ot; the transactions recorded are very often
given with a scrupulous and microscopic accuracy of reporting which no
detective could outdo. Defoe is not more circumstantial in detail
of fact than Balzac; Richardson is hardly more prodigal of
character-stroke. Yet a very large proportion of these characters, of
these circumstances, are evidently things invented or imagined,
not observed. And in addition to this the artist's magic glass, his
Balzacian speculum, if we may so say (for none else has ever had it),
transforms even the most rigid observation into something flickering and
fanciful, the outline as of shadows on the wall, not the precise contour
of etching or of the camera.

It is curious, but not unexampled, that both Balzac himself when he
struggled in argument with his critics and those of his partisans who
have been most zealously devoted to him, have usually tried to exalt the
first and less remarkable of these gifts over the second and infinitely
more remarkable. Balzac protested strenuously against the use of
the word "gigantesque" in reference to his work; and of course it is
susceptible of an unhandsome innuendo. But if we leave that innuendo
aside, if we adopt the sane reflection that "gigantesque" does not
exceed "gigantic," or assert as constant failure of greatness, but
only indicates that the magnifying process is carried on with a certain
indiscriminateness, we shall find none, I think, which so thoroughly
well describes him.

The effect of this singular combination of qualities, apparently the
most opposite, may be partly anticipated, but not quite. It results
occasionally in a certain shortcoming as regards _verite vraie_,
absolute artistic truth to nature. Those who would range Balzac in
point of such artistic veracity on a level with poetical and universal
realists like Shakespeare and Dante, or prosaic and particular realists
like Thackeray and Fielding, seem not only to be utterly wrong but to
pay their idol the worst of all compliments, that of ignoring his own
special qualifications. The province of Balzac may not be--I do no think
it is--identical, much less co-extensive, with that of nature. But it is
his own--a partly real, partly fantastic region, where the lights, the
shades, the dimensions, and the physical laws are slightly different
from those of this world of ours, but with which, owing to the things it
has in common with that world, we are able to sympathize, which we
can traverse