in any case the
charge is not worth answering. It does not lie against the whole of his
work; and if it lay as conclusively as it does against Swift's, it would
not necessarily matter. To the artist in analysis as opposed to the
romance-writer, folly always, and villainy sometimes, does supply a much
better subject than virtuous success, and if he makes his fools and
his villains lifelike and supplies them with a fair contrast of better
things, there is nothing more to be said. He will not, indeed, be
a Shakespeare, or a Dante, or even a Scott; but we may be very well
satisfied with him as a Fielding, a Thackeray, or a Balzac. As to the
more purely personal matter I own that it was some time before I could
persuade myself that Balzac, to speak familiarly, was a much better
fellow than others, and I myself, have been accustomed to think him. But
it is also some time since I came to the conclusion that he was so, and
my conversion is not to be attributed to any editorial retainer. His
education in a lawyer's office, the accursed advice about the _bonne
speculation_, and his constant straitenings for money, will account for
his sometimes looking after the main chance rather too narrowly; and as
for the Eugenie Grandet story (even if the supposition referred to in
a note above be fanciful) it requires no great stretch of charity
or comprehension to see in it nothing more awkward, very easily
misconstrued, but not necessarily in the least heartless or brutal
attempt of a rather absent and very much self-centered recluse absorbed
in one subject, to get his interlocutor as well as himself out of
painful and useless dwelling on sorrowful matters. Self-centered and
self-absorbed Balzac no doubt was; he could not have lived his life
or produced his work if he had been anything else. And it must be
remembered that he owed extremely little to others; that he had the
independence as well as the isolation of the self-centered; that he
never sponged or fawned on a great man, or wronged others of what was
due to them. The only really unpleasant thing about him that I know, and
even this is perhaps due to ignorance of all sides of the matter, is
a slight touch of snobbishness now and then, especially in those late
letters from Vierzschovnia to Madame de Balzac and Madame Surville,
in which, while inundating his mother and sister with commissions
and requests for service, he points out to them what great people the
Hanskas and Mniszechs a