SAINTE-BEUVE AND BALZAC
569
philosophic affair. Not much is made of it, anyhow. And the story
is much more concerned with the havoc a ruling passion can wreak
on an affectionate family that must put up with it, whatever the
object of that passion may be. Balthasar Claes is brother to Hulot,
and to Grandet. Anyone electing to write about a neurasthenic's
family will have material for a picture on the same lines.
Style is so largely a record of the transformation imposed on
reality by the writer's mind that Balzac's style, properly speaking,
does not exist. Here Sainte-Beuve is completely off the scent. "This
style which is often titillating and melting, enervated, flushed and
streaked with all manner of hues, this delightfully corrupted style,
thoroughly Asiatic, as our teachers used to say, and in places more
dislocated and more pliable than the limbs of a Greek pantomimist."
Nothing could be less accurate. In Flaubert's style, now, all the ele–
ments of reality are rendered down into the unanimous substance,
into vast, unvaryingly polished surfaces. No flaw remains in it. It
has been rubbed to looking-glass smoothness. Everything is shown
there, but only in reflection, and without affecting its uniform sub–
stance. Everything at variance with it has been made over and ab–
sorbed. In Balzac, on the other hand, all the elements of a style
which is still to come exist together, undigested and untransformed.
It is a style that neither suggests, nor mirrors; it explains. It explains,
moreover, by the aid of images which are intensely striking but do
not fuse with the rest, and which convey what he wants to say as
we convey something in the course of conversation-if we happen to
be conversational geniuses-without concerning ourselves as to
whether what we say is out of keeping or an interruption.
As
he
will say in a letter: "Good marriages are like cream; a mere nothing
will turn them sour," it is by images of this sort--striking, that is,
and apt, but discordant, explaining instead of suggesting, and refrac–
tory to any considerations of beauty or fitness-that he will get
his
effects: "M. de Bargeton's laugh which was like damp squibs go–
ing off, etc.," "Her complexion had taken on the warm tone of a
porcelain vase with a light inside it," "Finally, to describe the man
by a stroke whose intelligence will be appreciated by people accus–
tomed to do business, he wore blue spectacles, whose object was to
conceal his glance under a pretext of protecting his eyesight from the
glare of the light."
