d in purity, in
devotion, and unselfishness; though he did not think that these
qualities are triumphant on earth. In his pessimistic view of life,
virtue generally suffered, and had no power against vice; but he knew
that it existed, and he believed in a future where wrongs would be
righted.

He is a poet and idealist, and thus akin to the Romanticists--though
he lacks their perfection of diction--in his feeling for the beauty of
atmospheric effects, and also in his enthusiasm for music, which he
loved passionately. The description of Montriveau's emotions when the
cloistered Duchesse de Langeais plays in the church of Spain--and
Balzac tells us that the sound of the organ bears the mind through a
thousand scenes of life to the infinite which parts earth from heaven,
and that through its tones the luminous attributes of God Himself
pierce and radiate--is totally unrealistic both in moral tone, and in
its accentuation of the power of the higher emotions. His intense
admiration for Sir Walter Scott--an admiration which he expresses time
after time in his letters--is a further proof of his sympathy for the
school of thought, which glorified the picturesque Middle Ages above
every other period of history.

Whichever school, however, may claim Balzac, it is an undisputed fact
that he possessed in a high degree that greatest of all attributes
--the power of creation of type. Le Pere Goriot, Balthazar Claes, Old
Grandet, La Cousine Bette, Le Cousin Pons, and many other people in
Balzac's pages, are creations; they live and are immortal. He has
endowed them with more splendid and superabundant vitality than is
accorded to ordinary humanity.

To do this, something is required beyond keenness of vision. The gift
of seeing vividly--as under a dazzling light--to the very kernel of
the object stripped of supernumerary circumstance, is indeed necessary
for the portrayal of character; but although Dickens, as well as
Balzac, possessed this faculty to a high degree, his people are often
qualities personified, or impossible monsters. For the successful
creation of type, that power in which Balzac is akin to Shakespeare,
it is necessary that a coherent whole shall be formed, and that the
full scope of a character shall be realised, with its infinite
possibilities on its own plane, and its impotence to move a
hairsbreadth on to another. The mysterious law which governs the
conduct of life must be fathomed; so that, though there may b