son with, Rabelais. In some
points this will hold not so badly, for Balzac had narrative power of
the first order when he gave it scope; the deficiencies of mere style
which sometimes affect his modern French do not appear so much in this
_pastiche_, and he could make broad jokes well enough. But--and this
"but" is rather a terrible one--the saving and crowning grace of
Pantagruelist humour is not in him, except now and then in its grimmer
and less catholic variety or manifestation. And this absence haunts one
in these _Contes Drolatiques_, though it is to some extent compensated
by the presence of a "sentiment" rare elsewhere in Balzac.

[Sidenote: Notes on select larger books: _Eugenie Grandet_.]

Turning to the longer books, the old double difficulty of selection and
omission comes on one in full force. There are, I suppose, few
Balzacians who have not special favourites, but probably _Eugenie
Grandet_, _Le Pere Goriot_, and the two divisions of _Les Parents
Pauvres_ would unite most suffrages. If I myself--who am not exactly a
Balzacian, though few can admire him more, and not very many, I think,
have had occasion for knowing his work better--put _Eugenie Grandet_ at
the head of all the "scenes" of ordinary life, it is most certainly not
because of its inoffensiveness. It _is_ perhaps partly because, in spite
of that inoffensiveness, it fixes on one a grasp superior to anything of
Beyle's and equal to anything of Flaubert's or Maupassant's. But the
real cause of admiration is the nature of the grasp itself. Here, and
perhaps here only--certainly here in transcendence--Balzac grapples
with, and vanquishes, the bare, stern, unadorned, unbaited, ironic facts
of life. It is not an intensely interesting book; it is certainly not a
delightful one; you do not want to read it very often. Still, when you
have read it you have come to one of the ultimate things: the
_flammantia moenia_ of the world of fiction forbid any one to go
further at this particular point. And when this has been said of a
novel, all has been said of the quality of the novelist's genius, though
not of its quantity or variety.

[Sidenote: _Le Pere Goriot_ and _Les Parents Pauvres_.]

The other three books selected have greater "interest" and, in the case
of the _Parents Pauvres_ at least, much greater variety; but they do not
seem to me to possess equal consummateness. _Le Pere Goriot_ is in its
own way as pathetic as _Eugenie Grandet_, and Balzac has