always united suffrages from very
different classes of admirers. In the first place, it is not
"disagreeable," as the common euphemism has it, and as _La Cousine
Bette_ certainly is. In the second, it cannot be accused of being a
_berquinade_, as those who like Balzac best when he is doing moral
rag-picking are apt to describe books like _Le Medecin de Campagne_
and _Le Lys dans la Vallee_, if not even like _Eugenie Grandet_. It
has a considerable variety of interest; its central figure is
curiously pathetic and attractive, even though the curse of something
like folly, which so often attends Balzac's good characters, may a
little weigh on him. It would be a book of exceptional charm even if
it were anonymous, or if we knew no more about the author than we know
about Shakespeare.

As it happens, however, _Le Cousin Pons_ has other attractions than
this. In the first place, Balzac is always great--perhaps he is at his
greatest--in depicting a mania, a passion, whether the subject be
pleasure or gold-hunger or parental affection. Pons has two manias,
and the one does not interfere with, but rather helps, the other. But
this would be nothing if it were not that his chief mania, his ruling
passion, is one of Balzac's own. For, as we have often had occasion to
notice, Balzac is not by any means one of the great impersonal
artists. He can do many things; but he is never at his best in doing
any unless his own personal interests, his likings and hatreds, his
sufferings and enjoyments, are concerned. He was a kind of
actor-manager in his _Comedie Humaine_; and perhaps, like other
actor-managers, he took rather disproportionate care of the parts
which he played himself.

Now, he was even more desperate as a collector and fancier of bibelots
than he was as a speculator; and while the one mania was nearly as
responsible for his pecuniary troubles and his need to overwork
himself as the other, it certainly gave him more constant and more
comparatively harmless satisfactions. His connoisseurship would be
nothing if he did not question the competence of another, if not of
all others. It seems certain that Balzac frequently bought things for
what they were not; and probable that his own acquisitions went, in
his own eyes, through that succession of stages which Charles Lamb (a
sort of Cousin Pons in his way too) described inimitably. His
pictures, like John Lamb's, were apt to begin as Raphaels, and end as
Carlo Marattis. Balzac, t