Excerpt from Honore De Balzac, Vol. 2
Le Pere Goriot perhaps deserves to be ranked as that one of Balzac"s novels which has united the greatest number of suffrages, and which exhibits his peculiar merits, not indeed without any of Ins faults, but with the merits in eminent, and the faults not in glaring, degree. It was written (the preface is dated 1834) at the time when his genius was at its very height, when it had completely burst the strange shell which had so long enveloped and cramped it, when the scheme of the Comedie Humaine was not quite finally settled (it never was that), but elaborated to a very considerable extent, when the author had already acquired most of the knowledge of the actual world which he possessed, and when his physical powers were as yet unimpaired by his enormous labor and his reckless disregard of "burning the candle at both ends." Although it exhibits, like nearly all his work, the complication of interest and scheme which was almost a necessity to him, that complication is kept within reasonable bounds, and managed with wonderful address. The history of Goriot and his daughters, the fortunes of Eugene de Rastignac, and the mysterious personality and operations of Vautrin, not only all receive due and unperplexed development, but work upon each other with that correspondence and interdependence which form the rarest gift of the novelist, and which, when present, too commonly have attached to them the curse of over-minuteness and complexity. No piece of Balzac"s Dutch painting is worked out with such marvelous minuteness as the Pension Vauquer, and hardly any book of his has more lifelike studies of character.
It would, however, not be difficult to find books with an almost, if not quite, equal accumulation of attractions, which have somehow failed to make the mark that has been made by Le Pere Goriot. And the practiced critic of novels knows perfectly well why this is.
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