depictions—the “Avant-Propos” serves rather to justify

by means of whatever theory, a pre-existing anthropological project. . . . It does not establish an authentically new content, but provides the means of realizing an already given subject—by analogy with the natural sciences to represent human variety. ¹⁹

In short, Balzac’s pretense here intends less to “raconter l’origine” and to “expliquer” (225) the plan of La Comédie humaine, than to collect his various novels within the unifying notion of a Natural History which actually has its own hidden agenda.

It is precisely at such a juncture in the “Avant-Propos” (between Balzac’s desire to inscribe himself within an idea of genius which is of his own making, and his conflicting ambition to present an objective picture of contemporary French society) that he displays a singular act of arrogance.

Enfin, après avoir cherché, je ne dis pas trouvé, cette raison, ce moteur social, ne fallait-il pas méditer sur les principles naturels et voir en quoi les Sociétés s’écartent ou se rapprochent de la règle éternelle, du vrai, du beau? Malgré l’étendue des prémisses . . . l’œuvre, pour être entière, voulait une conclusion. Ainsi dépeinte, la Société devait porter avec elle la raison de son mouvement.

(232)

Thus rather than conceiving of his texts as contingent upon social reality, that reality is presumed not to exist until it is first given “la raison” which may serve as its framework. The totalitarian implications of such an idea are obvious, and it is what makes Balzac, especially the Balzac of the “Avant-Propos,” a true ideologue. What is ignored and repressed in such a conception, however, is the insight that textual production is not merely the work of the creative genius, but that it is a constituting process which takes place within a larger cultural dynamic. Indeed, the presumptuousness here of Balzac’s conflation of nineteenth-century French society with a “mouvement” which he himself is left autocratically to define ultimately subverts his alleged, and comparatively modest ambition to simply transcribe the given of society, to serve, that is, as the “secretary” of France (La Société française allait être l’historien, je ne devais être que le secrétaire [231]). This latter pretense is a disingenuous one, however, and serves to mask an instability which becomes the “Avant-Propos”’s “defining principle; the text is not simple and unified, it is uneven, disparate” (Macherey 263).

Balzac states that it had been his intention in his novels to give shape to those “personnes et la représentation matérielle qu’ils donnent de leur pensée; enfin l’homme et la vie, car la vie est notre vêtement” (229). As we have seen, however, the contradiction contained within this intention is that the truth of life which, with analogy to the genius of Scott, he maintains to “enfanter,” is somehow always already there, like some “vêtement” beyond our control or formulation. Indeed, the seamless correspondence between La Comédie humaine and the naturally-occurring truth of life which Balzac posits in the “Avant-Propos” unravels precisely at that point where the notion of “le génie” emerges. For this is a category whose essence lies in the imagination and originality of the writer; ²⁰ it is thus by definition at odds with Balzac’s emphasis of such “covering” principles as “la vie,” “l’histoire naturelle” and others which exist beyond the text, and to which he alludes in order to buttress his claim that La Comédie humaine transparently depicts reality.

The anxious and inherently contradictory movement of the “Avant Propos” is further evidenced by Balzac’s assertion that the thought of depicting a Natural History of society had come to him in the form of a “rêve” whose “commandements et . . . tryannie” he was compelled to obey (226). Yet “the actual order of events was a precise inversion of this account (Macherey 260). For rather than the revelatory vision which he cites as his original inspiration for La Comédie humaine, it was Scott who first indicated the means of realizing this project in the form of a sequence of novels whose detail appeared to enact the variety of nature itself. As Balzac justifiably maintains elsewhere in the “Avant-Propos,” “je ne voyais aucun moyen d’exécution” for depicting the “histoire du cœur humain” until “je lus les œuvres de Walter Scott,” that “trouveur . . . moderne,” who “imprimait alors une allure gigantesque à un genre de composition injustement appelé secondaire” (229). Scott did so by attempting “de mettre en ordre les faits à peu près les mêmes chez toutes les nations, de rechercher l’esprit de lois tombées en désuétude, [et] de rédiger des théories qui égarent les peuples . . . “(230). In ordering reality in such a manner, the characters of Scott’s narratives assumed an existence “plus authentique,” and this authenticity allowed him to elevate the novel “à la valeur philosophique de l’histoire”: “conçus dans les entrailles de leur siècle, tout le cœur humain se remue sous leur enveloppe, il s’y cache souvent toute une philosophie” (230).

In terms consistent with his desire to affirm his own incomparable genius, it is at this point in the “Avant-Propos” that Balzac introduces an important though predictable qualification of Scott’s literary credentials. For although he was “ébloui par la fécondité surprenante de Walter Scott,” he did not despair, for he found “la raison de ce talent dans l’infinie variété de la nature humaine” (231). This further allusion to a natural realm beyond the changing and heterogeneous forms of culture and history allows Balzac to defer judgement concerning his specific borrowings from Scott, for such a gesture might imply a debt greater than he is prepared to admit. Rather, he obviates the question by arguing for a totalizing, “nature humaine” of which his own novels ultimately serve as more systematically executed tokens. ²¹ In so arguing, he maintains that Scott’s failure lies in his inability to “relier ses compositions l’une à l’autre de manière à coordonner une histoire complète” wherein “chaque chapitre eût été un roman et chaque roman une époque” (230–31). This assertion allows him to infer that Scott’s narratives were ultimately less truthful than his own more complete rendering of “le système” which underlies reality:

En apercevant ce défaut de liaison . . . je vis à la fois le système favorable à l’exécution de mon ouvrage et la possibilité de l’exécuter . . . . En dressant l’inventaire des vices et des vertus, en rassemblant les principaux faits des passions, en peignant les caractères, en choisissant les événements principaux de la Société, . . . peut-être pouvais-je arriver à écrire l’histoire oubliée par tant d’historiens, celle des mœurs.

(231)

As we learn a few pages later, it is precisely Balzac’s more attentive study of “la passion” (which is the main “élément social,” since it contains both “la pensée et le sentiment” [233]) on which he bases his claim to have presented reality in a more faithful manner. The Waverley Novels, on the other hand, in their failure to depict the gamut of human emotion, are regarded rather as incomplete and contingent aberrations from the naturally occurring truth which only La Comédie humaine is capable of (re)producing in its entirety.

The Waverley Novels’ deficiencies in this respect, Balzac specifies, are located more precisely in Scott’s unsystematic depiction of female characters and to his misguided attention to the hypocritical ideas and religious prejudices of his reading public:

Obligé de se conformer aux idées d’un pays essentiellement hypocrite, Walter Scott a été faux, relativement à l’humanité, dans la peinture de la femme, parce que ses modèles étaient des schismatiques. La femme protestante n’a pas d’idéal. Elle peut être chaste, pure, verteuse; mais son amour sans expansion sera toujours calme et étrange comme un devoir accompli. . . . Dans le protestantisme, il n’y a plus rien de possible pour la femme après la faute; tandis que dans l’Eglise catholique, l’espoir du pardon la rend sublime. Aussi n’existe-t-il qu’une seule femme pour l’écrivain protestant, tandis que l’écrivain catholique trouve une femme nouvelle, dans chaque nouvelle situation.

(238)

As Balzac continues, if Scott had been able to depict a reality of more authentic proportions (one which Balzacs overtly identifies with Catholicism), then he would have “admis les passions avec leurs châtiments, avec les vertus.” And it was this lack which was a central and by no means minor defect, since “la passion est toute l’humanité. Sans elle, la religion, l’histoire, le roman, l’art seraient inutiles”; indeed, to neglect the virtue and truth of “la passion” is to ignore that which guides humanity in its “progrès de l’homme sur lui-même” (238).

Balzac thus locates the greater vraisemblance of his narratives in their amassing of “les faits” and in his attempts to “les peindre comme ils sont, avec la passion.” Yet his use here of “la passion” as a covering concept for “toute l’humanité” ultimately makes it too undifferentiated a notion to contain the various meanings with which he weights it, and through which he seeks to qualify the greatness of Scott. His subsequent conflation of this notion with the principles of “le Catholicisme” and “la Royauté” manifests rather a self-serving faith in the existence of a singular, universal authority which Balzac knows will tend to legitimate his texts as a whole; his reference to these “deux principes jumeaux” (234) are devised to lend La Comédie humaine an otherwise questionable authority by insisting on its evocation of these sublime and mutually confirming truths. His claim to have written his novels “à la lueur” of these “deux Vérités étérnelles,” like his paean to monarchical principles throughout the “Avant-Propos,” is explicitly based on the idea that only a social order informed by Catholic codes of conduct can be true to human nature: “Le christianisme, et surtout le catholicisme, étant . . . un système complet de répression des tendances dépravées de l’homme, est le plus grand élément d’Ordre Social” (233). ²² It is from this idea that his denunciation of the “unordered” (i.e., unsystematic) character of democratic society proceeds, where the law is not based on eternal ideals but on the fickleness of the masses (the form of society, of course, to which Scott catered): “L’Election, étendue à tout, nous donne le gouvernement par les masses, le seul qui ne soit point responsable, et où la tyrannie est sans bornes, car elle s’appelle la loi” (234). Unlike his own adherence to “la règle éternelle, du vrai, du beau” (232) in copying “toute la Société” (236), Balzac argues that Scott “n’était pas vrai dans les détails” precisely in his non-adherence to the “loi” of the serious novel “de tendre vers le beau idéal,” the latter, of course, being identical with the tenets of catholicism.

Throughout the “Avant-Propos” Balzac repeatedly invokes the authority of the law not only to underscore the legitimacy of his “opinions arrêtées,” but also to critique the anti-monarchism and illegitimate freedoms of democratic society in general: ²³

La loi de l’écrivain, ce qui . . . le rend égal et peut-être supérieur à l’homme d’état, est une décision quelconque sur les choses humaines, un devouement absolu à des principes. . . . ‘Un écrivain doit avoir en morale et en politique des opinions arrêtées, il doit se regarder comme un instituteur des hommes; car les hommes n’ont pas besoin de maître pour douter,’ a dit Bonald. J’ai pris de bonne heure pour règle ces grandes paroles. . . .

(232)

Balzac’s appeal here to the delimiting and ordering potential of “la loi” intends to consecrate an essentially conservative conception of society by underscoring the novelist’s duty to censure political excess. This appeal, however, ultimately results in something which is diametrically opposed to what he ostensibly intends; for the rehearsal of this category in its various forms and guises (“la belle loi du soi pour soi sur laquelle repose l’unité de composition” [226]; l’esprit de lois tombées en désuétude [230]; “la loi de l’écrivain” [232]; “la tyrannie . . . sans bornes . . . [qui] s’appelle la loi” [234], etc.) ultimately functions to empty the notion of meaning. In the very act of definition the signifying potential of “la loi” is undermined; the word is emptied of content and becomes more and more artificial, hollow and insoluble. With each mention it begins to slip into its opposite—into a diverse and senseless collection of rules ill-suited to Balzac’s attempt to give unity to his novels. These rules become signs separated from their referent, a referent “so inexorably diminished that the name does not appear an appendage of the thing but rather the thing an excrescence of the name.” ²⁴ Moreover, such unceasing semantic slippage is evident in all of the major terms which Balzac introduces in the “Avant-Propos” to lend coherence to his work. For the inner dynamics of such categories as “la loi,” “la passion,” “le génie,” “l’histoire naturelle,” “la nature humaine” and others can be considered mutually conflicting rather than complementary, opposed rather than converging. As such, these categories indicate the very condition which they are designed to eradicate, that is, a steady dissolution which signifies a menacing “incompleteness.” And of particular importance in the present context is that the legitimacy of Balzac’s distancing of himself from Scott in reference to such categories can be seriously put to question.

Balzac, however, would have his readers believe that his “devouement absolu à des principes” is sufficient proof of the authoritative character of his narratives. This assumption is based on Balzac’s familiar notion of the novelist/genius’ superior ability to sift through the random facts and details of an otherwise unordered reality to uncover the meaning which remains hidden to lesser minds. This idea is thoroughly consistent with his claim to have disclosed “le sens caché” of society in La Comédie humaine’s “immense assemblage de figures, de passions et d’événements” (232). This disclosure is presented furthermore as a response to a need which only he himself could properly satisfy: “J’obéis ici à une obligation. . . . L’ouvrage que j’ai enterpris aura la longueur d’une histoire, j’en devais la raison, encore cachée, les principes et la morale” (235). Yet as we have seen, the contradiction in Balzac’s claim to have uncovered “le sens caché” of society is that that society is elsewhere assumed to be an observable presence which is always already there.

In the end, the conceptual displacement produced by such contradictory gestures and conflicting motives undermines the “Avant-Propos”’s ability to confer unity on La Comédie humaine and indicates, rather, a definitive lack of final legitimacy. These are, in short, the repressed though haunting presence of Scott as the founder of an idea and a method which Balzac himself claims to have invented, or rather, “dreamed” (“L’idée première de La Comédie humaine fut d’abord chez moi comme un rêve” [226]); the double action of inscribing himself within a notion of genius of which Scott is the originary measure, and a conflicting attempt to base his claim to canonical status on the denial of the Scotsman’s greatness, or at least on the minimalization of it in comparison to his own ability to “peindre” characters of more alluring and passionate dimensions; and finally, the discrepancy between the diverse perspectives evoked in his narratives, and his overriding ambition to unify those perspectives within the grand, delimiting framework of the “Avant-Propos,” a framework which he sought only post-facto to impose on his oeuvre.

More important to the immediate concern here, however, is not the success or failure of Balzac’s discordant attempts to confer legitimacy on La Comédie humaine, but the fact that this discordance opens up a space which allows for a more analytical appraisal of Scott. As Georg Lukács so well demonstrates, ²⁵ Scott’s detailed description of characters as products of their social milieu was the first instance of the novel’s attempt to present a historical vision of society’s movement through time. In so doing he heralded 19th-century realism’s later efforts to produce the effect that one were experiencing the world directly rather than simply reading a narrative about it. To Balzac, Scott’s writing of a series of connected novels depicting recent British history and society proved invaluable, for it provided him with the idea and inspiration to accommodate the political upheavals and economic restructuring of French society in terms accessible to a post-revolutionary, mass readership.

It is therefore misguided to agree with Balzac’s assertion in his preface to the first edition of Une Fille d’Eve (1839) that “le seul roman possible dans le passé, Walter Scott l’a épuisé.” This occultation of Scott as a writer who “exhausted” the genre of the historical novel belies his pervasive importance to the development of the novel. Balzac’s implication here is that only after this exhaustion was the novel able to develop into a form more relevant to his own contemporary readers. Yet this reference again demonstrates the debt Balzac owes to Scott, for this is a notion which the latter first employed to defend his turn from recent Scottish history to medieval English history in the “Introduction” to his tenth novel, Ivanhoe (1820). He defends this turn by arguing that he had “exhausted” Scottish history in his previous narratives by depicting everything in it which was most “obvious, graceful, and natural.” Despite this claim, however, Scott argues that his readers should consider his treatment of the more distant past in Ivanhoe as “an avowed continuation of the Waverley Novels,” one which sought to affirm to “an indulgent public” the timeless universality of the “message” contained in his previous historical depictions. ²⁶ Seen from this perspective, it is thoroughly ironic that Balzac employs the same notion of “exhaustion” to distance himself from Scott. In justifying his presumably more modern and insightful depictions of society in the same terms to which Scott first had recourse, Balzac undermines the originality which he is so interested in claiming for himself and his texts. Seen from this perspective, La Comédie humaine, rather than existing beyond and apart from Scott’s innovative genius, can be considered, in a certain sense, as an “unavowed continuation” of the Waverley Novels.