nd, but even a point or two on the
other side of it. If even Frenchmen now confess that Balzac's characters
are very often not _des etres reels_, no Englishman need be ashamed of
having always thought so.

The fact is that this giant in novel-writing did actually succeed in
doing what some of his brethren in _Hyperion_ would have liked to do--in
setting up a new world for himself and getting out of the existing
universe. His characters are never _in_human; they never fail to be
human; they are of the same flesh and blood, the same soul and spirit,
as ourselves. But they have, as it were, colonised the fresh planet--the
Balzacium Sidus--and taken new colour and form from its
idiosyncrasies.[167]

[Sidenote: Its effect on successors.]

It is for this reason that one hesitates to endorse the opinions quoted
above as to the filiation of all or most subsequent French fiction upon
Balzac. Of course he had a great influence on it; such a genius, in such
circumstances, could not but have. The "interior" business was largely
followed and elaborated; it might be argued--though the contention would
have to be strictly limited and freely provisoed--that Naturalism in
general--as the "Rougon-Macquart" scheme certainly was in
particular--was a sort of bastard of the _Comedie_. Other points of
relationship might be urged. But all this would leave the most
characteristic Balzacities untouched. In the most obvious and
superficial quality--pessimistic psychology--the other novelist dealt
with in this chapter--Beyle--is far more of a real origin than Balzac
is. If one takes the most brilliant of his successors outside the
Naturalist school--Flaubert and Feuillet--very little that is really
Balzacian will be found in either. At least _Madame Bovary_ and _M. de
Camors_--which, I suppose, most people would choose to represent the
greatest genius and the most flexible talent of the Second Empire in
novel-writing--seem to me to show hardly anything that is like Balzac.
The Goncourts have something of degraded Balzacianism on its lower side
in them, and Zola approaches, at least in his "apocalyptic" period,
something like a similar though less offensive degradation of the
higher. But I can hardly conceive anything less like Balzac's work than
Maupassant's.

[Sidenote: And its own character.]

For the fact is that the real Balzac lies--to and for me--almost
entirely in that _aura_ of other-worldliness of which I have spoken. It
is in the