d
plenty of the fame, for which he cared quite as much as he cared for
money. Perhaps no writer except Voltaire and Goethe earlier made such
a really European reputation; and his books were of a kind to be more
widely read by the general public than either Goethe's or Voltaire's.
In England (Balzac liked the literature but not the country, and never
visited England, though I believe he planned a visit) this popularity
was, for obvious reasons, rather less than elsewhere. The respectful
vogue which French literature had had with the English in the eighteenth
century had ceased, owing partly to the national enmity revived and
fostered by the great war, and partly to the growth of a fresh and
magnificent literature at home during the first thirty years of the
nineteenth in England. But Balzac could not fail to be read almost at
once by the lettered; and he was translated pretty early, though not
perhaps to any great extent. It was in England, moreover, that by far
his greatest follower appeared, and appeared very shortly. For it would
be absurd in the most bigoted admirer of Thackeray to deny that the
author of _Vanity Fair_, who was in Paris and narrowly watching French
literature and French life at the very time of Balzac's most exuberant
flourishing and education, owed something to the author of _Le Pere
Goriot_. There was no copying or imitation; the lessons taught by Balzac
were too much blended with those of native masters, such as Fielding,
and too much informed and transformed by individual genius. Some
may think--it is a point at issue not merely between Frenchmen and
Englishmen, but between good judges of both nations on each side--that
in absolute veracity and likeness to life, in limiting the operation of
the inner consciousness on the outward observation to strictly artistic
scale, Thackeray excelled Balzac as far as he fell short of him in the
powers of the seer and in the gigantic imagination of the prophet. But
the relations of pupil and master in at least some degree are not, I
think, deniable.

So things went on in light and in shade, in homekeeping and in travel,
in debts and in earnings, but always in work of some kind or another,
for eighteen years from the turning point of 1829. By degrees, as he
gained fame and ceased to be in the most pressing want of money, Balzac
left off to some extent, though never entirely, those miscellaneous
writings--reviews (including puffs), comic or general sketches,
pol