of detail and of superstition. He knows
how to move you and make you palpitate from the first, simply in
depicting a garden-walk, a dining-room, a piece of furniture. He
divines the mysteries of provincial life; sometimes he makes them.
Most often he does not recognize and therefore isolates the pudic and
hidden side of life, together with the poetry it contains. He has a
multitude of rapid remarks about old maids and old women, ugly girls,
sickly women, sacrificed and devoted mistresses, old bachelors,
misers. One wonders where, with his petulant imagination, he can have
picked it all up. It is true that Monsieur de Balzac does not proceed
with sureness, and that in his numerous productions, some of which
appear to us almost admirable, at any rate touching and delicious or
piquant and finely comic in observation, there is a dreadful pell-mell.
What a throng of volumes, what a flight of tales, novels of all sorts,
droll, philosophic, and theosophic. There is something to be enjoyed
in each, no doubt, but what prolixity! In the elaboration of a
subject, as in the detail of style, Monsieur de Balzac has a facile,
unequal, risky pen. He starts off quickly, sets himself in a gallop,
and then, all at once, he stumbles to the ground, rising only to fall
again. Most of his openings are delightful; but his conclusions
degenerate or become excessive. At a certain moment, he loses
self-control. His observing coolness escapes; something in his brain
explodes, and carries everything far, far away. Hazard and accident
have a good share in Monsieur de Balzac's best production. He has his
own manner, but vacillating, fidgety, often seeking to regain
self-possession."

How much one could wish that, instead of producing more, Balzac should
have produced less. With a man of his native power and perseverance,
what greater perfection there might have been! Certainly, no defect is
more patent in the _Comedie Humaine_ than the trail of hasty
workmanship, the mark of being at so much a line. Strangely, the speed
with which he wrote furnished him with a cause for boasting. More
properly, it ought to have filled him with humiliation. Many
_litterateurs_ are compelled to drive and overdrive their pens. But,
if they have the love of letters innate in them, it will go against
the grain to send into the world their sentences without having had
leisure to polish each and all. Examples have already been given of
the short time spent over several bo