e
that way, and that he had no hope of finding it there. Not that there is
no genius in the two books mentioned; on the contrary, it is there first
to be found, and in _La Peau_ is of the first order. But their ways are
not the ways in which he was to find it--and himself--more specially.

[Sidenote: The _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_.]

As to _Argow le Pirate_[159] and _Jane la Pale_ (I have never ceased
lamenting that he did not keep the earlier title, _Wann-Chlore_) and the
rest, they have interest of various kinds. Some of it has been glanced
at already--you cannot fully appreciate Balzac without them. But there
is another kind of interest, perhaps not of very general appeal, but not
to be neglected by the historian. They are almost the only accessible
body, except Pigault-Lebrun's latest and Paul de Kock's earliest, of the
popular fiction _before_ 1830, of the stuff of which, as previously
mentioned, Ducray-Duminil, the lesser Ducange, and many others are
representatives, but representatives difficult to get at. This class of
fiction, which arose in all parts of Europe during the last years of the
eighteenth century and the earlier of the nineteenth, has very similar
characteristics, though the examples differ very slightly in different
countries. What are known with us as the Terror Novel, the Minerva
Press, the Silver Fork school, etc. etc., all have their part in it, and
even higher influences, such as Scott's, are not wanting. _Han
d'Islande_ and _Bug-Jargal_ themselves belong to some extent to the
class, and I am far from certain that the former is at all better than
some of these _juvenilia_ of Balzac's. But as a whole they are of course
little more than curiosities.

Whether these curiosities are more widely known than they were some
five-and-twenty, or thirty, years ago, when Mr. Louis Stevenson was the
only friend of mine who had read them, and when even special writers on
Balzac sometimes unblushingly confessed that they had not, I cannot say.
Although printed in the little fifty-five-volume[160] edition which for
so many years represented Balzac, they were excluded, as noted above,
from the statelier "Definitive," and so may have once more "gone into
abscondence." I do not want to read them again, but I no more repent the
time once spent on them than I did earlier. In fact I really do not
think any one ought to talk about Balzac who has not at least gained
some knowledge of them, for many of their defects remai