marble nor gold enough to his hand. For his _human comedy_ he
often lacked actors, and had to resign himself frequently to making
the understudies play. It is the fashion to-day to raise Balzac to the
level of the dominating geniuses of the world, such as Homer, Saint
Augustine, Shakespeare and Moliere; but for the mind that has accurate
vision, how many rocks are overturned on this Enceladus, what
staircases are forgotten in his Tower of Babel, as in his Jardies
house! Balzac was half a woman, as George Sand was half a man. He had
a woman's curiosities, he had also her contradictions. Balzac believed
himself religious; but his church was the witches' sabbath, and his
priest was not Saint Paul but Swedenborg, if not Mesmer; his Gospel
was the conjuror's book, perhaps that of Pope Honorius--Honorius de
Balzac. He believed himself a politician, and endeavoured to continue
de Maistre; he fancied he was glorifying authority, whereas he
realized the perpetual apotheosis of force; his heroes were named
indifferently Moses or Attila, Charlemagne or Tamerlane, Ricci, the
General of the Jesuits, or Robespierre, the profaner of the sanctuary,
Napoleon or Vautrin. The _History of the Thirteen_ will remain as the
grandiose and monstrous defence of personal force defying the social.
But will it not remain also, by the side of Hegel's philosophy, as an
eloquent codicil to those testaments of individual sovereignty signed
by Aristophanes, Montaigne, and Voltaire? He believed himself a
spiritualist, and, sublime sawbones, he studied only in the medical
amphitheatre. He entered a drawing-room only through the kitchen and
the dressing-room. He was always ignorant of that fine saying of
Hemsterhuys: 'This world is not a machine but a poem.' He believed
himself a painter of manners, and he invented the manners. His women
who are so vividly alive, Madame de Langeais or La Torpille, have
never been intimate with any other company than that of Monsieur de
Balzac. As other great artists, he created his world, a strange world
which has consoled and welcomed all the outcasts of the real world, an
impossible world which has more than once painted the actual one in
its likeness. What charming women of the provinces have since
developed into a Eugenie Grandet, a Madame de Mortsauf, a Madame
Claes! . . . What was wanting to Balzac in the hell of life, whose
every spiral he descended, was virginity in love and ingenuousness in
poetry. He always lost