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PARTISAN
RIEVIEW
nected with the great Romantic agitation for the mixture of styles-–
the movement whose slogan was "Shakespeare vs. Racine"-and I
consider Stendhal's anti Balzac's form of it, the mixture of seriousness
and everyday reality, more important than the form it took in the
Hugo group, which set out to unite the sublime and the grotesque.
The newness of this attitude, and the new type of subjects which
were seriously, problematically, tragically treated, caused the develop–
ment of an entirely new kind of serious or, if one prefers, elevated
style; neither the Antique nor the Christian nor the Shakespearean
nor the Racinian level of conception and expression could easily be
transferred to the new subjects; at first there was some uncertainty
in regard to the kind of serious attitude to be assumed.
Stendhal, whose realism had sprung from resistance to
a.
present
which he despised, preserved many eighteenth-century instincts in his
attitude. In his heroes there are still haunting memories of figures
like Romeo, Don Juan, Valmont (from the
Liaisons dangereuses)
, and
Saint-Preux; above all, the figure of Napoleon remains alive in
him;
the heroes of his novels think and feel in opposition to their
time, only with contempt do they descend to the intrigues and
machinations of the post-Napoleonic present. Although there is al–
ways an admixture of motifs which, according to the older view,
would have the character of comedy, it remains true of
him
that a
figure for whom he feels tragic sympathy, and for whom he de–
mands it of the reader, must be a real hero, great and daring in
his thoughts and passions. In Stendhal the freedom of the great
heart, the freedom of passion, still has much of the aristocratic loft–
iness and of the playing with life which are more characteristic of
the
ancien regime
than of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.
Balzac plunges his heroes far more deeply into time-conditioned
dependency; he thereby loses the standards and limits of what had
earlier been felt ,as tragic, and he does not yet possess the objective
seriousness toward modern reality which later developed. He bom–
bastically takes every entanglement as tragic, every urge as a great
passion; he is .always ready to declare every person in misfortune
a hero or a saint;
if
it is a woman, he compares her to an angel
or the Madonna; every energetic scoundrel, and above all every
figure who is at all gloomy, he converts into a demon; and he calls
poor old Goriot
«ce Christ de la paternite."
It was in conformity with
