that the comparison is not inapt. Round the
edge are the ever-restless waves; on the surface the foam blown by
fitful gusts of wind, the translucent play of sunbeams, and the
clamour of storms lashing up the billows; but down in the sombre
depths broods the resistless, immovable force which tinges with its
reflection the dancing and play above, and is the genius and
fascination, the mystery and tragedy of the sea.

Below the merriment and herculean jollity, so little represented in
his books, there was deep, gloomy force in the soul of the man who,
gifted with an almost unparalleled imagination, would yet grip the
realities of the pathetic and terrible situations he evolved with
brutal strength and insistence. The mind of the writer of "Le Pere
Goriot," "La Cousine Bette," and "Le Cousin Pons," those terrible
tragedies where the Greek god Fate marches on his victims
relentlessly, and there is no staying of the hand for pity, could not
have been merely a wide, sunny expanse with no dark places.
Nevertheless, we are again puzzled, when we attempt to realise the
personality of a man whose imagination could soar to the mystical and
philosophical conception of "Seraphita," which is full of religious
poetry, and who yet had the power in "Cesar Birotteau" to invest
prosaic and even sordid details with absolute verisimilitude, or in
the "Contes Drolatiques" would write, in Old French, stories of
Rabelaisian breadth and humour. The only solution of these
contradictions is that, partly perhaps by reason of great physical
strength, certainly because of an abnormally powerful brain and
imagination, Balzac's thoughts, feelings, and passions were unusually
strong, and were endowed with peculiar impetus and independence of
each other; and from this resulted a versatility which caused most
unexpected developments, and which fills us of smaller mould with
astonishment.

Nevertheless, steadfastness was decidedly the groundwork of the
character of the man who was not dismayed by the colossal task of the
Comedie Humaine; but pursued his work through discouragement, ill
health, and anxieties. Except near the end of his life, when, owing to
the unreasonable strain to which it had been subjected, his powerful
organism had begun to fail, Balzac refused to neglect his vocation
even for his love affairs--a self-control which must have been a
severe test to one of his temperament.

This absorption in his work cannot have been very flattering