Yet, perused in volume
form, it reveals comedy in abundance. The portraits are limned with
master hand; and Celestine Rabourdin, the wife of the head clerk, has,
together with her grace and taste, the gift of amusing by the skill
with which she bamboozles the dissolute des Lupeaulx.

The _Firm of Nucingen_ is a scathing satire of the world of
stock-jobbing, where the money of the small investor is robbed with
impunity under cover of legality. Balzac's Jewish banker, who thrives
on others' ruin is a type that exists to-day, as then, without any
adequate effort made by law to suppress him. Less happy in indicating
a remedy than in branding an evil, the novelist naively held that
France had only to adopt his doctrine of absolute rule for the
suppression to become a fact. An unprejudiced reading of history
should have informed him that _regimes_ have always so far existed for
the benefit of their creators, and that, although constitutional
monarchies and republics have not yet found out a system capable of
defending the interests of all individual citizens, and perhaps never
will, absolute monarchy has shown to satiety its inability to defend
the interests of more than a few.

In perusing such a book as the foregoing, one is led to ask why it was
so inoperative on the life of the country. One reason perhaps is that
Balzac wrote from his head rather than from his heart. Whatever may
be, in other respects, the superiority of the Realistic over the
Romantic school of fiction, it is inferior in this, viz., that its
emotiveness tends to the negation, not to the affirmation, of action.
One cannot but recollect to the novelist's disadvantage, as applying
to this reference, the following statement he made to Madame Hanska
for another purpose: "I have never in my life confused the thoughts of
my heart with those of my head, and, excepting a few lines written
only for you to read (for instance, Madame de Chaulieu's jealous
letter), I have never expressed in my books anything of my heart. It
would have been the most infamous sacrilege." Unconsciously insincere,
like the majority of people in their justificative confessions, Balzac
often allowed his heart to intrude where it had no business to be
present. Nevertheless in his realist pictures he exercised himself
with all the cold delight of the anatomist, and with none of the warm
emotion that might have become communicative. This Brunetiere
implicitly admits when he says that most o