the ostensibly "occult" or (as he was pleased to call
them) "philosophic" studies and and stories that you get this
atmosphere. It spreads practically everywhere--the very bankruptcies and
the sordid details of town and country life are overshadowed and in a
certain sense _dis_-realised by it. Indeed that verb which, like most
new words, has been condemned by some precisians, but which was much
wanted, applies to no prose writer quite so universally as to Balzac. He
is a _dis_-realiser, not by style as some are, but in thought--at the
very same time that he gives such impressions of realism. Sometimes, but
not often, he comes quite close to real mundane reality, sometimes, as
in the most "philosophical" of the so-called philosophical works, he
hardly attempts a show of it. But as a rule when he is at his very best,
as in _La Peau de Chagrin_, in _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, in _Le
Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, he attains a kind of point of unity between
disrealising and realising--he disrealises the common and renders the
uncommon real in a fashion actually carrying out what he can never have
known--the great Coleridgian definition or description of poetry. In
fact, if prose-poetry were not a contradiction in terms, Balzac would
be, except in style,[169] the greatest prose-poet of them all.

[Sidenote: Peculiarity of the conversation.]

On[170] one remarkable characteristic of the _Comedie_ very little has
usually been said. It has been neglected wholly by most critics, though
it is of the very first importance. And that is the astonishingly small
use, _in proportion_, which Balzac makes of that great weapon of the
novelist, dialogue, and the almost smaller effect which it accordingly
has in producing his results (whatever they are) on his readers. With
some novelists dialogue is almost all-powerful. Dumas, for instance (as
is pointed out elsewhere), does almost everything by it. In his best
books especially you may run the eye over dozens, scores, almost
hundreds of pages without finding a single one printed "solid." The
author seldom makes any reflections at all; and his descriptions, with,
of course, some famous exceptions, are little more than longish stage
directions. Nor is this by any means merely due to early practice in the
drama itself; for something like it is to be found in writers who have
had no such practice. In Balzac, after making every allowance for the
fact that he often prints his actual conversations witho