Excerpt from Seraphita
About these he seems always to have had a hankering to write, which was due partly to his lifelong cult of Sir Walter, and partly to a curious delusion that he was himself a born historical novelist. "Seraphita," on the other hand, has a sort of kinship with other products of the 1830 period.
But all the books are perhaps most interesting to us, first, as showing Balzac's specially "philosophic" velleities; and, secondly, as exhibiting a side of him which is apt to be overlooked - his character as a reader and a student.
The "philosophy" has been rather variously judged. It has seldom been taken very seriously; but attempts have sometimes been made to discover in it anticipations of later discoveries or, to adopt a much safer word, theories. These anticipation-hunts rarely send the hunter home with an empty bag, but it is as rarely that the game is of certain quality. Indeed, if we remember that even in the widest and vaguest sense, "philosophy" was practically exhausted many hundred years ago - that new philosophies are only the old ones with their coats and trousers turned, scoured, dyed, and altered somewhat in fashion - it would be very odd if a clever man, even with no regular training or special vocation, did not anticipate more or less what others of his contemporaries are going to think. For the rest, Balzac's philosophy is of a distinctly loose sort, and may very well have occurred to him in whole or in part when he was a studious, if irregularly studious, schoolboy. It is, indeed, very much of the kind to which schoolboys of some brains are as prone as men of riper years, and in which they are perhaps as likely to attain a result, or what looks like it.
The second bearing of these curious books is more tangible. It is certain that Balzac, unlike Dickens, his fellow voyant, and still more unlike most of the "realists" who claim kindred with him, was a very great reader.
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. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Seraphita (Classic Reprint) (Clara Bell)