ing plot Balzac is unequal and often inferior. Here it is
that his romanticist origins reappear rankly like weeds, giving us
factitious melodrama that accords ill with his sober harvest of
actuality. And his melodrama has not the merit of being various. It
nearly always contains the same band of rogues, disguised under
different names, conspiring to ruin innocent victims by the old tricks
of their trade.

Then, again, many of his novels have no understandable progression
from the commencement, through the middle, to the conclusion. This is
not because he was incapable of involving his characters in the
consequences of their actions, but because things that he esteemed of
greater importance interfered with the story's logical development. We
have episodes encroaching on the main design, or what was originally
intended to be the main design, which is disaggregated before the end
is arrived at. As a matter of fact, quite a number of his plots are
swamped by what he forces into them with the zeal of an
encyclopaedist. Philosophy, history, geography, law, medicine, trade,
industry, agriculture enter by their own right. The novelist yields up
his wand, and the pedagogue or _vulgarisateur_ comes forward with his
chalk and blackboard. Canalization is explained at length in the
_Village Cure_; will-making is discoursed upon in _Ursule Mirouet_;
promissory notes, bills of exchange, and protests, not to speak of
business accounts, cover pages in the _Lost Illusions_; therapeutics
takes the place of narrative in the _Reverse Side of Contemporary
History_; physiology is lectured upon in the _Lily in the Valley_;
_Louis Lambert_ aims at becoming a second and better edition of the
_Thoughts of Pascal_; and in _Seraphita_ we have sermons as long and
tedious as those of an Elizabethan divine. The result is that even
novels containing the presentment of love in its most passional phases
lose their right to the name. At best they can be called only
disparate chapters of fiction; at worst, they are merely raw material.

As for his achievement in the pathetic, it is almost nil. At least, if
by pathos we mean that which touches the heart's tenderest strings.
Harrow us, he can; play upon many of our emotions, he is able to at
will. But, at bottom, he had too little sympathy with his fellows to
find in their mistakes, or sins, or sufferings, the wherewithal to
bring out of us our most generous tears. Those he wept once or twice
himself when