. "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us
all,"--that might be the motto. The young quasi-hero is Julian,
an ambitious worldling of no family, and his use of the Church
as a means of promotion, his amours with several women and his
death because of his love for one of them, are traced with a
kind of tortuous revelation of the inner workings of the human
heart which in its way declares genius in the writer: and which
certainly makes a work disillusioning of human nature. Its more
external aspect of a study of the politic Church and State, of
the rivalry between the reds and the blacks of the state
religion, is entirely secondary to this greater purpose and
result: here, for the first time at full length, a writer shows
the possibility of that realistic portrayal sternly carried
through, no matter how destructive of romantic preconceptions of
men and women. It is the method of Richardson flowering in a
time of greater freedom and more cynical questioning of the
gods.

II

But giving Stendhal his full mint and cummin of praise, he yet
was but the forerunner of a mightier man. Undoubtedly, he
prepared the soil and was a necessary link in the chain of
development wherewith fiction was to forge itself an unbreakable
sequence of strength. Balzac was to put out his lesser light, as
indeed the refulgence of his genius was to overshine all French
fiction, before and since. It would be an exaggeration to say
that the major English novelists of the middle nineteenth
century were consciously disciples of Balzac--for something
greater even than he moved them; the spirit of the Time. But it
is quite within bounds to say that of all modern fiction he is
the leader and shaper. Without him, his greatest native
follower, Zola, is inconceivable. He gathers up into himself and
expresses at its fullest all that was latent in the striking
modern growth whose banner-cry was Truth, and whose method was
that of the social scientist. Here was a man who, early in his
career, for the first time in the history of the Novel,
deliberately planned to constitute himself the social historian
of his epoch and race: and who, in upwards of a hundred
remarkable pieces of fiction in Novel form executed that plan in
such fulness that his completed work stands not only as a
monument of industry, but as perhaps the most inspiring example
of literary synthesis in the history of letters. In bigness of
conception and of construction--let alone the way in w