But
Balzac's fiction has, too, its pocket Utopias, less attractive and
less invigorating than Madame Dudevant's, and in his most realistic
portrayals there are not infrequently dream-scapes of the fancy. The
truth that we can most readily perceive in his work is one which,
after all, embraces the ideally potential in man as well as his most
material manifestations. It is small compared with the mass of what he
wrote; but, where found, it is supreme.
In constructing plot Balzac is unequal and often inferior. Here it is
that his romanticist origins reappear rankly like weeds, giving us
factitious melodrama that accords ill with his sober harvest of
actuality. And his melodrama has not the merit of being various. It
nearly always contains the same band of rogues, disguised under
different names, conspiring to ruin innocent victims by the old tricks
of their trade.
Then, again, many of his novels have no understandable progression
from the commencement, through the middle, to the conclusion. This is
not because he was incapable of involving his characters in the
consequences of their actions, but because things that he esteemed of
greater importance interfered with the story's logical development.
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