usness, where manners
as well as morals are easily tainted and vulgarity can creep in.
Again, he creates his women with a theory, and, in art, theories are
apt to become prejudices. According to his appreciation Walter Scott's
heroines are monotonous; they lack relief, he said, and they lack it
because they are Protestants. The Catholic woman has repentance, the
Protestant woman, virtue only. Many of Balzac's women repent, and many
of those that repent either backslide or come very near to it. His
altogether virtuous women are childish without being children, and
some are bold into the bargain. In fine, his gamut of feminine
psychology seems to be limited, very limited. Women of the finest mind
he neither comprehended nor cared to understand. They were outside his
range.

But what he missed in the whole representation of the fair sex he made
up for by what he invented, as indeed, too, in his representation of
the sterner sex; and Jules Janin's account of the matter is not far
from the truth:--

"He is at once the inventor, the architect, the upholsterer, the
milliner, the professor of languages, the chambermaid, the perfumer,
the barber, the music-teacher, and the usurer. He renders his society
all that it is. He it is who lulls it to sleep on a bed expressly
arranged for sleep and adultery; he, who bows all women beneath the
same misfortune; he, who buys on credit the horses, jewels, and
clothes of all these handsome sons without stomach, without money,
without heart. He is the first who has found the livid veneer, the
pale complexion of distinguished company which causes all his heroes
to be recognized. He has arranged in his fertile brain all the
adorable crimes, the masked treasons, the ingenious rapes mental and
physical which are the ordinary warp of his plots. The jargon spoken
by this peculiar world, and which he alone can interpret, is none the
less a mother-tongue rediscovered by Monsieur de Balzac, which partly
explains the ephemeral success of this novelist, who still reigns in
London and Saint Petersburg as the most faithful reproduction of the
manners and actions of our century."

Janin's animus blinded him to the rest, and it is just the rest of the
qualities which converted the ephemeral success into the permanent.
Taine's estimate is more discursive. He is further removed from
polemics. He says:--

"Monsieur de Balzac has of private life a very deep and fine sentiment
which goes even to minuteness