Balzac : Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), French novelist; he converted what had been styled romance into a record of human experience.
... is common on that ground. "Faugh!" expresses the feeling. 27 April 1937 Dickens and Balzac For literary creation and effective expression, who will deny that style has a great force? Of course; without style there is no literature—except in fiction, where a man with bad style like Dickens or Balzac can make up by vigour and the power of his substance. 29 October 1933 Page 550 ... tops are not so high, the drops not so low as in poetical literature. Then again there are great writers in prose and great prose writers and the two are by no means the same thing. Dickens and Balzac are great novelists, but their style or their frequent absence of style had better not be described; Scott attempts a style, but it is neither blameless nor has distinguishing merit. Other novelists... head staring" no doubt at their own position in astonishment at his English. His merit lies in his stories and characters (some of them) not in his language which is bad. The same may be said of Balzac who is the greatest of French novelists but the worst of French writers. 13 June 1938 Romain Rolland Somnath was drawn to the spiritual life through reading novels like Jean Christophe. ...
... was a creator in prose, though not so intense in emanation of character as Balzac, and even in prose he had what Shakespeare had in poetry, though naturally there not to such a heart-disturbing degree as Shakespeare — the gift of imaginative music. Passages in his novels, therefore, approximate often to great poetry, while Balzac for all his giant capacity of dramatic fiction is not seldom the despair... In that sense he was "poetic" enough — "poet" meaning in Greek a maker of forms; but there is form of dramatic situation and there is form of character and there is form of imaginative word-music. Balzac shares with Shakespeare the vastest power known to Europe of living characterisation and is his superior in plot-weaving: a regular world criss-crossed by remarkable incidents and tense with vital ...
... from the literary point of view he is extremely powerful and very beautiful. The names of all his works were mentioned last night." After some time, we had a film on Balzac, apropos of which I asked the Mother, "Have you read Balzac, Mother?" "Yes," she replied, "but I could never go to the Page 50 end. His writing is so boring as if you are chewing stones. But from the psychological point... piece of paper, "Très bien" (Very good) in appreciation. This is the story of my literary work in the two decades. In the year 1952 or 1953 we saw a few films on French writers and musicians like Balzac, Zola, and Chopin (originally a Polish Jew). I had some interesting talks with the Mother on them. I do not know how it happened. Probably because I had at that time become a teacher of French in the ...
... the most concrete, almost the only, reality and Shakespeare seems to have made a more vibrant, more life-thrilled universe where even clowns have genius just as in the novels of Balzac even cooks have it. Shakespeare and Balzac are colossal creators — equal in so far as the putting forth of living beings in a complicated pattern of interrelations is concerned. But while every Frenchman, though excited... of warm sentiment and cool intellect: a clear-seeing, accurately organising idea-force is an important part of the Frenchman's nature side by side with emotional enthusiasm and aesthetic feeling. So Balzac does not answer the whole or even the central need of the Frenchman's being. The typical Englishman in the matter of coolness is not guided by Page 381 intellect but by a commonsense ...
... advanced sadhaks here—you and I." (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: This instance of two reminds me of a joke about Hugo. Balzac is supposed to have told a friend, "There are only two men who know how to write French—myself and Hugo." When this was repeated to Hugo, he said, "But why Balzac?" There is also the story of a Calvinist lady. The Calvinists have the doctrine that people are predestined to go ...
... sadhaks here,..you and I ( laughter ). Sri Aurobindo : This instance of ‘two’ reminds me of a joke of Hugo. Balzac said to a friend that there are two men who know and write French : myself and Hugo. When that was reported to Hugo he said : “That is alright, but why Balzac?” ( Laughter ) There is another story of a lady who believed the doctrine of eternal hell or heaven – according ...
... incomparable was manufactured partly by your enormous reading?" "I agree," he answered, "that without style there is no literature except in fiction where a man with a bad style like Dickens or Balzac can make up by vigour and power of his substance. But I cannot agree with you that I manufactured my style laboriously; style with any life in it cannot be manufactured. It is bom and grows like ...
... directly to France I I must speak up for one of the mightiest no less than finest creations in world literature, Les Miserables of Victor Hugo. A contemporary of Hugo's, equally famous as he, was Balzac who is the most prolific creator of living characters after Shakespeare. So intense is the life-force in his characters that someone has said that even his scullions have genius. To my mind his ...
... there is no obligation to copy faithfully from life. The man of imagination carries a world in himself and a mere hint or suggestion from life is enough to start it going. It is recognised now that Balzac and Dickens created out of them selves their greatest characters which were not at all faithful to the life around them. Balzac's descriptions of society are hopelessly wrong, he knew nothing about ...
... literary creation and effective expression, who will deny that style has a great force? Of course; without style there is no literature—except in fiction, where a man with bad style like Dickens or Balzac can make up by vigour and the power of his substance. Aren't all your letters so refreshing, stimulating to us because of your superb style? And to manufacture your style, you will hardly deny ...
... there is no obligation to copy faithfully from life. The man of imagination carries a world in himself and a mere hint or suggestion from life is enough to start it going. It is recognised now that Balzac & Dickens created on the contrary their greatest characters which were not at all faithful to life around them. Balzac's descriptions of society are hopelessly wrong, he knew nothing about it, but ...
... fundamental principle, the bedrock of real literature or of world-literature. Sub specie aeiernitatis – even a little of this saving factor saves us from a great peril. In the stark realism of a Balzac or in the winging romanticism of a Victor Hugo, or in the poised classicism of a Leconte de Lisle we get a glimpse of this very thing. That is why with all the defects we feel that the sleeping Brahman ...
... proliferating theosophical movement in 1875 – not to mention alchemy, mesmerism (i.e. hypnotism), the illuminati, and dark satanic sects … A glance at the literature of that time will meet with Honoré de Balzac (a disciple of Swedenborg), Victor Hugo, a practicing spiritist, Joris-Karl Huysmans and his novels about black magic, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and his idiosyncratic Sherlock Holmes, Marcel ...
... the most relevant points should be borne in mind. Notable Westerners have believed in reincarnation: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Gauguin, Strindberg, Mondriaan, Jung, H. G. Wells. It was the great composer and director Gustave Mahler who wrote: ‘We all return; ...
... any are not so high, the drops not so low as in poetical literature. Then again there are great writers in prose and great prose writers and the two are by no means the same thing. Dickens and Balzac are great novelists, but their style or their frequent absence of style had better not be described; Scott has a style I suppose, but it is neither blameless nor has distinguishing merit. Other novelists ...
... indeed the age of satire. Voltaire was really a superb master in the field. Byron allied satire with sublimity in his work Vision of judgment. In the 19th century, Dickens, George Eliot and Balzac, although not satirists in the proper sense of the term, must be mentioned in this connection. Passing through Samuel Butler and G.B.Shaw, we come to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell of the 20th century ...
... senses, but that does not mean that she has been sticking to an excessive and disorderly play of the senses. Neither Byron nor Oscar Wilde is the ultimate ideal of Europe. When the famous novelist Balzac used to sit down to write he would do so in a lonely place in a monk's tunic in order to help his one-pointed concentration. Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander were no Page 312 helpless ...
... deliver the names of the ten or twelve best prose styles in the world's literature.... There are great writers in prose and great prose-writers and the two are by no means the same thing. Dickens and Balzac are great novelists, but their style or their frequent absence of style had better not be described; Scott attempts a style, but it is neither blameless nor is it his distinguishing merit. Other novelists ...
... believe what is said in the papers, there is much indulgence today, especially among the aristocrats. SRI AUROBINDO: Not only among them but among the common people too. SATYENDRA: When one reads Balzac, one wonders why people in France marry at all. NIRODBARAN: As Sri Aurobindo once said, "To love to love another!" SRI AUROBINDO: Marriage among the French is more for an economic advantage. ...
... fulfilling such an ideal I declare it open today. And in doing so I cannot do better than quote some lines from Savitri, that epic of supreme research, which might take for a subtitle the name of one of Balzac's novels: La Page 194 Recherche de I'absolu. The mood at our opening ceremony, at which I was honoured with the job of cutting the ribbon at the Academy's door, should be inspired ...
... fulfilling such an ideal I declare it open today. And in doing so I cannot do better than quote some lines from Savitri, that epic of supreme research, which might take for a subtitle the name of one of Balzac's novels: La Recherche de I'absolu. The mood at our opening ceremony, at which I was honoured with the job of cutting the ribbon at the Academy's door, should be inspired by what Aswapati, the father ...
... subordinate mental operations were of a different character and colour. And in art itself there are different kinds of intuition. Shakespeare's seeing of life differs in its character and aims from Balzac's or Ibsen's, but the essential part of the process, that which makes it intuitive, is the same. The Buddhistic, the Vedantic seeing of things may be equally powerful starting-points for artistic creation ...
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