hen
Eugenie Grandet starts from _le petit banc de bois_ at the reference to
it in her scoundrelly cousin's letter (to take only one instance out
of a thousand), we see in Balzac the same observation, subject to the
limitation just mentioned, that we see in Dante and Shakespeare, in
Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great poets do not as a rule _accumulate_
detail. Balzac does, and from this very accumulation he manages to
derive that singular gigantesque vagueness--differing from the poetic
vague, but ranking next to it--which I have here ventured to note as
his distinguishing quality. He bewilders us a very little by it, and he
gives us the impression that he has slightly bewildered himself. But the
compensations of the bewilderment are large.

For in this labyrinth and whirl of things, in this heat and hurry
of observation and imagination, the special intoxication of Balzac
consists. Every great artist has his own means of producing this
intoxication, and it differs in result like the stimulus of beauty or of
wine. Those persons who are unfortunate enough to see in Balzac little
or nothing but an ingenious piler-up of careful strokes--a man of
science taking his human documents and classing them after an orderly
fashion in portfolio and deed-box--must miss this intoxication
altogether. It is much more agreeable as well as much more accurate
to see in the manufacture of the _Comedie_ the process of a Cyclopean
workshop--the bustle, the hurry, the glare and shadow, the steam and
sparks of Vulcanian forging. The results, it is true, are by no means
confused or disorderly--neither were those of the forges that worked
under Lipari--but there certainly went much more to them than the dainty
fingering of a literary fretwork-maker or the dull rummagings of a
realist _a la Zola_.

In part, no doubt, and in great part, the work of Balzac is dream-stuff
rather than life-stuff, and it is all the better for that. What is
better than dreams? But the coherence of his visions, their bulk, their
solidity, the way in which they return to us and we return to them, make
them such dream-stuff as there is all too little of in this world. If it
is true that evil on the whole predominates over good in the vision
of this "Voyant," as Philarete Chasles so justly called him, two
very respectable, and in one case very large, though somewhat opposed
divisions of mankind, the philosophic pessimist and the convinced and
consistent Christian believer,