Yet a word should be said of Balzac's widening the limits
of admission. His widening was two-fold. It boldly took the naked
reality of latest date, the men and women of his time in the full
glare of passion and action, unsoftened by the veil that hides and in
some measure transforms when they have passed into history; and it
included in this reality the little, the commonplace, the trivial.
This innovator in fiction aimed, as Crabbe and Wordsworth had aimed in
poetry, at interesting the reader in themes which were ordinarily
deemed to be void of interest. The thing deserved trying. His
predecessors, and even his contemporaries, had neglected it. An
experimenter in this direction, he now and then forgot that the proper
subject-matter of the novel is man--man either individual or
collective--and spent himself in fruitless endeavours to endow the
abstract with reality.
When he opined, somewhat rashly, that George Sand had no force of
conception, no power of constructing a plot, no faculty of attaining
the true, no art of the pathetic, he doubtless wished the influence to
be drawn that he was not lacking in them himself.
As regards the first, his claim can be admitted without reserve.
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