It is a more serious accusation against him that his pleasant likable characters are so invariably the victims of his wicked ones, though it may be thought that this is not really too great a simplification of what is true in life. Mauriac speaks of 'the fundamental manichaeism of Balzac, for whom darkness and light divide the kingdom between them': and it is true that Balzac's wicked characters go to and fro upon the earth unchecked, like incarnations of Satan, and the virtuous characters have no defences against them. The self-abnegation which these virtuous characters nearly always practise has a spiritual significance, as well as a social one, though because Balzac was less interested in this aspect than he was in the power of the evil forms opposed to them, the radiance and grandeur of their sublimity' is not so overwhelmingly revealed to us that we forget the crippling restrictions imposed on their earthly development and happiness, which Balzac, in fact, takes care to emphasize. And these restrictions are, of course, their tragedy. Not for Balzac's heroines the terrible splendour of Desdemona's tragedy, nor the crashing finality of Tess of the D'Urbervilles' catastrophic end, but the continued narrow colourless existence of a wealthy ageing woman in a provincial town, which we see prolonged into the future beyond the confines of the book.