Poor Relations by Honoré de Balzac
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_berquinade_, as those who like Balzac best when he is doing moral
rag-picking are apt to describe books like _Le Medecin de Campagne_ and _Le Lys dans la Vallee_, if not even like _Eugenie Grandet_. It has a considerable variety of interest; its central figure is curiously pathetic and attractive, even though the curse of something like folly, which so often attends Balzac's good characters, may a little weigh on him. It would be a book of exceptional charm even if it were anonymous, or if we knew no more about the author than we know about Shakespeare. As it happens, however, _Le Cousin Pons_ has other attractions than this. In the first place, Balzac is always great--perhaps he is at his greatest--in depicting a mania, a passion, whether the subject be pleasure or gold-hunger or parental affection. Pons has two manias, and the one does not interfere with, but rather helps, the other. But this would be nothing if it were not that his chief mania, his ruling passion, is one of Balzac's own. For, as we have often had occasion to notice, Balzac is not by any means one of the great impersonal artists. He can do many things; but he is never at his best in doing any unless his own personal interests, his likings and hatreds, his sufferings and enjoyments, are concerned. He was a kind of actor-manager in his _Comedie Humaine_; and perhaps, like other actor-managers, he took rather disproportionate care of the parts which he played himself. Now, he was even more desperate as a collector and fancier of bibelots than he was as a speculator; and while the one mania was nearly as responsible for his pecuniary troubles and his need to overwork himself as the other, it certainly gave him more constant and more comparatively harmless satisfactions. His connoisseurship would be |
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