--this point has perhaps been too
frequently lost sight of. The great critics who were his contemporaries
and immediate survivors were rather too near. The greatest of the later
batch, M. Brunetiere, was a little too eager to use Balzac as a stick to
beat the Romantics with for one thing, and to make him out a pioneer of
all succeeding French fiction for another. But, quite early, Philarete
Chasles hit the white by calling him a _voyant_ (a word slightly varying
in signification from our "seer"), and recently a critic of less repute
than Brunetiere, but a good one--M. Le Breton--though perhaps sometimes
not quite fair to Balzac, recognises his Romanticism, his _frenesie_,
and so the Imagination of which the lunatic and the lover are--and of
which the devotee of Romance in verse and prose should be--compact.

Nevertheless it would be of course highly improper, and in fact absurd,
to deny the "observation"--at least in detail of all kinds. Although--as
we have seen and may see again when we come to Naturalism and look
back--M. Brunetiere was quite wrong in thinking that Balzac _introduced_
"interiors" to French, and still more wrong in thinking that he
introduced them to European, novel-writing, they undoubtedly make a
great show in his work--are, indeed, one of its chief characteristics.
He actually overdoes them sometimes; the "dragging" of _Les Chouans_ is
at least partly due to this, and he never got complete mastery of his
tendency that way. But undoubtedly this tendency was also a source of
power.

Yet, while this observation of _things_ is not to be denied, Balzac's
observation of _persons_ is a matter much more debatable. To listen to
some of the more uncritical--especially among the older and now almost
traditional--estimates of him, an unwary reader who did not correct
these, judging for himself, might think that Balzac was as much of an
"observational" realist in character as Fielding, as Scott when it
served his turn, as Miss Austen, or as Thackeray. Longer study and
further perspective seem recently to have put more people in the
position which only a few held some years ago. The astonishing force,
completeness, _relative_ reality of his creations is more and more
admitted, but it is seen (M. Le Breton, for instance, admits it in
almost the very words) that the reality is often not _positive_. In fact
the _Comedie_ may remind some of the old nautical laudation of a ship
which cannot only sail close to the wi