y as one may admire a forceful mass of
things, when it is looked at from afar, through an atmosphere that
softens outlines, hides or transforms detail, adds irreality. In such
an ambience certain novels that by themselves would shock, gain a sort
of appropriateness, and others that are trivial or dull serve as
foils. But, at the same time, we know that the effect is partly
illusion.

In a writer's entire production the constant factor is usually his
style, while subject and treatment vary. Balzac, however, is an
exception in this respect as in most others. He attains terse vigour
in not a few of his books, but in not a few also he disfigures page
after page with loose, sprawling ruggedness, not to say pretentious
obscurity. His opinion of himself as a stylist was high, higher no
doubt than that he held of George Sand, to whom he accorded eminence
mainly on this ground. Of the French language he said that he had
enriched it by his alms. Finding it poor but proud, he had made it a
millionaire. And the assertion was put forward with the same
seriousness that he displayed when declaring that there were three men
only of his time who really knew their mother-tongue--Victor Hugo,
Theophile Gautier, and himself. That his conversancy with French
extended from Froissart downwards, through Rabelais' succulent jargon
as well as Moliere's racy idiom, is patent in nearly all he wrote; and
that he was capable of using this vocabulary aptly is sufficiently
shown in the best and simplest of his works. But it is not so clear
that he added anything to the original stock. Such words as he coined
under the impetus of his exuberance are mostly found in his letters
and have not been taken into favour.

A demur must likewise be entered against his style's possessing the
qualities that constitute a charm apart from the matter expressed. Too
many tendencies wrought in him uncurbed for his ideas to clothe
themselves constantly in a suitable and harmonious dress. Generally
when his personality intruded itself in the narrative, it was quite
impossible for him to speak unless affectedly, with a mixture of odd
figures of speech and similes that hurtled in phrases of heavy
construction. Taine has collected a few of these. In the _Cure of
Tours_ we read:--

"No creature of the feminine gender was more capable than Mademoiselle
Sophie Gamard of formulating the elegiac nature of an old maid."

Elsewhere, he speaks of the "fluid projections of looks