them here and the hell beneath them? and God frowning and the
deevil grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra idee of the classic
tragedy defined to be--man conquered by circumstances? Canna ye see it
here?' But the quotation must stop, for Mackaye goes on to a moral not
quite according to Balzac. Balzac, indeed, was anything but a Christian
socialist, or a Radical reformer; we don't often catch sight in his
pages of God frowning or the devil grinning; his world seems to be
pretty well forgotten by the one, and its inhabitants to be quite able
to dispense with the services of the other. Paris, he tells us in his
most outrageous story, is a hell, which one day may have its Dante. The
proletaire lives in its lowest circle, and seldom comes into Balzac's
pages except as representing the half-seen horrors of the gulf reserved
for that corrupt and brilliant society whose vices he loves to describe.
A summary of his creed is given by a queer contrast to Mackaye, the
accomplished and able De Marsay. People speak, he says, of the
immorality of certain books; here is a horrible, foul, and corrupt book,
always open and never to be shut; the great book of the world; and
beyond that is another book a thousand times more dangerous, which
consists of all that is whispered by one man to another, or discussed
under ladies' fans at balls. Balzac's pages are flavoured, rather to
excess, with this diabolical spice, composed of dark allusions to, or
audacious revelations of these hideous mysteries. If he is wanting in
the moral elevation necessary for a Dante, he has some of the sinister
power which makes him a fit guide to the horrors of our modern Inferno.

* * * * *

Before accepting Balzac's guidance into these mysterious regions, I must
touch upon another peculiarity. Balzac's genius for skilfully-combined
photographic detail explains his strange power of mystification. A word
is wanting to express that faint acquiescence or mimic belief which we
generally grant to a novelist. Dr. Newman has constructed a scale of
assent according to its varying degrees of intensity; and we might,
perhaps, assume that to each degree there corresponds a mock assent
accorded to different kinds of fiction. If Scott, for example, requires
from his readers a shadow of that kind of belief which we grant to an
ordinary historian, Balzac requires a shadow of the belief which Dr.
Pusey gives to the Bible. This still remains di