Had he done so, however,
he would have been astonished to find his canon reversed, and to have
perceived that the primary condition of the realist's success, and
the distinctive note of those writers who have pressed genius into
the service of realism, is that they do _not_ share--that they are
unalterably and ostentatiously free from--the emotions to which
they appeal in their readers. A fortunate accident has enabled us to
compare the treatment which the world's greatest tragic poet and its
greatest master of realistic tragedy have respectively applied to
virtually the same subject; and the two methods are never likely to
be again so impressively contrasted as in _King Lear_ and _Le Pere
Goriot_. But, in truth, it must be impossible for any one who feels
Balzac's power not to feel also how it is heightened by Balzac's
absolute calm--a calm entirely different from that stern composure
which was merely a point of style and not an attitude of the heart
with the old Greek tragedians--a calm which, unlike theirs, insulates,
so to speak, and is intended to insulate, the writer, to the end that
his individuality, of which only the electric current of sympathy ever
makes a reader conscious, may disappear, and the characters of the
drama stand forth the more life-like from the complete concealment of
the hand that moves them.
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