(Or nostalgic for ancient graces and splendours.) Hawthorne's America exists in a "dry American light". James half-envied Balzac's freedom to invent novels in a historically younger world where (James thought) everything could still be seen with clarity and differentiated - partly because Balzac, writing early in the development of the social novel, constructed his form as he went along, partly because he escaped "the fatal fusions and uniformities inflicted on newer generations, the running together of all the differences of form and tone, the ruinous liquefying wash of the great industrial brush over the old conditions of contrast and colour".Ä«alzac's Europe is bright and clear and complicated. In that paradox lie both its greatness and the edged tone that arouses instinctive dislike in many readers. It is written, paradoxically, with a ferocious, precise, detailed - and wildly comic - realism that derives from Dickens and Balzac. The Bostonians is about idealism in a democracy still recovering from a civil war bitterly fought for social ideals.
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