favor of the chiefs of parties, and so
forth, are temptations to newspaper managers not to hold up a very
high standard of honor, anonymity affords to newspaper writers a
dangerously easy shield to cover malice or dishonesty. But I can only
say that during long practice in every kind of political and literary
journalism, I never was seriously asked to write anything I did not
think, and never had the slightest difficulty in confining myself to
what I did think.

In fact Balzac, like a good many other men of letters who abuse
journalism, put himself very much out of court by continually
practising it, not merely during his struggling period, but long after
he had made his name, indeed almost to the very last. And it is very
hard to resist the conclusion that when he charged journalism
generally not merely with envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness, but with hopeless and pervading dishonesty, he had
little more ground for it than an inability to conceive how any one,
except from vile reasons of this kind, could fail to praise Honore de
Balzac.

At any rate, either his art by itself, or his art assisted and
strengthened by that personal feeling which, as we have seen counted
for much with him, has here produced a wonderfully vivid piece of
fiction--one, I think, inferior in success to hardly anything he
has done. Whether, as at a late period a very well-informed,
well-affected, and well-equipped critic hinted, his picture of the
Luciens and the Lousteaus did not a little to propagate both is
another matter. The seriousness with which Balzac took the accusation
perhaps shows a little sense of galling. But putting this aside, _Un
Grand Homme de Province a Paris_ must be ranked, both for comedy and
tragedy, both for scheme and execution, in the first rank of his work.

The bibliography of this long and curious book--almost the only one
which contains some verse, some of Balzac's own, some given to him by
his more poetical friends--occupies full ten pages of M. de
Lovenjoul's record. The first part, which bore the general title, was
a book from the beginning, and appeared in 1837 in the _Scenes de la
Vie de Province_. It had five chapters, and the original verse it
contained had appeared in the _Annalaes Romantiques_ ten years earlier
with slight variants. The second part, _Un Grand Homme de Province_,
likewise appeared as a book, independently published by Souverain in
1839 in two volumes and forty chapters. But