An aside: Ellen Wilson and Benjamin Disraeli's conflicting views of Balzac reveal much

Reflections by politicians on authors of literature and their works are not just trivia. They have a way in some cases of revealing almost more than political writings. Thus this article will glance at the remarks Woodrow Wilson's family and Benjamin Disraeli made about the novelist Honore de Balzac, about whom I wrote last month. After ruminating on Balzac in my last post because his political novels were a forerunner of Disraeli and the political novel, I thought I might look up what Woodrow Wilson, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone thought of him. Because the results were charming and interesting, I am pausing to share them.

Only one document in the monumental 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson references Balzac, and it’s not by Woodrow. It is a letter to the future president by his young wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, an even more devoted reader of literature than Woodrow, who dabbled in fiction himself but largely specialized in works about government and history. I always like looking up literary figures in the indexes of the Wilson papers because one of the most interesting things about Wilson as opposed to other presidents is that he was our only president with a PhD, and thus was exposed to myriad great writers in the course of his long academic career. Even some of Wilson’s biggest detractors find this to be an appealing fact about Wilson. Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, who has called himself a founding member of the “Hate Woodrow Wilson Club,” said as much in his book Liberal Fascism. “There’s no disputing that a big part of Wilson’s appeal, then and now stemmed from the fact that he was the first PhD to serve in the Oval Office. Of course, the White House was no stranger to great minds and great scholars. But Wilson was the first professional academic at a time when the professionalization of social science was considered a cornerstone of human progress.”

Ellen Wilson's rejection of Balzac

Here is what Ellen wrote to Wilson about Balzac on March 8, 1889, while Wilson was a young professor in Middletown, Connecticut:

“I need you to get me some more books to read! Have finished all those--all except two which were uninteresting so I merely looked them over. I feel inclined after this dose of Balzac to equal or exceed you in your contempt for the French. One of them particularly is a revelation in the singular & total inability shown by both the author & his characters to even form the conception of morality! However that is evidently only true of Parisian life. It was consoling to read in Hamerton [author of The Intellectual Life, which the Wilsons read and discussed in their letters] that the smaller communities are in this respect exactly like the same in England. ‘There is no question as to the morality of the women,--it is a matter of course.’ [This is a quote from Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady.] Even Balzac recognizes conjugal fidelity as a ‘bourgeoise virtue’!”

The first interesting thing about this letter is that it is revealing of how the future president thought about the French, with whom he had to negotiate to end World War One in 1919. “I feel inclined after this dose of Balzac to equal or exceed you in your contempt for the French,” Ellen writes. Earlier this year I wrote about scholars’ debates on whether the young Wilson was contemptuous of Germans, and once again found his reflections on the subject in the context of a discussion with his wife about a literary writer. Then it was Henry James and his negative view of Germans that inspired Wilson to reveal a little of what he thought of them. This time reflecting on Balzac got Ellen started on Woodrow’s “contempt for the French.” This is fascinating in light of speculation by some writers that Woodrow was biased against the French in the talks over the Versailles Treaty in 1919 that settled the lay of the new world after the Great War ended. Adam Tooze, in a 2015 book called The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, wrote that “Wilson was no doubt more comfortable with the British than the French.” Tooze chronicled what he viewed as Wilson’s stereotypes coming into relations with the European leaders. (For example he viewed British prime minister Lloyd George as a reactionary warmonger, Tooze says, and Wilson’s top deputy “Colonel House, when he visited London, much preferred dealing with Tory patricians, such as Lord Balfour and old-school Liberal Grandees like Sir Edward Grey, who fitted Wilson's aspic image of British politics far better than the populist Lloyd George.”) This caused French prime minister Georges Clemenceau to react with his own stereotypes, Tooze writes: “Faced with this wall of stereotypes, it was tempting for the Europeans to respond with their own version of the stylized transatlantic difference. At Versailles, Georges Clemenceau was to remark that he found Wilson's sanctimoniousness easier to stomach when he reminded himself that the American had never lived in a world where it was good form to shoot a Democrat.” Thus Wilson’s “contempt” for the French may have had real world impacts on the terms to end World War One.

The second interesting thing about Ellen’s letter about Balzac is what her outright rejection of Balzac’s depiction of sexual infidelities says about the history of the culture wars in this country and in Europe. We tend to think of conservatives as being more strict on sex, and liberals as being more relaxed. But as this letter shows it hasn’t always been thus. The Wilsons were a conservative Christian family, though liberal in some respects in 19th Century Presbyterian culture. Disraeli, by contrast, whose view of Balzac we will get to in a moment, was the leader of the capital-C Conservative Party in England and yet is much more “liberal” about sex. His arch-rival William Gladstone was a very strict Christian who has become famous for notating in his diary the moments when he whipped himself for sexual thoughts, but headed the Liberal Party in the UK. The evolution of the United States’ Republican and Democratic parties on the subject of religion is worth a closer look in some other essay. But suffice it to note here that the progressives of Wilson’s era originated their views in a socially conscious religious tradition that included not only Wilson but also Jane Addams and many others. 

Ellen says in the letter that the two Balzac novels she perused demonstrated a “total inability … by both the author & his characters to even form the conception of morality.” Perhaps she was looking at Cousin Bette, one of his most famous novels, which satirizes the Parisian culture of marital infidelity and is consequently loaded with extramarital affairs. Or perhaps she was reading Lost Illusions, the inciting event of which is an affair, among other examples of extramarital sex. Or his Father Goroit, in which a young lawyer tries to climb into high society by sleeping with married women. All these novels satirize and scrutinize the culture of infidelity in 19th Century Paris. But Ellen seems not to pick up on Balzac’s satire. 

If Ellen missed Balzac’s criticism of Parisian life it may be partly because Balzac was not always satirizing sex. He had a complicated relationship to the subject. “Salvation through sexual intercourse is one of the themes of his life and work,” wrote Balzac biographer Graham Robb. (So though was a view of sex as a negative “drain on creative energy.”) Or it could be that word of Balzac’s sometimes casual approach to sex in his own life had somehow reached the Wilsons in central Connecticut, though this is unlikely. Balzac married very late. After years of trying to wed, in part for money, he finally married the year he died, in 1850. In the meantime evidence exists of trysts with women and prostitutes: “Scraps of correspondence reveal a certain amount of casual promiscuity,” Robb writes. “A note from a girl called Jenny who worked as a waitress at the Cafe Frascati downstairs; and some transactions with Armand Dutacq involving ‘Annette’ and another Louise. Recourse to prostitutes was common enough to be relatively insignificant -- but not with someone who had firm ideas about sex as a drain on creative energy. Here, the work appears far richer than his life. In [Balzac’s 90-plus-novel series] ‘La Comédie Humaine,’ shop-girls and waitresses earning money on the side have surnames and identities; in Balzac's life, they do not. These women were just distractions from the task of finding the global solution he hoped [his girlfriend] would provide.”

In any case, Ellen’s dismissal of Balzac out of hand is perhaps evidence of a certain social conservatism on the part of the Wilsons, who both grew up in small towns in the South. Ellen’s rejection of Balzac’s often sociological studies of all aspects of Parisian life reminds one that Ellen was not just a strong female who grew up planning not even to marry a man (see my writing on Ellen’s independence in youth in this blog post). She also, despite that history, agreed with Woodrow in the Gilded Age that women belonged only in certain gender roles. In 1884 after hearing a woman speak at the Association for the Advancement of Women in Baltimore, Woodrow remarked: “Barring the chilled, scandalized feeling that always overcomes me when I see and hear women speak in public, I derived a good deal of whimsical delight … from the proceedings.” In response, Ellen said that the sight of “representative women in medicine, the pulpit and the law” lecturing from the podium sometimes made her “too indignant to see the funny side.” She wondered: “How can they make themselves so absurd,—and worse than absurd! I know some of them are as good as can be, and I suppose they must be clever,—above the average; and yet how absolutely senseless their conduct. Why is it that cleverness is so apt to unsettle a woman's brains? Isn’t there room in our poor heads for both common sense, and uncommon?” Woodrow did however have positive comments for women who preserved some femininity, or were “motherly” or “jolly” or “graceful” in attitude, as Victoria Bissell Brown points out in a chapter entitled “Conservative among Progressives: Woodrow Wilson in the Golden Age of American Women's Higher Education,” in editor James Axtell’s 2011 essay anthology The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson. This is what women who sought to get Wilson to approve the vote for women were up against. Though Wilson ultimately signed the amendment that got women the vote, his conversion to that side of the issue was long and incremental.

Disraeli's admiration of Balzac

It's also interesting to note the contrast between Ellen’s view on Balzac and Benjamin Disreali’s. Woodrow detested Disraeli, perhaps mainly because he was such a huge fan of Dizzy’s archrival William Gladstone. The difference between Gladstone and Disraeli’s views of sex were one of the things Gladstone hated about his rival. It’s been said he never felt Disraeli had the moral fortitude Gladstone saw as necessary for prime minister. This may have been in part rank hypocrisy on Gladstone’s part, as he had a long shadowy history looking for prostitutes to “reform,” but it is true that Disraeli for better or worse was much more cosmopolitan about sex. He wrote a novel about a long extramarital affair with a married women, has been rumored to have left “illegitimate” children after relationships with other women, and reportedly encouraged his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton to go to Turkey to enjoy “seraglios of boys” that he had apparently encountered while traveling the East.

Disraeli had the highest respect for Balzac as a writer. “I should not be surprised if the great body of writers of fiction that have flourished in France during the last half of a century will ultimately take in their literature the same position as is occupied in ours by the Elizabethan Dramatists,” Disraeli wrote in 1860, in a diary entry reprinted in Helen M. Swartz and Marvin Swartz’s 1975 book Disraeli’s Reminiscences. “Among these French writers, two names will, I apprehend, stand out pre-eminent, though their style is very different. I will not speak of George Sand as of Shakespeare, for they have little resemblance, though Balzac may be pitted with Ben Jonson--but Sand is in my opinion, without doubt, the finest prose writer in any language.” (The emphasis is mine.) This compliment to Balzac is perhaps an even greater tribute than one might realize, as Disraeli rarely read English novelists. As Disraeli biographer Sarah Bradford wrote:

“Another curious aspect of Disraeli as a writer is that, although living in the greatest age of the English novel, he rarely read the works of his contemporaries and when he did was not impressed. “In September 1857 he confessed in a letter to Lady Londonderry, ‘I wish, like you, I could console myself with reading novels … but I have lost all zest for fiction, and have for many years.” [Thirteen years later he would release another novel and Charles Dickens would welcome him back to the brotherhood of men of letters. But in 1857 Disraeli went on:] “I have never read anything of Dickens, except for an extract in a newspaper, and therefore, I cannot help to decide on the merits of Little Dorrit.”

But then Disraeli didn’t have to speculate on Balzac’s character from Middletown, Connecticut, as did the Wilsons. He actually once attended a dinner with Balzac, as well as Alexandre Dumas. Disraeli wrote, in another diary entry in Disraeli’s Reminiscences:

“This reminds me, that in 1842 I met one evening at the Opera one Charles Le Dru whose acquaintance I had made at Lady Blessington's--an advocate & great democrat, but very much addicted to the English, a lively, cordial man. He was with my banker John Drummond, & he told me that a provincial poet, of whom much was expected, was to read a tragedy that night after, or before, of at, a supper which he was to give in a sort of barn, or colossal garret, or gigantic artist's studio, quite unfurnished, which was lent him for the occasion— & so I went. And it was a wonderful scene. John & Harvey Drummond & I think George Smythe, & then all the literary heros of whom we had heard so much, Sue & Souliés, Balzac, & many more. I dare say forty persons—rough fare, but plenty.”

A survey of indexes, incidentally, in works about William Gladstone turned up no comments at all about Balzac. Perhaps he would have agreed with Ellen Wilson. 

In any case, while there are obvious limits to what can be gleaned from a short private statement about a writer like Balzac, these statements reveal flashes of the inner hearts of these political figures, and sometimes (as in the case of Wilson’s depicted “contempt for the French”) more than would ever be shown in their public writings.