t, he
flourishes and thrives, and we look on with a smile not altogether
devoid of complacency. Shall we not take the world as it is, and be
amused at the 'Comedie Humaine,' rather than fruitlessly rage against
it? It will be played out whether we like it or not, and we may as well
adapt our tastes to our circumstances.

Ought we to be shocked at this extravagant cynicism; to quote it, as
respectable English journalists used to do, as a proof of the awful
corruption of French society, or to regard it as semi-humorous
exaggeration? I can't quite sympathise with people who take Balzac
seriously. I cannot talk about the remorseless skill with which he tears
off the mask from the fearful corruptions of modern society, and
penetrates into the most hidden motives of the human heart; nor can I
infer from his terrible pictures of feminine suffering that for every
one of those pictures a woman's heart had been tortured to death. This,
or something like this, I have read; and I can only say that I don't
believe a word of it. Balzac, indeed, as compared with our respectable
romancers, has the merit of admitting passions whose existence we
scrupulously ignore; and the further merit that he takes a far wider
range of sentiment, and does not hold by the theory that the life of a
man or a woman closes at the conventional end of a third volume. But he
is above all things a dreamer, and his dreams resemble nightmares.
Powerfully as his actors are put upon the stage, they seem to me to be,
after all, 'such stuff as dreams are made of.' A genuine observer of
life does not find it so highly spiced, and draws more moderate
conclusions. Balzac's characters run into typical examples of particular
passions rather than genuine human beings; they are generally
monomaniacs. Balthazar Claes, who gives up his life to search for the
philosopher's stone, is closely related to them all; only we must
substitute for the philosopher's stone some pet passion, in which the
whole nature is absorbed. They have the unnatural strain of mind which
marks the approach to madness. It is not ordinary daylight which
illuminates Balzac's dreamland, but some fantastic combination of
Parisian lamps, which tinges all the actors with an unearthly glare, and
distorts their features into extravagant forms. The result has, as I
have said, a strange fascination; but one is half-ashamed of yielding,
because one feels that it is due to the use of rather unholy drugs. The
vapo