On such an occasion
there was no room for the reservations of criticism. It was the moment
to apply the maxim, _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_. "The name of Balzac,"
he said, "will mingle with the luminous track projected by our epoch
into the future. . . . Monsieur de Balzac was the first among the
great, one of the highest among the best. All his volumes form but a
single book, wherein our contemporary civilization is seen to move
with a certain terrible weirdness and reality--a marvellous book which
the maker of it entitled a comedy and which he might have entitled a
history. It assumes all forms and all styles; it goes beyond Tacitus
and reaches Suetonius; it traverses Beaumarchais and attains even
Rabelais; it is both observation and imagination, it lavishes the
true, the intimate, the bourgeois, the trivial, the material, and,
through every reality suddenly rent asunder, it allows the most
sombre, tragic ideal to be seen. Unconsciously, and willy nilly, the
author of this strange work belongs to the race of revolutionary
writers. Balzac goes straight to the point. He grapples with modern
society; and from everywhere he wrests something--here, illusion;
there, hopes; a cry; a mask.
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