re is
no danger of any novelist--any painter of life--doing harm, if
he but gives us the whole. It is the story-teller who rolls some
prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him: he
who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his
audience. Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the
moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed
any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of
representing things as they are. But this matters not, if only a
writer's nature be large and vigorous enough to report of
humanity in a trustworthy way. Balzac was much too well endowed
in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to
look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual
meaning.

In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty
of the social historian was more than to give a statement of
present conditions--the social documents of the moment,--variable
as they might be for purposes of deduction. He insisted
that the coming,--perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be
prophesied;--those future ameliorations, whether individual or
collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast. Let me
again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man
who is called arch-realist of his day: "The novelist should
depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better
world." In the very novel where he said it ("Pere Goriot") he
may seem to have violated the principle: but taking his fiction
in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the pronunciamento
exemplifies his practice.

Balzac's work has a Shaksperian universality, because it is so
distinctly French,--a familiar paradox in literature. He was
French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen
receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the
social organisms through which man could best work out his
salvation. We find him teaching that humanity, in terms of
Gallic temperament, and in time limits between the Revolution
and the Second Republic, is on the whole best served by living
under a constitutional monarchy and in vital touch with Mother
Church,--that form of religion which is a racial inheritance
from the Past. In a sense, then, he was a man with the
limitations of his place and time, as, in truth, was Shakspere.
But the study of literature instructs us that it is exactly
those who most vitally grasp and voice their own land and
period, who ar