Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 20.djvu/18

INTRODUCTION Balzac, on the other hand, a Frenchman of Frenchmen, was born in a French country town, was brought up in the country, and, what is more, was in the constant habit of retiring to out-of-the-way country inns and similar places to work. He had the key, to begin with; and he never let it get rusty. To some tastes and judgments his country sketches, if less lively, are more veracious even than his Parisian ones; they have less convention about them; they are less obviously under the dominion of prepossessions and crotchets, less elaborately calculated to form backgrounds and scenery for the evolutions of Rastignacs and Rubemprés.

The result is, in Les Paysans, a book of extraordinary interest and value. In one respect, indeed, it falls short of the highest kind of novel. There is no character in whose fortunes or in whose development we take the keenest interest. Blondet is little more than an intelligent chorus or reporter, though he does not tell the story; Montcornet is a good-natured "old silly;" the Countess is—a Countess. Not one of the minor characters, not even Eigou, is very much more than a sketch. But then there is such a multitude of these sketches, and they are all instinct with such life and vigor! Although Balzac has used no illegitimate attractions—think only of the kind of stuff with which M. Zola, like a child smearing color on a book-engraving, would have daubed the grisly outlines of the Tonsard family!—he has not shrunk from what even our modem realists, I suppose, would allow to be "candor;" and his book is as masterly as it is crushing in its indictment against the peasant.

Is the indictment as true as it is severe and well urged? I am rather afraid that we have not much farther to look than at certain parts of more than one of the Three Kingdoms