(i) Biography

Donald Adamson has undertaken a study of the life and achievements of A.L. Rowse, who was a friend of his for thirteen years.

Anyone wishing to discuss this project will be most welcome to do so on aimsworthy@tesco.net. So too will anyone with memories of, or information or opinions about, the great Cornish poet, historian, diarist and political and social commentator.

(v) History

The manorial system came into existence in the eighth century. Arising in central Europe (in the territory of the old Roman Empire, under Carolingian influence), it spread fairly rapidly both eastwards and to England. In England it was solidly established by the tenth century. The basis of this system was self-sufficiency, not only in agricultural but also in military terms -- and in the latter sense the manorial system is practically coterminous with the feudal system, both of them being founded upon the notion of reciprocal service. However, the manorial system overall was by no means identical to the feudal one, since manorial land could be allodial, and the principal characteristic of allodial land was that its lord owed no military allegiance to any higher authority.

The feudal system was based upon the notion of an extending hierarchy, at the apex of which was the King. The great lords owed the King military allegiance; they were his vassals. Smaller lords and all knights owed military allegiance to the great magnates. These great magnates -- or lords paramount -- held sway over large tracts of land: for example, Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester, was in control of large areas of the North-West of England. Immediately after the Norman Conquest most of these lords paramount (Odo of Bayeux, Robert of Mortain) were relations or intimates of William the Conqueror. The manor, being the basic unit of the feudal system, was held by a lord who was either a great magnate himself or paid homage to a great magnate. From this manor the lord, or knight, would have to raise troops in times of war; and each manor and knight's fee was assessed in accordance with the number of soldiers which it was capable of providing. The subdividison of manors from the level of the lords paramount downwards continued without interruption until the statute of Quia Emptores was passed in 1290; it was known as subinfeudation and was, in itself, one of the major causes of the breakdown of the feudal system.

But, as has been said, the manorial system was something more far-reaching than the feudal system from which it took its being. This was because of the all-important agricultural aspect. Whilst soldiers were being trained, they and all other residents of the manor had to live. Many of those who worked the fields did not receive military training, nor could they afford it. Equally, the lord could not till the earth -- or even supervise the tilling of the earth -- if he was to fulfil his own military duty. And this duty was, of course, twofold: both to the lord paramount (or, in exceptional cases, directly to the King) and to the bondmen who depended upon his military protection.

It is important, however, to be precise as to centuries. These conditions of twofold service -- allegiance to the King, and defence of one's manorial dependants -- flourished in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. Gradually the military (or strictly feudal) dimension of the manor ceased to have such importance; this trend became strongly marked in the thirteenth century. Yet at this very same period (i.e., from 1200 to 1270) the manorial system reached its zenith, the reason for this being purely administrative: there was greater concentration upon the strict reading of contracts and hence a revival of virtually defunct rights; most importantly of all, there was greater efficiency in tax-collecting.

It was, of course, no coincidence that the process of subinfeudating manors -- creating ever smaller parcels of manorial land out of much larger ones -- was brought to an end by Edward I at the end of the thirteenth century. Subinfeudation arose from the increasing complexities of civilian and commercial life. The statute of Quia Emptores was intended to reinforce the military dimension. For the danger of subinfeudation, from a military point of view, was that in this endless proliferation of manorial hierarchies the upward dynamic of military service tended to be overlooked. This same process, of the manor declining to the commercial status of a tenement on which rent was due, occurred rather earlier in French history: during the reign of Philippe-Auguste (1180-1223).

Thus, the beginning of the decline of the feudal system can be said to date from the early thirteenth century whilst the manorial system continued to flourish mightily until the fifteenth. There were two reasons for the decline of the feudal system: not only subinfeudation, but also the actual creation of allodial land, a process which, though very different in character from subinfeudation, was nevertheless related to it in that both were aspects of the twofold phenomenon of growing commercialism and diminishing military responsibility. When, however, we come to consider the decline of the manorial system, the situation is different. Allodial land resembles non-allodial land from the standpoint of manorial government. On both allodial and non-allodial manors commercialism broke up the manorial nexus, loosening the ties between lord and bondman. In 1086 the Bishop of Worcester's estates were valued at £269 p.a. 180 years later, in 1266, this valuation had risen to £580. In 1299, a mere thirty-three years on, their estimated annual revenue stood at £1,191. The intrusion of what, in a quite different historical context, Thomas Carlyle has described as the "cash nexus" marks the decline of the manorial system in its purest form -- the essence of that system being barter, service for goods, and goods for service, just as (in parallel form) the essence of the feudal system was military service in exchange for land tenure.

By the fifteenth century this commercialism, strongly encouraged by Islamic culture and by the system of Arabic numerals transmitted through Spain, had become well-established throughout northern Europe (France, Germany, Flanders, England); it co-existed with a manorial system which was beginning to show the first signs of decrepitude. In fact, at the end of the Middle Ages money was beginning to take precedence over the old manorial bonds. During the reign of Charles VII Jacques Cœur was an immensely rich banker, shipowner and royal counsellor; he financed the reconquest of Normandy from the English and was as wealthy as the King of France. In Italy the commercialism had earlier origins. Taking advantage of their favourable trading situation in the Mediterranean, the merchants of Venice, Pisa and Genoa enjoyed long-established mercantile relationships with the fabulously wealthy Arabs. As early as 1140, as is reflected to some extent in the chronicle of Bishop Otto von Friesing, this trend had become so pronounced that the Italian lords actually came into the cities and began to engage in commercial activity on their own account.

Venice, Pisa and Genoa -- the earliest mercantile cities of Italy -- led the way for similar developments in the rest of Europe, albeit at a rather later date: Ghent, Bruges and Liége, for example, in the Low Countries during the thirteenth century. As in Italy, so in Flanders: these cities grew at the expense of the traditional political infrastructure, though the lords did not actually enter the Flemish cities, preferring instead to maintain their superiority in their fortified châteaux. A new social order was developing, outside the manorial system. Towns grew up regardless of manorial boundaries. In some towns and even in some villages the inhabited area fell under the jurisdiction of two or more manors: but as the community spirit developed, the citizens felt greater loyalty to the borough, or even the small village, than to their manorial master.

Greater even than the division of many towns and villages into two or three manorial jurisdictions was the growth of money as the well-nigh universal method of payment. The cash nexus invalidated the delicate equilibrium of service for goods, and goods for service. This cash network was something beyond the lord's control, and which had (as it were) an existence of its own. The lord's only way of maintaining any sort of superiority was to join in that system as best he could, on the most favourable terms he could manage. It was a process which was to be seen in many forms many times later in history: as, for example, when land itself ceased to predominate over the cash nexus, or when, in our own times, even industry has become subordinate to the technological revolution and dot.com economy. But it has to be said that the division of towns and villages into more than one manorial jurisdiction -- something actually quite unrelated to the cash nexus -- was a most powerful factor contributing to the decline of the efficiency of the manor as a social and administrative unit.

© Donald Adamson 2000

THE LEIGHS OF WEST HALL, HIGH LEGH, CHESHIRE

The Leighs belong, or belonged, to the numerous gentry of a county praised by John Speed in 1611 as the "seedplot of gentility, and the producer of many most ancient and worthy families". Of these Cheshire gentry families they were one of the oldest, having had an unbroken connection with the county palatine from at least 1215 until as recently as 1944. Judicious marriages brought them further estates in Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire, so that in what was perhaps their period of greatest prosperity, from 1863 to 1908, their 3900 acres in Cheshire were supplemented by nearly 1000 in the Midlands.

Yet the Leighs exerted no discernible political influence, nor did they seek favour at Court. Throughout the 800 years of their recorded existence they therefore obtained very little indeed by way of hereditary titles, and only two that are still in existence today, both of which, Lords Leigh and Newton, are remote from the main family line. Except for the current activities of Mr Edward Leigh MP, both as backbencher and minister, their Parliamentary role has been negligible.

Equally remote was their main seat, tucked away in a corner of north Cheshire. It stood in the same parkland as another mansion, inhabited by Leghs, who were no relations of, and often feuded with, the Leighs with an i. (The Leighs/Leghs had roughly the same surname because, with no family relationship at the outset and indeed only once at any time in the future, they were lords of separate manors within the same village.) Memorably drawn in 1814 by Copley Fielding, West Hall was finally demolished sixty-eight years ago. Long before 1814, however, the Leighs' Cheshire base had become the grander and more modern Jodrell Hall; and, following West Hall's demolition in 1935, East Hall was to make way in the early 1960s for an expensive residential development.

As for the complications of the first and second medieties of the advowson of Lymm, the second of which consisted of two moieties whilst from at least 1316 until 1893 the Leighs were patrons of the first, such mysteries are beyond the comprehension of all who, unlike myself, were not actually brought up in the area. As a boy and young man living on my father's farm at Oughtrington, I never really understood those two medieties of the rectory of Lymm, nor did anyone else of whom I enquired. The shadowy existence of a lady of the manor, with rights over the cobbled precincts of the village cross, also baffled most local inhabitants. Alas! Cheshire has lacked an A.L. Rowse to explain the wonderful byways of its history.

For me, coming as I did from Oughtrington, it was an absorbing fact that a branch of the Leighs had been settled in that hamlet for some centuries. But there was no church with which they had any close family connection; their portraits -- unlike those of the Leighs of High Legh -- seem to have been lost; and, although there must be many descendants of the Leighs who became Traffords, most have vanished without trace. So, too, has all trace of those Leighs within Oughtrington itself.   (Diana, Countess of Minto is, however, a descendant of Trafford Trafford.)    

It has been said, partly in jest, that the Leighs are "famous for having achieved nothing", yet such cannot be said of the Middle Ages. From the time of the Norman Conquest, when Domesday Book recorded the manor of Lege -- in reality 2 manors! -- as having "a priest and a church", "land for 2 ploughs" and "woodland 1 league long and ½ league wide", they exercised not only their military function as raisers of troops for the King but also their feudal administrative role, reinforcing social cohesion and maintaining order and stability in troubled times. Theirs is one of the oldest coats of arms on record.

During the past 400 years the senior Leighs have been comparatively rootless, and in keeping with this is the fact that nowadays they are landless too. Until the mid-nineteenth century, and especially during the eighteenth century when they enjoyed the patronage of their cousins the Earls and Dukes of Bridgewater, their financial and social base was the Church of England. Presenting members of their own family to their own rectorial benefice of Lymm, they were also enterprising pluralists without ever attaining episcopal office. The extent of the Venerable Egerton Leigh's pluralism was matched only by the number of his nineteen children: he was an aristocratic Mr Quiverful of the so-called Old Corruption.

At an official level the Leighs never made much of a mark in Cheshire, and it was only with considerable reluctance that Colonel Egerton Leigh became High Sheriff in 1872. All power, authority and even ceremonial require an adequate base, economic and otherwise (but principally economic). Notwithstanding their ecclesiastical patronage exercised both at Lymm and more recently at High Legh, the Leighs became disengaged from county affairs (a) because of their straitened financial circumstances which sometimes, in earlier centuries, compelled them to leave Cheshire in pursuit of affluent and very necessary church livings and (b) because of their lack of a suitable presence within a village community until their acquisition of the Jodrell estate in 1778. With Jodrell came wealth and a revolution in their financial circumstances in the nineteenth century.

Until the 1930s no county society was more resistant than in Cheshire to the social encroachments of Victorian industrialists (Rylandses, Watkins, Dewhursts, etc). In the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth the Leighs, when at Jodrell or High Legh, enjoyed the highest social prestige.

High Legh was always spelt High Leigh by the Leighs. They disposed of the West Hall estate at various times. Much of it was sold by Capt Egerton Leigh in 1908, the purchaser being Col Hubert Cornwall-Legh, of East Hall, High Legh. Charles Cornwall-Legh senior bought West Hall in 1931, thus including both halls within the one High Legh Park; from then on his seat became known as High Legh Hall. West Hall was rebuilt three times. About the time of the refoundation of the parish church in 1816 an extension was attached to the original half-timbered house, which by 1819 was in use as a farmhouse. Rebuilt in the comfortable Victorian style, it appears to have been reconstructed yet again after 1905. A print exists of the original mansion, after a drawing executed by Copley Fielding in 1814. West Hall was finally demolished in 1935 by Charles Cornwall-Legh junior, later 5th Lord Grey of Codnor, soon after he inherited the estate:  it, and the land around it, became a building development.

The father of Mrs Edward Leigh, Mr Philip Henry Russell Goodman, is the elder son of Sir Victor Goodman (1899-1967) by his first wife Julian Ottoline (1906-1989), only child of Philip Edward Morrell MP of Garsington Manor, Oxford by his wife Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck, half-sister of the 6th Duke of Portland and a leading member of the Bloomsbury Group. Mrs Julian Goodman, later Mrs Julian Vinogradoff, was thus a second cousin of H.M. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Through the grand-ducal family of Mecklenburg-Strelitz Mrs Leigh's mother is a descendant of Kings George I and George II of England and of Tsar Paul I of Russia and Catherine the Great.

The family's arms are so ancient that they predate specific grants. There are references to them in a number of medieval rolls of arms, even as early as the reign of Edward I (1272-1307). However, according to Augustine Vincent, Windsor Herald from 1624 to 1626, they may date from the reign of Henry II (1154-1189).

The family's crest is of later date than the arms as crests were in restricted use during the Middle Ages. It was granted by Sir Gilbert Gethick, Garter King of Arms, in 1556.

© Donald Adamson 2003  

LEIGH NOTES

These notes refer to the genealogy of the Leigh family, of West Hall, High Legh, Cheshire, originally posted on this website.   It is now available through Burke’s Peerage and Gentry online and will also be published in the next printed edition of Burke’s Peerage and Gentry

Mr Philip Goodman is the elder son of Victor Goodman by his wife Julian Ottoline (1906-1989), only child of Philip Edward Morrell, MP, of Garsington Manor, Oxford (see BLG 1952 edn, Morrell of Headington Hill Hall) by his wife Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck, half-sister of the 6th Duke of Portland (see BP 2003 edn, Portland, E) and a leading member of the Bloomsbury Group.   Mrs Julian Goodman, later Mrs Julian Vinogradoff, was a second cousin of H.M. the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Through the grand-ducal family of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Mrs Goodman is a descendant of George I and George II of England and of Paul I and Catherine the Great of Russia.

High Legh, Knutsford, Cheshire consists of 2 manors.   They existed before the Norman Conquest.   In 1086 it was recorded in Domesday Book that both were held by Gilbert de Venables, (feudal) Baron of Kinderton, under the paramountcy of Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester, nephew of the half-blood of William the Conqueror.   Subsequently the Leighs held the 1st (High Legh) moiety of the manor whereas the 2nd (High Legh) moiety descended to the (Cornwall-)Leghs of East Hall, in whose possession it still is.

For 577 years the patronage of the 1st mediety of the rectorial benefice of Lymm remained in the Leigh family.   In former times the private chancel (known as the Domville Chapel) on the north side of Lymm Church was reserved for the Domvilles as lords of the 1st moiety of the manor of Lymm whereas the private chancel on the south side was reserved for the Leighs as patrons of the 1st mediety of the rectorial benefice.   Neither chancel was retained when the church was reconstructed in 1850-1851 although a brass wall-plate and several memorial tablets were incorporated into the new building.

In 1086, under the paramountcy of Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester, Gilbert de Venables held the 1st (or Domville) moiety of the manor of Lymm whilst Edward, a mesne lord, held the 2nd (Warburton) moiety from Osbern FitzTezzo.   There is no longer any representative of the 1st (Domville, or Leigh) moiety of the manor of Lymm;  the 2nd (Warburton) moiety of the manor is now held by the 11th Viscount Ashbrook.            As lords of this moiety the (Egerton-)Warburtons were patrons of the 2nd mediety of Lymm, but this did not involve them in the presentation to the living of Lymm: instead, they appointed the Rector of Lymm with Warburton.

Oughtrington, Lymm, Cheshire is not mentioned in Domesday Book.   Oughtrington Hall was rebuilt by Trafford Trafford in 1812;  it is now the nucleus of Lymm High School, formerly Lymm Grammar School.   In 1862 the estate, some 1100 acres in extent, was sold to George Charnley Dewhurst (1807-1894), of Beechwood, Lymm, partner in the firm of G. & R. Dewhurst, cotton-traders and manufacturers of Silko thread, of Great Marlborough Street, Manchester, whose elder son by his 1st marriage, George Bakewell Dewhurst (1839-1891), moved into the mansion within a year of his marriage.   On the death of the latter's widow in 1911 their son (Gerard) Powys Dewhurst (1872-1956) sold Oughtrington Park to Lever Brothers, by whom it was sold to Cheshire County Council.   A descendant of Trafford Trafford is Diana, Countess of Minto.

Elizabeth Egerton was descended from Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, by Mary, his wife, Queen Dowager of France, daughter of King Henry VII.

The Leatherlakes House estate, at Runnymede, Surrey, latterly comprising 20 acres and once the residence of George Henry, Viscount Dupplin and later of the 2nd Lord Walsingham, was inherited from Mrs Mary Priscilla Allett (d 1795), widow of Rev James Allett, Vicar of Rodmersham and of Teynham, Kent (d 1776), and sole heiress of John Allett of Leatherlakes House, who d 1770.   It was sold by James Allett Leigh in 1859.

The Langley estate, Buckinghamshire belonged in the eighteenth century to the dukes of Marlborough.   The Rev. James Allett Leigh inherited it in 1817 from his uncle Thomas Stone.

Contrary to the view that John Milton has left no surviving descendants, Susanna Birch was reputedly descended from the poet;  and it seems that this may well have been so.

Warburton Chapel, Cheshire was a chapel of ease formerly within the parish of Lymm.   It is known nowadays as Warburton Old Church.

The Crown Office believes that the baronetcy of Leigh of South Carolina became dormant in 1873.

Hamlet Yates was the steward and tenant of Sir George Warburton, 3rd Bt, of Arley.

The family (Egerton Leigh senior or junior) must have been living for at least part of the time at West Hall in 1816, for that was the consecration year of the parish church of St John the Evangelist, High Legh, later to be rebuilt after its destruction by fire in 1889.   The 1816 chapel was of neo-Classical design, whereas the original chapel (which had been the domestic chapel of the Leigh family) was a half-timbered one.   The original High Leigh chapel was a chapel of ease of the parish of Rostherne.   Within High Legh Park the Leghs of East Hall also had a private domestic chapel, which still exists.

Jodrell Hall, Middlewich, Cheshire, a small Tudor mansion, is said to have been destroyed by fire some time in the second half of the eighteenth century.   It was rebuilt on a new site in 1779, a year after Egerton Leigh's marriage to Elizabeth Jodrell had brought him the estate.

Broadwell Manor, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, a Domesday manor, comprised 486 acres in 1873.   The mansion was rebuilt in 1757 after most of it had been destroyed by fire.   The Leighs, who inherited the estate in 1777, sold it in 1971.

Col Egerton Leigh purchased Twemlow Hall, Middlewich, Cheshire from the heirs of the bankrupt Booth family in 1863.   The estate comprised over 900 acres, for which he paid £32,000.

A mediety was the advowson of a moiety of the benefice.   The rectory of Lymm ceased to be the 1st mediety in 1869 on the establishment of the independent benefices of Warburton and Oughtrington.   From Rowland Egerton-Warburton, lord of the (2nd moiety of the) manor of Lymm, George Charnley Dewhurst had bought, in the previous year, the 2nd moiety of the (2nd) mediety of the rectory of Lymm with (the Chapel of) Warburton.   This 2nd mediety of Lymm consisted of 2 moieties, the 1st of which became in 1869 the independent parish of Warburton, of which Rowland Egerton-Warburton remained the patron.   The 2nd moiety of the (2nd) mediety of Lymm with Warburton became the rectory of Oughtrington, a parish also constituted in 1869.   Thus, both parishes were carved out of the parish of Lymm.   The Rector of Lymm with Warburton had a shared responsibility for Lymm, as well as full responsibility for Warburton: he had to serve Warburton every Sunday, and Lymm on alternate Sundays.

The estate of West Hall, High Legh was always spelt High Leigh by the Leighs.   Comprising 1131 acres, it included land that had previously belonged to the Daniells, with whom, coincidentally, they had intermarried in 1270.   The Leighs disposed of it at various times.   Much of the estate was sold by Capt Egerton Leigh in 1908, the purchaser being Col Hubert Cornwall-Legh, of East Hall, High Legh.   Charles Cornwall-Legh senior bought West Hall in 1931, thus including both halls within the one High Legh Park;  from then on his seat became known as High Legh Hall.   The final disposal of the Leighs' Cheshire property (which in 1873 had comprised 3946 acres, and 3518 in 1924) took place on 25 March 1944.   West Hall was rebuilt three times.   About the time of the refoundation of the parish church in 1816 an extension was attached to the original half-timbered house, which by 1819 was in use as a farmhouse.   Rebuilt in the comfortable Victorian style, it was leased circa 1870 to Charles A. Stewart.   West Hall appears to have been reconstructed yet again after 1905, perhaps to accommodate the land agent, the Hon. J.E. Cross, who also acted for the High Legh estate;  it is known that West Hall was tenanted in 1904 and by Mr Cross until his death in June 1921.   A print exists of the original mansion, after a drawing executed by Copley Fielding in 1814.   West Hall was finally demolished in 1935 by Charles Cornwall-Legh junior (later 5th Lord Grey of Codnor) in order to make way for an expensive building development.

Jodrell Hall, Holmes Chapel, Cheshire was let in the late 1870s to J.Edward Reiss, a Manchester businessman, later of Cassia Lodge, Hartford, Northwich, whose daughter Florence married Capt Oswald Leigh, of Belmont.   The (Egerton) Leighs returned to live at Jodrell Hall in the 1890s but left it in 1916, never to return. Capt Egerton Leigh disliked Cheshire, finding it flat and uninteresting; his second wife felt likewise, preferring her house at 20 Cadogan Place.   The mansion and estate, comprising some 2200 acres, were disposed of in 1924, when, after public auction, the hall and some 50 acres of land were privately acquired by the business tycoon Sir Edwin Stockton (1873-1939), who because of a downturn in his financial circumstances sold it in 1935.   Since 1939 Jodrell Hall has been the preparatory school Terra Nova. On part of the estate is the well-known Jodrell Bank radio-telescope, completed in 1957.

In 1908 Capt Egerton Leigh sold the advowson of High Legh to Col Hubert Cornwall-Legh; apparently, the Leighs' lordship of the manor of High Leigh was sold to Col Cornwall-Legh at the same time.

In 1893 Capt Egerton Leigh sold (what had formerly been the 1st mediety of) the advowson of Lymm to G.C. Dewhurst's younger son by his 1st marriage John Dalby Dewhurst (1844-1894), of Oughtrington House (now Cotebrook, Oughtrington), by whose son William Arthur Dewhurst (1871-1948) this patronage was transferred, circa 1926, to the Bishop of Chester.

Kermincham Lodge, Congleton, Cheshire, a Domesday manor purchased in 1801, was after 1924 the only land that the Leighs still owned in the Jodrell area.   Resettled on Capt Cecil Leigh on 4 Aug 1926, it was sold in 1931.

Gladys Durell Barnes was said to be descended from an illegitimate son of the 1st Duke of Wellington.

From France the Garcins moved to live at Bantry in the Republic of Ireland, and thence (in 1951) to England, whilst retaining their château near Marseilles, which is still in the Garcin family.

Berkeley, Dunkirk, Kent was from 1906 to 1907 the country retreat of Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough after her separation, but long before her divorce, from the Duke.

Capt Cecil Leigh was killed in a car crash on the road from Fréjus to Cannes.

Col Branch's younger daughter Elizabeth married in 1946 Prince Nikolai Galitzine.

The arms of Leigh are so ancient that they predate specific grants. There are references to them in a number of medieval rolls of arms, even as early as the reign of Edward I (1272-1307).   However, according to Augustine Vincent, Windsor Herald from 1624 to 1626, they may date from the reign of Henry II (1154-1189).

The Leigh crest is of later date than the arms as crests were in restricted use during the Middle Ages.   It was granted by Sir Gilbert Dethick, Garter King of Arms, in 1556.

© Donald Adamson 2009

(vi) Philosophy

MATHEMATICAL ASPECTS OF PASCAL'S CONCEPTION OF GOD

A version of this text was published in Mathematics and the Divine:  A Historical Study (ed T. Koetsier, L. Bergmans), 2005 (pp. 405-421)

1.   INTRODUCTION

Pascal's mathematical achievement is fourfold.   Lacking Descartes's algebraic expertise, he chose to work in the traditional field of synthetic rather than analytic geometry, and thus contributed to the study of conic sections.   Six years later, in The Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle and in its first appendix Multiple Numbers, he published his findings on the theory of number (prime numbers and magic squares), propounding the method of combinatorial analysis known as 'Pascal's Triangle,' and applying properties of the binomial theorem.   In collaboration with Fermat, and at the prompting of his gambling acquaintance the Chevalier de Méré, he laid the foundations of modern probability theory.   And towards the end of his life, in his History of the Cycloid, he resolved various problems in the geometry of indivisibles, thereby helping to create the infinitesimal calculus:  this, though falling short of the generalized formulation which made Newton's integral calculus possible, nevertheless established the geometric laws applicable to a curve.  

Such intermittent but highly concentrated scientific activity confirms him as one of the seventeenth century's greater mathematicians, yet in a famous letter he disparages such intellectual labours and pours scorn upon his arithmetical and geometric achievement.   'I would not go two steps out of my way for geometry's sake,' he writes, adding that so different is the work on which he is currently engaged that he has almost forgotten about mathematics;  'for, to be frank with you about geometry, it is, in my opinion, the highest of mental exercises;  but I also see that it is so useless that I draw hardly any distinction between a mere geometrician and a skilled workman;'  'whilst geometry was a good means of testing one's mental powers, it was not a good means of employing them' (522). 

Nor is this disparagement of mathematics an isolated instance in Pascal's writings.   The 'abstract sciences are not mankind's proper concern' (687).   Descartes, he maintains (553), probed too deeply into science — by which he principally means mathematics — and should be censured accordingly.   Moreover, 'I think it is right that one should not look closely into Copernicus's opinion;  however, it affects our whole life that we should know whether the soul is mortal or immortal' (164).

Pascal reflects this situation in his celebrated Thought on the 'geometric' and the 'intuitive outlook' (for want of a better word to translate the admirably termed 'esprit de finesse').   In this antithesis the 'geometric outlook' is that of deductive, a priori reasoning, the reasoning of mathematics, whilst the 'intuitive outlook' not only embodies inductive, a posteriori reasoning — the thinking processes of natural philosophy — but also encompasses all the nuances and perceptions of human living, those very subtleties which the court-functionary Leibniz, the lawyer Fermat, the soldier turned Royal tutor Descartes (who in his Treatise on Man was also a natural scientist) and even Pascal's father, the tax commissioner Étienne Pascal, dealt with in the course of their professional careers.   This Thought 512, in which almost the whole of Pascal's intellectual achievement is encapsulated, acknowledges that each of the two 'outlooks' and methods has its own particular validity — indeed its own necessity — within its sphere of influence.   Pascal's so-called 'geometric' method foreshadowed the quasi-mathematical logic of the lemmas of Spinoza's Ethics as a method of reasoning geometrically from seemingly indubitable first principles.

To present the argument of this article:  the characteristics of a God who is firmly embedded in human history suggest to Pascal a salvation-plan for the world that has been divinely created.   God, it is suggested to and by Pascal, can be apprehended by both heart and mind.   His existence, though not indubitable, can rightly be regarded as matter for informed mathematical speculation.   A demonstration of the mathematical aspects of Pascal's religious dialectic concludes the article.

2.   CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD

Pascal holds that, rare and admirable as the 'geometric outlook' may be, it does not have any bearing upon what is truly important in human life.   What is essential from this standpoint is the 'intuitive outlook;'  yet whereas the excogitations of the 'geometric outlook' do at least produce results that are universally acknowledged, those of the 'intuitive outlook' yield no similar certainty.   Does God exist?   Like Voltaire (somewhat disingenuously) a century later, Pascal maintains that belief in God should be the supremely important issue in the lives of his fellow men;  yet not even the God of deism can be conclusively proved by mathematics;  the God of revealed religion still less so!   Mathematics is, he believes, 'useless in its profundity' (694);  nor can the divine existence be proved by any of the traditional arguments of the schoolmen (Anselm's ontological argument or the Thomist arguments of the Prime Mover, First Cause and Necessary Being), nor indeed by any moral argument nor by those from design or natural law.

In short, whether mankind has been created randomly or by a good God or a wicked demon cannot be decided by any individual's natural powers alone (131), though the natural order does indeed suggest that 'a necessary, eternal and infinite being' may well exist.   Within nature there are, he says, powerful signs that God does exist and these in themselves are more cogent, if not more coherent, than the so-called metaphysical proofs, for the latter are interdependent and (in a manner of speaking) syllogistic so that not all of them can easily be comprehended at any one time, with the result that only an hour after a person has acknowledged their force they are all too easily confused, misunderstood and put to one side (190).

On the contrary, the God of Christianity is much more than the God of deism, natural religion being as distant from Christianity as is atheism itself — and both being equally abhorrent (449, 781).   'The Christian God,' Pascal asserts, 'is not simply a God who is the author of geometric truths and of the natural order';  and therefore 'I shall not undertake here to prove by natural reasons either the existence of God or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that kind, not only because I do not feel myself sufficiently able to find in nature proofs to convince hardened atheists, but also because this knowledge is useless and barren without Jesus Christ ...' (449)

Pascal identifies three of the four principal attitudes towards divine belief as those of 'the Pyrrhonist, the deist and the Christian' (170):  these are agnosticism, deism and Christianity, and 'doubt, assurance and submissiveness' are their distinctive features respectively.   From this analysis he excludes atheism, refusing to make it central to his thesis.   His reference in Thought 449 to 'hardened atheists' defines and circumscribes the main aim of his Apologia;  this comprehensive defence of Christianity, as wide-ranging as those of St Thomas Aquinas, Chateaubriand, Kierkegaard or Teilhard de Chardin, was a project upon which he had embarked at the urgent request of the Jansenist-inclined Duc de Roannez:  intended to convert the agnostic rather than the atheist, it was a work which he contemplated for many years and for which his Thoughts were preparatory jottings.   Doubt, which is the focus of the projected Apologia, characterizes the Pyrrhonist because, like Arcesilaus, Montaigne and Charron, he resists and refutes dogmatic attitudes.   On the other hand, whereas the deist's attitude is one of complacent self-assurance, the Christian believer approaches his God reverently and submissively because he trusts in a personal Deity who has uniquely revealed himself in history and the Scriptures.

Never at any time does Pascal give us a palpable apprehension of the Godhead beyond affirming that he is the soul's 'path, object and final goal' (551), 'an infinite and immutable object,' 'the sole principle ... and sole end of all things:'  thus, in the purely abstract sense of the philosopher rather than the visionary, we know what is meant by him.   Pascal resorts to arithmetic in order to explain the necessary haziness of man's perception of the Godhead:  we do not know what God is like, he argues, just as in mathematics we are incapable of forming a mental picture of the infinite (418).

In mathematics Pascal sees the outlook of infinity;  and the conviction which this gives him of the existence of some sort of infinite being adds vibrancy to his apologetic whilst also filling him with the same spacious and serene tranquillity expressed by Spinoza in his Ethics and by Plato in the Timæus.   But whereas Spinoza is said by Balzac (in Cousin Bette) to have 'proved the existence of God by mathematics,' such was never Pascal's intention.   His God is no mathematical abstraction (449), nor is he the teleological Creator as seen by Aquinas and Bonaventura although the doctrine of divine grace undoubtedly has a teleological aspect.   Nor is he the Prime Mover of the universe 'who sets the world in motion with the flick of a finger' (1001), which is how Pascal describes the God of Descartes's Discourse on Method.

On the contrary, Pascal's Godhead is voluntaristic, going much beyond the Deity in whom Newton believed, to the extent that through the Person of Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, through prophecy, miracles and Scriptural revelation, he actively intervenes in the unfolding of world-history, sustaining his Church throughout its tribulations, and putting each human soul to the test though by no means leading mankind into error.   And therefore he is a personal God:  not the Divinity 'of the philosophers and scientists' but the 'God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob' whom he so vividly perceived during the two hours or so of a mystical vision and of whom, in his metaphor of tongues of fire, he has left a record in his Memorial.   Pascal is indeed the 'God-inebriated man,' to borrow the phrase invented for Spinoza by Novalis.

Pascal's Godhead, in his interventions in the unfolding of world-history, is the hidden God of whom Isaiah prophesied;  the God who, through the Holy Spirit, has inspired all prophetic utterance and who has shed some light but not too much, wishing to blind some people and enlighten others.   He is the 'God of Jesus Christ' (913), without whom we cannot know the Father, for 'Jesus Christ is ... the true God of mankind.'   And being through Jesus the epitome of self-sacrifice, he is also the God of love, 'humbled,' 'crucified,' and even actually 'lost' or 'destroyed:'  not quite abandoned upon the Cross, as Vigny was later to envisage his death, but 'lost' and 'destroyed' at the very heart and in the very fullness of the Godhead itself (471).   Echoing in this respect all three Synoptic Gospels, Pascal emphasizes in The Mystery of Jesus that, though the Son may, in his humanity, have wished not to have to taste the bitterness of death, yet he was not abandoned by the Father:  'he prays but once that the cup may pass from him, which he does submissively, and twice he prays that it may come to him if such be the will of God.'   And it is this disquieting perception of both Father and Son being 'lost' or 'destroyed' which, through original sin, exactly mirrors the Fall of Man.     

This God who has loved and redeemed us we must also love, and Pascal well realizes that there is a world of difference between knowing about God and actually loving him.   'We must,' he says (618), 'love only him, and not our transient fellow-creatures' — acknowledging him in our hearts as 'saviour, father, priest, host, nourishment, king, sage, lawgiver, sufferer, pauper, and one who must produce a people whom he will lead, feed, and bring into the Promised Land' (607).

Hence the fundamental Pascalian concept of a God of contradictions, or contrariétés, as he tends to call them:  the Word who at his Nativity was unable to speak a word, the child who is God, the outsider who is King, the Messiah who is the spiritual rather than the secular saviour not merely of his own people but of all peoples, the Triune God in time yet out of time, who is of obscure birth and yet not so obscure that there are no signs of him.   These are indeed the sorts of contradiction — reidentified and reiterated by Pascal — which, across most if not all denominations, have been the familiar substance of Christian worship and theology from the Fathers of the Church to the present day;  and it is a tenet of Pascal's faith that in the Second Person of the Trinity, 'Jesus Christ, all contradictions are reconciled.'

Within Pascal's view of God there are, however, two sorts of contradiction.   There are the traditional contradictions previously mentioned, and these, perhaps better than anyone, he turns to convincing apologetic use:  the fact, to which Isaiah bears witness, that in God's revelation of Jesus to mankind there is enough clarity for some to discern in him the God-Man but also enough darkness and obscurity for others to be mistaken.   Likewise with the parables, of which Jesus himself says that he has told them to so many 'that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.'   The shedding of light — and even the bestowal of faith — is 'a gift of God:'  it is not something of human origin.   

Over and above the traditional contradictions, however, there are also those which, looking in at Pascal's conception of God from a standpoint which is not his, we equally perceive as being present.   Predominantly, these contradictions are to be found in his attitude towards the doctrines of the Fall of Man, original sin, and predestination, matters which are confronted in his four Writings On Grace written in 1657-1658 although indirectly, in 1656, they had also been the subject of his earliest Provincial Letters.

Pascal, though not a theologian in the formal sense, assimilated a great deal about theology through the writing of these epistolary masterpieces, which, with their vivid and ironical dialogue, came brilliantly to the Jansenists' rescue in their struggle against the Jesuits.   This dispute, which continued for well over a century, was between modernizers and traditionalists.   Focusing on aspects of moral theology, upon the doctrines of sufficient and efficacious grace and upon the impact upon practical daily behaviour of any relaxation of moral teaching, it culminated in the Jansenists' defeat when, in 1713, their teaching was condemned in a Papal bull.   In Pascal's particular phase of this prolonged acrimonious debate the intellectual ammunition concerning the Jesuits' doctrinal and ethical laxity was prepared for him by his friends at Port-Royal;  but he, better than anyone, knew how to hit his target.   And it is arguments about sufficient and efficacious grace that preoccupy him in his first three Provincial Letters.  

In the Bible — and especially in Matthew's and Mark's Gospels and in the Pauline and supposedly Pauline Epistles — much is said about predestination, the Elect and the doctrine of divine grace.   This central aspect of Christian teaching is nowadays understated to the extent that the Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism once championed by the Jesuists has become the common currency of the Church's belief;  but from any reading of the Epistle to the Romans it is clear why Augustine fervently denounced Pelagius and why, at the Synod of Carthage, Pelagianism was condemned as heretical as long ago as the fifth century. 

Whereas Pelagius had denied original sin, teaching that the human will is equally free to do evil or good and thereby save his soul, Augustine argued that God has an absolute will to save those who will be saved but, conversely, a conditional will to damn those who will be damned.   Original sin, vehemently denied by Pelagius and of which (in Pascal's thought) the 'lost' or 'destroyed' God is so bold a metaphor, stems from the temptation by the serpent, the Fall of Man and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden — Adam, and through him all men, having thereby failed to fulfil God's plan for the salvation of the world.

Geometric and algebraic skills being close in nature to the logical syllogism and sorites, it is these which Pascal repeatedly uses in respect of the existence of the Christian God, the divine plan for the salvation of mankind, the Church's teachings on sufficient and efficacious grace, and, again in the Provincial Letters, the casuistical methods of probabilism and probabiliorism (e.g., 715-719);  to some extent Pascal also defends the doctrine of predestination in like manner.   This apologetic activity, beginning with the Provincial Letters, was at its most coherent and singleminded in the Writings on Grace and continued until the end of his life, when he was preoccupied by his Thoughts.

3.   GOD'S SALVATION-PLAN

In the Writings on Grace these quasi-mathematical skills are applied to the consequences of Augustine's view of divine grace as Pascal tries to resolve some of the riddles and contradictions which that involves.  

(1)           The Fall of Man.   In the beginning of things, he argues, the divine plan was that all people should be saved;  all therefore received sufficient grace to enable them, with freewill, to work out their salvation (965-967).   After the Fall of Man not only Adam but all his descendants became worthy of punishment.   It is God's conditional will that some, but not all, shall be so punished (952-954).

(2)           Proximate Power.  Those whom God elects for salvation receive his efficacious grace, in addition to which a proximate power is needed to enable them to persist in prayer (976-977).   A syllogism endeavours to establish that sometimes this proximate power is withheld even from the Elect:-

(a)        if all the Elect have a proximate power to pray 'in the next instant,' they must also have a proximate power to persist in prayer;

(b)        if the Council of Trent has laid down that not all the Elect are capable, at all times, of such persistence;  then

(c)        it is contrary to the teaching of the Council of Trent to say that a proximate power to pray 'in the next instant' is always given to the Elect.

(3)   Efficacious Grace.   However, the salvation of the Elect is assured because they have that perseverance in faith which is God-given through Jesus Christ.   But the non-Elect cannot be saved because they do not have the efficacious grace which is required for salvation.

(4)   Prayer.   Regular and devout prayer is sufficient to procure grace which will be efficacious in procuring salvation.   Yet God can still abandon the prayerful man, perhaps because he can foresee the sins that he will commit of his own free will (951, 953, 965).

(5)   Moral Laxity.   Pascal denies that the belief that one belongs to the Elect may encourage in that person a lax attitude towards morality.

(6)   Scope for Human Effort.   He urges all men and women to do everything that could contribute to their salvation.

(7)   Ambivalence.   Pascal is reluctant to accept that 'God would have made the world in order to damn it' (864, cf. 725), or that he would damn an innocent child (131) or those people born before the Redemption.   And if a man cannot achieve his salvation through faith and commitment, what is the point of an apologetic exercise?

The four Writings on Grace were the closest Pascal ever came to writing theology.   Although, broadly speaking, they projected the Jansenists' theological point of view, it does not follow that Pascal himself entirely shared the beliefs he had analysed and defended in the Provincial Letters — great as was his admiration for Arnauld, Nicole etc as human beings.   In the aftermath of the Jesuit-Jansenist controversy, as also in many of his scientific discoveries, this for ever non-systematic man formulated his meditations in response to an adventitious stimulus.   It was very far indeed from his intention to construct a theological system of his own.   He was, on the whole, exceedingly content to abide by Scriptural revelation and the teachings of synods and ecumenical councils.

4.   HEART AND REASON

In this all-important matter of the foundations of a belief in God Pascal's position should be distinguished from the positions of, say, Rousseau or Kant.   To Jean-Jacques, unwavering in his religious belief, the two clearest evidences of God were 'the spectacle of nature' (Milton's 'harmony divine,' Addison's 'spacious firmament on high') and that 'inner voice' of conscience and the moral law which also underlay Kant's conviction of the divine existence.   But whereas Pascal agreed with Kant and Rousseau that religion could not strictly be founded on the a priori principles of mathematical reasoning, he held that the 'first principles' which are the basis of all deductive thinking are mediated to mankind by the heart, claiming that it was 'useless for reasoning, which has no part in the matter, to try to combat them ...   For the knowledge of first principles, of space, time, movement and numbers, is as solid as any that is given to us by reasoning, and it is upon such knowledge, conveyed by heart and instinct, that reason has to rely' (110).   These first principles, the postulates of the laws of physics, are of an arithmetical or geometric kind and therefore — as was thought at that time about the common notions and postulates of Euclid — it might have been expected that for Pascal the truthfulness of the existence of these first principles was beyond question.   Yet he plays down the part that reason might have to play in such processes, arguing that 'except for faith and revelation, we have no certainty of the truth of these principles other than the fact that within ourselves we have a natural feeling that they are true.   However, this natural feeling is not a convincing proof of their truth, ... there being no certainty outside faith' (131).   The heart, says Pascal (418), knows that the number of finite numbers is infinite though reason cannot prove that this is so:  he chooses to regard this infinitude of finite numbers not as a postulate but as evidence of the primordial importance of faith and revelation.   It can, on the other hand, be demonstrated that 'there can be no square numbers one of which is double the other:'  that, for him, is the province of reason, not of the heart.

For Pascal, therefore, the foundation of divine belief is first and foremost a matter of the heart, but it is not a case of the heart inspiring the first principles from which reason can conclude propositions from which belief can stem.   Rather, the God-given first principles that are confirmed to us by faith and revelation show the inadequacy and contingency of deductive reasoning — and, a fortiori, of inductive reasoning too.   Faith, the ultimate guarantor of these first principles, stems from the heart, and 'those to whom God has given religious belief through feelings of the heart are blessed indeed and very properly persuaded, but those who have not that belief can only be given it by reasoning until such time as God will give it them through feelings of the heart, without which faith is merely human and quite useless for salvation' (110).   This goes some way towards explaining the riddle that faith is bestowed by God only upon the Elect, for a 'merely human' faith is said to be 'quite useless for salvation' and reason is said to have little or no part to play in the conversion to religious belief.   Other religions, argues Pascal, have 'suggested reasoning as the method of attaining faith, but it does not lead to faith, for all that.'  'Only two kinds of people can be called reasonable:  either those who serve God with all their hearts because they know him, or those who seek him with all their hearts because they do not know him.'   'The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing:'  what is meant by this strange paradox?   The reasoning mind proceeds, says Pascal, 'by principle and demonstration' whereas 'the heart's method is different:'  in the last analysis its apprehension of God is God-given.   Faith is mediated by the grace of God — and Pascal considers that the two firmest foundations of religious belief are divine grace and miracles, 'both of which are supernatural' (861).

It is, then, a still stranger (though directly related) paradox that the avowed aim of the Thoughts is to bring about religious conversions.   Pascal's God is not only the Deity who, for their original sin, has consigned to 'eternal damnation' (131) those who lived before the time of Jesus;  he is also, and for the same reason, the God whose bestowal of mercy, although sometimes withheld, is always undeserved (149).   He is the dispenser of  grace which is not given to all but is necessary to all (110, 131, 984-991), yet in whom there is merit in believing (509).   For 'denying, believing and doubting come as naturally to man as does running to a horse' (505);  'religion ... is uncertain;'  hence, says Pascal, a man would not believe in God if there were no signs of him.

However, as is indicated by the analogy of the running horse, believing (religious faith) also comes as naturally to man as do denying (atheism) and doubting (agnosticism);  and whether it be a case of joining battle, going to sea or walking along a plank, it is of the very nature of human endeavour to be for ever engaged in risk-taking (travailler pour l'incertain).   Without being a mathematician, Augustine had also seen this element of risk and this fact of human nature (577), but how much more reasonable and meritorious it is to appreciate such things in the seventeenth rather than the fourth and fifth centuries, in the light of the probability calculus which he and Fermat happen to have pioneered!   For the probability calculus demonstrates that people must take risks;  and thus we are led to Pascal's famous — almost notorious — argument of the Wager, a leap of faith which is the most controversial aspect of the Thoughts and of his religious thinking generally.

5.   THE WAGER ARGUMENT (418)

Rather like the physical universe which he sees as being suspended between nothingness and infinity, Pascal portrays the individual human life as a sea-voyage on which man has embarked from an uncertain origin towards an uncertain goal.   Yet the fact that he is uncertain of the goal does not mean that he should refrain from suppositions concerning it.   Pascal, notwithstanding any reservations he may have about the Elect being foreordained to salvation, believes that all men should be mindful of the Last Things (death, judgment, Heaven, Hell), weighing in the balance — in the form of a probability calculus — whether it is better to enjoy present worldly delights to the possible detriment of one's eternal salvation, or whether it is better to forgo concupiscence with a view to gaining an infinitude of happiness which may or may not await one in a possible Hereafter.   Man, he argues, should stake his present life for the sake of winning something infinitely better in the world to come.   This is the broad sense of the Pascalian Wager, which, for all the apparent rigour of its mathematical formulation, has been rejected by Voltaire, Diderot and Laplace.

Objections to the Wager Argument

(i)   Existence of the Gain.   Contrary to the normal mathematical conventions of a wager, the interlocutor is urged to gamble on the possible existence of the prize.

(ii)   Nature of the Gain.   How does the mathematics of Pascal's argument correlate to the specific concept of the Christian Heaven?

(iii)   Compulsion.   The Pascalian Wager is not constructed on the normal model, where the risks are undertaken of the gambler's own free will.   For reasons which are unclear Pascal says to his interlocutor that he must gamble because he has embarked.   But is wagering for God actually believing in him or merely making the effort to do so?

(iv)   Distaste for Immortality.   Unbelievers may serenely face the prospect of total extinction;  and likewise the unhappy recluse.   Both for the libertine and the unhappy recluse, but particularly for the former, the Wager argument should therefore have reposed on the concept of Hell.

(v)   Crypto-materialism of the Notion of Gain.   Just as the Jesuits attacked the Provincial Letters for 'ridiculing holy things' (779, cf. 750), so Pascal is also open to the criticism that holy things are quantified and reified in the Wager argument.

(vi)   Differential Rewards.   Consequently, God might not reward infinitely those whose efforts to believe in him are prompted by mercenary considerations.   And, rather similarly, he might differentiate belief that is based on faith from belief that is based on evidential reasons.   Perhaps, therefore, different decision matrices are required for different persons.

(vii)   Disproportion.   The lack of any recognizable relationship between the stake and the gain is an almost insuperable obstacle to those wagerers whose top priority is the maximization of gain.   Conversely, the value that the stake still has for the unbeliever in terms of secular pleasure is no less a sticking-point for those who seek to minimize potential loss.

Both mathematically and otherwise the Wager argument perhaps therefore lacks the decisive force for which its creator hoped.   But (α) it may be wondered whether this argument and the concept of divertissement were the specific expressions of a neurotic outlook;  and, consequently, (β) the quasi-mathematical argument of the Wager might not have become supremely pivotal in opening the doorway from a pessimistic analysis of human nature into the effulgence of the Christian revelation.   On the contrary, it would very probably have been one of the numerous convergent arguments used by Pascal in furtherance of his apologetic goal:  in Newman's phrase, one of the 'powerful and concurrent' reasons — most of them non-mathematical — the sum of which may work towards religious conversion.

6.   MATHEMATICAL ASPECTS OF PRESENTATION

What part is played by mathematics in Pascal's apologetic achievement and in his perception of the Godhead?

(a)   Proof.   The object of Euclidean geometry is proof.   In the final part of the never-to-be-finished Apologia it seems that Pascal would likewise have sought to adduce proofs — and by a disproportionate process akin to that already noted in his Wager argument.   There would perhaps have been five proofs from the prophecies (274), various proofs from Moses, i.e., from the Pentateuch (290-297) and there would certainly have been many proofs of and from Jesus Christ:  all of these proofs are adumbrated in the Thoughts.  

(b)   Probability Calculus.   Pascal's work with Fermat on probability had released the natural sciences from the confinements of absolute certainty, establishing instead the concept of a stochastic universe.   These joint mathematical findings deeply influenced both Pascal's religious thought and its presentation:  not all people will be saved, not all will be damned;  impossible though it is to read the mind of God, we know through his revealed word that human salvation will depend upon the imparting of his grace, and human faith by itself will not be enough.   The salvation-plan is therefore to a large extent deterministic, but not entirely so as human commitment is still required in order that that plan shall take effect.   At a religious level the mind that had grappled with mathematical probability was universally aware of probability, including the casuistical methods of probabilism and probabiliorism.   Furthermore, in the Wager argument his work with Fermat is at the core of his presentation of eschatological choice, although it can scarcely be said that the algebraic equations are proportionate.   Pascal recognized that it is both natural and right to take calculated risks.

(c)   The Calculus of Indivisibles.   Cavalieri's work on maxima and minima, later perfected by Roberval, became the foundation of the infinitesimal and integral calculus.   It would be incredible to suppose that Pascal was unfamiliar with their work on the summation of infinite series, especially as Cavalieri's Six Geometrical Exercises rapidly became a cornerstone of seventeenth-century mathematics;  and he must have known of the earlier findings of Archimedes's method of exhaustion and Kepler's theory of infinitesimally small geometric quantities.   Archimedes had calculated the area of a segment of a parabola by constructing an infinite sequence of triangles starting with one of area A and continuing to add further triangles between the existing ones and the parabola;  by the same method of maxima and minima, or upper and lower limits, Cavalieri had calculated the quadrature of areas enclosed by certain curves.   So too with Pascal's apologetic technique in the Thoughts, where a somewhat similar technique of movement between extremes, for ever approaching the resolution of the problem, was at the heart of his didactic purpose.   'There are two errors,' he says (252), 'to take everything literally and to take everything spiritually;'  'if a man is boastful, I will humble him ...   And I shall go on contradicting him ... ' (130);  'I will not allow him to rest in either [view] so that, lacking both a stable base and peace of mind, ... ' (464)   However, for Pascal there is an Absolute Truth compared with which all the contradictions of the phenomenal world (inconsistencies, for example, in the human view of  justice) are stark evidence of human fallibility and its causation in original sin.

(d)   Infinity.   The mathematical concept of infinity, so familiar to Pascal from his knowledge of the summation of infinite series, naturally comes to his mind whenever he considers the infinite nature of God, and sometimes he thinks of it when he considers the cosmic situation of man:  human beings are mysteriously suspended between two Infinites (199);  'unity added to infinity in no way increases it ... ' etc (418).   There is an infinite number of finite numbers:  this is asserted in no less than three Thoughts (663, 418, 110), and to Pascal it is perhaps the clearest indication of the existence of an infinite being.  

(e)   Syllogism.   The Writings on Grace can also be seen not as the work of a theologian but as speculation in the manner of a mathematician who, by means of syllogistic proof, seeks an elegant resolution of apparent contradictions;  and the same criticism has been levelled at the Provincial Letters, that in some of them the mysterious relationships of human beings with God have been treated as if they were a geometric problem.   The quasi-mathematical techniques of syllogism and sorites are primarily resorted to in the earlier letters' discussions of the rival doctrines of divine grace (e.g., Letters I-III) although they are also used with deadly effect in Pascal's mockery of the ethical implications of the Jesuits' casuistical devices (Letters VI, VII, XII).   Even before embarking in earnest on the Thoughts Pascal had perfected his mastery of syllogism in the Provincial Letters.   Self-evidently, his mastery of syllogism and near-syllogism must have contributed to a similar mastery of the apophthegmic discourse, as in the self-referential paradox that 'it is not certain that everything is uncertain' (521).   Thought 192 is the best example of the near-syllogism:  'knowledge of God without knowing one's wretchedness leads to pride.   Knowledge of one's wretchedness without knowing God leads to despair.   Knowledge of J.C. is the happy medium because in him we find both God and our wretchedness.'   This Thought has the dialectical form of the strict syllogism but is more in the nature of an elaborate antithesis.

(f)   Antitheses are linked to syllogisms to the extent that they are the second term of the dialectical process.   In Pascal's hands they become a sharply etched literary device which is also a geometric one.   'I should be much more fearful of being mistaken and finding that the Christian religion was true than of not being mistaken in believing that it was true' (387):  such antitheses reflect the elegant mathematical harmony of Pascal's mind, a harmony that was so much at variance with the condition of the actual human world as he conceived it — damaged as that had been by original sin.   Just as algebraic proofs could not, as we have seen, demonstrate the truth of the Word made Flesh, so likewise, in the defence of the Triune God, there is a danger that words themselves can be merely formulaic, their syllogistic neatness assuming the character of a priori demonstrations without particular reference to lived existence.   This is particularly so when the antithesis almost amounts to syllogism, as in Thought 462:  'the prophets have predicted but were not predicted.   In later times the saints were predicted but were not predictors.   Jesus Christ was both predicted and a predictor.'   But Pascal warns himself, just as much as his reader, against the danger of false antitheses (559).   The stark contrasts of antitheses such as 'there is nothing on this earth ... ,' in Thought 468, are not literary bravura.   They are strictly logical in function in that they remind the reader of the categorical nature of the choice facing him, for Pascal writes in the spirit of Jesus's words (recorded in both Matthew and Luke) that 'he that is not with me is against me,' and this saying of Our Lord is quoted in Thought 775.   The best example of the syllogistic antithesis is the one in which Pascal suggests that there is greater certainty about religion than that we shall live to see tomorrow (577).   Perhaps this Thought is a mere jotting and not a potential cornerstone, perhaps it would merely have helped to flesh out one of the 'powerful and concurrent' reasons;  for the main philosophical objection to it is that such an argument could be applied to the defence of any religious, political or other belief.

(g)   Symbolism.   Pascal's training in geometry rather than algebra — but awareness of algebra nevertheless — would have stood him in good stead if he had ever come to the point of composing his Christian apologia;  it has served him well in the Thoughts.   For just as algebra is numerical symbolism, and as the geometry within which he worked can itself be made to perform exactly the same uses, so the Thoughts are permeated with the notion of figures, or prophetic metaphor:   through the symbolism of the Messiah, the Suffering Servant, the Temple, the Babylonian Captivity and the Stone which the builders rejected Pascal would have sought to demonstrate that Old Testament prophecy had been fulfilled in Jesus's life and death.   For example, the Gospel words 'I am the living bread,' echoing Exodus XVI, are quoted in Thoughts 268 and 503, as Pascal thinks of Jesus as the manna, or divine bread, come down from Heaven to feed mankind.   Algebra cannot prove the divinity of Jesus or that he is the living bread, but it is not surprising that Pascal, as a numerical symbolist, saw the whole world as a divine metaphor.

Indeed, in a certain sense mankind is a figure of the Godhead, made in God's image;  and Pascal, like Kepler, believed that, because man was made to resemble God, so he was capable of understanding the universe which God had created.   Kepler, following Pythagoras and Plato, also believed, however, that God had made the universe according to a mathematical plan and that consequently mathematics would provide a secure key to the understanding of the whole of that universe.   Pascal had no such easy perception of the relationship of God and man.   Original sin means that man's apprehension of the world and (in Kepler's phrase) of the harmony of the world is necessarily imperfect;  the role of reason is limited.   Infinity, the mathematician's concept to which Pascal always returns, terrifies him or his alter ego in the phenomenal world (198, 201).   It is the perfect metaphor for eschatological uncertainty:  'the never-ending silence of those infinite spaces fills me with dread.'   'The last act is bloody' (165);  man on earth is like a prisoner in a dungeon or death cell (163);  human beings are like chained men watching their companions, one by one, being put to death (434).   As for the eschatological decision, man is alone.   Yet the relationship with God is not just a one-to-one relationship, for 'true religion teaches us our duties, our incapabilities, our pride and lusts;  it also teaches us what the remedies are:  humility and self-mortification.'   The Christian religion is not only 'the object and centre towards which all things tend,' it is also the vehicle of a moral message;  and Pascal emphasizes what virtuous men and women there are in the Christianity community, he extols the good and happy lives they lead.   This amounts to the important argument of Christian witness.

7.   CONCLUSION

What shape would Pascal's apologia of the Christian religion ultimately have taken?   Except for a few disconnected jottings in readiness for a Provincial Letter that was never written, practically nothing in the Thoughts seems irrelevant to the main purpose.   What would he have added or omitted?   Could the eventual work have had the beautiful simplicity of a theorem?   'The arrangement of the material is new,' he explains (696).   'When playing tennis, both players use the same ball, but one is better at handling it::'  all would have depended on the final order.   'The last thing you discover when you are writing a book is what you have to put first' (976).   And yet, more than on logical orderliness, everything would have depended on Pascal's incomparable literary skill, which, contrary to the situation usual at that time, was modelled not on Latin authors but on Epictetus and Montaigne, the sceptical writers whom he had discussed in his Conversation with M. de Saci:  'I will write down my thoughts in a disorderly manner though not perhaps in purposeless confusion.   That is the true order of presentation:  in its very disorder it will always be indicative of the order I have in mind' (532).   Thus the orderliness of the syllogism, the sorites, the dialectical antithesis would have been traversed by an alternative if not higher order of literary and linguistic presentation.

Pascal was a formal mathematician but not a formal philosopher, nor was he a formal theologian.   In Archilochus's terms he was one of those who knew 'one really good thing' — and that thing did not belong to the realm of mathematics.   Whether in religion, physics or mathematics he was not concerned to construct a unitary system of thought, tending instead to work brilliantly although sporadically in response to external stimuli (the vacuum experiments, the help he gave Méré, the Jansenists' controversy with the Jesuits, his involvement in the cycloid challenge).   Given the a priori character of the 'geometric outlook,' there was no way in which he could not have been a formal mathematician;  but in philosophy and theology, where lay the 'one really good thing' which he recognized for what it was worth, his approach was quite the reverse.   Pascal had undergone at least one unforgettable mystical experience, when for those two hours during his 'night of fire' (913) on 23-24 November 1654 he had had a vision of the God of the Old Testament who is also the God of the New Covenant, lapped, as was the Holy Spirit (Acts II 2-4), in tongues of flame;  and this experience had caused him to realize that insights which appear rational are essentially intuitive and that the phenomenal world can only ever be imperfectly understood.   Thus miracles apparently contrary to the mathematical uniformity of the laws of physics would have had their all-important place within his apologetic discourse;  and the presentational 'disorderliness within orderliness' would have served as a metaphor for miracles' disruption of the orderly sequences of the natural world.   It is a voluntaristic approach in keeping with Jesus's conduct and assessment of his own ministry:  'except ye signs and wonders, ye will not believe.'

'Contradiction,' says Pascal (177), 'is not a sign of falsity, nor is the lack of contradiction a sign of truth,' and this is as applicable to the wonders that are miracles as it is to the signs of the hidden God.   And just as there are the twin aspects of contradiction, so also there are the twin aspects of truth, of which the deductive and inductive truths of mathematics/physics are but one aspect — and by no means the more important.   Though he is deeply committed to Christian doctrine, Pascal dislikes the formulaic repetition of dogma, and in his Writings on Grace he explores the full implications of that doctrine, working them out in the manner of a mathematical problem.   A facet of his seemingly random responsiveness to external stimuli is his devotion to truth at all costs:  thus, he does not resile from the empirical findings that the fall of the column of mercury within the pipette or test tube is evidence of a vacuum, whatever the schoolmen may have said about nature abhorring the void and God not existing if the existence of a vacuum could be established.   Pascal proves otherwise but still believes in God, and in Letters XII and XVII of the Provincial Letters he extols truth as something God-given and eternal.   Likewise, the purpose of the Thoughts is to disseminate truth:  'wherever disputes occur, people enjoy seeing the clash of opinions — but as to the discovery and contemplation of truth?  they have no interest in that' (773).   Yet, he warns, 'truth itself becomes an idol, for truth without charity is not God:  rather, it is his image and an idol which is neither to be loved nor worshipped, and still less must one love or worship its opposite, which is falsehood' (926).  

This is a modern conception of the Christian religion, except for Pascal's seeming commitment to the Jansenists' cause, whose eventual defeat by the semi-Pelagianism of the Jesuits he did not foresee (662).   The fact that his religious thought was unsystematic — in other words, that it was not, and did not purport to be, a philosophy or a theology — does not in any way subtract from its intrinsic value as an urgent eschatological entreaty, nor as the categorical outline of a way of life.

The plain numbers within brackets denote some of Pascal's lesser known Thoughts as laid out in the second of L. Lafuma's editions (Seuil 1962).   The bold numbers within brackets refer to the pagination of Pascal's collected writings edited by J.L.A. Chevalier (Pléiade 1954).

 © Donald Adamson 2005

Known in his lifetime as a geometrician and physicist but also as a staunch champion of Jansenism, yet dismissed in the age of Voltaire as a pessimist and fanatic, Pascal is nowadays a perennial object of fascination to many theologians, philosophers and writers, not only in his own country, where men so different in outlook as Mauriac, Sartre and Camus have been haunted by him, but also throughout the world.

There is a reason for this. Pascal was neither a theologian nor even, in the strictest sense of the word, a philosopher. His religious thought was rooted in the social attitudes of his time; and if he appears to be of such huge importance today, this is largely because of the curious parallel between those seventeenth-century attitudes and certain features of modern society. As a religious thinker he has something in common with Teilhard de Chardin in that he is a breakaway theologian -- though Pascal is not really a theologian at all but a man deeply engaged in the patterns of contemporary secular thought yet possessed of, and indeed possessed by, a strong prophetic vision.

Much is heard nowadays of the "dialogue" between Christians and non-Christians, and between Christians of different persuasions. And it is a remarkable thing that the centuries-old atmosphere of religious controversy has largely been replaced by an atmosphere of dialogue as apologetic has given way to encounter. What this means is that those of particular religions and religious denominations are willing to admit, first, that those who disagree with them are probably doing so in good faith and, secondly, that their opposing arguments are worth listening to and may indeed have solid foundations. Alternative belief systems may or may not be right but are nevertheless reasonable.

There are therefore three types of dialogue: those between Catholic and non-Catholic Christians; those between Christians and believers in other religions; and those between Christians and believers in no religion. It was with this last category that Pascal was mainly concerned. What interested him was not the argument against belief but rather the atmosphere and the psychology of unbelief. In other words, he was interested in these questions: what lies behind the attitude of the person who could not care less whether there is a God or not? what causes the person who does care nevertheless to prefer despair to the answer offered by religion? and how can you establish contact with moral indifference or offer the consolations of religion to someone who believes on principle that such consolations have no meaning?

Religious unbelief includes both agnosticism and atheism. Hitherto, in most if not all human ages and societies, not only the individual consciousness but also that of the group have been sustained by a more or less strong religious instinct: for such ages and societies the concept of God has been, in however unformulated a way, a psychological necessity. This is no longer so in the twenty-first century, nor was it in the twentieth. Vast numbers of people now live their lives in profound indifference as to whether they have any destiny beyond their terrestrial existence and as if it were a matter of no importance whether or not there is a personal Maker of the world. Such was the significance of Nietzsche's contention, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that "God is dead": and nowadays, far more than was the case in 1885, there is a settled conviction in very many minds and hearts that mankind has simply outgrown the religious instinct. Moreover, even by actual religious believers it is commonly accepted nowadays that the life of faith is overlaid by emotional states which in no way correspond to the essential optimism of Christianity. Pascal's profound emphasis on moral indifference and existential anguish foreshadows this phenomenon of modern unbelief.

By moral indifference is not meant that callous absence of conscience or denial of principles which is known to theologians as the outlook of the hardened sinner. Rather, it is an absence of spiritual awareness, a conviction that God and eternity are irrelevances, which may coexist with a highly developed conscience in regard to personal and social behaviour. The standards of people who combine such characteristics have no foundation and no sanction outside themselves and their social function. Such people embody that mysterious thing, the anima naturaliter christiana, in that to all intents and purposes they fulfil the demands of Christian morality yet without any supernatural intervention; and it does seem to be the case that this type of humanist idealism tends to exclude the supernatural. There is a sense in which the virtues of moderation, tact, and a relaxed balance of stoicism and epicureanism offer little foothold to the almost savage atmosphere of visionary Christian idealism centred, as Pascal profoundly believed it must be, on the mysteries of death and eternity. The view of life of Pascal's libertin is an urbane and by no means despicable outlook, and any attempt to inject into it some sense of Christianity's vast reaches of thought would be rather like transferring the Sahara or the Himalayas to the more comfortable and comforting landscape of Kent or East Sussex.

Pascal was perhaps the first Christian thinker who attempted to enter into constructive dialogue with this point of view. Equipped by his scientific training and background to understand the sceptical mood of the mid-seventeenth century, he approached it in a way which is as pertinent to our times as it was to his. From his scientific training and experience he derived several important attributes. He learned to understand the psychological implications of the modern, post-Copernican scientific outlook. He sensed the new dimensions of the universe and strongly supported the movement towards the conception of the natural sciences as an autonomous field of study independent of theology. He acquired a modern scientific method of enquiry, with its cautious and pragmatic regard for facts. Above all, he mastered the scientific method of demonstration, understanding both its value and its limitations. He thought and felt like an intelligent scientist faced with religious problems, not like a philosopher or a theologian faced with scientific problems. He had no sympathy for, and very little understanding of, either theology or metaphysics.

He also thought and felt like a man of the world. Not only did he share, during his worldly period, the quite widespread scepticism as to religious dogma and the holistic notion of morality, he also picked up the preoccupation with manners and the delicacies of social intercourse that was characteristic of that refined society. The somewhat aristocratic "libertine" movement operated at two levels. At the philosophical level it was the done thing to read Montaigne's Essays, to subscribe to a tolerant and broad-minded deism and to advocate good behaviour for humane and æsthetic reasons rather than for reasons that were strictly ethical. But there was also the polite level of "libertinism", that of behaviour itself. The key to this was honnêteté, a concept which can best be translated as gentlemanliness or even civility and which was defined by one of the most cultivated of Pascal's friends (the Chevalier de Méré) as "the art of excelling in all aspects of graciousness and good taste".

There was no doubt much that was superficial and self-conscious in this movement of cultivated scepticism and good manners, but nevertheless it conditioned people's ways of thinking and was symptomatic of something deeper than aristocratic fashion and wider than the sphere of influence of the French capital. On Pascal its influence was very great. He saw in the writings of the amiable and easy-going gentleman-philosopher Montaigne the germs of total scepticism and moral lassitude, noting amongst his own contemporaries precisely the same combination of moral indifference and good behaviour. When, therefore, after his conversion he set about closing the (already at this period) widening gap between Christianity and secular society, he devised a method of doing so that would appeal to the fashionable sceptics whom he saw all around him.

This methodology of Pascal is very revealing, especially when seen in the context of what had been till then the standard approach to controversy, namely the rigid defence of fixed positions, with little regard for flexibility or sympathy. Pascal's "Apologia of the Christian Religion" has come down to us in the form of isolated fragments not arranged in strict sequence. Some of these are tentative notes written for his own benefit, a few are careful summaries of the points of view against which he intends to argue, others are more fully-fledged essays setting out his own philosophical position. The impression is created of a man determined above all else not to argue in a vacuum but rather to retain his opponent's interest by remaining as much as possible on that opposite terrain. The pattern of his dialectic is psychological rather than logical: he does not propose to offer a water-tight proof of the truth of Christianity but rather to make it seem attractive and also reasonable. In the course of an interesting excursus in which he examines various possible ways of presenting his case, Pascal states:

Men feel contempt for religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. To cure them of this attitude, one must begin by showing them that religion is not contrary to reason: that it is venerable, and so evoke respect for it. Next one must show that it is gracious, making good men wish it were true; and then prove that it is true ...

Venerable, in that it knows human nature so well.

Gracious, in that it holds out the promise of the true good (12).

 

In a separate work, an essay On the Geometrical Mind, Pascal has analysed this matter of persuasion. Comparing the technique of scientific demonstration with the subtler art of persuasion, he points out that in persuasion sheer logic is far less important than are certain other factors. Normally a person will accept an argument only if he or she finds it attractive as well as merely cogent. Consent operates at two levels. "The mind and the heart", says Pascal, "are, as it were, the doorways whereby truths are received into the soul" (593). By this he means that intellectual consent is conditioned by what would nowadays be called the whole area of conditioned reflexes, half-conscious attitudes and emotional and intuitive responses. The most celebrated of all Pascal's remarks, "the heart has its reasons of which the mind knows nothing" (423), belongs to this dimension of thought. It is clear, then, that someone presenting an argument must fully understand his opponent: "he must", says Pascal, "know his mind and heart, what principles he accepts, what things he likes ... So that the art of persuasion is just as much concerned with being attractive as with being convincing" (594). All this, so basic to Pascal's line of argument, now seems commonplace. But nobody had thought of saying it before him, and not until the publication of Newman's Grammar of Assent in 1870 did anyone -- not even Coleridge -- have much to say on the subject.

Quite early in his projected work, at the point where he is trying to engage the interest of his opponent who is making it almost a point of honour not to be interested in religion, Pascal would have faced up to the problem of the equation of moral indifference with good behaviour. His method here would have been to make this equation seem both strange and unworthy. The honnête homme prides himself on his commonsense, integrity and good taste. Pascal appeals to these qualities and, in a painstaking rebuttal of scepticism, suggests that such qualities are incompatible with the irresponsibility about fundamental matters in which the sceptic actually takes pride:-

The immortality of the soul is a matter of such importance to us, and of such deep concern, that one would have to be completely out of one's mind not to care what the situation is. All our actions and thoughts must follow such different courses, according to whether or not there will be eternal rewards to be hoped for, that it is impossible to take any step with sense and judgment except with reference to this point which must be our ultimate consideration ...

Amongst the unconvinced I therefore make a huge distinction between those who strive with might and main to enlighten themselves on the subject and those who go through life without troubling themselves on this score, indeed without thinking about it ... Such negligence in a matter which so concerns them, their eternal life, their all, irritates me more than it moves me; it astonishes and appals me: I think there is something monstrous about it. I do not say this out of pious zeal or from devout spirituality. On the contrary, I mean that people should feel in this way from being thus motivated by their own humanity and self-respect …

It is definitely, therefore, a great misfortune to be in such a state of doubt; but it is at least our bounden duty to keep on seeking when one is in such a state of doubt; and so anyone who doubts but does not seek is both very unhappy and very unfair. And if he is unruffled and self-satisfied into the bargain, and proclaims that he is so, and if, in addition, he also regards that as a matter for pride and rejoicing, then I am lost for words to describe so far-fetched an attitude.

Where can anyone acquire such feelings? What reason can there be for rejoicing if one cannot look forward to anything except unhappiness without end? How can one pride oneself about being surrounded by impenetrable darkness, and how can it be that such arguments could occur to a reasonable person? (427)

 

Expressing the viewpoint of the agnostic or sceptic, Pascal proceeds to underline the inner logic, or the lack of inner logic, of scepticism:-

'I do not know who has brought me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself; concerning everything I am in an appalling state of ignorance ...

'I behold the terrifying spaces of the universe in which am imprisoned and observe that I have been attached to a tiny corner of that vast extension without knowing why I am in this place rather than that, nor why my brief lifespan has been assigned to me at this point rather than at another in the whole of the eternity that has preceded me and the whole of the eternity that is to follow. All I can see are infinities on all sides, enclosing me like an atom, or like a shadow lasting only for a second and never to return. All I know is that I must soon die; but what I am most ignorant about is this very death I cannot avoid.

'Just as I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going; I only know that on departing this world I shall fall for ever either into the void or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of these two conditions must be my lot for all eternity. Such is the state in which I am, full of weakness and uncertainty. And the conclusion I draw is that I must therefore spend all the days of my life without thinking of finding out what must befall me. I could perhaps find some enlightenment of my doubts; but I do not want to take that trouble ... '

 

"Now", ripostes Pascal,

who would wish to be friends with a man who talks in that way? Who would choose to tell him, rather than someone else, all about his business? Who would turn to him in adversity? ...

Thus, the fact that some men are indifferent to the loss of their being and to the peril of an eternity of unhappiness is something that is completely unnatural (427).

 

Responding to the notion that most such people are not really like that at heart, he proceeds to develop his argument:-

They are people who have heard it said that it is a sign of fine manners to act like a hothead. It is what they call casting off the yoke, and it is something they try to imitate. But … men of the world who have a sound judgment of things … know that the only way to [win esteem] is to give the impression that they are gentlemanly, loyal, judicious and able to be of good use to a friend ... Now, what advantage do we gain from hearing a man say that he has cast off the yoke, that he does not believe there is a God overseeing his actions, and that he regards himself as being the sole judge of his conduct … ? Does he think that by saying this he has encouraged us to feel great confidence in him from now on … ? ... Now, is that something that should be said cheerfully? Quite the reverse, is it not something that should be said sadly, as if it were the saddest thing that has ever been? (427)

 

And, ready to irritate his opponent providing he does not bore him, Pascal concludes that such easy-going scepticism is "so contrary to good sense and so incompatible with gentlemanliness" (427). This is a kind of initial challenge, which the sceptic, being a gentleman, is almost bound to answer. And once he has done so, he has engaged in the Pascalian dialectic, he has taken a stand, he has ceased to be neutral. From then on, says Pascal, whatever attitude he may adopt, "I shall go on contradicting him" (130).

One way of evading the basic challenge of scepticism is, Pascal argues (136), divertissement. "Since", he writes (133), "men have been unable to remedy death, penury and ignorance, they have taken to giving no thought to such things in their attempt to achieve happiness". If it is true that human life consists, at best, of a balance between action and contemplation, it can equally become -- thanks to our own deficiencies and tendency towards self-deception -- a tension between restless activity and boredom. As in Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven", men can be constantly in flight: fleeing down the labyrinthine ways of new experiences and nervous stimulation. But fleeing from what? It is at this point that Pascal's keen awareness -- perhaps, indeed, experience -- of existential anguish comes into play.

The people, and more particularly men, of the seventeenth century may not have had Aston Martins and Ferraris but they did have other amusements. Of these distractions, or divertissements, Pascal's examples are "gambling, women's company, warfare, high office, ... [and] hunting" (136). "Whenever a soldier bewails the harshness of his lot, or a farm-labourer likewise", he writes, "give them nothing to do" (415). Pascal maintains that men cannot abide inactivity. He points out that most men who are in a position to lead a quiet and restful life do not do so. For to do that would leave them too much time in which to brood over life's meaning. It would bring them face to face with the uncomfortable realities of human insufficiency.

Is this Pascal's key argument or is it, on the other hand, an argument the logic of which he grotesquely distorts? The point was first made by Pascal's friend and spiritual mentor Pierre Nicole in 1672, that the Thought on divertissement ignores the possibility, in a mature man, of any fruitful relationship between contemplation and action. The Thought on divertissement, said Nicole, is merely concerned with the sterile dichotomy between idleness and activity. Idleness is a flight from activity, and vice versa; activity is undertaken, not primarily with a view to some positive gain which lies byond it, but for the sake of escapism: according to Nicole, the happiness offered by such activity is the purely negative one of not being idle. For, says Pascal, "that is why men are so fond of noise and bustle. That is why imprisonment is such fearful torture, that is why the pleasure of solitude is something impossible to comprehend" (136).

Gambling and hunting, his favourite symbols of divertissement, are, he argues, not sought after "because in fact they bring happiness, nor does anyone imagine that true bliss stems from the money you can win at gambling or in the hare you hunt: you would not want them if they were offered to you ... This is why hunting is preferable to the kill" (136). In the Thoughts the kill signifies finality, completion, repose, the moment of truth (anagnorisis) when we have no alternative but to take stock, face up to reality, and make some irreversible choice. Hunting, on the other hand, signifies movement, noise and that involvement in the outside world whereby we evade our fundamental responsibilities.

It is up to each individual person, as Pierre Nicole recognized, to judge whether such an analysis of human life is a sound one. Nor would Pascal have wished otherwise! For his aim is to persuade the doubter to take his doubt seriously, by showing him that his previous avoidance of the problem has been engendered by psychological immaturity. The abandonment of escapism will be a difficult and painful process. The sincere sceptic, the man who doubts but searches and who is dissatisfied with the illusions of self-fulfilment offered by divertissement, has to face a desolate sense of emptiness. This, in Pascal's view, is exactly as it should be. From now on the dialogue deepens. The problem is no longer the preliminary one of sincerity, but the central one of atheism and faith.

Atheism, in itself, throws into sharper relief all that is implied by the notion of God. A hallmark of authentic Christian mysticism, and even perhaps of average Christian experience, is the sense of the Divine absence: the discovery that faith is no comfortable luxury but a seed freely implanted by God in the arid soil of atheistic disbelief. Christ's Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and His words on the Cross suggest that it was God's plan for His Incarnate Word to suffer this sense of the solitude of man without God, in order to redeem individual solitudes by entering into them. And so when Pascal says that Jesus will be in agony until the end of time (919), he implies that part at least of the Christian experience is the full entry into faith through the very experience of the atheistic conviction. "Nothing", he writes,

is so unbearable to mankind as being in a state of perfect repose, without passions, without business, without distraction and without occupation.

Then he feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his inadequacy, his dependence, his impotence, his emptiness.

At once there will rise up from deep within him boredom, gloom, sadness, annoyance, exasperation and despair (622).

 

By this means atheism is invited, and indeed challenged, to engage in the wider context of religious belief. A recurrent theme of Pascal is that of cosmic space as with a physicist's intuition he transforms the newly discovered vastnesses of the universe into an image of the apparent absence of God. "When", he writes,

we observe the blindness and wretchedness of man, and behold the silent vastness of the universe, and man without enlightenment, abandoned to his own devices and (as it were) gone astray in this corner of the universe, ... I am overwhelmed with dread like a man who has been carried off during his sleep to some terrifying desert island, and who then wakes up without knowing where he is and without any means of escape (198).

 

A celebrated Thought (201) sums up this sense of vertigo: "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me" (Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie). This memorable sentence, contrary to what some (including Lytton Strachey) have thought, is actually an expression of the agnostic's or atheist's vertiginous anguish. It is not really known whether Pascal ever experienced such a dark night of the soul, as was certainly experienced by the Carmelite mystic St John of the Cross and also by the Jesuit poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins who in his sonnet "No worst, there is none" writes of the mind's dizzying "cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed".

How is it, then, that this sense of the absence of God can lead to the discovery of His presence? That it is not bound to do so is clear: by no means all agnostics or atheists are converted to Christianity or indeed to any form of religious belief. But if the agnostic or atheist is compelled by his sense of wretchedness and inadequacy to search for the solution to his problem (what Pascal often refers to as the "True Good"), then the right condition has been created for the discovery of the Divine existence. God is there for those who are prepared to look for Him. Indeed, echoing St Augustine's words, Pascal asserts that the search is itself a form of discovery: "you would not seek Me if you had not found Me" (919). He takes his conception of God's self-manifestation (epiphany) in the world from an Old Testament theme, found in the Book of Isaiah: it is that of the Deus absconditus, or Hidden God. He bitterly attacks the methods of conventional religious apologetics, whereby metaphysical proofs of the existence of God, arguments from design and so forth, are complacently recited for the benefit of people who are entirely incapable of following such lines of reasoning. "Nothing", he says (781),

is likelier to make [unbelievers] despise religion. Scripture does not speak thus, and it has a better understanding of the things of God. On the contrary, it says that God is a hidden God, and that since the corruption of nature [i.e., the coming into existence of Original Sin] He has left them in a state of blindness such that they can emerge from it only through Jesus Christ, except for Whom all communication with God is cut off.

 

And Pascal cites Matthew XI 27:

Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.

 

Thus he rejects the God of Reason, appealing instead to the God of the Scriptures. Central to his outlook is the fact of the Incarnation, whereby God is hidden in human form, obscure to those who refuse to love truth but accessible to those who search.

What do the prophets say about Jesus Christ? that He will self-evidently be God? No, but that He truly is a hidden God, and that He will not be recognized, and that no one at all will think it is He, and that He will be a stone against which several will stumble, etc.

Therefore, let us no longer be reproached with lack of clarity, since this is what we profess to be the case (228).

 

God is hidden in Christ because he took upon Himself our own wretchedness. But it is precisely this which makes him the perfect intermediary, for in Him we not only recognize our own human condition but also discover God.

The personal mystery of Jesus Christ, with all its magnetic power and with all the dimensions that are imparted to it by the Scriptures, is the doorway to which Pascal has tried to lead the unbeliever. Whether the door itself will open is not his final responsibility. I think it is insufficiently appreciated to what extent, in that age long before the advent of political correctness, his views on conversion to Christian belief must have been unwelcome and jarring to his readers; yet they would have been accepted by those same readers without demur, although not necessarily adopted by them, precisely because of the laid-back, easygoing honnêteté with which those civilized people envisaged all matters of life and death.

And in the third millennium Pascal's encounter with unbelief, inspired by his own experience of the life of faith, is still of absorbing interest. It is an outlook on life that is impressive to all who are daring or pessimistic enough to enter into the spirit of his enquiry.

The plain numbers within brackets denote Pascal's Thoughts as presented in the second of Louis Lafuma's editions. The bold numbers refer to the pagination of Pascal's collected writings edited by Jacques Chevalier.

© Donald Adamson 2002

(vii) Literary Criticism

Two of the most characteristic anecdotes about Balzac concern the vividness of his depiction of the external world. George Sand relates how, very early on in the novelist's career, he interrupted some conversation of his (and her) friend Jules Sandeau with the words: "Revenons à la réalité. À qui marierons-nous Eugénie Grandet?" And the dying Balzac is reported -- perhaps somewhat apocryphally -- by Octave Mirbeau to have said: "Il me faudrait Bianchon. Bianchon me sauverait, lui!" In other words, only one doctor could now save his life: Bianchon, the fictional doctor, the friend of Eugène de Rastignac in the novels Old Goriot and The Protection Order, and the participant in another 28 novels and short stories. Sainte-Beuve, in his Nouvelles Causeries du lundi, records similar utterances of Balzac regarding the Baron de Nucingen and the Duchesse de Langeais.

It would seem, from these anecdotes, as if the interior private world of Balzac's fiction were more real to him, more charged with its own dynamic coherence, than the so-called "real" external world of history of which Balzac repeatedly set himself up as the amanuensis, chronicler, historian, analyst and mentor. Amanuensis, as when in his own Foreword to The Human Comedy, published by him in 1842, he declares: "La Société française allait être l'historien, je ne devais être que le secrétaire". Chronicler, in that (I again quote from his Foreword to The Human Comedy) he sets out to "faire concurrence à l'État Civil".

But it is not as an amanuensis, nor as a chronicler, but as a historian of his contemporary society that Balzac is more clearly recognizable both to himself and to us, his readers. Not, however, so much the official historian (the phrase is from Lost Illusions) as the secret historian (again, the phrase is from Lost Illusions), the historian who will write -- as he puts it elsewhere -- the "secret history of the human race", probing and dissecting the true but deeply and deliberately concealed causes of human events. "Biographies are rather a thing of the past", he asserts in an early article. He evidently does not subscribe to the opinion of his contemporary, Thomas Carlyle, in On Heroes and Hero-Worship, that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men". Balzac's form of history is that of social mores, l'histoire des mœurs. The title of the largest category of the works of The Human Comedy is Études de Mœurs (Studies in Social Life), containing no less than 70 finished novels and short stories. This is the sort of history which, he tells us in his celebrated Foreword, "Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia and India have unfortunately not left us concerning their civilizations". The secret history is not, therefore, in any sense the unearthing of official secrets hitherto unknown, but rather (as he puts it, again in the Foreword) "the history and criticism of society, the analysis of its ills and the discussion of its principles". Balzac is not just a "historian of French society" (as he describes himself at times both in his fiction and in his correspondence ): "I have been able to surpass all other historians', he writes in the Foreword, 'because I have greater freedom". He is the self-proclaimed "doctor of social sciences", and -- echoing Bonald -- a "teacher of men".

Balzac's world of fiction, with its greater freedom than that of any chronicler or official historian, is an unfinished one: the product of nearly twenty years of unremitting labour -- I suppose that no artist who has ever lived has stuck more feverishly or stubbornly to his task. Its collective title is The Human Comedy (an unmistakable echo of Dante's Divine Comedy), and it contains 94 novels and short stories (Balzac's plays are distinct from his prose fiction, and do not belong to The Human Comedy). 94 novels and short stories are surely, by any standard, a sufficient achievement for any writer; but, had Balzac's health and eventually his life itself not been cut short by such Herculean overwork, his intention would have been to compose no less than 149 works of fiction, extending over the whole face of French society in the first half of the nineteenth century, and consisting of the three broad categories of Studies in Social Life, Philosophical Studies and Analytical Studies; the Studies in Social Life themselves being divided into six sub-categories, the Scenes from Private Life, the Scenes from Provincial Life, the Scenes from Parisian Life, the Scenes from Political Life, the Scenes from Military Life and the Scenes from Country Life.

Of these projected 149 works, 116 would have belonged to the category of Studies in Social Life; 27 to the Philosophical Studies; and 6 to the Analytical Studies. 94, as I have said, were actually completed (except that, even of these, three -- The Peasants, The Member of Parliament for Arcis, and The Lower Middle Classes -- were not actually completed, but are always counted amongst the finished works); and, of the 94, 70 belong to the previously mentioned Studies in Social Life, 22 to the Philosophical Studies, and 2 to the Analytical Studies. From these figures it is evident that the most completed category, proportionately speaking, is that of the Philosophical Studies (22 out of 27); that the least complete section is that of the Analytical Studies (2 out of 6); whilst about ¾ of the Studies in Social Life were brought by Balzac to a successful conclusion. And, turning briefly to the subdivisions of the Studies in Social Life, we further notice that whereas (for example) 4 out of the projected 32 Scenes from Private Life remained unfinished, and whereas 4 out of the projected 8 Scenes from Political Life suffered the same fate, the shortfall was large to the point of being quite catastrophic in the Scenes from Military Life: 25 unfinished titles out of 27.

Of the 94 finished works about 40, incidentally, can properly be called novels -- the remaining 50 or so being short stories or novellas. But is Albert Savarus a short story or a novel? Is The Collection of Antiques a novel or a novella? Such questions of nomenclature, though possibly idle in themselves, lead us towards a consideration of what is the novel, and serve to remind us that in The Human Comedy the dividing-line is an almost invisible one between novel and short story -- so that it can truly be said that Balzac's short stories (such as The Old Maid, The Parish Priest of Tours, The Vendetta and Colonel Chabert) have about them the density and the sense of continuity in time of the novel proper, about which I shall subsequently have more to say.

For the moment, in an endeavour to map out the landscape of The Human Comedy for those of my listeners who are not well acquainted with it, I would add that, whilst in no sense is this lecture a statistical enquiry, the dimension of numbers is a significant one in Balzac's achievement. Never before -- and never indeed since, not even by Proust -- has a work of fiction, either single or collective, been conceived on so vast a scale. One can go further than this, in the words of Félix Davin's preface to the Philosophical Studies, that it is "one of the most immense undertakings ever envisaged by one man". Balzac himself considered his achievement to be Napoleonic in character, or God-like: in the bringing to fulfilment of his own ambitions in the external historical world, "Napoleon", writes Balzac, "did not show so much will-power or courage" as he has shown in the writing of The Human Comedy; the will-power needed to create and to go on creating is no less than that needed to fight sixty battles and win almost all of them: "my will-power, whose only equal is thought to be Napoleon's"; he even compares his struggles with intractable literary inspiration to those of Napoleon on the battlefield, to Brienne, Champaubert and Montmirail; to create and to go on creating is the attribute of a god or a demiurge: créer, toujours créer! Dieu n'a créé que pendant six jours! Thanks to his literary creation, he will, Napoleon-like, have led "an immense life": Napoleon "lived the life of Europe ... I shall have carried nothing less than a whole society in my head".

A world carried in Balzac's head: tout son monde, as he describes it in the Foreword; a world, as he says there, containing "the 2,000 or 3,000 salient figures of an epoch" (though, in fact, there would have been more like 4,000, for there are 2,500 in the unfinished cycle already); a world, as he explains in a letter to Mme Hanska in 1834, where the Studies in Social Life "will represent the social effects" whose causes are delineated in the Philosophical Studies, and whose principles will be set out in the Analytical Studies; a world of "men, women and things", a world (as he hopefully envisages it in the Foreword) of "noblemen and middle-class people, artisans and peasants, politicians, dandies and army men". Balzac describes, in another letter to Mme Hanska, a visit to a clairvoyant: "out of curiosity, they gave my hand to the clairvoyant who, after placing it on her stomach, released it in terror:- Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette tête-là! a-t-elle dit. C'EST UN MONDE, cela me fait PEUR". What relationship does this world of Balzac's which so terrified the clairvoyant have to the "real", "external" world of history? And is he not himself a clairvoyant more than a straightforward observer?

In approaching this question, let us first of all define more clearly the relationship of Balzac to the previous tradition of the novel. Let us also define, if at all possible, the relationship of Balzac's world to the external world.

The origins of the European novel have been widely debated, a debate in which more heat has been generated than light. Some critics and historians of literature see these origins in the Icelandic prose sagas such as the Sturlunga Saga, Njál's Saga, the Völsunga Saga, and the Eyrbyggja Saga, a summary of which was published by Sir Walter Scott. Other critics are disposed to see the origins of the novel in the romances (romans) which were medieval narrative poems of love, chivalry and adventure sometimes perhaps deriving their inspiration from episodes in the epic chansons de geste: such romances are The Romance of Tristan, by Béroul, and the great achievements of Chrétien de Troyes: his Érec et Énide, Yvain and Perceval, clearly inspired by the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail. Beowulf could perhaps be regarded as a similar progenitor of the European novel from an English point of view. But the fact remains that all the works just mentioned are narrative poems, usually of an epic character; and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are as close as they are to what eventually emerged as the novel, though Chaucer again wrote in verse. Mention of Chaucer brings to mind his model for The Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron, a collection -- this time, of prose tales -- supposed to have been told by courtiers and ladies who in 1348 withdrew to a garden outside Florence in order to escape from the plague. It is clear that the search for historical antecedents of the novel could be prolonged indefinitely; but the most obvious line of descent is from the Decameron. The novel, therefore, arose out of the short story; just as, in Balzac's own case, the novels of The Human Comedy were, for the most part, preceded by the long succession of short stories contained in the Scenes from Private Life.

As the development of the European novel continued through the centuries, from Boccaccio onwards -- through the work of Cervantes, Mme de La Fayette, Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Fielding, Prévost, etc. -- various characteristics of what may properly be called the novel emerge as being more than merely accidental ones; though, needless to say, the onward progression of the writing of novels is no step-by-step progress towards a defined goal but rather the ebb and flow of a tide, the endless dialectic of action and reaction, so that certain works of prose fiction -- even such major ones as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The New Héloïse -- stand in no very clear relationship either to their contemporaries' or to their successors'. These irregularly emerging characteristics (or should they be called tendencies?) are as follows:-

(1) the novel establishes itself as a prose narrative of considerable length dealing with the fortunes of one or more principal characters in a more or less contemporary situation;

(2) in varying degrees, according to the different novelists and novels, an element of moral criticism -- authorial criticism, implicit or explicit (usually implicit) -- of the characters' social conduct makes itself felt;

(3) the novel frequently becomes the vehicle of social criticism, that is to say, the vehicle of commentary upon the moral values of society as a whole; and

(4) Rousseau's Confessions, though not in any direct sense a novel but rather an autobiographie romancée, set the pattern for the spate of first-person confessional novels (such as Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, Fromentin's Dominique, and Dickens's Great Expectations) which become so important a feature of nineteenth-century prose fiction.

Balzac is not himself particularly fond of first-person narrative, largely no doubt because in The Human Comedy he is attempting, as a historian, to portray a world somehow external to himself. The notable exceptions to the third-person authorial approach are those works (such as Another Female Study) in which a story is told by the fireside, for example by Dr Bianchon, and again those (such as The Lily in the Valley, Memoirs of Two Young Brides, and The Marriage Settlement) in which letters are exchanged, the letters being of course written in the first person; of this technique The Lily in the Valley is an outstanding example, both for the peculiar vividness of the self-portraiture of its hero, Félix de Vandenesse, and (above all) for the scathingly ironical effect produced by Natalie de Manerville's reply to the letter, written by him, which effectively is a novel all by itself. So sharp are the outlines of the self-portraiture of Félix de Vandenesse, particularly so when everything he says about himself is (as it were) stood on its head by the woman he loves and yet retains its essential validity, that there can be no doubt that Balzac's account of his hero in those 259 pages of The Lily in the Valley is deeply autobiographical. The epistolary technique, inherited from the eighteenth century and such novels as The New Héloïse, Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, and Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, permits such autobiographical and other first-person narratives. Nevertheless, as has been said, considering the enormous scale of The Human Comedy, Balzac is not at all fond of first-person narrative. His work does, however, fully reflect all other characteristics of the emerging European novel (as I defined them a little while ago): in its social criticism, in its moral criticism, and in the fact that his novels are prose narratives dealing with the fortunes of one or more principal characters in a more or less contemporary situation.

A more or less contemporary situation ... But at this point another, most significant, feature of the development of the European novel must be introduced: the emergence, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, and during Balzac's childhood, of the historical novel in The Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott. Balzac's two literary heroes, as a young man, were Scott and Byron; just as his hero in "real" life was Napoleon. Alfred de Vigny, in Cinq-Mars (a novel dealing with intrigues at the court of Louis XIII, in which Richelieu is shown to be playing a prominent part), and Victor Hugo, in Notre-Dame de Paris (set in the Middle Ages), were likewise inspired by Scott's revelation of the vast potential of the novel formula relating the events of a past age. Balzac, however, unlike his contemporary Alexandre Dumas whose fame and popularity as a historical novelist dogged his own success throughout his career, basically does not believe that there is any further artistic potential in the historical novel as commonly understood: "the only possible novel of the past has been thoroughly worked out by Walter Scott", he wrote in 1839. Scott's Waverley Novels had ranged widely over many countries and many centuries. Just, for instance, to take novels dealing with Scotland: Old Mortality is set in 1679; Rob Roy in 1715; Waverley itself in 1745; and Redgauntlet in the 1760s. Balzac differs from Scott in two essential respects, and in these same respects he differs from the tradition of the European novel generally: his historical novels are historical novels of the present; and, by means of his creation of a system of recurring characters, he establishes interconnecting links between practically all his fictions, in a way in which there are no interconnecting links between Rob Roy and Old Mortality, Redgauntlet and Waverley.

Historical novels of the present ... As a matter of fact, a few -- a very few -- of Balzac's novels and short stories are set in the historical past: Jesus Christ in Flanders is set in the Middle Ages, as are The Outlaws and Master Cornélius; Concerning Catherine de' Medici is set in the years 1560-1573; The Accursed Child between the years 1591 and 1617; The Unknown Masterpiece in 1612; Sarrasine partly in 1758 ... Nevertheless, in the main the novels -- and the short stories -- of The Human Comedy are concerned with the historical present. The first novel in the great series, The Chouans, deals with the guerrilla warfare of Republicans and rebellious Royalists on the borders of Normandy and Brittany in the year 1799 (the year of Balzac's own birth); and so the novels record, with varying sharpness of focus, all the cataclysmic events of the historical epoch through which Balzac lived: Napoleon's assumption of power as First Consul, his assumption of even greater power as Emperor, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, the Peninsular War, the First German War of Liberation, Wagram, the Treaty of Schönbrunn, the invasion of Russia, the Second German War of Liberation, Leipzig, Napoleon's first abdication, the First Restoration, the flight from Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo (all this had occurred by the time Balzac was sixteen!), the Second Restoration, the reign of Charles X, the Revolution of 1830, and the July Monarchy. These events are, however, recorded at one remove. Unlike Vigny, whose Cinq-Mars has as its leading characters the major figures of its historical epoch, Balzac believes that within the world of The Human Comedy the major historical figures of his own tumultuous lifetime -- Napoleon, Fouché, Talleyrand, Louis XVIII, Villèle, Polignac, Guizot, Thiers -- must be kept firmly in the background. Balzac is the diametrical opposite of Jane Austen, in that her novels give no impression that the Napoleonic Wars were currently being waged; whereas in The Human Comedy the imprint of those wars is everywhere (there are indeed over 1,100 allusions to Napoleon in Balzac's novels and short stories) -- but there are no more than three works containing scenes in which the actual Napoleon appears: in The Vendetta, as First Consul with his brother Lucien in 1800; in A Murky Business, in the unforgettably luminous encounter between the Emperor and Laurence de Cinq-Cygne on the battlefield, and on the eve of the battle, of Jena; and in The Woman of Thirty, where Napoleon appears like some distant divinity reviewing his last great parade held at the Tuileries Palace in January 1813, a parade which Balzac may personally have witnessed. As Proust remarks in Le Côté de Guermantes, "You find ... in a biographical dictionary of Balzac's characters, in which even the most illustrious figures feature only in terms of their relationship to The Human Comedy, that Napoleon occupies a far smaller place than Rastignac, and occupies it solely because he conversed with persons such as Mlle de Cinq-Cygne".

No, Balzac's fictional characters impart to the supposedly "historical" ones their own glamour, unless indeed that historical character is set within a luminous nimbus (as in The Woman of Thirty and the Tuileries parade) or else becomes a figure of legend and myth, as is the case with Napoleon in the veteran trooper Goguelat's sixteen-page pæan of praise for him in The Country Doctor -- surely one of the most remarkable bravura performances in the whole of French literature! The Scenes from Military Life were, after all, the novels and short stories which Balzac did not write. Of the great novel which he intended to write about the Battle of Essling, avowedly one of the cornerstones of The Human Comedy, only ten words were put down on paper. No more than fourteen of Balzac's novels and short stories are set within the Napoleonic period, anyway. The fact is that in The Human Comedy Balzac is essentially concerned, from a historical point of view (that is to say, from the point of view of the external world), with the Restoration and July Monarchy periods, with the peace which followed the Napoleonic victories and defeats, with the impact of the development of the Industrial Revolution and of elementary technologies upon French society -- and with the dwarf-like stature of the world, the diminished morality and heroism of men, after the overthrow of a colossus. "Il ne peut plus y avoir rien de grand", says a character in Modeste Mignon, "dans un siècle à qui le règne de Napoléon sert de préface" ("There can no longer be any greatness in a century prefaced by the reign of Napoleon").

It is about this world of the Restoration and the July Monarchy -- about the men, women and things of the post-Napoleonic period -- that Balzac writes oftenest and with the surest touch. The Human Comedy is full of the stirring developments which, on all sides, Balzac saw, or had seen, going on around him. No novelist has ever had a surer grasp of the law of his native land (not for nothing did he work for over two years as a clerk in lawyers' offices!). For a digest of the then law on bankruptcy procedure, turn to ten or so pages of César Birotteau: even the lawyers did! For the clearest possible exposition of the law of matrimonial settlements, turn to The Marriage Settlement; likewise to The Protection Order for an explanation of the law on the separation of matrimonial property. For the clearest possible statement of the law of inheritance as it affected illegitimate children and the children of illegitimate children, turn to Ursule Mirouët. (Balzac's grasp of the law throughout The Human Comedy is, I think, far surer than Anthony Trollope's in Orley Farm -- and even, perhaps, surer than George Eliot's in Felix Holt, though no more remarkable than Emily Brontë's fine grasp of certain points of the law in Wuthering Heights.)

Again, no novelist has written more assuredly, or more continuously, not just for money but about money. This too is one of the distinguishing features of The Human Comedy, and one of the things in the tireless description of which Balzac takes pride. It has been said that, with Daniel Defoe, Balzac has "introduced the religion of money into literature". It would not strictly be true to say that in every novel and short story written by Balzac money plays a part. It does not play a part, for instance, in the first novel of The Human Comedy, The Chouans. Nor does it play a part in the works set in earlier historical periods, nor does it play a substantial part in the Philosophical Studies. Nor does money have a part to play in that section of Colonel Chabert dealing with the Napoleonic period. But seventy or so of Balzac's works of fiction are set in the periods of the Restoration and the July Monarchy; and in these, money has a dominant role to play, precisely because Balzac saw it as having a dominant role to play in "real" life. We see its dominance, for example, in César Birotteau, the tale of a bankruptcy brought on by property speculation in the early years of the reign of Louis XVIII. We see it, presented in a very different light, in Old Goriot, where a father is drained of all his money by ungrateful daughters. Not even The Lily in the Valley can escape its seemingly all-pervasive influence in the modern world: for, in addition to being an angel of beauty and self-abnegation, Henriette de Mortsauf -- like Julie de Wolmar, in The New Héloïse -- is very skilled in keeping the household accounts. Moreover, there are of course the four great inheritance novels of The Human Comedy: Eugénie Grandet, Ursule Mirouët, The Black Sheep and Cousin Pons, in which Balzac explores with remarkable virtuosity varying aspects of the theme of the legal versus the spiritual family. It is not merely the case that Balzac writes so much about money, but that -- at any rate, from a strictly legal, commercial and even political point of view -- he writes about it so accurately. "I consider him", wrote Anatole France, "to be the greatest historian of modern France, which comes alive in its entirety in his immense work". And Friedrich Engels praises his "complete history of French Society from which, even in economical details (for instance, the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period put together".

As was previously mentioned, one of the hallmarks of the emerging European novel in the eighteenth century was that it dealt "with the fortunes of one or more principal characters in a more or less contemporary situation". We have seen how important this "contemporary situation' is for Balzac. Indeed, the depicting of the "contemporary situation" was also a problem, because, as he advanced in the writing of The Human Comedy, Balzac found the internal dates of his novels catching up on their external dates of composition -- with the result that, as he confesses in one of his prefaces, "the author awaits 1840 [he was writing this in 1839] in order to round off adventures whose dénouement requires that three years should elapse". So closely do Balzac's plots mesh not only into the contemporary world viewed as a sort of abstraction but into the actual dates of the (then) present!

For the view that the contemporary world is viewed by Balzac as a sort of abstraction, despite the dates, a tenable (indeed, exceedingly persuasive) case can be made out. And, in spite of all the talk over the years about Balzac's "realism", it is a case which has been made out by numerous critics. Baudelaire, in a famous line, has written of Balzac as "a visionary, and a passionate visionary into the bargain". Zola, in his book Naturalist Novelists, has described The Human Comedy as "an enormous dream dreamed aloud by a man who is awake". To begin with, even so far as the Restoration and July Monarchy are concerned, Balzac is very selective in the picture of the external "historical" world which he gives us. Although he purported to depict the face of a whole society, there are few -- very few -- working-class characters upon the face of Balzac's earth. (Admittedly, The Human Comedy was left unfinished.) There are few children, few teachers, few soldiers (at any rate, few soldiers on the battlefield), few peasants, few politicians, few statesmen; but many dandies, many businessmen, many lawyers, many painters and writers, many ladies of easy virtue. And amongst the many businessmen and lawyers, few honest ones; scarcely an honest judge; and amongst the many politicians, few statesmanlike ones; and amongst the many painters and writers, few successful ones; and amongst the many cocottes, few even comparatively virtuous ones. And, even allowing for the fact that Balzac as novelist prefers the "shady" businessman to the "honest" one, few insights into the industrial -- as distinct from the financial and commercial -- changes which around 1820 were just beginning to work through the fabric of French society as the consequence of France's Industrial Revolution. So, for example, we find nothing about Lille or Lyons -- but a great deal about the picturesque cottage industry of David Séchard's printing-shop in Lost Illusions, a printing-shop which is more akin to some alchemist's laboratory than to any shopfloor known to the century of the Great Exhibitions. Balzac's information, in Lost Illusions, about paper-manufacture and the printing industry is uncannily accurate (he had been in business as a printer and publisher himself); but the physical setting which becomes the matrix of that information is even more amazingly picturesque.

Picturesqueness is indeed one of Balzac's key artistic pursuits in The Human Comedy: picturesqueness more of topographical location than of human character; and that is saying something! He approaches the picturesque sites of provincial sites, and those of Paris too, with an antiquary's zeal - in the (Romantic rather than Realist) spirit of Nodier's and Taylor's Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France, substantively published in fourteen volumes between 1820 and 1845. Think of the description of Angoulême, in Lost Illusions; of Issoudun, in The Black Sheep (there is a whole archæological disquisition on Issoudun, and an expression of regret that in that town they have demolished "the charming church of Saint-Paterne, ... one of the loveliest specimens of Romanesque church architecture in France, ... without anyone having drawn the west door, which was still in a state of perfect preservation"); think again of the description of Nemours, in Ursule Mirouët, with its placid beauty worthy of a minor Dutch master; or of Douai, in The Quest of the Absolute. More particularly, Balzac has given us, in the opening pages of A Double Family, a description of the Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, in the Marais, and of the actual tourniquet, or turnstile, from which the street took its name; both of these were demolished during Balzac's lifetime, but he -- with no small pride -- has recorded their appearance for posterity. "Thanks to the care he has taken", he writes of himself in his preface to A Daughter of Eve, "perhaps people will know, in 1850, what the Paris of the Empire was like ... " You will find dans son histoire the archæological record of houses which used to exist in Paris and which no one in 1850 would believe ever had existed, had he not described them as they really were. One such description is that of the Guillaumes' house, in the opening pages of At the Sign of the Cat and Racket. Or that of the Sauviats' home at Limoges, in The Village Priest. Or that of the Galeries de Bois, in Lost Illusions. Or the Marquis d'Esgrignon's house at Alençon, in The Collection of Antiques. Or Chabert's retreat in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel... The list is endless! No wonder Henry James wrote that "we, for our part, have always found Balzac's houses and rooms extremely interesting; we often prefer his places to his people" - singling out for especial praise the description of Mme Camusot's house in The Collection of Antiques. Balzac, Henry James continues, "has his necessary houses and his superfluous houses": yes! his "superfluous" houses, in that not all the houses and places described by Balzac in The Human Comedy are strictly necessary to the illumination of human character. The things, as it were, are there in their own right.

The description of things - both physical and institutional -- is, therefore, of the essence of Balzac's narrative purpose. No novelist prior to him had described them with the same minuteness or (as in his picture of the boarding-house in Old Goriot) the same delirious excitement. This endless faculty for the proliferation of things is one of the highest signs of Balzac's innovative power. Whether his characters are as varied and versatile is perhaps open to question; what is undoubtedly original about them is that a quarter or so of the total belong to a complex system of recurring characters: characters who appear in more than one novel or short story of The Human Comedy, on one occasion, maybe, as the principal character, in another work as a character of secondary importance placed in the middle ground, elsewhere perhaps as a mere supernumerary flitting transiently across the stage. There had been no parallel to this in any fiction before Balzac embarked on The Human Comedy. A rudimentary system of reappearance of a few characters (Figaro, Chérubin, Almaviva) already existed, it is true, in Beaumarchais's dramatic trilogy Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro and La Mère coupable; two characters, Leather-Stocking and John Mohegan to be precise, move from episode to episode of Fenimore Cooper's five Leather-Stocking Tales, The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, three of which were published in English - and also translated into French - before Balzac began his proper literary career; analogues can be found in the work of Thackeray, Trollope (both the ecclesiastical and political novels), Zola and Galsworthy. Trollope's Palliser novels have a general design and a sense of progression of character which are lacking in the Barsetshire chronicles; Balzac, Trollope's forerunner in the art of investing a fictional world with coherence and a spirit of continuity, achieves this result sometimes apparently at random and always step by step. The grand design of depicting a whole epoch, the moving of characters from novel to novel, the reference in one novel or short story to events that have occurred elsewhere - all this comes upon Balzac gradually (his first intuition of it was in 1833). And the progression of character and circumstance which were to be important to Trollope in Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, The Prime Minister and the rest of the Palliser novels but which he had ignored in the ecclesiastical works, this, to Balzac, is at the very heart of his creative enterprise.

Sainte-Beuve disliked the system of recurring characters as developed by Balzac in The Human Comedy. He argued that it was confusing for the reader of one work to have to try and grasp the complexity of a given situation or a given character without perhaps being aware of the background to that situation or character as revealed in other novels; he also maintained that Balzac had only thought up the systematic use of recurring characters so as to more or less compel his readers to buy all his works. But then, Sainte-Beuve personally disliked Balzac, and it must be admitted that his objection to the system does apparently spring from a personal animus. Whether Sainte-Beuve recognized this or not, the system of recurring characters does have unmistakable advantages. First, the texture of the experience of the "real" world is imparted to The Human Comedy by the fact that there are many many important characters in Balzac's novels and short stories (I would say, at a rough guess, 200 of them) who never, as it were, have a novel to themselves - but whom we see, first here, then there, and so (as in real life) we gradually accumulate an experience of them through these intermittent encounters. Needless to say, such a method of presentation does absolve Balzac from the necessity of providing a full-length "authorial" account of those characters in any given novel: he does, however, cross-reference his works, referring his readers to other novels in which vital information about such and such a character can be found: Voir UNE FILLE D'ÈVE, Voir AUTRE ÉTUDE DE FEMME, Voyez LE PÈRE GORIOT, Voyez BÉATRIX, Scènes de la Vie privée, etc.; The Human Comedy is full of such cross-references, which to many -- including Sainte-Beuve -- seem too functional and inelegant. The Human Comedy, whether Sainte-Beuve and a handful of critics like it or not, has that true-to-life, true-to-our-experience-of-this-world quality that we meet its characters as we might meet people in this world briefly, at irregular intervals, then ponder on all that must have happened to them in the intervals of our desultory contacts.

Secondly, the system of recurring characters has this advantage, which is (I think) equally an advantage to Balzac the spinner of innumerable plots and to that texture of density and lifelikeness (worldlikeness) of which I have already spoken: how has such and such a character progressed -- or regressed -- from A to B? Such a thought must often occur to us about the characters whom we meet in "real" life; such a thought occurs to us very often in our reading of The Human Comedy. How, for example, does Rastignac, the impecunious student in Old Goriot, become (as we learn fleetingly from The Unselfconscious Comedians) Minister of Justice and a peer of France? How indeed does the action of Old Goriot really end? What comes of the budding but very fragile relationship of Rastignac and Delphine de Nucingen? For the dénouement of Old Goriot is not an ending, but merely a beginning. The device of the system of recurring characters places a huge question-mark over the "ending" of Old Goriot: and not just the suspense-creating question-mark of the "cliffhanger" (did they live happily ever after?) but a moral question-mark of gigantic size. For consider the irony of another revelation in The Unselfconscious Comedians: Rastignac becomes Delphine's son-in-law. The money which he had scorned to inherit from a marriage with Victorine Taillefer -- whose father's fortune, as we know from The Red Inn, was founded upon a crime -- marries (but does so outside the strict narrative confines of The Human Comedy) the daughter of a financier, Nucingen, whose fortune -- as, again, we can see from The House of Nucingen -- was founded upon many "crimes" not strictly branded as such by the law.

Moral ambiguity is the supreme consequence of the system of recurring characters. Another advantage, hardly less great, is that it frees Balzac from the necessity of filling in all the details of all his major characters' careers: an impossibility, anyway, even if he had written 149 novels and short stories. How does Rastignac get from being a poor student to a rich Cabinet minister? Balzac tells us that he has done so without needing to tell us by what devious processes the climb up the greasy pole was made. Behind The Human Comedy we sense a whole hinterland of pullulating activity, such that -- to adapt a phrase from Pascal's Thoughts -- the centre of that activity is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In any case, the description of politicians, statesmen and of political life generally was not one of Balzac's strong points (Henri de Marsay, Rastignac and Maxime de Trailles, as politicians, are not at all convincing); Balzac tells us, rather than shows us, that Rastignac became Minister of Justice; and, in so doing, offers a social rather than a narrative commentary. The usefulness of the system of recurring characters in creating a narrative hinterland of the kind I have just described was to be equally apparent to Proust when he came to write The Remembrance of Things Past; but no novelist has ever surpassed Balzac in the use of recurring characters to create moral ambiguity.

Before leaving the subject of Balzac's recurring characters there are two further points which I must briefly mention. In a fictional world stamped with that evolution of human character which Balzac, Trollope, Proust and Galsworthy all sought to achieve by means of this device, it is natural that a character on his second major appearance in The Human Comedy should strike us as being a somewhat changed person from the time of his first appearance. Such, for instance, is the case with Rastignac. But there are characters in Balzac's fictional world who seem to us to be not merely changed persons on their various appearances, but different persons altogether. Joseph Bridau, the painter-hero of The Black Sheep, makes his first appearance in The Human Comedy in Lost Illusions. There he is a young man so prone to falling in love that his very career is threatened by his amorous waywardness: "the shafts of love", writes Balzac, "not only transfix his heart but also his brain, disturbing the tenor of his life and setting him off along the strangest of zigzag paths". At his next appearance in The Human Comedy, in Pierre Grassou, the young artist is almost a caricature of the Romantic genius: with wild eyes, dishevelled hair and tempestuous manner, he bursts into his friend Grassou's studio, shocks Grassou's sitter and her parents with his unpolished language, and damns, then retouches the mediocre portrait. In The Black Sheep, on the other hand (which is not necessarily his third appearance according to the internal chronology of The Human Comedy), he is all docility and studiousness, the devoted son of a less devoted mother, chaste, and the perfect contrast to his brother Philippe. We have the impression that The Human Comedy is in a state of perpetual becoming, not just in that it was left unfinished, not just in the interaction of character with character across the broad spectrum of Balzac's imaginative world, but in the fact that his recurring characters are capable of differing radically from what they were. Élie Magus, in The Marriage Settlement, Pierre Grassou and Cousin Pons, is another case in point. Balzac, seventy years before Bergson, anticipates the truth of the latter's dictum: "Things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions". Only once in The Human Comedy does Balzac present the same hero in the foreground of more than one novel. Lucien de Rubempré, the hero (or anti-hero) of Lost Illusions, is also the hero of A Harlot High and Low. It is a moot point whether Lucien, in A Harlot High and Low, has become a radically different character from the man he was in the novel of his first appearance. From the point of view of the interrelationship of character, his is certainly a radically different situation from the earlier one. For in Lost Illusions, despite all his confusions of identity, he had retained for a long time some independence of character, whereas in A Harlot High and Low he is Vautrin's (or rather Herrera's) puppet. Balzac, who failed so miserably in the depiction of politicians (he is much less gifted than Trollope in this respect!), fails - I think - on this score because, both temperamentally and narratively speaking, he is much less good at depicting success than failure. And perhaps it is because he so excels in the depiction of failure that he chose to make Lucien de Rubempré the hero of two monumental novels.

But what, after all, is the meaning of "failure"? In Balzac's hands this is a highly ambiguous concept. Failure by worldly standards may be equivalent to success by the standards of some transcendent moral authority. But in what form of transcendent authority, if any, does Balzac believe?

Such is his view of human nature that, although (narratively speaking) the world of The Human Comedy appears to be suspended between extremes of "vice"and "virtue", there is about most -- if not all -- of his characters an opacity of motive which casts doubt upon the existence of these moral absolutes. Let us take Old Goriot as an example: the eponymous hero is referred to by Balzac as "this Christ of Fatherhood", yet no neat syllogism can entitle us to infer that Goriot is a virtuous man: he is too wrapped up in himself and in his daughters, too unmindful of the claims of the external world; like Christ, he suffers his Passiontide, but it is a secular Passiontide brought on by his passion for his daughters; like Christ, he engages in an act of redemption, but it is a secular act of redemption -- the redemption of his daughters' debts, not the redemption of the whole world. He is a monomaniac, whose thoughts and emotions are entirely absorbed by the object of his passion. Look at him! says Vautrin. "The Countess exploits him ... "(Vautrin is unaware, at this moment, that Anastasie de Restaud is Goriot's daughter!) "The poor fellow thinks only of her. Apart from his passion ... he is a brute beast. But just get him started off on that subject, and his face sparkles like a diamond". So much so that, later in the novel, when practically all the inhabitants of the boarding-house have deserted Mme Vauquer, when young Taillefer has been killed in a duel, and when Vautrin has been arrested, "what does that matter to us?" cries Goriot, "I am dining with my daughter". "But", Rastignac protests, "today the world has been turned upside down". "Turned upside down?" replies Goriot. "Never has the world been so wonderful as it is today!" Expressed in Old Goriot in a peculiarly extreme form, such selfishness is the hallmark of all -- or virtually all -- of Balzac's characters; and, although it would be untrue to say that there are as many outsize monomaniacs in The Human Comedy as is sometimes supposed (Goriot, Grandet, Baron Hulot and Balthazar Claës are certainly among them), very very many (I hesitate whether to say most or all) of Balzac's characters are monomaniacs in the sense that their one thought is the gratification of selfishness.

If Goriot cannot properly be considered an extreme of virtue (despite his momentary Christ-like aspect), neither can Vautrin properly be considered -- from the standpoint of Balzac's presentation of him -- an extreme of vice. Branded by society as a criminal (and even with the convict's letters TF stamped on his shoulder), he castigates that society for its hypocrisy and sham morality; there is, he maintains, far less honour, far less integrity, far less of a sense of solidarity, far more selfishness, amongst the members of a "moral" society than there is amongst the criminals and convicts of an underworld deemed -- by society -- to be "immoral". "We have", he says, addressing his fellow-boarders just after his recapture, and through these boarders apostrophizing the whole of the "respectable" world, "less infamy on our shoulders than you have in your hearts, flabby members of a gangrenous society". This "respectable" world, he has earlier told Rastignac, is one in which might is right, in which the end justifies the means (it is consistent with this philosophy that, when he reappears in Lost Illusions, he should be disguised as a Jesuit priest): commit a crime that is big enough, and you will get away with it; Paris, he says, is "a slough. If you get splashed with its mud whilst riding in a carriage, you're an honest man; you're a rogue if you get dirty on foot". How much more honourable to revolt against that world, a world which (as The Black Sheep shows us) is a more selfish civilian battlefield than the great military battlefields of a few years previously; how much more merciful to have a man like Michel Taillefer killed in a duel than over long years to break the hearts of all those, the victims of your calculating self-interest, who, wearing their hearts on their sleeve, betray -- affection. "The world", says Mme de Langeais, echoing Vautrin's earlier remark, "is a slough, let us try to stay on higher ground". "The world", says Mme de Beauséant, "is an assembly of fools and knaves". After taking in all this advice Rastignac (writes Balzac) "saw the world as it is; saw how laws and morality are powerless to control the rich, and found in money the ultima ratio mundi". Yes, even the laws (though this is Vautrin's assertion, and does not have the authorial authority of the previously quoted sentence) are a device employed by the rich in order to maintain the poor in subjection. The resemblance to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men is obvious; and indeed Vautrin, at his arrest, proclaims himself to be a follower of Jean-Jacques, "protesting against the profound deceptions of the Social Contract". No wonder that George Eliot, in her diary entry for 25 October 1859, described Old Goriot as a "hateful book". It was hateful to her because of its moral relativism, because to its illusionless description of the ways of the world it opposes no moral philosophy of transcendent or superior value.

Although, therefore, Balzac can write in his Foreword to The Human Comedy that "in Paris are found extremes of good and evil", we have seen that the opposition of Goriot and Vautrin is not, in moral terms, the opposition of Christ and Satan -- though the terms Christ and Satan are in fact used of those characters themselves. The Christlike figure has his crass selfishness, the Satanic figure has an engaging unselfishness and intellectual sensitivity. (And perhaps, in view of this, it was the use of epithets such as "Christ" and "Fallen Archangel" which led F.R. Leavis to complain of the "excited emphasis", "sublimities and degradations" and "romantic rhetoric" of Old Goriot.) For reasons which are rather of an æsthetic nature, Balzac loves to construct gigantic contrasts, extremes and polarizations. But things, in The Human Comedy, are not as they outwardly seem. Men, even when they are not openly wearing masks (openly, that is, to us the readers), are often deceiving themselves as to their true motives. And how often they do wear masks in The Human Comedy! Even at the moment of Vautrin/Herrera's apparent "conversion" in A Harlot High and Low, when he seems to jump from one extreme of "vice" to the opposite extreme of "virtue", and from being an arch-criminal becomes chief of Parisian police, the contrast is not a moral contrast (as it were) of black and white but the opposition of varying shades of grey. Or rather, not grey at all; for what primarily interests Balzac in his depiction of the innumerable facets of human behaviour is the colourfulness with which men and women strive to attain their various objectives. It is not the snow-white purity of moral ends which is Balzac's concern as a novelist, but the motley colourfulness of the (essentially amoral) means to which people resort in order to attain them. Vautrin/Herrera's apparent "conversion" is no change of heart but a substitution of roles. He claims that he will be better able to pursue his aim, the achievement of justice, within society than beyond its pale: "I shall become", he says, "the Figaro of justice", avenging Lucien de Rubempré and bringing about Corentin's death. Mention of Figaro is proof enough that he takes none of his roles too seriously. Yet, beneath all the role-playing, is the constant human factor of the predatory ferocity of men. "We were the game, now we're the huntsmen, that is the only difference", he explains in A Harlot High and Low.

Just as some characters (like Vautrin) may be deceptive concerning their true motives, so some characters may be self-deceptive. This is true, for example, of the outwardly virtuous -- indeed angelic -- Adeline Hulot, in Cousin Bette, for ever excusing her husband's infidelities and yet so extreme in her self-abasement as to encourage his sexual mania. Adeline, therefore, is not by any means the angel which a superficial reading of the text might suggest; and Balzac is careful to insert into the text of Cousin Bette suggestions that she, no less than her husband, has fallen into an extreme of behaviour. Just as it is in the nature of the huntsman to pursue his quarry, so (it would seem) all the characters of The Human Comedy have it in their natures to go on until self-destruction (like Goriot) or self-fulfilment (Hulot) pursuing the objects of their passion, fulfilling what appears to be programmed deep inside them as the reason for their existence. Their passion, therefore (and we see this of Nucingen in A Harlot High and Low, of Mme Descoings in The Black Sheep, of Pons and Élie Magus in Cousin Pons, of Claire de Beauséant in Old Goriot and The Jilted Woman, of Joséphine Claës in The Quest of the Absolute), their passion is their ineluctable destiny. In other words, it is as inevitable that Adeline Hulot should go on endlessly forgiving her callously wayward husband as that, in the same novel, Lisbeth Fischer should give way at a certain juncture to an outburst of jealousy as seething and uncontrollable as any volcanic explosion. And, as is spelt out so vividly in the opening pages of The Girl with the Golden Eyes, it is inevitable that the objects of the passion of predatory mankind should be two things: or et plaisir, money and physical pleasure. Furthermore, what is true of individuals also holds good for society at large, and (as we see from César Birotteau) for the whole history of the world. Society, in Balzac's eyes, has a capacity for self-preservation and self-perpetuation larger than any narrow moral considerations. In Lost Illusions, for example, the secrets of paper-manufacture discovered by David Séchard but which he cannot exploit are exploited instead by the Cointet brothers: however "immoral" or otherwise the Cointets' seizure of those secrets may be, the industrial life of France must go on -- a fact which the tender moral sense of the idealistic inventor is only too ready to acknowledge.

Balzac's sense of social morality is, therefore, conditioned by his powerful awareness that the strength and vitality of society can only be upheld by those, such as the Cointets, whose energy, will-power and resilience exploit the resources of human life to the full; often in that process, of course, exploiting others. Over the productive processes of the world the same sense of moral ambiguity presides as over that great novel of barrenness and unproductiveness, Old Goriot. We sense at every point the novelist's admiration for his characters' indomitable will-power, or grandiose self-abnegation, or (as with the Cointets) for those acts of tenacity and astuteness which, whilst being neither grandiose nor exemplary in themselves, contribute massively to the life of the world. It is, by and large, as useless to seek a "morality" in the actions of Balzac's characters as it would be to seek the same in the action of any force of nature, such as a volcano. The magnetic power which Balzac ascribes to many of his characters is itself akin to a force of nature; it too is a form of destiny.

Balzac, Henry James has written,

had no natural sense of morality, and this we cannot help thinking a serious fault in a novelist. Be the morality false or true, the writer's deference to it greets us as a kind of essential perfume. We find such a perfume in Shakespeare; we find it, in spite of his so-called cynicism, in Thackeray; we find it, potently, in George Eliot, in George Sand, in Turgénieff. They care for moral questions; they are haunted by a moral ideal ... [Balzac] had a sense of this present terrestrial life which has never been surpassed, and which in his genius overshadowed everything else. There are many men who are not especially occupied with the idea of another world, but we believe there has never been a man so completely detached from it as Balzac ...

I quote Henry James's remarks at some length, first because they underline my own conclusions concerning the "morality" of Balzac's novels, but secondly because they illustrate, in respect of The Human Comedy, a very difficult problem. Henry James's essays about Balzac are amongst the most perceptive -- as well as vastly entertaining -- that have ever been written. Yet it is patently untrue to say, as he does, that no man has ever been so completely detached from the idea of another world as has Balzac. Or rather, it all depends on which novels of The Human Comedy you happen to have read. Balzac was certainly not religious in the sense of being a devout churchgoer. His protestations, both in the Foreword to The Human Comedy and in The Country Doctor, concerning the merits of Christianity have the hollow ring of an eighteenth-century deist for whom belief in God was a valuable moral sanction, a spur to socially correct behaviour. Balzac, besides being the author of Séraphîta and Louis Lambert (which perhaps hardly anyone need read), is also, however, the author of Ursule Mirouët: a novel which should be read by everyone wishing for a better understanding of The Human Comedy. Surely, if any of Balzac's novels and short stories do this at all, Ursule Mirouët presents us with "virtuous" characters? and with "vicious" ones into the bargain? Here, surely, there are undeniable "conversions" (those of Minoret-Levrault and Goupil)? And certainly, the presence not only of a spiritual world but also of a spiritualist world is everywhere evident in Ursule Mirouët! In this novel, it seems, the "good" are rewarded, and the "wicked" punished; and it is well to remember that in The Human Comedy such poetic justice is, however seldom, to be found. Alas for many readers of Balzac! (and this question I leave entirely to your own judgment) the presentation of many of the characters in Ursule Mirouët does not seem entirely convincing. It would be hard to believe in the operations of poetic justice concerning characters who were themselves devoid of credibility. Worse too, for an upholder of the essential morality of the world, that morality is dependent upon a spiritual world so close to spiritualism as to blur the distinction between the material and the divine. This can be seen, for instance, in Chapter VI of Ursule Mirouët, concerning the thaumaturgic power of Jesus. It is all very reminiscent of Spinoza, in whose Ethics the interplay of freewill and determinism, and of the spiritual and the material, is as central an issue as it is in The Human Comedy.

Balzac's characters do not at any point in The Human Comedy seem greatly endowed with freewill, though many are greatly endowed with will-power. This is because they are spurred on by their Napoleonic will-power in directions preordained by that desire, or monomania, of theirs which is, as it were, engraved into their very nature. And this, I think, is the meaning of Gaëtan Picon's words: "Objects arise from circumstances. Only the passions of the characters arise from destiny". Picon says again that "the hand of cards is dealt out at the beginning. The destiny of every character is foreordained". We sense in The Human Comedy, something which we do not sense in Stendhal's Scarlet and Black or The Charterhouse of Parma, that -- whatever the twists and turns of the action may be -- Balzac's characters are not gifted with that unpredictability, the blessing of freewill, which would enable them, at any juncture in their lives, to have the gladdening prospect of choosing between alternatives. "Chance", Balzac writes in his Foreword, "is the greatest novelist in the world". But that chance is not the result of freewill, or of human unpredictability, but of the endless interactions of social life: the multitudinous opportunities for calculation thrown up, as if in a kaleidoscope, by the conflict of passions and wills both in the capital and in the provinces, but especially in Paris. And for this reason we must not be too tempted to accuse Balzac of melodramatic improbability; for the characters, under the force of that "heroic pressure" (as Henry James calls it) "that drives them home to our credence", are all of a piece; and, interacting in the great clash of life, they are at all times subject to strokes of chance, though not realizing that that chance can in reality be the manipulation -- usually of their enemies (as in Lost Illusions), occasionally of their friends (as in Honorine), and often from a distance.

Hence that complexity of structure, and density of texture, of which I have already spoken: a complexity and a density which are to be found in the short stories as much as in the novels. It would not, I think, be true to say (with Arnold Bennett) that "there are some two thousand ... different individuals [in The Human Comedy], but probably fewer than a dozen genuine distinctive types. No creative artist ever repeated himself more brazenly or more successfully than Balzac". For, in The Human Comedy, the characters are indeed inseparable from their situations. And this is why, far from being colourless, repetitive or monotonous beings, they are all (or most!) of them invested with the colourful attributes of the chance circumstances in which they become involved. And for this reason, except when they are monomaniacs (which is not so often), they rarely if ever appear to lead deeply satisfying lives of their own. We do not derive, from all the thousands of pages of The Human Comedy, any notion that (to borrow a phrase from Disraeli's Contarini Fleming) "the sense of existence is the greatest happiness": that sense of the pure joy of being which illuminates Rousseau.

Not only does Balzac -- unlike George Eliot or Dostoyevsky -- refrain, by and large, from revealing to us the moral reflections of his characters (for of these there may, as it were, have been very few indeed); he also refrains from disclosing to us that endlessly modulated response to the external world which characterizes the lives of all thinking and feeling beings. One of Balzac's two novels about childhood, Pierrette, illustrates this fact with particular clarity. This short novel, or long-short story, is very far indeed from what might be expected of a novel of childhood. There is none of that awakening sense of wonderment in the face of the world, such as we find in Colette's Le Blé en Herbe, no sense of irretrievably lost magic as in Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, no fragile nostalgic memory as in Proust's Combray. A small girl, heartlessly imposed on by her elderly and emotionally stunted cousins (in whom Balzac displays more interest than in the child herself!) is assaulted by her female cousin, and dies, mourned only by the young man, Jacques Brigaut, who had been her only friend -- and he had admired her with the purest affection. Her death, and the enquiries into that death, fuel the flames of the political quarrel that had been flaring up in the town of Provins between Royalists and Liberals -- on the strength of which her male cousin, from being the nonentity that he originally was, achieves some political success. As Françoise Mallet-Joris rightly observes,

Balzac is visibly fascinated by the principle of association, just as, on the individual plane, he is fascinated by the notion of a single passion concentrating an individual's strength, or eating it away like a cancer. Pierrette is alone in Provins ... The Rogrons, on the other hand, as soon as a group, a political party, gathers around them, are saved -- without even realizing why. If you were to look for other examples of Balzac's faith in the intricate workings of the social machine, you would find them in practically all his novels.

Even in the novels of adult life, which are the huge majority of Balzac's novels, there is no emphasis upon the diversity of the life -- and the responses -- of the individual. The accent is upon the diversity of social life, and its accidental manifestations. In the same way, any individual sense of morality is subordinate to the collective, social one. However, Balzac's genius, universal in the philosophic sense, is peculiarly French in its application to fiction. Only about nine novels and short stories of The Human Comedy are situated beyond the frontiers of France. Perhaps it is not so much The Human Comedy as The French Comedy! Balzac's genius is a genius of diversity but it is a localized genius. In his own words, in his dedication of The Collection of Antiques to Josef von Hammer-Purgstall, The Human Comedy is his "long and vast history of French social customs in the nineteenth century".

Balzac's novels and short stories display the same complexity and density in the technical sphere as they do thematically. His dialogue, in both forms of prose fiction, is exceedingly concentrated. "There is none of that wholesale dialogue", Henry James has remarked, "chopped into fragments, which Alexandre Dumas fabricates by the yard, and which bears the same relation to real narrative architecture as a chain of stepping-stones tossed across a stream does to a granite bridge". The short story Colonel Chabert, for example, excels in terse dialogue appropriate to many kinds of situation. Ramifying as it does into the whole saga of the Battle of Eylau, and yet covering altogether a time-span of more than thirty-three years, it also has a complexity far greater than is normally expected of the short story, with its conventional turning-point. The same, but on an even more generous scale, is true of the novels proper. Much of our understanding of each of these novels is only to be gained from our juxtaposing them with characters and episodes from other works. Balzac is by no means as culpable as Zola has asserted of constantly butting in on the narrative action; to a far greater extent than Zola would admit or realize, The Human Comedy leaves us to draw our own conclusions. In this way the Balzacian novel is, in Roland Barthes's use of the word, one of the earliest of scriptible texts -- largely because of the device of recurring characters.

To conclude: although The Human Comedy is no doubt lacking to some extent in a sense of the fullness of individual being (such as is to be found, for example, in Proust's work), it is deeply impressive in its picture of the social ferment, in its gluttonous zest for encyclopædic information, and (most of all) it is impressive, through its profusion of contrasts, in the fertile sense which it conveys that in opposition is life.

© Donald Adamson 2001

Every work of Balzac's, whether novel or short story, has a hero in that there is always some protagonist around whom the plot develops and on whom our attention is chiefly focused. Arguably, Le Père Goriot has not one hero (the eponymous one) but two (Eugène de Rastignac and Goriot himself), whilst Vautrin - in a rather different sense of the word - indubitably displays some heroic attributes. Seldom if ever does the "hero" of one work of fiction also become the "hero" of another, despite the intricately interwoven system of recurring characters employed by Balzac from the time of Le Père Goriot onwards. Lucien de Rubempré is perhaps the exception to this rule. Otherwise, throughout the Comédie humaine the "narrative hero" of one work of fiction - say, Daniel d'Arthez in Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan - merely crops up elsewhere as a more or less transitory character. No continuous emphasis is ever given to him again. His personal drama is not at the heart of any other work of fiction.

The life of any Balzacian "hero" is, of course, enriched and illuminated by his episodic appearances elsewhere and by the incidental references to him in other works made either by other characters or by the novelist functioning as commentator in the discursive text. In L'Interdiction (III 422), as can be seen from a conversation between Rastignac and Bianchon, the young hero of Le Père Goriot has succeeded in providing his sisters with the dowries that are so powerful a stimulus to his worldly ambition at the outset of his career. It is more interesting still to read, in a discursive comment by the narrator-author of Le Député d'Arcis (VIII 804), that years after the events of Le Père Goriot Rastignac finally marries the only child and heiress of Delphine and the Baron de Nucingen. Does the man who in his youth had resolutely refused to marry Victorine Taillefer (because he did not love her!) finally marry for love? The narrative method of Balzac's reference to Rastignac's marriage poses an enigma, and leaves that enigma unresolved. We know, if we have read Le Député d'Arcis, that Rastignac becomes the husband of Augusta de Nucingen; we do not know why, nor by what means he has attained that result. Such effects are achieved by the device of recurring characters. Some critics, and indeed some readers, have accused Balzac of arbitrariness and concealment in that he states without revealing or demonstrating. But the fact is that asides like the one in Le Député d'Arcis have the enigmatic finality of so many of the occurrences in "real" life which we as human beings hear of but do not directly experience.

Balzac's "narrative heroes" are seldom (if at all) statesmen, politicians, military men, teachers, farmers, business men, doctors, lawyers or priests. They are never practising doctors, though two - Minoret in Ursule Mirouët, and Benassis in Le Médecin de campagne - are doctors who have retired. Except in Les Chouans, Une Passion dans le désert, Adieu and El Verdugo, his "heroes" are never indeed serving military men; Chabert is a retired colonel. Only in Pierrette are Balzac's hero and heroine children. Except also to some extent in Pierrette and collectively in Les Paysans, the protagonists of the novels and short stories of the Comédie humaine are never working-class figures. Balzac does not look for his heroes amongst working-class figures partly because of his limited acquaintance with that class, and partly because it had not yet become recognized that working-class life was a subject suitable for literary treatment. Nor does he look for them amongst politicians and statesmen, partly because this would bring him too close to the chronicled history of his own times, and partly again because he had little personal experience of the business of government. Except in Illusions perdues (with David Séchard) and in La Recherche de l'Absolu (with Balthazar Claës), he does not look for his heroes amongst scientific men, of the practical detail of whose work he had little understanding. And the same reasons and restrictions apply to the serving military men; yet no one can doubt that, in the basic sense of the word hero, military men were at times deeply revered by Balzac for their heroism. Napoleon, especially in Le Médecin de campagne (IX 520-536), is the continuous object of Balzac's hero-worship.

Who then are Balzac's heroes, these men and women who are hardly ever heroes in two separate works of fiction, and who do not work in many of the most traditional trades and professions known to the civilized world? Artists (Joseph Bridau, Frenhofer, Pierre Grassou, Théodore de Sommervieux, Hippolyte Schinner, Ginevra dei Piombo) and writers (Daniel d'Arthez, Albert Savarus) are the heroes of many of Balzac's works. Penniless young men with high social ambitions are the heroes of Le Père Goriot and Illusions perdues. A perfumer, César Birotteau, is the business-man hero of the novel of that name. A high-ranking civil servant, Xavier Rabourdin, is the hero of Les Employés. The father of Eugénie Grandet is an avaricious millionaire who has profited by the collapse of the old social and economic order brought about by the French Revolution. Goriot is a totally retired business man. Sylvain Pons scratches a living as the conductor of a third-rate orchestra in a boulevard theatre, but his importance to the plot of Le Cousin Pons is as gourmet, art collector - and cousin. Hector Hulot is a civil servant whose importance to the plot of La Cousine Bette is as a lover of Valérie Marneffe and the virtual destroyer of his family by the irresistible force of his sexual passions. Bette herself is an old maid - and a cousin, or social parasite.

Hard then as it is to generalize about so wide and varied a range of heroes (there are ninety-four works of fiction in the Comédie humaine), it may be said that the artist is either shown, like Frenhofer, battling against the intractable nature of his conceptions and artistic medium or conversely, like Grassou, basking in the approval of the Philistine bourgeoisie; or else, and more often, he is shown, like Joseph Bridau and Lucien de Rubempré, battling against the incomprehension of a Philistine world. Thus Balzac presents us with the sufferings of the inventor, and the tortures and martyrdom of the artist: "un grand écrivain est un martyr qui ne mourra pas, voilà tout" (V 311). For the picture of David Séchard's ostracism and suffering he had in mind the real-life tragedy of the career of the sixteenth-century inventor Bernard Palissy. For that of Joseph Bridau's sufferings at Issoudun he had in mind the Crucifixion, Jesus bearing His Cross on the way to Calvary (IV 461). The inventive genius of Xavier Rabourdin, with his plans for reforming the structure and procedures of the civil service, likewise faces the uncomprehending hostility of the established world. So too does Lucien de Rubempré's poetic genius, as his sonnet-sequence and historical novel meet with the hardbitten publisher Dauriat's disfavour and do not become commercial successes until their author has already become a social success: his worldly success is reflected in theirs.

Lucien's eventual literary success in Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes neatly epitomizes the nature of the hero's involvement with the human world against which he so often has to struggle. Except in such personal battles as those of Frenhofer, Louis Lambert and Balthazar Claës, questing for the Absolute, Balzac's favourite portrayal of the heroic struggle is to describe the embroilment of a man of loftier talents in the meaner, more self-seeking and ruthless machinations of the world. Although, unlike Trollope, he seemed to be incapable of writing political novels as such, no novelist has been fonder than Balzac of politicizing the interplay of human relationships. In the exploitation of this theme he was greatly assisted by the politicization of French society itself during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Le Cousin Pons pits a sensitive musician and art collector, the eponymous hero, against the massive weight of an acquisitive capitalist society (VII 568). And the most disturbing feature of the forces ranged against him is their astonishing capacity for collusion and intrigue, in the course of which Pons's art collection - "l'héroïne de cette histoire", as Balzac assures us (VII 763) - is degraded by Philistine capitalism to the level of an investment medium, a store of monetary value. Similarly, Xavier Rabourdin becomes entangled in the toils of the very bureaucratic system he is attempting to overhaul. Lucien de Rubempré is caught up in the crossfire between the two polarized camps of journalism, Royalists and Liberals; his poetic work, too, is degraded to the level of an industrial commodity. Joseph Bridau is entangled and defeated in the intrigues at Issoudun. César Birotteau's bankruptcy, at the hands of scheming and colluding opponents, is a form of martyrdom. Even Balzac's one story of childhood, Pierrette, presents the naive idealism and innocence of the young hero and heroine, Jacques Brigaut and Pierrette Lorrain, against a sordid background of internecine rivalry, the antagonism of Royalists and Liberals at Provins. It does not even end with Pierrette's death, and a sixteen-year-old boy nailing together his fourteen-year-old sweetheart's coffin. Instead, the rival camps of Royalism and Liberalism seek to make political capital out of the manner of the heroine's death, whilst the young hero retires from the scene in disgust. How different Pierrette is from the studies of the private world of childhood that novelists usually write (such as Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, Proust's Combray, or even Mauriac's Le Mystère Frontenac); but how typical of Balzac's fiction generally, as childhood in all its simplicity becomes a pawn of adulthood!

The martyrdom of César Birotteau by an unfeeling capitalist society offers an instructive instance of Balzac's attitude towards the hero of fiction. César is both a "narrative hero" (structurally considered) and a "heroic hero" (considered thematically); yet how unusual, and traditionally unheroic, this latter "heroism" is! In a letter written nine years after the publication of the novel Balzac explains the difficulties caused by the conception of the subject:

J'ai conservé César Birotteau pendant six ans à l'état d'ébauche, en désespérant de pouvoir jamais intéresser qui que ce soit à la figure d'un boutiquier assez bête, assez médiocre, dont les infortunes sont vulgaires ... Dans un jour de bonheur, je me suis dit: 'Il faut le transfigurer, en en faisant l'image de la probité!'

In the words of the novel, the hero becomes "un martyr de la probité commerciale" (VI 312). His very name is indicative of heroic qualities, but it is the heroism of the man in the street brought face to face with almost invincible opposition. César, despite his name, has no superlative qualities; indeed, he is somewhat fatuous and vain, and given to attitudinizing, so much so that the association with Cæsar is mock-heroic in tone rather than suggestive of the heroic bravery of the past. He performs no great exploits. He founders in the cut-throat commercial world of Paris because he is honest; and he repays all his creditors in full, also because he is honest. Through his attachment to an ideal of personal integrity, and through his translation of that ideal into reality, he has attained a latter-day legendary stature: as close to epic dimensions, it would seem, as the modern capitalist world is capable of becoming (VI 81).

In his attachment to his ideal of probity, like the artists in their struggles with intractable inspiration, César Birotteau is perhaps a monomaniac; but the term is generally reserved for a different category of heroes of the Comédie humaine, of whom Grandet, Hulot and Goriot are conspicuous examples. Goriot, too, "ce Christ de la paternité" (III 231), is pitted against the oppressive force of the world; and he is defeated by this Juggernaut.

Le char de la civilisation, semblable à celui de l'idole de Jaggernaut, à peine retardé par un cœur moins facile à broyer que les autres et qui enraye sa roue, l'a brisé bientôt et continue sa marche glorieuse (III 50).

This indictment of contemporary civilization, though a theme dear to Balzac, does not perhaps fully accord with the theme of monomania which is also a deeply felt preoccupation. Has the modern world, which has been so harsh to the business man César Birotteau, somehow brought about Goriot's excess of paternal affection? Would not some similar punishment - or "martyrdom" - have been inflicted upon himself by an over-indulgent father in earlier times? In the existential experience of mankind this may well be so, but in the terms of that alternative world, the Comédie humaine, Goriot's anguish is a different matter. Goriot is a secular Christ-like figure resembling Jesus in his passion, which is suffering, and in his redemptive power. But the redemption is the secular redemption of debts, not souls, and the passion is endured not for the sake of the whole world but only for his daughters. There can be no simple equation of Goriot with Christ: if the latter may justifiably be regarded as virtuous and heroic, it does not follow that Goriot is virtuous and heroic in the same sense. Rather, displaying at times "heroic" or "sublime" attributes, he partakes at times - in his utter self-emptying - of the glamour of the Divinity. "Les belles âmes ne peuvent pas rester longtemps en ce monde", says Rastignac (III 270), likening Goriot to Mme de Beauséant, whom Balzac - interpreting the young man's thoughts - likens to a goddess of the Iliad (III 265). Beauty such as theirs is so extreme in its self-abnegation as to merit inclusion in any of the latter-day annals of heroism, so total a feature of these epigones as itself to be worthy of legend. Hence Théodore de Banville's description of Balzac as "l'immortel Homère du monde moderne". And André Malraux has written that "ce n'est pas à l'état-civil que Balzac fait concurrence, mais à l'Iliade".

If Goriot is Christ-like (albeit within a limited register), then (within a larger register) Vautrin is Satanic. His demonic attributes belong to the tradition of Romantic Satanism, the universe of Goethe's Faust, Byron's Cain, Vigny's Éloa, and Victor Hugo's La Fin de Satan. He is the Fallen Archangel (III 219), the loser of the War in Heaven heroically carrying on his war against God on earth. In terms of the more explicit narrative, on the other hand, he is not so much the antagonist of Divine virtue as of social hypocrisy: the social rebel, the outlaw-figure so beloved of Romanticism from Byron's Corsair and Scott's Pirate to Schiller's Die Räuber, Hugo's Hernani and the Jean Valjean of Les Misérables. He is the analyst of social corruption and decadence, "qui proteste contre les profondes déceptions du contrat social, comme dit Jean-Jacques, dont je me glorifie d'être l'élève". It is his dispassionate analysis of the world, no ignoble desire for selfish gain, which leads to this attitude of social protest. The sham morality of the world must, in his view, be resisted with might, which is itself far kinder than many of the callous exploitations of the human heart practised by the yellow-gloved dandies of lesser stature - Paul de Manerville, Charles-Édouard de La Palférine, Maxime de Trailles, even Henri de Marsay - who, although they may themselves be the "narrative heroes" of lesser works (Le Contrat de Mariage, Un Prince de la bohème, Le Député d'Arcis, La Fille aux yeux d'or), seem bereft of all heroism of character.

In such a society - where, as we read in Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes (VI 591), "le succès devient ... la raison suprême d'une époque athée" - the only possible heroism of character is, it seems, to be found either in stubborn resistance until the end, with varying degrees of resourcefulness all doomed to failure, or else in the constructive projects which are the theme of Le Médecin de campagne and Le Curé de village. Le Colonel Chabert, Balzac's closest approximation to a military work of fiction, has as its "narrative hero" the military man who was a glorious hero of the Battle of Eylau. The message of this short story is akin to Vautrin's own analysis of the human situation: that there is a nobler sense of honour on the death-dealing battlefield than in the elegant salons of peacetime; there is no place for the hero of Eylau in the Paris of 1819, and he retreats from so-called civilized society in angry disgust. A similar retreat into the "bonheur de la vie intime" from "les barbaries de la vie du monde" is sought by the twin heroes of Le Cousin Pons, Pons and Schmucke. "Aux cœurs blessés, l'ombre et le silence": these words, which are the epigraph of Le Médecin de campagne and the guiding principle of its hero Benassis's own life, apply also to the sheltered lives of such social martyrs as Chabert, Pons, Schmucke, the Abbé Birotteau (Le Curé de Tours), Albert Savarus, Z. Marcas and certain members of Daniel d'Arthez's Cénacle. In his "ombre et ... silence" Benassis, on the other hand, embarks on a vast scheme of social and economic regeneration in Dauphiné; and the same is true, in the countryside near Limoges, of the heroine of Le Curé de village, Véronique Graslin. Of these two figures, hero and heroine both narratively and thematically, Ernst Robert Curtius has written:

Convertir et guérir l'âme romantique, c'est là ... un des thèmes principaux de la Comédie humaine ... Balzac n'a jamais fait partie de l'École romantique; il en a ... rejeté le système de vie.

To those of Balzac's readers who happen to prefer Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues, Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes, Ferragus and La Femme de trente ans to Le Médecin de campagne, L'Envers de l'Histoire contemporaine and Le Curé de village this must seem - at least in part - a questionable statement. Curtius is right to have underlined the constructiveness of the purposive heroism in some of Balzac's novels. He has, however, overlooked the endless dialectic waged in the Comédie humaine between Balzac's respect for the established social order and his equal respect for the outsider of energy and will-power bold enough to challenge all social norms and conventions. "La politique vécue de Balzac", Gaëtan Picon observes, "est celle de la montée des ambitions; elle exalte le trouble, l'ébranlement des traditions que sa pensée respecte".

Vautrin, therefore, is at the opposite pole to those positive heroes of the Comédie humaine, Benassis and Véronique Graslin. Yet he is not an anti-hero. Nor is his role negative. In this context his relationship with Lucien de Rubempré, in Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes, is of crucial importance. Lucien, likewise, can hardly be considered an anti-hero in the sense in which this term is generally intended. He is not, so far as can be discerned, a man of middling poetic ability (there is some ambiguity about this). As is evidenced also by his maternal ancestry, he is a man of some distinction. I have described him elsewhere as "an ambiguous being, half-male, half-female, half-poet, half-journalist, half-aristocratic, half-plebeian", and with "no core to [his] personality"; and the reason why he lacks a core to his personality is, it would appear, that he has disregarded the stirrings of the poetic vocation within him. The sin against the Holy Ghost, of which there is some symbolism in Un Grand Homme de province à Paris (V 476; 347, 427, 458, 530), leads him to be untrue to his poetic nature. Herrera, alias Vautrin, usurping the functions of a Creator, seeks to refashion Lucien after his own image (V 703). The fallen hero, evacuated of his personal identity, becomes the mere shadow of a former substance.

It is an arresting fact that, towards the end of Un Grand Homme de province à Paris (V 525-526: at a point where, in the first edition of the text, the chapter heading was "La Fatale Semaine"), Lucien de Rubempré's crisis is represented as a colossal challenge of Napoleonic proportions. "Pour Napoléon, cette semaine fut la retraite de Moscou. Ce cruel moment était venu pour Lucien:

Quand un homme perd la tête au milieu de ce désordre moral, il est perdu. Les gens qui savent résister à cette première révolte des circonstances, qui se roidissent en laissant passer la tourmente, qui se sauvent en gravissant par un épouvantable effort la sphère supérieure, sont les hommes réellement forts.

This heroic hyperbole - remarkably precursive of Nietzsche - is echoed in Part III of Illusions perdues, when Herrera addresses the suicidal poet in terms of the "vaulting ambition" of statesmen and politicians: speaking to him of Biron Duke of Courland, Marshal d'Ancre, the Medicis and of Napoleon's disregard for Kellermann's heroism (V 697-698), as if his personal destiny were somehow to be viewed as equal to theirs! To some readers this allusion to the colossal dimensions of European history may, by implication, suggest that Lucien himself is a colossal figure, since the young man who is unquestionably the "narrative hero" of Illusions perdues is also measured by the yardstick of heroic and (in Biron's case) mock-heroic events.

The very burlesqueness of the reference to Biron, the huge incongruity of the Napoleonic parallel, should suffice to convince us that Lucien, as heroic hero, is not to be taken seriously. The juxtaposition of his name with Napoleon's serves to belittle him so effectively that one wonders whether, by means of Lucien, Balzac is trying to exorcise from within himself any temptations that might lead to the same tragic poetic fate. The references to Marshal d'Ancre, the Medicis and again Napoleon are infinitely less suggestive of Lucien's personality and outlook than of Herrera's own. Although, therefore, Lucien may be regarded as typifying the will-less poet generally (whose conduct is the reverse of the heroic Napoleon's, to which Part II refers), the references in Part III of Illusions perdues to further historical figures from a heroic past are emanations of Herrera's almost delirious sense of the closeness of history to his personal life; they do not illuminate Lucien's situation as poet.

How then, if at all, is the situation of the "narrative hero" Lucien typical of that of the poet absolutely? György Lukács has seen in him "le nouveau type de poète spécifiquement bourgeois". "Ce naufrage" is, he claims, "le destin typique du poète pur, du talent poétique authentique dans le capitalisme florissant". Even so, the springs of Lucien's inspiration have dried up long before, in Paris, he emerges into specifically bourgeois society. There is no clear reason why will-lessness should be universally characteristic of bourgeois society. How, if Lucien were the archetypal bourgeois poet, would any poetry ever be written in future, let alone published? Above all, what seems to stand out most clearly about Lucien is the extreme individuality of his character, if not of his poetry.

Concerning the Comédie humaine as a whole there has also been much debate whether Balzac, especially in his portraits of heroes and major characters, tends to create types or individuals. In the words of Arnold Bennett:

No creative artist ever repeated himself more brazenly or more successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious delightful actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping virgin, his angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his faithful stupid servant -each is continually popping up with a new face in the Human Comedy.

And others have agreed with Bennett that the members of each species of Balzacian hero and heroine are depressingly identical: from Mme de Langeais to Mme d'Espard (L'Interdiction) to Mme de Maufrigneuse (Le Cabinet des antiques), later Princesse de Cadignan; from the misers Gobseck and Grandet to Molineux (César Birotteau), Samanon, Gigonnet and Vauvinet; and from the old maids Sophie Gamard (Le Curé de Tours) to Sylvie Rogron (Pierrette) to Madeleine Vivet (Le Cousin Pons); but the criticisms have principally focused on the type of the "vicious delightful actress", the courtesan.

Precisely because the courtesans belong to a demi-monde only related to the wider social world of duplicity and intrigue by the nexus of sexual desire, it is understandable and indeed true that they - Florine, Florentine, Carabine, Tullia and others - are seldom delineated with any individuality. Nevertheless, there is the contrast between Jewess and Gentile, and between woman of the world and ingénue, whilst in Josépha Mirah (La Cousine Bette) there is the humbling acknowledgment of the heroine's moral superiority. Balzac goes further still in his portrayal of Coralie, describing her association with and influence upon Lucien in spiritual and religious terms (V 409-410). It could likewise be argued that his old maids are exceedingly dissimilar in their characterizations.

As for the young men: Rastignac, because of his dependence on Mme de Beauéant's talismanic influence, is by no means a representative student - despite Balzac's implied reference to him as such at one point in Le Père Goriot (III 152); nor is he necessarily typical of the young man about town, nor of the young aristocrat. Savinien de Portenduère is perhaps in some respects representative of the lethargy and disorientation of the French aristocracy during the Restoration period, but he is no "corsaire à gants jaunes" even though, in Ursule Mirouët, we see him fraternizing with Rastignac, Maxime de Trailles and Henri de Marsay during his time in Paris; he stands apart from the dandies by reason of his unworldliness and gradually deepening sense of responsibility. The young Polish aristocrat Wenceslas Steinbock, in La Cousine Bette, wavers between his career as a sculptor and his social and sexual temptations; his loss of that heroic self-dedication so necessary in every artist is symbolized by the statue of "Samson and Delilah" commissioned from him by his mistress Valérie Marneffe: it depicts a man of heroic stature fatally enfeebled by a woman of easy virtue (VII 259-260). In La Rabouilleuse the portrait of the painter Joseph Bridau is accompanied by two other strikingly vivid portraits of young men. Both ex-Napoleonic soldiers, both men who would no doubt have become military heroes had the wars continued, both officers on half pay, both refusing to serve in the army of the Bourbon King, both brave and ruthless, both cynical and disillusioned, Maxence Gilet and Philippe Bridau are nevertheless carefully differentiated. Thanks to Balzac's practice of relating almost all his heroes and major characters to the social nexus of self-interest and intrigue, the reader is led to ponder the "might-have-beens", and the would-be heroism, of the lives of these two young men. He is aided in this speculation by an actual epitaph (IV 510) on the career of the ludic hero, Maxence: a rare device in the Comédie humaine, and one that is never applied to "narrative heroes".

Le Lys dans la vallée portrays another young man, the "narrative hero" Félix de Vandenesse, with considerable irony, thanks to what is also an unusual narrative device in the Comédie humaine: the technique of the epistolary novel. Natalie de Manerville's letter of reply at the very end of Le Lys dans la vallée throws our previously formed impressions of the young hero into a new, and sobering, perspective. The angelic purity and self-restraint of the heroine, Henriette de Mortsauf, is likewise thrown into a new perspective by Mme de Manerville's letter. In La Cousine Bette the portrait of yet another "angelic wife and mother", Adeline Hulot, again presents supposedly exemplary qualities with ironic detachment: this time, however, without the distancing effect afforded by an exchange of letters.

Arnold Bennett's charge of brazen self-repetition cannot, therefore, be substantiated, especially as Balzac's characters so often derive much of their persona and coherence from the complexities of the social nexus around them. Most individualized of all, however, are the monomaniacs, who (like the artists) tend to stand apart from that nexus: engrossed, as is Balthazar Claës, in his scientific researches into the physical world, or else, like Agathe Bridau and Goriot, in the intensity of one or more human relationships. Sometimes martyrs themselves, they sacrifice their lives to their obsessions. Sometimes, like Hulot, Grandet and Nucingen who belongs to the realm of myth rather than monomania, they make martyrs of others: being externally attached to the social nexus either, like Hulot, by the irresistible force of lust or else, like the arch-capitalists, by financial greed.

Vautrin/Herrera, who until and even perhaps after his "conversion" is the outsider rebelling against the hypocrisies of mankind, has a depth of ambiguity, and (like Nucingen) a mythical rather than monomanic dimension, which it is beyond the scope of this essay to contemplate.

© Donald Adamson 2002

The notion of the contiguity of the arts of painting and literature is by no means peculiar to the nineteenth century. Cicero expresses the same thought in his oration Pro Archia Poeta, and it was a commonplace of æsthetic criticism in the sixteenth, seventeeth and eighteenth centuries that, to quote Horace's On the Art of Poetry: Ut Pictura poesis: Poetry is like painting. Poetry is like a picture". The closest period of the association of painting and literature in France ended about the years 1833/1834. This was an association on both a personal and an imaginative level.

To deal, briefly, with the personal level. Victor Hugo's salon at his home in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was attended by Balzac (from 1829 onwards), Mérimée, Musset and the painters Delacroix, Boulanger and Eugène and Achille Devéria; Hugo was particularly filled with this notion of the Fraternité des Arts between 1828 and 1830. Charles Nodier's salon at the Arsenal, where he was librarian, was attended by Musset, Delacroix, Boulanger, the Devéria brothers, the Johannot brothers (most of them painters and engravers!) -- and also by Balzac from 1830 onwards. It was in Nodier's salon that Balzac and Delacroix had their first serious talk.

At an imaginative level, the Romantic movement in painting derived much of its inspiration from historical and literary subject-matter. I need not mention Delacroix's paintings, well known to you all! Nor perhaps indeed Delaroche. However, at the 1827 Salon we find a painting of the "Première Entrevue de J.-J. Rousseau avec Mme de Warens"; at the 1831 Salon, one of "Young écrivant ses Nuits"; at the 1833 Salon, one of "Voltaire Enfant, présenté à Ninon de l'Enclos par l'abbé de Châteauneuf". There is a marked falling-off in the number of such paintings after that date. The date 1833 is significant as the terminus ad quem, in so many respects, of this sort of convergence of literature and painting. By the time, therefore, when Balzac comes to write Les Deux poètes, the first part of his great trilogy Illusions perdues, in 1836, he is already somewhat anachronistic in his view of a fraternity of artists encompassing both scientists and writers of historical novels and lyric poetry.

However, the earliest expression of the writer-painter parallelism in Balzac's own fiction occurs as early as 1823. The reference is to the apprentice novel La Dernière fée, a work never included by Balzac in the canon of the Comédie humaine:

Nos peintres [he writes there] font souvent, dans leurs admirables tableaux, des intérieurs séduisants: pourquoi l'humble prose ne pourrait-elle pas approcher de l'effet produit par le pinceau, et tracer des lignes que l'œil de l'âme colorerait des plus vives teintes? Les muses sont sœurs et par conséquent rivales.

It is clear, from what Balzac has written in La Dernière fée, that (in his belief) not only can literature inspire the subject-matter of painting, but also painting can influence the subject-matter, and the techniques, of literature.

Within Illusions perdues there still remain vestiges of Balzac's original plan to write "une histore de France pittoresque". The phrase is Daniel d'Arthez's in Illusions perdues (V 313). It refers to the draft of Lucien de Rubempré's L'Archer de Charles IX, as he advises him on the best ways in which that historical novel could be modified. The word "pittoresque" is important. It is in the tradition of Horace's Ut Pictura poesis. This history of France would have pictorial qualities. It would, in an important sense, be like a picture -- or perhaps a series of moving tableaux. I quote from a review published in Le Globe on 30 June 1827, some four years after the publication of La Dernière fée. This was a review of Augustin Thierry's recently published Lettres sur l'histoire de France:

les grands mots de réalité, de tableaux vivants, de couleur locale, furent mis à l'ordre du jour; Walter Scott eut du débit, les Ducs de Bourgogne [Prosper de Barante's Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne de la Maison de Valois, 1824-1826] et ensuite la Conquête de l' Angleterre par les Normands [by Thierry, 1825] prirent faveur.

This notion of couleur locale derives in large measure from the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott: whether it be the Tudor England of Kenilworth, France in the reign of Louis XI in Quentin Durward, the Scottish Lowlands during the late seventeenth century in Old Mortality, or eighteenth-century Edinburgh in The Heart of Midlothian. However, as Balzac writes in 1839 in his preface to Une Fille d'Ève, "le seul roman possible dans le passé, Walter Scott l'a épuisé" (II 263): the local colour which Sir Walter Scott so painstakingly and skilfully achieved refers to places which existed in the past and which, as such, no longer exist. It was, as is well known, Balzac's achievement to have written novels and short stories which are, in a sense, the history of the present, and which are descriptive of many provincial and Parisian localities: an exercise in couleur locale reminiscent both of Scott's Waverley Novels and of the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France, by Nodier (Balzac's host at the Arsenal), Taylor and de Cailleux.

A word first about the title of this great work of Romantic topography. It seems that the word pittoresque made its first appearance in French in 1720 (whereas its English equivalent had occurred just a little earlier, in 1703 and 1712, in the writings of Sir Richard Steele and Alexander Pope). As for Romantic, we find Jean-Bernard Le Blanc writing in 1745 that "plusieurs Anglais tâchent de donner [à leurs jardins] un air qu'ils appellent en leur langue Romantic, c'est-à-dire à peu près Pittoresque" . Only later did the word "Romantic" come to be regarded as the antithesis of "Classical", when Mme de Staël popularized this meaning of the word in De l'Allemagne in 1810, having borrowed it from Schlegel. Its application to French literature -- and painting -- dates from the 1820s. As early as 1745, therefore, the word Romantic is associated with the picturesque.

The Voyages pittoresques were the collective project of Nodier, Taylor and de Cailleux. Alphonse de Cailleux was director of the École des Beaux-Arts during the closing years of the July Monarchy and the creator of the Musée Historique de Versailles. Nodier was celebrated as a novelist and writer of short stories. But the leading spirit of the enterprise was Baron Taylor: soldier, traveller, book-collector, archæologist, painter, early Romantic playwright, commissioner of the Théâtre Français, book collector, and art collector extraordinary on behalf of King Louis-Philippe. The aim of this study of provincial France, the Voyages pittoresques, was to record -- both in words and in pictures (for photography was not invented until 1839) -- the picturesque and fast disappearing attractions of the French provinces: of upper Normandy (1820-1825), Franche-Comté (1829), Auvergne (1829-1833), etc. Taylor toiled for no less than fifty-nine years -- from 1819 to 1878 -- to bring out this great series of twenty-four volumes, the last two of which, however (those on Burgundy and lower Normandy, in 1863 and 1878), show a marked decline of quality both in the written word and in the quality of the lithographic illustrations. The illustrators of the series in its early years included Géricault, Ingres, Isabey, Horace Vernet -- and Taylor himself. Even Bonington, the close friend and artistic associate of John Constable (both of whose works created a sensation at the 1824 Salon), was persuaded to contribute lithographic illustrations to the Voyages pittoresques. Many of the finest lithographs were contributed by Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, the son of the celebrated Rococo painter. "Nos contrées", we read in the article on Tancarville in Normandy (and the writer of these words was probably Nodier), "ne sont dénuées d'aucune des couleurs qui brillent sur la palette du peintre, d'aucun des souvenirs qui animent l'heureux génie du poète". Thanks to such brilliant and atmospheric lithographs, buildings are shown in their urban or rural settings with all the picturesqueness of their market places, processions and festivals. Very often the illustrations have a distinctly archaic flavour. But there are also lithographic illustrations of the ground plans of churches and sectional views; there are plates, rather like those of the Encyclopédie, full of architectural detail: capitals, architraves, tympanums, abacuses, and the like. Although Taylor's achievements in the whole of this field were immense, he did not, as was his ambition, manage to cover the whole of France. There are no Voyages pittoresques to Aquitaine, Provence or the Eastern regions of France; and none either to the Loire valley, an area which (as in Le Lys dans la vallée, La Grenadière and Le Curé de Tours) is often so evocatively described by Balzac in the Comédie humaine.

The Voyages pittoresques are full of nostalgia for the vanishing past. Their descriptions of towns, hamlets, castles, churches and natural objects are written in an elegiac and yet scholarly tone, full of that spirit of antiquarianism and reverence for the past which characterize Sir Walter Scott. "Commencés dans l'intérêt seul des souvenirs poétiques et pittoresques", we read in the article on the Abbaye de Saint-Amand at Rouen, "les Voyages dans l' ancienne France sont devenus peu à peu le tableau des faits du moyen âge". They are, Nodier writes in his introduction to the Franche-Comté volume, "l'immense exploration de la France du moyen âge", "ce vaste itinéraire de l'antiquaire et de l'historien". And, because of their antiquarianism, Nodier and his friends are interested in the details of domestic life. "L'histoire de la vie domestique", we read in the article on the houses of Rouen, "n'est à dédaigner, ni dans l'histoire des peuples ni dans l'histoire des arts" . A somewhat similar spirit of antiquarianism, and above all of interest in domestic life, although with less reverence for the past, characterizes the author of the Comédie humaine. "L'auteur s'est entendu souvent reprocher", Balzac writes, also in his preface to Une Fille d'Ève (II 266-267), "quelques descriptions; mais ... il veut peindre le pays tout en peignant les hommes, raconter les plus beaux sites et les principales villes de la France aux étrangers, constater l'état des constructions anciennes et modernes au dix-neuvième siècle ... Grâce au soin qu'il a eu, peut-être saura-t-on, en 1850, comment était le Paris de l'Empire". Balzac claims, as it were, to be the archæologist of the present for the benefit of future generations.

Thus, he continues (II 267), the archæologist of the future will be able to learn from the Comédie humaine "la situation du tourniquet Saint-Jean et l'état du quartier adjacent" (a building demolished in 1823); and indeed, the description of this gatehouse and its immediate vicinity is to be found in Une Double famille (II 17-19). In Paris houses and places are described whose existence no one reading the Comédie humaine in 1850 would have dreamed of, unless they had seen such things for themselves. A purpose identical to that of Nodier and his friends is fulfilled by innumerable descriptions in the Comédie humaine: descriptions of the corner turrets of medieval houses such as the home of Maître Cornélius, descriptions of the "rows" (similar to those at Chester) which in medieval Paris -- as Balzac takes care to inform us in Sur Catherine de Médicis -- ran alongside houses and shops. There are the descriptions of the Maison Vauquer in Le Père Goriot; the Guillaumes' shop in La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote; in L'Interdiction the squalor of the Rue du Fouarre, one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the whole of Paris; and the Cité Bordin in Le Cousin Pons. The area of the Palais-Royal, its gaming-houses and lottery office are evoked in Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues and La Rabouilleuse. La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote, Le Père Goriot and Une Fille d'Ève convey the elegance of the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain.

You will have noted that all the above descriptions refer to Paris. However, the capital, in all its mystery and variety, was not a subject that had been dealt with by Nodier and Taylor in their Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France. It is Balzac's merit -- and, to some extent, his originality -- that he turned his attention to Paris. And Paris is fairly substantially covered by him. Not that this means, however, that he altogether neglects the provinces: Issoudun in La Rabouilleuse, Saumur in Eugénie Grandet, Angoulême in Illusions perdues, Nemours in Ursule Mirouët, Douai in La Recherche de l'Absolu, Guérande in Béatrix, Limoges in Le Curé de village, Alençon in La Vieille Fille and Le Cabinet des Antiques, Sancerre in La Muse du Département. There is also, in Sur Catherine de Médicis, Balzac's celebrated historical account of the Château de Blois. The castle's history under the Comtes de Blois, Louis XII and Francis I is related in some considerable detail, and very much in the manner of Sir Walter Scott. The novelist who, like Scott, is also an antiquarian deplores the disrepair into which the château had been allowed to fall in the eighteenth century; in 1784 it had even been turned into a barracks! "Ces pierres éloquentes ... n'existeront peut-être plus que dans ces pages!" (XI 241)

However, the picture of the provinces is not complete. It is far less comprehensive, indeed, than the picture which Balzac has drawn of the capital: in such a variety of ways, in Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues, La Fille aux yeux d'or, Le Colonel Chabert and La Cousine Bette! In the Comédie humaine there is no description -- not even a mention, I think? -- of the great Northern manufacturing city of Lille. There is nothing of Lyons, to which even Rousseau refers in his Confessions! There is nothing of Marseilles. And there is practically nothing of Bordeaux, except what we read in Le Contrat de Mariage. This is because, as a Romantic rather than a Realist, Balzac is everywhere concerned with the picturesque and Romantic aspects of the France he is describing. Even, for example, in his description of the Impasse du Doyenné in La Cousine Bette, or (in César Birotteau) Molineux's squalid apartment in the Cour Batave, or Chabert's lodgings in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, and most certainly in part II of Illusions perdues, Un Grand homme de province à Paris, where he recalls the so-called Galeries de Bois which until 1828 stood next to the Palais-Royal gardens:

toute cette infâme poésie est perdue ... C'était horrible et gai ... Ces monstrueux assemblages avaient je ne sais quoi de piquant, les hommes les plus insensibles étaient émus. Aussi tout Paris est-il venu là jusqu'au dernier moment ... Des regrets immenses et unanimes ont accompagné la chute de ces ignobles morceaux de bois (V 360-361).

However, it could well be argued that in Balzac's work two notions of the picturesque and the Romantic co-exist, at least one of which is productive of his Realism. Let us very briefly compare a passage from La Rabouilleuse with one from the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l' ancienne France: not so much in terms of minute resemblances of style as from the point of view of the spirit animating the enterprise.

In the opening pages of the second part of La Rabouilleuse (which, significantly, is dedicated to Nodier) there is a long passage, justly famous, concerning the archæology of Issoudun, much of the inspiration for which Balzac had obtained from Armand Pérémé, his archæologist acquaintance in Issoudun. There the novelist writes of

la charmante église de Saint-Paterne, récemment démolie par l'héritier de celui qui l'acheta de la Nation. Cette église, un des plus jolis specimen d'église romane que possédât la France, a péri sans que personne ait pris le dessin du portail, dont la conservation était parfaite. La seule voix qui s'éleva pour sauver le monument ne trouva d'écho nulle part, ni dans la ville, ni dans le département (IV 365).

Compare this with the following words from the Franche-Comté volume of the Voyages pittoresques, of 1829: words which were almost certainly written by Charles Nodier, whose birthplace was Besançon, the capital city of the province of Franche-Comté. They refer to the Château de Chandée, a medieval fortress built in 1270 and demolished in 1825. The text is accompanied by a very attractive lithograph of the castle from a drawing made shortly before its destruction.

Il subsista plus de cinq cents ans; nos crayons en ont conservé par hasard un faible souvenir: ce beau monument n'existe plus. C'était un des types les plus remarquables des châteaux forts du moyen âge. Ses hautes murailles garnies de parapets, de créneaux, de tourelles élégantes, ses fossés, ses ponts-levis, tout avait bravé de longs sièges et d'immenses machines de guerre; il avait résisté au temps, triomphé d'un indigne oubli; il fut respecté durant le cours d'une révolution terrible: il est tombé sous la puissance de l'avarice, qui a vendu, pour un peu d'or, ses tours élancées comme des pavillons dressés pour la fête d'un roi, et ses portiques ciselés comme les joyaux d'une princesse.

Tout cela est détruit, et avec les chefs-d'œuvre des arts on n'a pas même bâti un hospice pour le pauvre voyageur, un lazaret pour le malade, un refuge pour le mendiant; on les a brisés, on les a mutilés, et puis on les a jetés quelque part, à l'angle d'un évier, ou pour marquer la limite d'un cimetière! Voilà comme il y a quelques années on comprenait en France les souvenirs de la France!

In both cases the tone of lamentation for a vanished or vanishing past is unmistakable. However, in his approach Balzac is more informative, less fanciful, more "Realistic". Here, as always in the Comédie humaine, the mood of regretfulness is short-lived, and in these six or seven pages of La Rabouilleuse Balzac provides us, concerning Issoudun, with a historical as distinct from an antiquarian account which also embraces economic factors; yet, and this should carefully be noted, it is a historical account which also includes much archæological detail.

As for the extract from the Franche-Comté volume of the Voyages pittoresques, this would merit a commentary all of its own, highlighting Nodier's use of words such as "hospice", "lazaret" and "évier", phrases such as "tours élancées comme des pavillons dressés pour la fête d'un roi". The relevance of such remarks to the Comédie humaine is obvious, when we think of the occasional medieval undertones in Le Père Goriot, of Delphine de Nucingen, for example, saying to Rastignac:

autrefois les dames ne donnaient-elles pas à leurs chevaliers des armures, des épées, des casques, des cottes de mailles, des chevaux, afin qu'ils pussent aller combattre en leur nom dans les tournois? Eh bien, Eugène, les choses que je vous offre sont les armes de l'époque (III 229),

or when we think of the power of money throughout the Comédie humaine, the "puissance de l'avarice", the omnipotent cash nexus destructive of works of beauty, destructive of the poetic values of the Middle Ages, and so powerful that not even the walls and turrets of the Château de Chandée -- or the sacred wall of the Église de Saint-Paterne at Issoudun -- can withstand its Juggernaut impact.

However, in their like-minded concern to preserve for posterity the vanished and vanishing beauty of the past, it is a feature of the realism of both the Comédie humaine and the Voyages pittoresques that they record for posterity as painstakingly, as visually and as accurately as possible: whether by means of the innumerable plates in Nodier's and Taylor's work or else by means of Balzac's descriptions. Interestingly, however, the author of the Comédie humaine is well aware of his own limitations in this respect as a poet of the written word: no record of the principal door, or the tympanum, of the Église de Saint-Paterne was ever kept, and Balzac in La Rabouilleuse is not in a position to provide one.

I mentioned just now that there may be in Balzac's work two distinct notions of the picturesque and the Romantic, at least one of them productive of Realism. We have considered the aspect of Realism. What of the other aspect?

A few words are required at this point about the Bande Noire, the pejorative name given in the 1820s by Romantic writers, notably Victor Hugo, to the speculative, asset-stripping syndicates that bought ancient castles and abbeys at knockdown prices, only to demolish them, sell off the building materials and also the works of art of all kinds which they contained, and which likewise broke up into small and indeed often unviable parcels of land the surrounding landed estates. La Bande Noire is the title of a well-known poem by Hugo, written in 1823 and published in his Nouvelles Odes. This was indeed the first occasion on which Hugo sang the praises of medieval architecture, a subject to which he was often to return, especially of course in Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831. In L'Ancien Bourbonnais Achille Allier writes that, even during the Restoration period, "les donjons crénelés croulaient sous les marteaux de la bande noire; on mutilait, et, qui pis est, on restaurait les cathédrales". It was, in large measure, to protect the beauty of the past from the depredations of the Bande Noire that the Voyages pittoresques were undertaken. The first Normandy volume of the Voyages pittoresques was the inspiration of Hugo's poem La Bande Noire, which -- significantly again -- is dedicated to Charles Nodier.

As in his picture of Jean-Jacques Rouget's house in La Rabouilleuse, Balzac often describes the outcome of the devastation wrought by the Bande Noire and also by the chineurs, those unscrupulous purchasers of works of art for a fraction of their true value, the most memorable representative of whom in the Comédie humaine is, of course, Rémonencq in Le Cousin Pons. Now, the Sèvres vases belonging to the sordid money-lender Gigonnet in César Birotteau (VI 258) are in that Philistine bourgeois's possession thanks to this cultural vandalism against which both Victor Hugo and the historian and politician Montalembert made such strenuous protests. These things of beauty, which formerly stood in Marie-Antoinette's boudoir at Versailles, do not now belong to Gigonnet because of his superior taste but because he has bought them from Auvergnat junk-dealers, who themselves have come by them through the break-up and dispersal of the priceless artistic heritage through the activities of the Bande Noire. Gigonnet has Sèvres vases precisely because art objects in the Comédie humaine are constantly presented against a background of historical flux.

The contrast between their beauty and his ugliness -- between the spiritual and the material -- is overwhelming and reminds us of Victor Hugo's definition of the modern concept of the Beautiful in that credo of Romanticism, the preface to his play Cromwell, of 1827:

c'est de la féconde union du type grotesque au type sublime que naît le génie moderne, si complexe, si varié dans ses formes, si inépuisable dans ses créations, et bien opposé en cela à l'uniforme simplicité du génie antique ... Le contact du difforme a donné au sublime moderne quelque chose de plus pur, de plus grand, de plus sublime enfin que le beau antique.

But this contrast of beauty and ugliness, the spiritual essence and the material envelope, is no different from Balzac's portrait of the ugliness of Joseph Bridau in La Rabouilleuse, or that of Schmucke in Le Cousin Pons. It is a contrast which goes much further than the dispersal of art objects thanks to the Bande Noire. As such, it does not have that element of historical verisimilitude which belongs to the present resting-places of works of artistic beauty. Nevertheless, both forms of the contrast of beauty and ugliness illustrate Victor Hugo's concept of Romantic beauty.

It would have been necessary, had time permitted, to consider these matters of Romanticism, Realism and beauty from the standpoint of the philosophy of æsthetics, and more especially from that of the concept of the "beau idéal". The dictum of Horace to which I referred at the outset -- that of Ut Pictura poesis -- meant that, as interpreted by the theoreticians of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, poets had sought only a limited degree of historical verisimilitude. Now, in the 1820s, the works of Sir Walter Scott, Prosper de Barante, Augustin Thierry and others led authors and their readers to strive both for greater local colour and for a more exact realism. However, the realism which recognizes the ugliness of Schmucke and Joseph Bridau is but the other face of that Romanticism which implements the artistic philosophy of the Préface de Cromwell.

Truth, in other words, is not the beauty envisaged by the Classical theorists of æsthetics, Winckelmann (with his vision of the "noble simplicity and tranquil greatness" of the art of Classical Greece), or that remarkable figure in the history of France between 1790 and 1830, Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy; rather, it is the beauty of a Velázquez or a Murillo. Balzac himself writes, in his Avant-Propos to the Comédie humaine, of "la règle éternelle, du vrai, du beau" (I 11-12), that beauty postulated by Plato in his Symposium and Republic which exists in the world of Ideas beyond the power of full human attainment, and of which earthly expressions of beauty are merely a shadowy reflection. He had most probably attended the series of lectures on Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien delivered by Victor Cousin at the Sorbonne in 1818, where Cousin (though professedly a syncretistic philosopher) had -- differing from Diderot -- argued essentially in favour of the Platonic absolute. What, however, is the relationship of beauty to truth? For there, surely, lies the nature of Realism. If the mission of art is to approximate, as far as is humanly possible, to ideal beauty, "la règle éternelle" (in Balzac's words) "du vrai, du beau", what then of the phenomena of the world to which Realism and a fortiori Naturalism have attached such understandable importance?

Balzac regularly negates such Realism. "Je ne cesserai jamais de répéter", he writes in the Revue parisienne on 25 September 1840, "que le vrai de la nature ne peut être, ne sera jamais le vrai de l'art" . Within the Comédie humaine itself the pronouncements on this subject are often made by particular characters, and not by the authorial voice: by Camille Maupin in Béatrix (supposedly modelled on George Sand?), for whom "la beauté ... est l'enseigne que la nature a mise à ses créations les plus parfaites, ... elle est le plus grand des hasards" (II 777); and by Joseph Bridau in La Rabouilleuse (supposedly modelled on the painter Delacroix?), who "aimait ... le beau idéal en tout; il aimait la poésie de Byron, la peinture de Géricault, la musique de Rossini, les romans de Walter Scott" (IV 326).

Balzac, it seems, was well aware of the philosophical aspects of the question of the nature of Beauty and the beau idéal. In his practice he exemplifies many of the preoccupations of Romanticism, whilst carrying its enthusiasm for history to heights of accuracy and verisimilitude which may well, in loose parlance, be deemed realistic though scarcely so on philosophical grounds. For, after all, though in the Avant-Propos he has little to say about those early Romantic preoccupations which had helped to make the Comédie humaine what it finally was, Balzac's concern is more with the laws underlying human nature, human society and the history of the world than with any ambitions of historical accuracy or historical realism narrowly interpreted.

© Donald Adamson 2002

(viii) Creative Writing 

© Donald Adamson 2001

(ix)  Political Commentary

FAITH WITHIN THE BROADER SCHOOL CURRICULUM

Throughout most of the history of Western civilization, and indeed in many other civilizations too, secular education (or what is nowadays quite simply termed “education”) was an integral part of the rounded, holistic educational process which had religion at its heart.   This was less so in ancient Greece and Rome, however, although in those civilizations there was formal worship of the gods.

In Europe in the Middle Ages theology was regarded as the queen of the sciences – “science” meaning “knowledge” or “learning”.   And in that same period education was imparted by the monasteries, a clerk (a man able to read and write) was a cleric.   The earliest English schools, like those at Canterbury, Rochester and York, flourished in monasteries.   Eton, Winchester, King’s College, Cambridge, New College, Magdalen and Christ Church at Oxford, were all religious foundations established by kings or bishops.   Until the late nineteenth century, if not later still, religious worship was a regular and compulsory feature of their daily life.

The Renaissance, or New Learning, did nothing to change the prevailingly religious framework within which teaching was conducted in England.   Grammar schools had their daily worship;  the so-called “public” (boarding) schools, with their Kingsley-inspired cult of “muscular Christianity”, had their regular chapel services.   The Church of England established many day schools in the nineteenth century.   So too, in lesser numbers, did the Roman Catholic and Nonconformist Churches.   The 1944 Education Act laid down that every school in England and Wales should celebrate a daily act of religious worship.   Moreover, religious instruction was the only educational subject specifically laid down in the curriculum.

What has been very noticeable in the English state-school system in recent decades is the generally low status of religious, or “school”, assemblies.   Devoid of their religious element, these consist nowadays of very little at all beyond the giving-out of school notices or the brief discussion of some non-religious topic.   It is a situation which has naturally been deplored by many religious leaders, including the archbishops of Canterbury and York.   For entirely understandable reasons state-maintained schools have also been reluctant to use the mandatory one-lesson-a-week of religious instruction for that specific purpose.   Often taught by unqualified, uncommitted teachers, it was frequently recast as a “general” period or as the euphemistically named “civics”.   Such periods, if not by now totally evacuated of religious content, have come to consist, in English local-authority-controlled schools, of a thematic or quasi-historical course in comparative religion with emphasis on religions other than Christianity.   The reason for this historical development has, of course, been the growing agnosticism of teachers operating within the framework of an increasingly secularized society.

However, the recent growth of the fundamentalist sectors of most religions, together with an increase in the number and gravity of threats from terrorist groups, has given rise to unprecedented interest in the role of religious education in schooling.   The increase in mixed and minority ethnic and religious populations in the United Kingdom has resulted in occasional clashes in the streets and in the courts.   These have been blamed on the multiculturalism which has mostly been welcomed in a country where, ever since the Jews’ readmission into England in 1656, racial tolerance has been practised for centuries.   At the wider social level there is the current fear, keenly felt by many, that faith communities will become polarized, as has long been the case in Northern Ireland, where in 2003, to no one’s surprise, 82% of parents favoured integrated education.

More specifically, the expansion of faith-schooling has re-opened curricular controversies, such as the conflict between creationism and Darwinism in England and America, controversies reminiscent of those in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s but not much heard of in England until now.   In plain language, whilst the ideal of multiculturalism has been widely applauded, the need for an intercultural dialogue, in order to curb its excesses, has become ever more urgent.

OFSTED has declared that a small number of evangelical Christian and Muslim schools give cause for concern.   The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, whilst rejecting proposals for new legislation to prevent the growing influence of religious organizations in state education, has nevertheless voted to ban further Government funding for faith schools.   In a House of Lords debate in February 2006 some peers voiced strong opposition to the concept of faith schools generally and, more particularly, they opposed the creation of further faith schools.   One spoke of sleepwalking into educational apartheid.   Another said:  “I hope that the Government will put a halt to further faith schools”.   In the words of another peer:  “I accept that there is a degree of potential divisiveness, particularly in relation to Muslim schools, because of the circumstances in which they exist”.   These and other leaders and agencies of British opinion doubt the beneficial effects of faith schools.

Their doubts arise from a fear of social divisiveness.   In the words of a Home Office report published in 2001:  “separate education arrangements, community bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks [are] producing living arrangements that provide virtually no contact between the native Caucasian population and the Muslim immigrants”.   Recent immigrants, including Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh, have become increasingly segregated from the host community, and this is especially true of twenty-five urban areas including Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford, Blackburn, Oldham, Slough and several boroughs of Greater London.

Nevertheless, in the past decade the British Government has been powerfully moving in the direction of faith schools.   One of its key policy objectives has been to encourage the take-over of existing community schools by faith communities and other faith-based sponsors.   These faith schools are financed in such a way as to be part of the independent “special” schools policy of New Labour.   But it is a trend that goes back rather further than that.   The last two decades have seen an upsurge of commitment to the faith-schools sector in England and Wales.   This is an all-inclusive faith sector, which, although largely consisting of Anglican schools, also comprises those established by other religious groups, whether it be the Church of Wales, the Roman Catholic Church, other Christian denominations or other faith communities.   It is a sector which has grown far more rapidly in Britain than in other European countries, and the reasons for this rapid expansion in the number of all manner of faith schools have been twofold:  (a)  the rise of religious fundamentalism, especially but by no means exclusively Islamic religious fundamentalism, and (b)  the influence exerted by madrasahs (Islamic places of learning under the ægis of a mosque) not only upon some Muslims but indirectly upon society at large.

In England and Wales 25% (4,500) of primary schools are Church of England ones but this is true of only 5% (200) in the secondary sector.   Moreover, there are over 2,000 Roman Catholic schools in England and Wales although, on paper at least, these countries have a much smaller population of Roman Catholic believers.   Nationwide about 30% of state-funded schools currently have a faith sponsor – i.e., 36% of primary schools and 17% of secondary schools.   Of today’s 7,000 faith schools almost all are associated with the major Christian denominations, but over recent years other faiths have promoted schools.   The breakdown of these 7,000 schools is as follows:  Church of England, 4,700;  Roman Catholic, 2,300;  Jewish, 36;  Muslim, 6;  Sikh, 2;  Greek Orthodox, 1.   And the number of all these is set to grow substantially.   In 2001 the Church of England committed itself to creating 100 more secondary schools within five years;  120 are already under way.   Though faith schools account for only 18% of secondary schools, they represent 42% of the top 200 comprehensives.   Faith schools have a high standard of discipline, a strong community ethos – and they achieve some of the best academic results in the country.   What is more, in socio-economic terms their intake is little different from that of state-maintained schools.

In continental Europe, on the other hand, religious practice and instruction have to a greater or lesser extent been removed from schools’ daily life.   At most levels most Continental churches have relinquished to the state their sponsorship of education, though not all of them to the same degree.   France has provided the most extreme instance of this trend.   The culmination of the long tradition of anti-clericalism in that country during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first inspired by Cartesian rationalism, the Encyclopédie and the ferment of the French Revolution, resulted in 1905 in Émile Combes’s total separation of Church and State.   This outcome, seductive in its austerity and almost simplistic in its conception, has had a number of clear-cut consequences.   Religion is deemed to be a matter of private commitment, something to be taught within the family or Sunday school.   It is not thought to have anything to do with public education.

Thus, in France, the wearing of all forms of “faith”-inspired dress has been banned and, in such a secular environment, there are no logical grounds for Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Muslims to allege any conflict between their schooling and their religion.   Only in certain private, and fee-paying, Roman Catholic day and boarding schools is there a religious component to the educational process.   It has to be said, too, that Continental Europe has some faith universities, such as the Catholic University of Louvain.

By and large, however, the trend in Continental Europe has been secular:  France has been by no means alone in this attitude even though its implementation of laicity is rather more extreme than elsewhere.   There are many other European countries where schooling has been, or has become, divorced from religion and where the composition of the curriculum was, or has been, taken over by the state.   In Germany no religious assemblies are permitted.   Under Communism faith education was transferred to religious institutions.   The Communist countries’ state-provided compulsory schooling eliminated religious instruction altogether, replacing it by instruction – or brainwashing – in sociology and politics.

In very recent times, however, Ján Figel, EU Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism, has taken a much broader view.   There must, he says, be “respect for human rights, including religious rights”.   Arguing that “the subsidiarity principle in education is justified”, he urges “understanding and respect [for the] differences between [the] value systems of different religious or ethnic groups”.   In his opinion the religious, cultural and humanist inheritance is the legacy which will prove decisive for Europe’s future.   “I believe that looking at these issues through the lens of religious beliefs can give us a unique, sharp and detailed picture …   We need to know it, to respect it and to nourish this heritage”.  For, he claims, in the last analysis “the religious and humanistic background of [the] founding fathers [of the EU] was the driving force for what was to become the European Union” and likewise “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 … was also inspired by Christian values”.

To many English, indeed British, people remarks such as Ján Figel’s seem laudable but vague.   Paradoxically, the countries in which educational secularization has been carried to its furthest lengths are often those which most strongly affirm the osmotic unity of religious and educational values.   England, on the other hand, is the only European country – with the exception of Scotland – which still has an Established Church.   Hence the religious ethos of the great public schools.   Hence the large number of faith schools of various kinds, but particularly Anglican ones, in England.   But hence too the feelings, and the fears, of social divisiveness.   Hence the concern that the Government’s policy of increasing numbers of faith schools will hinder integration, foster religious divisions and provide fertile ground for religious and ethnic conflicts and even terrorism.

Largely by a quirk of history, the peculiar mix which has come about in the public-education system in England is one of virtually secular local-authority-schools, faith schools, inter-faith and multi-faith schools.   This, like so many English institutions, is not something which would take shape on the drawing-board if England had to be invented again but nor, on the other hand, is it something that can lightly be done away with.   It is a situation with which England has to live, but also a situation which brings with it certain very considerable advantages.   Mono-faith schools admit children from other and from no faith traditions although they are not legally obliged to operate a quota system.   Inter-faith schools such as the Liverpool Kensington Academy, in the Kensington quarter of Liverpool, admit Anglican and Roman Catholic children alike.   At the privatized “multi-faith” city academies – schools built with the help of up to £2,000,000 of private money – pupils will learn about not one but all religions whilst, in those areas, schools that are dominated by either white or ethnic-minority pupils will be closed down.

Many of these academies, founded and to a large extent funded by a benefactor or benefactors other than the state, may for all intents and purposes be regarded as faith schools although they were not established with any religious affiliation.   But their social mix is less diverse than that of the faith schools.   The Anglican Church, being one of the two Established Churches of Great Britain, has a particular tradition of providing schools not just for Anglicans but for the local community as a whole.   Many Church of England schools accept a substantial number of pupils from other faith traditions.   So too do many Roman Catholic schools.

In England faith and (Christian) inter-faith schools deliver sound educational results.   Whilst admittedly falling short of the Utopian ideal, they are also socially inclusive.   And in their composition they are, in varying degrees, inclusive of other faiths.

The newly conceived multi-faith schools – based upon City academies and perhaps rather more restricted in social mix – will, on the other hand, be syncretistic in outlook.   Multi-ethnic in composition, they will teach about all faiths.   Their strong point will be that they will bring together, on a daily basis, in work and in play, children of all faith traditions and ethnic groupings.  

However, they may well prove to be insufficiently mindful of Ján Figel’s stirring words about the Christian substratum of all Western culture.   For he, speaking in a voice seldom heard in England, maintains that it is the Christian legacy which is the very matrix of the European educational process and of European lives.

© Donald Adamson 2007

A.L. Rowse: An Obituary

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Genealogy of the Leigh Family

Harefield Church

Personal

An Unrecognized Balzac Masterpiece (La Bourse)

Atheism

Rousseau's Politics

Tolstoy