re, what infinite honor and profit it will be
to be connected with them, and how desirable it is to keep struggling
engineer brothers-in-law and ne'er-do-well brothers in the colonies out
of sight lest they should disgust the magnates.

But these are "sma' sums, sma' sums," as Bailie Jarvie says; and
smallness of any kind has, whatever it may have to do with Balzac the
man, nothing to do with Balzac the writer. With him as with some others,
but not as with the larger number, the sense of _greatness_ increases
the longer and the more fully he is studied. He resembles, I think,
Goethe more than any other man of letters--certainly more than any other
of the present century--in having done work which is very frequently, if
not even commonly, faulty, and in yet requiring that his work shall be
known as a whole. His appeal is cumulative; it repeats itself on each
occasion with a slight difference, and though there may now and then be
the same faults to be noticed, they are almost invariably accompanied,
not merely by the same, but by fresh merits.

As has been said at the beginning of this essay, no attempt will be
made in it to give that running survey of Balzac's work which is
always useful and sometimes indispensable in treatment of the kind.
But something like a summing up of that subject will here be attempted
because it is really desirable that in embarking on so vast a voyage the
reader should have some general chart--some notes of the soundings and
log generally of those who have gone before him.

There are two things, then, which it is more especially desirable to
keep constantly before one in reading Balzac--two things which, taken
together, constitute his almost unique value, and two things which not
a few critics have failed to take together in him, being under the
impression that the one excludes the other, and that to admit the other
is tantamount to a denial of the one. These two things are, first, an
immense attention to detail, sometimes observed, sometimes invented or
imagined; and secondly; a faculty of regarding these details through a
mental lens or arrangement of lenses almost peculiar to himself, which
at once combines, enlarges, and invests them with a peculiar magical
halo or mirage. The two thousand personages of the _Comedie Humaine_
are, for the most part, "signaled," as the French official word has it,
marked and denoted by the minutest traits of character, gesture, gait,
clothing, abode, what n