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PARTISAN REVIEW
very greatness of Balzac's achievement. Sainte-Beuve said of him that
he cast himself on the nineteenth century as on his subject, that so–
ciety is a thing of the female gender, that society wanted a portrait,
that he was that painter, that he painted it without any regard to
tradition, that he brought the methods and expedients of painting
up to date in order to comply with the ambition and coquetry of a
society that was resolved to be its own precedent and to resemble
nothing but itself. But Balzac did not have such a straightforward
portraiture in mind, at any rate in the plain sense of painting exact
likenesses. His books resulted from splendid ideas, ideas of splendid
pictures, if you like (for he often thought of one art in terms of
another), but in that case from a splendid artistic effect, from a
splendid pictorial idea. As he saw an artistic effect as a splendid idea,
in
the same way he could see the idea of a book as an artistic effect.
His mind's eye showed him a picture where there was something
strikingly original and compelling. Imagine a writer nowadays who
would have the idea of treating the same theme twenty times over
in different lights, and who would feel that he was doing something
as deep, as subtle, as powerful, overwhelming, original, and striking
as Monet's fifty cathedrals or forty water lilies. An ardent picture–
lover, Balzac at times delighted in the thought that he too had a
splendid idea for a picture, for a picture that people would rave
about; but it was always an idea, a ruling idea, not unpremeditated
portraiture, as Sainte-Beuve took it to
be.
From that point of view
even Flaubert worked with less of a preconceived idea than he.
Color of
Salammbo
J
Bovary.
Beginning on a subject that doesn't ap–
peal to him. Takes whatever's handy to get to work on. But all the
great writers coalesce somewhere, and are like different moments,
sometimes incompatible, of a single man of genius whose life is co–
terminous with the story of mankind. Where Flaubert coalesces with
Balzac is where he said: "I've got to have a glorious finish for
Felicite."
Because of this true-to-life reality in Balzac's novels, by knowing
them we come to see a sort of literary quality in a hundred everyday
occurrences which till then we should have looked on as too acci–
dental for it. But it is just the law of such accidents that emerges
from his books. Don't let us hark back to his characters and events
in their lives. We needn't repeat among ourselves what others have
