ng for centuries. His scientific knowledge was
superficial in nearly every branch. It was his divination which was
great. And divination is not omniscience.

An offshoot from the naturalistic school apparently, but derived more
truly from the _Comedie Humaine_, is that decadent, pornographic art,
of which Balzac would have been ashamed, had he lived to see the
vegetation that grew up from the seeds he had sown without knowing
what they would bring forth. In Zola's novels the plant was already
full grown; its earlier appearance as the slender blade was
Champfleury's vulgar satire, the _Bourgeois de Molinchart_. More
recently the blossom has revealed its pestilential rankness so plainly
that no one can be deceived as to its noxious effect.

Where Balzac's influence is likeliest to remain potent for good is in
the domain of history. He was not altogether an initiator here, having
learnt from Walter Scott in the one as in the other capacity; but he
developed and focussed what he had received; he added to it, and made
it a factor in the historical science. After him historians began to
assign a more important place in their narrations and chronicles to
the manners and interests of the people, patiently seeking to assemble
and situate everything that could relate them exactly to the great
political and other public events which would be nothing but names
without them. The de Goncourts, in their _History of French Society
during the Revolution and under the Directoire_, applied this method
with all the zeal of fresh disciples, and with hardly enough
discretion. Taine's _Origins of Contemporary France_ abdicates none of
the older historian's role, but its background is Balzacian. Among the
later writers who have taken up the historian's pen, Masson, Lenotre,
and Anatole France, illustrate the newer principles, each with a
difference, but all excellently, the first in his _Napoleon_, the
second in his _Old Houses, Old Papers_, the third in his _Joan of
Arc_.

It can scarcely be disputed that an entrance of realism into French
literature would have occurred in the second half of the nineteenth
century, had there been no Balzac. Some other novelists or writers,
themselves reacted upon by the scientific spirit, would have set the
example in their own way, if not with the achievement of the author of
the _Comedy_. On the other hand, it is certain that Balzac, had he put
his hand to another treatment of fiction, would nevertheless