284
PARTISAN
R'EVIEW
places the human beings whose destiny he
is
seriously relating, in
their precisely defined historical and social setting, but also con–
ceives this connection as a necessary one: to
him
every milieu be–
comes a moral and physical atmosphere which impregnates the land–
scape, the dwelling, furniture, implements, clothing, physique, char–
acter, surroundings, ideas, activities, and fates of men, and at the
same time the general historical situation reappears as a total atmos–
phere which envelops all its several milieux.
It
is worth noting that
he did this best and most truthfully for the circle of the middle and
lower Parisian bourgeoisie and for the provinces; while his representa–
tion of high society is often melodramatic, false, and unintention–
ally comic. He is not free from melodramatic exaggeration elsewhere;
but whereas in the middle and lower spheres this only occasionally im–
pairs the truthfulness of the whole, he is unable to create the true
atmosphere of the higher spheres-including those of the intellect.
Balzac's atmospheric realism is a product of his period, is it–
self a part and a result of an atmosphere. The same intellectual at–
titude--namely Romanticism-which first felt the atmospheric unity–
of-style of earlier periods so strongly and so sensuously, which dis–
covered the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well as the his–
torical idiosyncrasy of foreign cultures (Spain, the Orient) -this same
intellectual attitude also developed organic comprehension of the
atmospheric uniqueness of its own period in all its manifold forms.
Atmospheric Historicism and atmospheric Realism are closely con–
nected; Michelet and Balzac are borne on the same stream. The
events which occurred in France between 1792 and 1815, and their
effects during the next decade, caused modem contemporaneous
realism to develop first and most strongly there, and its political and
cultural unity gave France, in this respect, a long start over Germany;
French reality, in all its multifariousness, could be comprehended as
a whole. Another Romantic current which contributed, no less than
did Romantic penetration into the total atmosphere of a milieu, to
the development of modem realism, was the mixture of styles to
which we have so often referred; this made it possible for char–
acters of any station, with all the practical everyday complications of
their lives-Julien Sorel as well as old Goriot or Madame Vauquer
-to become the subject of serious literary representation.
These general considerations appear to me cogent; it is far
