d by his knobbed cane
abroad, and his Benedictine habit and statuette of Napoleon at home;
but every single one of his creations seems to have in some shape or
other a cane, a robe or a decorative attribute, which distinguishes
each individual, as if by a badge, from every other member of the
company in the Comedy of Life.

The art of characterization exhibited by the author fascinates us; we
gaze and examine as if we were face to face with real personages,
whose passions are laid bare, whose life is traced, whose countenance
is portrayed with miraculousness, distinctness and verisimilitude. All
the phenomena of life in the camp, the court, the boudoir, the low
faubourg, or the country chateau are ranged in order, and catalogued.
This is done with relentless audacity, often with a touch of grotesque
exaggeration, but always with almost wearying minuteness. Sometimes
this great writer finds that a description of actuality fails to give
the true spiritual key to a situation, and he overflows into allegory,
or Swendenborgian mysticism, just as Bastien-Lepage resorts to a
coating of actual gilt, in depicting that radiant light in his Jeanne
d'Arc which flat pigment could not adequately represent.

But this very effort of Balzac to attain realistic characterization
has resulted in producing what the ordinary reader will look upon as a
defect in his stories. When we compared above the stories of this
writer to a painting, we had been as near the truth, if we had likened
them to a reflection or photograph of a scene. For in a painting, the
artist at his own will arranges the light and shade and groups, and
combines according to his own fancy the figures and objects which he
finds in nature. He represents not what is, but what might be, an
actual scene. He aims at a specific effect. To this effect everything
is sacrificed, for his work is a synthesis, not a mere analysis.
Balzac does not aim at an effect, above and independent of his
analysis. His sole effort is to emphasize the facts which his analysis
brings to light, and when he has succeeded in this, the sole end he
aims at is attained. Thus action is less important in his estimation
than impression. His stories are therefore often quite unsymmetrical,
even anecdotic, in construction; some of them are mere episodes, in
which the action is irrelevant, and sometimes he boldly ends an
elaborate romance without any dramatic denouement at all. We believe
that Honore de Balzac