Rexroth on Balzac

Kenneth Rexroth in Classics Revisited, at Bureau of Public Secrets.

"Balzac started out a romantic of the romantics, imitating the Gothic novels of Mrs. Radcliffe and Walpole, and Walter Scott remained his favorite novelist. The novels of his maturity, the Comédie humaine, are just as romantic. What Balzac did, and he was quite well aware that he did this, was to take Scott from the barbarous world of the Scotch border and apply him to the far more barbarous slums and salons of Paris, and to the stifling, small town houses of the provincial middle class. It is this romantic vision which gives Balzac’s novels their melodramatic and cinematographic character."

See Balzac, "A Passion in the Desert", in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 3, and Cousin Bette, in Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 45.