V. Balzac's Influence

During Balzac's lifetime his influence was perhaps more powerful abroad than in France itself, where lie was fiercely attacked on ail sides.

The enthusiasm of his admirers seems almost fabulons. We hear of societies that were formed in Venice and several other towns, whose members adopted the names of his heroes and heroines and impersonated them. His descriptions of interiors were copied to a nicety, and whole houses were furnished à la Balzac !

But France, too, soon recognized in him a writer of the foremost rank and a personality that marks an epoch in the history of French literature. Balzac bas been termed the father of the modem novcl, but it is not only the modem novel which owes its origin to him, but also the modem drama and to some extent modem criticism. Balzac, in opening out before the novelist and dramatist the whole wide field of human life and activity, broke through, once and for ail, the trammels of conventionality, making a careful and faithful imitation of reality the essential élément of any work whose aim it is ^ to hold, as 'twere, a mirror up to nature.' If the so-called ^ Naturalist ' school of writers in particular, with Emile Zola at their head, trace their methods back to Balzac, or rather consider him as ^ anticipating ' the qualities of tlie ^expérimental' novel created by themselvos, his influence on the novel in gênerai is no Icss palpable, ludeed, it is not too much to allège tliat every good ^vritel'

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of fiction of the présent day is indebted to Balzac in some way or another; no less an autlior than George Eliot owes much of her firmness of delineation to the French novelist.

Balzac considers man as a product of his race, his time, and his social standing ; this view leads naturally up to Taine, his most ardent admirer, and author of the famous Histoire de la littérature anglaise^ who regards a writer as the outcome of his nationality, his period, and his immédiate surroundings. It is interesting to notice that Taine in his essay on Balzac makes use of precisely the same method as Balzac employed in dealing with his characters. Other critics hâve applied this theory less absolutely than Taine, but it still holds its own in modem criticism.