LITERARY VALUE 31
statisticians of the period together.2 Engels meant that the novelist was able to represent the essence of the transformations in French society in a more convincing and adequate manner that the historians et al could do.
Engels pointed out that Balzac was politically a legitimist whose sympathies were with the feudal nobility, the class that was doomed to extinction. But he employed 'cutting' satire and citing' irony in delineating the members of this class and did not disguise has admiration for his Republican political opponents. Engels added : "That Balzac was thus compelled to go against his class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles and describes them as people deserving no better fate ; that he saw the real men ^of the future where, for the time being, they alone could be found— that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, one of the greatest features in old Balzac.'53
It should be mentioned that Engels makes this point about Balzac while discussing the characteristics of realism in literature. The realism which he has in mind may creep out even in spite of the author's views. He recognises it as a distinct possibility that a writer may have reactionary class loyalties incompatible with the changing reality of the times, yet in his works he may reveal a sure grasp of the essence of real historical processes.
Ralph Fox and Sidney Finkelstein evaluate Balzac's achievement along the above formulated lines. Fox called Balzac France's literary Nepoleon because "he destroyed feudal ideals in literature as thoroughly as the great soldier destroyed the feudal system in politics."4 He calls Balzac's Comedie Humaine a revolutionary picture of his age, "revolutionary, not because of the intention of its author, but because of the truth with which the inner life of his time is portrayed."5 Explaining the sources of Balzac's realism, Finkelstein says that it sprang from "the contrast between ideology and the movement of real life, especially apparent to one who is actively engaged in the social currents and class struggles of real life."6 The greatness of his novels is based on the real and critical documentation of the way in which "new social and economic conditions were reshaping human psychology and personality down to the most intimate relations of love, marriage and family, creating a new kind of people."7
The foregoing Marxist discussions of Balzac yield a valuable criterion to evaluate literature. We evaluate a writer's achievement not on the basis of his subjective inclinations, sympathies and intentions but on the basis of the correspondence between the objective social reality and the total picture emerging from his works. The subjective reactionary inclinations of Balzac did not prevent him from seeing the objective dynamics of the French society in one of the most epoch-making periods of modern history. His insight into reality, the truth of his representation, his success in transcending his personal loyalties in the process of portraying the actual movement of society in terms of fictional characters—all these form a basis of his artistic greatness. But can we absolutise this position