and comprehend. Every now and then the artist uses his
observing faculty more, and his magnifying and distorting lens less;
every now and then he reverses the proportion. Some tastes will like him
best in the one stage; some in the other; the happier constituted
will like him best in both. These latter will decline to put _Eugenie
Grandet_ above the _Peau de Chagrin_, or _Le Pere Goriot_ above the
wonderful handful of tales which includes _La Recherche de l'Absolu_
and _Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, though they will no doubt recognize
that even in the first two named members of these pairs the Balzacian
quality, that of magnifying and rendering grandiose, is present, and
that the martyrdom of Eugenie, the avarice of her father, the blind
self-devotion of Goriot to his thankless and worthless children, would
not be what they are if they were seen through a perfectly achromatic
and normal medium.

This specially Balzacian quality is, I think, unique. It is like--it may
almost be said to _be_--the poetic imagination, present in magnificent
volume and degree, but in some miraculous way deprived and sterilized
of the specially poetical quality. By this I do not of course mean that
Balzac did not write in verse: we have a few verses of his, and they are
pretty bad, but that is neither here nor there. The difference between
Balzac and a great poet lies not in the fact that the one fills the
whole page with printed words, and the other only a part of it--but in
something else. If I could put that something else into distinct words
I should therein attain the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the
_primum mobile_, the _grand arcanum_, not merely of criticism but of
all things. It might be possible to coast about it, to hint at it,
by adumbrations and in consequences. But it is better and really
more helpful to face the difficulty boldly, and to say that Balzac,
approaching a great poet nearer perhaps than any other prose writer in
any language, is distinguished from one by the absence of the very
last touch, the finally constituting quiddity, which makes a great poet
different from Balzac.

Now, when we make this comparison, it is of the first interest to
remember--and it is one of the uses of the comparison, that it suggests
the remembrance of the fact--that the great poets have usually been
themselves extremely exact observers of detail. It has not made them
great poets; but they would not be great poets without it. And w