Force
of conception is dominant throughout his fiction. It is that which
gained his novels their earliest acceptance. Whether they were
approved or disapproved in other respects, their strong originality
imposed itself on the attention of friends and enemies alike. One felt
then, and one feels now, though more than half a century has elapsed
since they were produced, that, whatever factitious accretions clung
to them, they came into the world with substance and form new-fashioned;
no mere servile perpetuation of an effete type, but a fresh departure
in the annals of art.
Especially is this seen in his characterization. His men and women are
most of them put on foot with the energy of movement in them and an
idiosyncrasy of speech and action that has not been surpassed. As
already stated, they generally are not portraits, although his memory
was of that peculiar concave visuality which allowed him to cast its
images forth solidly into space. What he did was to remodel these
images with proportions differing from those of the reality,
magnifying or diminishing them pretty much as Swift with his
Brobdingnagians and Lilliputians; and, having got the body of his
personage recomposed, with mental and moral qualities and defects
corresponding to every one of its details--for Balzac was a firm
believer in the corporal being an exact reflection of the spiritual
--he set his mechanisms in motion.
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