In other words, fictions, including the novel, were meeting a new need created by the fact that the horizon had vastly extended while the means of conveying information had not developed to keep pace. The newspapers were unequipped for the job of reporting on distant events and discoveries—the telegraph was just being invented. Photography was still in its early days, which made the “word pictures” of the novelist—themselves a rather recent invention—an enormous public service. In the absence of radio, films, television, news magazines, the novel kept the public in touch with what was happening in science, manufacturing, agriculture, and so on. Indeed it sometimes seemed to accept the functions of a mail-order catalogue or a farmer’s almanac, as in Tess of the D’Urbervilles when the bright-blue new turnip-slicing machine and the still newer bright-red thresher are introduced to the farm laborers. The novel was not only a conveyor of factual information. It filled the place of today’s round tables and seminars that people watch on television or listen to on the radio and that is the commonest source of their general ideas.
In any case, the immense fullness of Victor Hugo (which leads many to fear, mistakenly, that he is unreadable) was not a peculiar deformity, not a species of giantism resulting from a swollen ego. In France, you have it in Balzac, whose title The Human Comedy declares the resolve to encompass the entire species. And Balzac, like Hugo, remained his own spokesman, undisputed lord of his creation. But there is a marked difference in manner and tone. Hugo’s assumption of the mantle of advocate for his misérables rested on compassion. His determination to widen the view, to soar above his narrative, implied no detachment of feeling. But Balzac was detached, to the point of being unsympathetic, often, with his principal figures, most noticeably in that strange masterpiece Les illusions perdues. Lucien de Rubempré (whose real name is Chardon like the lowly thistle) is a pathetic example of l’esprit du siècle. That is, he is an arriviste, endowed with two gifts—beauty and literary talent—on which he intends to capitalize. We are never allowed to know how much talent he really has—no samples are given of his historical novel, The Archer of Charles IX—but his worldly career is an abject fizzle. He lays siege to Paris, scales its heights briefly, is repulsed with humiliating rapidity, driven back to his province, where he has brought ruin not only on himself but also on his devoted sister and brother-in-law, who have “believed” in him. What they have believed in is not the frail creature they knew too well but the idea of “genius” incarnate in him like a promise that cannot be broken.
The spirit of the age, then, is one of rapacious opportunism. Many examples are held up for almost loving inspection. Monstrous specimens from the big pond of Parisian literary life compete in gross rascality with the entrepreneurs and small lawyers of the provincial backwater, and the only distinction, doubtless not foreseen by Balzac, is that the shamelessness of Parisian literary circles is probably more believable than before—that depraved milieu has not changed with time but only become more itself, like an essence or concentrate. Balzac lets us see that a few rare innocents are to be found both in dull, dead Angoulême and the capital; in the provinces one might expect that they would be slightly more numerous, but it is not so. Lucien himself is a false innocent; he fails because he is a weak opportunist. His utter lack of self-knowledge may have at the beginning a naive, ingenuous charm but it is soon revealed as simple cowardice: he does not want to have a clear picture of the base actions he is about to commit that will then “add up to” a self he does not wish to know. It would be wrong to say that he is satirized; he is far too weak for that. It takes a more robust figure, like Meredith’s Sir Willoughby Patterne (also utterly lacking in self-knowledge), to stand up to satire. Lucien hovers on the verge of being a comic figure, as he hovers on the verge of the literary world. Toward the end, he has decided or, rather, thinks he has decided to commit suicide—the only manly act left for him after the wrong he has done his family. Then, on reflection: “J’ai toujours le temps de me tuer” (“I’ve always got time to kill myself”). So instead he accepts a cigar.