Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France — Story, Setting & Ideas

Balzac's Uneven Diction and the Question of Style

Brandes devotes considerable attention to Balzac's stylistic inconsistencies. He notes that Balzac's prose is 'uncertain,' alternating between 'vulgarly trivial' and 'bombastic.' This is not a casual observation; Brandes argues that such unevenness is a serious deficiency because 'what distinguishes art from that which is not art, is just that determined exclusion of what is almost, but not quite right, to which we give the name of style.' He further claims that French readers, with their 'keen rhetorical sense,' found this particularly objectionable, whereas foreign audiences—who read Balzac in translation—were more forgiving. The passage reveals Brandes's own critical method: he evaluates authors by the precision of their language, and he links stylistic choices to national literary expectations.

Dialogue and the Representation of Social Milieu

Brandes's analysis of Balzac's dialogue is implicit in his broader discussion of the novelist's method. He credits Balzac with introducing 'a method of observation which could be followed by others,' suggesting that the author's dialogue and descriptive passages are grounded in empirical attention to social detail. The excerpt on Balzac's death, drawn from Victor Hugo's Choses Vues, illustrates this: the maid's reported speech—'Monsieur is dying. Madame has gone to her own room'—is a terse, revealing exchange that Brandes uses to underscore Balzac's marital disappointment. Brandes does not invent dialogue; he selects quoted words that expose character and social relations. This technique mirrors what he admires in Balzac: the ability to let a single line of dialogue convey a world of unspoken tension.

Recurring Motifs: The House, Death, and the Writer's Solitude

Brandes weaves a subtle motif around domestic spaces and mortality. He notes that Balzac 'had furnished a beautiful house in Paris for himself' shortly before his death, and his friends recalled the Turkish proverb: 'When the house is ready, Death enters.' This image recurs in the description of Balzac's final moments, where his wife retreats to her own room, leaving him attended by servants and his mother. Brandes also reports that Balzac advised young writers to pursue 'diligence, a solitary life, and (this half in jest) the vow of chastity.' The juxtaposition of domestic preparation, marital absence, and the ideal of solitude creates a coherent pattern: Brandes uses these details to argue that Balzac's personal life mirrored his literary method—a disciplined, almost monastic devotion to observation, even at the cost of human connection.

Brandes's Critical Voice: Diction as a Lens

Brandes's own diction is notably precise and evaluative. He describes Balzac's contemporaries as 'astonished' by his advice on chastity, and he dismisses attacks on Balzac's morality as 'the invariable insult hurled by literary impotence at everything in literature that is vigorous and virile.' This is not neutral reporting; Brandes chooses forceful, even combative language to align himself with the 'vigorous' authors he studies. He also uses structural cues—such as the chapter titles 'Balzac' repeated six times—to signal the centrality of certain figures. In the excerpt, he moves from political background to individual author, always grounding his judgments in specific textual or biographical evidence. His critical method is itself a form of authorial choice: he privileges concrete observation over abstract theory, and he expects the same from the writers he examines.

Brandes's study rewards readers who attend to the interplay between an author's language and the social forces that shape it. He does not offer a simple chronicle of Romanticism; instead, he demonstrates how diction, dialogue, and descriptive detail reveal the tensions of an era. For those approaching this volume, it is useful to read with an eye for Brandes's own stylistic judgments—his praise of precision, his impatience with bombast—as they illuminate the critical standards he applies to the French Romantics.

That grey afternoon, Brandes’ careful tracing of Balzac’s recurring gestures made me think of small, deliberate acts—how a button or a stitch can carry a whole world of feeling. The rain kept falling, and I drifted to The Tailor of Gloucester — Themes and Context, where another patience dwells, quiet and unhurried, like warmth behind a lit window.