will tell us that this is at least not
one of the points in which it is unfaithful to life. If the author is
closer and more faithful in his study of meanness and vice than in his
studies of nobility and virtue, the blame is due at least as much to his
models as to himself. If he has seldom succeeded in combining a really
passionate with a really noble conception of love, very few of his
countrymen have been more fortunate in that respect. If in some of his
types--his journalists, his married women, and others--he seems to have
sacrificed to conventions, let us remember that those who know attribute
to his conventions such a power if not altogether such a holy influence
that two generations of the people he painted have actually lived more
and more up to his painting of them.

And last of all, but also greatest, has to be considered the immensity
of his imaginative achievement, the huge space that he has filled for us
with vivid creation, the range of amusement, of instruction, of (after a
fashion) edification which he has thrown open for us all to walk in.
It is possible that he himself and others more or less well-meaningly,
though more or less maladroitly, following his lead, may have
exaggerated the coherence and the architectural design of the _Comedie_.
But it has coherence and it has design; nor shall we find anything
exactly to parallel it. In mere bulk the _Comedie_ probably, if not
certainly, exceeds the production of any novelist of the first class
in any kind of fiction except Dumas, and with Dumas, for various and
well-known reasons, there is no possibility of comparing it. All others
yield in bulk; all in a certain concentration and intensity; none even
aims at anything like the same system and completeness. It must be
remembered that owing to shortness of life, lateness of beginning,
and the diversion of the author to other work, the _Comedie_ is the
production, and not the sole production, of some seventeen or eighteen
years at most. Not a volume of it, for all that failure to reach the
completest perfection in form and style which has been acknowledged,
can be accused of thinness, of scamped work, of mere repetition, of mere
cobbling up. Every one bears the marks of steady and ferocious labor,
as well as of the genius which had at last come where it had been
so earnestly called and had never gone away again. It is possible to
overpraise Balzac in parts or to mispraise him as a whole. But so long
as ina