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During the years of Balzac's greatest literary activity, which were
also those of his bitterest polemics, his opponents made much capital
out of the caprices of his pen. In the lawsuit against the _Revue de
Paris_, Monsieur Chaix d'Est-Ange, the defendant's counsel, provoked
roars of laughter by quoting passages from the _Lily in the Valley_;
and Jules Janin, in his criticism of _A Provincial Great Man in
Paris_, grew equally merry over the verbal conceits abounding in the
portraits of persons. And yet the very volumes that furnish the
largest number of ill-begotten sentences contain many passages of
sustained dignity, sober strength, and proportioned beauty.
Normally, Balzac's style, in spite of its mannerisms, its use and
abuse of metaphor, its laboured evolution and expression of the idea,
and its length and heaviness of period, adapts itself to the matter,
and alters with kaleidoscopic celerity, according as there is
description, analysis, or dramatization. Thus blending with the
subject, it loses a good deal of its proper virtue, which explains why
it does not afford the pleasure of form enjoyed in such writers as
George Sand, Flaubert, Renan, and Anatole France.
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