ong honoured and
long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final
estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the
intellectual force of Honore de Balzac could only have been taken by the
inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles
Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the
distinction indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and
imaginative reality.

"I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an observer should
be Balzac's great popular title to fame. To me it had always seemed that
it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. All
his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself.
All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of
the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his _Human
Comedy_ are keener after living, more active and cunning in their
struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in
enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world
shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very
scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with
will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all the beings of the outer
world presented themselves to his mind's eye in strong relief and with a
telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he
has blackened their shadows and intensified their lights. Besides, his
prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see
everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to make
others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the
principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. He
reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied with the
biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main
scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition of
mind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition is
generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More properly speaking, it is
exactly his great distinctive duality. But who can boast of being so
happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him
to invest--and that with a sure hand--what is purely trivial with
splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not,
to speak the truth, does n