In Séraphita we see a terrifying example of the disaster which overtakes writers who succumb to the temptation of protesting too much about matters of which they know too little. (I use the word ‘know’ to signify, in this case, the immediate, first-hand knowledge that is born of feeling.) Balzac had a considerable abstract knowledge of mysticism; it was his crime that he also pretended to possess an intuitive, emotional knowledge from within, and his misfortune that he lacked, or lost, those literary arts, by means of which he might have made the pretence convincing. ‘Lost’—for, as I have said, Balzac could write, not beautifully perhaps, but well and vigorously enough about his beloved World, just as Milton could be unaffectedly sublime about the Flesh (his account of the first wedding is bright with an almost unearthly glow of sensuality) and that indomitable Devil, whose self-esteem was founded, like Milton’s own, on ‘just and right.’ The moment Balzac had to protest too much, as he had to do about matters which did not lie near his heart, he lost this power to write well and sank or soared into fustian.
Séraphita is characterized by a peculiar emotional vulgarity. In his attempt to express the mystical emotions which he does not naturally have, Balzac is forced to make incessant overstatements. Not only do the characters themselves protest, both in speech and in action, much too much; the symbols with which Balzac surrounds them also protest too much. It would be easy by means of extended quotation to illustrate what I have been saying about Séraphita. But world and time are lacking, and I must be content to cite this one sentence, into which Balzac has considerately crammed examples of almost all the faults which characterize his mystical writing. ‘And with a lifted finger, this singular being showed her the blue aureole which the clouds, by leaving a clear space above their heads, had drawn in the sky and in which the stars could be seen in daylight, in virtue of hitherto unexplained atmospheric laws.’ In these few lines Balzac has succumbed to three separate temptations. First, in his anxiety to impress us with the mystical merits of his Séraphita, he has called her ‘a singular being.’ (He gives her many other such honorific titles in the course of his narrative: she is ‘unique,’ ‘inexplicable,’ and the like.) The adjective protests too much about a matter which it was the business of the story itself and not the commenting author to make clear.
Consider, in the second place, that aureole of blue sky, which follows Séraphita about in all her rambles like a celestial dog, however cloudy the weather. This symbol is so obviously poetical, so loudly significant of Higher Things, that it fails to impress—it merely shocks, as the diamond rings symbolical of Levantine opulence merely shock without impressing. The stars are just a set of diamond studs to match the rings. But in those hitherto unexplained atmospheric laws, in virtue of which they are visible by daylight, we have another, quite new vulgarity—an intellectual vulgarity this time. It is Balzac the charlatan, Balzac the philosophic tipster giving us a piece of inside information, straight from the scientific horse’s mouth. Now one can talk very knowingly in a novel, poem or other work of literary art even about such things as hitherto unexplained atmospheric laws, without necessarily being vulgar; but only on condition that the talking is done tactfully and with perfect relevance.
One must be, as Jean Cocteau said of that most universally known of modern novelists, M. Paul Morand, ‘un nouveau riche qui sait recevoir.’ M. Morand has a wonderfully airy, easy way of implying that he has looked into everything—absolutely everything, from God and the Quantum Theory to the slums of Baku (the world’s most classy slums—didn’t you know it?), from the Vanderbilt family and all the Ritz Hotels to the unpublished poetry of Father Hopkins. Just the quick passing implication of knowledge, just the right word in each particular case, the absolutely correct, esoteric formula—that is all. M. Morand is the almost perfect literary knower; he hardly ever, at any rate in his earlier books, makes a mistake. Balzac was too serious in his charlatanism, too vastly ambitious, too energetic to be a very tactful intellectual hostess; for all his wealth he did not know how to receive.
Thus, in the present case, he has fallen into vulgarity, because he could not resist the temptation of being knowing at a most inopportune moment. That horse’s-mouth information about atmospheric laws has been dragged irrelevantly and absurdly into the middle of a poetic symbol—a much too poetic symbol, as we have seen; which only makes the incongruity more apparent. Blue aureoles are a part of an angel’s uniform, as much de rigueur among cherubs as top-hats at a Royal Garden Party. Unexplained atmospheric laws have nothing to do with angels. By bringing them thus incongruously together, Balzac calls attention to the vulgarity of a knowingness which insists on displaying itself at all costs and on all occasions.
The case of Dickens is a strange one. The really monstrous emotional vulgarity, of which he is guilty now and then in all his books and almost continuously in The Old Curiosity Shop, is not the emotional vulgarity of one who simulates feelings which he does not have. It is evident, on the contrary, that Dickens felt most poignantly for and with his Little Nell; that he wept over her sufferings, piously revered her goodness and exulted in her joys. He had an overflowing heart; but the trouble was that it overflowed with such curious and even rather repellent secretions. The creator of the later Pickwick and the Cheeryble Brothers, of Tim Linkinwater the bachelor and Mr Garland and so many other gruesome old Peter Pans was obviously a little abnormal in his emotional reactions. There was something rather wrong with a man who could take this lachrymose and tremulous pleasure in adult infantility.
He would doubtless have justified his rather frightful emotional taste by a reference to the New Testament. But the child-like qualities of character commended by Jesus are certainly not the same as those which distinguish the old infants in Dickens’s novels. There is all the difference in the world between infants and children. Infants are stupid and unaware and sub-human. Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. From all accounts Jesus must have been child-like, not at all infantile.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. An infantile man is one who has not developed at all, or who has regressed towards the womb, into a comfortable unawareness. So far from being attractive and commendable, an infantile man is really a most repulsive, because a truly monstrous and misshapen, being. A writer who can tearfully adore these stout or cadaverous old babies, snugly ensconced in their mental and economic womb-substitutes and sucking, between false teeth, their thumbs, must have something seriously amiss with his emotional constitution.
One of Dickens’s most striking peculiarities is that, whenever in his writing he becomes emotional, he ceases instantly to use his intelligence. The overflowing of his heart drowns his head and even dims his eyes; for, whenever he is in the melting mood, Dickens ceases to be able and probably ceases even to wish to see reality. His one and only desire on these occasions is just to overflow, nothing else. Which he does, with a vengeance and in an atrocious blank verse that is meant to be poetical prose and succeeds only in being the worst kind of fustian. ‘When Death strikes down the innocent and young, from every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity and love, to walk the world and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. In the Destroyer’s steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.’ And so on, a stanchless flux.
Mentally drowned and blinded by the sticky overflowings of his heart, Dickens was incapable, when moved, of re-creating, in terms of art, the reality which had moved him, was even, it would seem, unable to perceive that reality. Little Nelly’s sufferings and death distressed him as, in real life, they would distress any normally constituted man; for the suffering and death of children raise the problem of evil in its most unanswerable form. It was Dickens’s business as a writer to re-create in terms of his art this distressing reality. He failed. The history of Little Nell is distressing indeed, but not as Dickens
