ueer specimen of his own incapacity in an attempt to
investigate the true history of a real murder, celebrated in its day,
and supposed by everybody but Balzac to have been committed by one
Peytel, who was put to death in spite of his pleading. His skill in
devising motives for imaginary atrocities was a positive
disqualification for dealing with facts and legal evidence. The greatest
poet or novelist describes only one person, and that is himself; and he
differs from his inferiors, not necessarily in having a more systematic
knowledge, but in having wider sympathies, and so to speak, possessing a
great number of characters. Cervantes was at once Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza; Shakespeare was Hamlet and Mercutio and Othello and Falstaff;
Scott was at once Dandie Dinmont and the Antiquary and the Master of
Ravenswood; and Balzac embodies his different phases of feeling in
Eugenie Grandet and Vautrin and the Pere Goriot. The assertion that he
knew the human heart must be interpreted to mean that he could
sympathise with, and give expression to, a wide range of human passions;
as his supposed knowledge of the world implies merely that he was deeply
impressed by certain phenomena of the social medium in which he was
placed. Nobody, I should be inclined to think, would have given a more
unsound judgment than Balzac as to the characters of the men whom he
met, or formed a less trustworthy estimate of the real condition of
society. He was totally incapable of stripping the bare facts given by
observation of the colouring which they received from his own
idiosyncrasy. But nobody, within certain points, could express more
vividly in outward symbols the effect produced upon keen sympathies and
a powerful imagination by the aspect of the world around him.

The characteristic peculiarities of Balzac's novels may be described as
the intensity with which he expresses certain motives, and the vigour
with which he portrays the real or imaginary corruption of society. Upon
one particular situation, or class of situations, favourable to this
peculiar power, he is never tired of dwelling. He repeats himself
indeed, in a certain sense, as a man must necessarily repeat himself who
writes eighty-five stories, besides doing other work, in less than
twenty years. In this voluminous outpouring of matter the machinery is
varied with wonderful fertility of invention, but one sentiment recurs
very frequently. The great majority of Balzac's novels, i