nd at the nave as well. How he managed to
last, even to fifty, is one of the major curiosities of literary
biography.

[Sidenote: And of Balzac himself.]

Of the three divisions of this vast but far from chaotic production, the
miscellaneous, of course, concerns us least. It shows Balzac as a
failure of a dramatist, a critic of very varying competence,[153] not a
particularly effective _writer_ merely as such, not possessed of much
logical power, but having pretty wide interests and abundantly provided
with what we may call the odd tools of the novelist's workshop. As a
correspondent his writing has absolutely none of what may be called the
"departmental" interest of great letter-writers--of Madame de Sevigne or
Lady Mary, of Horace Walpole or Cowper; its attraction is not epistolary
but wholly autobiographic. And it is only fair to say that, despite
Balzac's immense and intense self-centredness, it leaves one on the
whole with a much better opinion of him as a man than might be derived
from his books or from the anecdotes about him. To adapt one of the best
known of these, there was, in fact, nothing real to him but Honore de
Balzac, Honore de Balzac's works and schemes, and, in rare cases (of
which Madame Hanska was the chief), Honore de Balzac's loves. These
constituted his subject, his universe of thought and feeling, of action
and passion. But at the same time he stands apart from all the other
great egotists. He differs from those of whom Byron is the chief in that
he does not introduce himself prominently in his fictitious creations.
He does not, like those who may take their representative in Goethe,
regard everything merely as it relates to his personality. His chief
peculiarity, his unique literary character, and, it may be added at
once, his greatness and his weakness, all consist in the fact that he
evolves a new world out of himself. Now and then he may have taken an
actual human model--George Sand, Madame d'Agoult, Madame de Castries,
Liszt, Latouche,[154] Remusat--as many others as anybody likes. But
always these had not merely to receive the Balzacian image and
superscription, but to be transmuted into creatures of a _Balzacium
Sidus_. And it is the humanity of this planet or system, much more than
of our world, whereof his _Comedie_ is the Comedy--a _Comedie
Balzacienne_.

[Sidenote: Balzac's "general ideas."]

But, it has been said, and the saying has been attributed to no less a
critic than M. Fa