IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
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itself makes it possible to deduce; secondly, that he conceives the
present as history-the present
is
present, being a story resulting from
history. And in practice his people and his atmospheres, contemporary
as they may be, are always represented as phenomena sprung from
historical events and forces; one has but to read over, say, the account
of the origin of Grandet's income
(Eugenie Grandet),
or that of Du
Bousquier's life
(La vieille Pille)
or Old Goriot's, to be certain of
this. Nothing of the sort so conscious and so detailed is to be found
before the appearance of Stendhal and Balzac, and the latter far
outdoes the former in organically connecting man and history. Such a
conception and execution are wholly historical.
We will now return to the second
motif-ccce ne seront pas des
jaits imaginaires; ce sera ce qui se passe partout."
What is expressed
here is that the source of his invention is not free imagination but
real life, as
it
presents itself everywhere.
Ndw,
in respect to this mani–
fold life, steeped
in
history, mercilessly represented with all its trivial–
ity, practical preoccupations, ugliness, and vulgarity, Balzac has an
attitude such as Stendhal had had before him: in the form determined
by its actuality, its triviality, its inner historical laws, he takes it
seriously, and even tragically. This, since the rise of classical taste,
had occurred nowhere-not even in Balzac's own practical and
his–
torical manner, oriented as it is upon a social self-accounting of man.
Since French Classicism and Absolutism the treatment of ordinary
reality had not only become much more circumscribed and decorous,
but moreover a tragic or problematic view of this reality was ex–
cluded. We have attempted to analyze this in the preceding chapters:
a subject from practical reality could be treated comically, satirically,
or moralistically; certain subjects from definite and limited realms
of contemporary everyday life attained to an intermediate style, the
pathetic; but beyond that they might not go. The real everyday life
of even the middle ranks of society belong to the vulgar style; the
profound and important Henry Fielding, who touches upon so many
moral, aesthetic, and social problems, keeps his presentation steadily
within the satiric-ethical key and says in
Tom Jones
(Book XIV,
chapter 1): " ... that kind of novels which, like this I am writing,
is of the comic class."
The entrance of existential and tragic seriousness into realism,
as we observe it in Stendhal and Balzac, is indubitably closely con-
