, with old times
or with new. A further puzzle has arisen from the fact that though Balzac
has virtuous characters, he sees humanity on the whole "in black": and
that, whether he actually prefers the delineation of vice, misfortune,
failure, or not, he produces as a rule in his readers the sensation
familiarly described as "uncomfortable." His morality has been fiercely
attacked and valiantly defended, but it is absolutely certain that he wrote
with no immoral intention, and with no indifference to morality. In the
same way there has been much discussion of his style, which seldom achieves
beauty, and sometimes falls short of correctness, but which still more
seldom lacks force and adequacy to his own purpose. On the whole, to write
with the shorthand necessary here, it is idle to claim for Balzac an
absolute supremacy in the novel, while it may be questioned whether any
single book of his, or any scene of a book, or even any single character or
situation, is among the very greatest books, scenes, characters, situations
in literature. But no novelist has created on the same scale, with the same
range; none has such a cosmos of his own, pervaded with such a sense of the
originality and power of its creator.

Balzac's life during these twenty years of strenuous production has, as
regards the production itself, been already outlined, but its outward
events, its distractions or avocations--apart from that almost weekly
process of "raising the wind," of settling old debts by contracting new
ones, which seems to have taken up no small part of it--must now be shortly
dealt with. Besides constant visits to the Margonne family at Sache in
Touraine, and to the Carrauds at Frapesle in Berry, he travelled frequently
in France. He went in 1833 to Neuchatel for his first meeting with Madame
Hanska, to Geneva later for his second, and to Vienna in 1835 for his
third. He took at least two flights to Italy, in more or less curious
circumstances. In 1838, he went on a journey to Sardinia to make his
fortune by melting the silver out of the slag-heaps of Roman mines--a
project, it seems, actually feasible and actually accomplished, but in
which he was anticipated. The year before, tired of Paris apartments, he
had bought ground at Ville d'Avray, and there constructed, certainly at
great, though perhaps exaggerated expense, his villa of Les Jardies, which
figures largely in the Balzacian legend. His rash and complicated literary
engagements