Zola borrowed more, but
mainly the unwholesome parts, truncating these further to suit his
theory of the novel as a slice of life seen through a temperament, and
travestying in the Rougon-Macquart scheme, with its burden of heredity
and physiological blemish, Balzac's cumbrous and plausible doctrine of
the _Comedy_. Both novelists made a mistake in arrogating to
themselves the role of the _savant_. Neither of them seemed to
understand that there are limits imposed on each profession by the
mode of its operation. For Zola the novel was not only an observation
working upon the voluntary acts of life, it was an experiment--like
that of the astrologers whom Moses met in Egypt--producing phenomena
artificially, and allowing a law of necessity to be deduced from the
result. And for Balzac the novel was something of the same kind--a
synthesis of every human activity framed by one who, as he proudly
claimed, had observed and analysed society in all its phases from top
to bottom, legislations, religions, histories, and present time. What
Balzac did in fiction and what he thought he did are separated by a
gulf which could only have been bridged over by the long and painful
study of a man surviving for centuries.
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