e apt to give a comprehensive view of humanity at
large; to present man sub specie aeternitatis. This is so
because, thoroughly to present any particular part of mankind,
is to portray all mankind. It is all tarred by the same stick,
after all. It is only in the superficials that unlikenesses lie.

Balzac was intensely modern. Had he lived today, he might have
been foremost in championing the separation of Church and State
and looked on serenely at the sequestration of the religious
houses. But writing his main fiction from 1830 to 1850, his
attitude was an enlightened one, that of a thoughtful patriot.

His influence upon nineteenth century English fiction was both
direct and indirect. It was direct in its effect upon several of
the major novelists, as will be noted in studying them; the
indirect influence is perhaps still more important, because it
was so all-pervasive, like an emanation that expressed the Time.
It became impossible, after Balzac had lived and wrought, for
any artist who took his art seriously to write fiction as if the
great Frenchman had not come first. He set his seal upon that
form of literature, as Ibsen, a generation later, was to set his
seal upon the drama, revolutionizing its technique. To the
student therefore he is a factor of potent power in explaining
the modern fictional development. Nor should he be a negligible
quantity to the cultivated reader seeking to come genially into
acquaintance with the best that European letters has
accomplished. While upon the lover of the Novel as a form of
literature--which means the mass of all readers to-day--Balzac
cannot fail to exercise a personal fascination.--Life widens
before us at his touch, and that glamour which is the
imperishable gift of great art, returns again as one turns the
pages of the little library of yellow books which contain the
Human Comedy.

Balzac died in 1850, when in the prime of his powers. Seven
years later was published the "Madame Bovary" of Flaubert, one
of the most remarkable novels of the nineteenth century and the
most unrelenting depiction of the devolution of a woman's soul
in all fiction: certainly it deserved that description up to the
hour of its appearance, if not now, when so much has been done
in the realm of female pathology. Flaubert is the most
noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. He seems
personally of our own day, for, living to be an old man, he was
friend and fellow-worker with t