"Thus," he says,
"brothers and sisters, in the time of their infancy or childhood, have
nothing in common except a certain family resemblance--and this not
always. But, as they advance in age, the features that individualized
them become attenuated, they return to the type of their progenitors,
and one perceives that they are children of the same father and
mother. Balzac's novels," he concludes, "have a connection of this
kind. In his head, they were, so to speak, contemporary."
The simile is not a happy one. It does not help to reconcile us to an
artificial approximation of books that are heterogeneous, unequal in
value, and, frequently, composed under influences far removed from the
after-thought that was given to them by a putative father. Balzac was
not well inspired in relating his novels to each other logically. Such
natural relationship as they possess is that of issuing from the same
brain, though acting under varying conditions and in different states
of development; and it is true that, if the story of this brain is
known, and its experiences understood, a certain classification might
be made--perhaps more than one--of its creations, on account of common
traits, resemblances of subject or treatment, which could serve to
link them together loosely.
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