Excerpt from Aspects of Balzac

Some of his critics would have said that to talk of "the Methods of Balzac" was to offer a contradiction in terms, since Balzac and method were incompatible. They might have found much to support their objection. The novelist himself held that a man should fling himself headlong into his work, as Curtius plunged into the gulf. Perhaps the most pregnant saying in the general preface of 1842, wherein the scheme of the "Comedie" is set out, one fully borne out by the novels themselves, is that "La passion est toute l'humanite. Sans elle, la religion, l'histoire, le roman, l'art, seraient inutiles." This phrase is the keynote to the vast harmony which Balzac composed.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.