n, there is
the _Comedie_. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the last
stones of it; and it exists--if a little the worse for wear: the bulk is
enormous--if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten and crumbling.
Truly, he had 'incomparable power.' He was the least capable and the
most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired
and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was
gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of
Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But
he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded
tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate
suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinate
effects. He may be impossible; but there is French literature and French
society to show that he passed that way, and had 'incomparable power.'
The phrase is Mr. Henry James's, and it is hard to talk of Balzac and
refrain from it.

LABICHE

Teniers or Daumier?

To the maker of Poirier and Fabrice, of Seraphine and Giboyer, of Olympe
and the Marquis d'Auberive, there were analogies between the genius of
Labiche and the genius of Teniers. 'C'est au premier abord,' says he,
'le meme aspect de caricature; c'est, en y regardant de plus pres, la
meme finesse de tons, la meme justesse d'expression, la meme vivacite de
mouvement.' For myself, I like to think of Labiche as in some sort akin
to Honore Daumier. Earnestness and accomplishment apart, he has much in
common with that king of caricaturists. The lusty frankness, the jovial
ingenuity, the keen sense of the ridiculous, the insatiable instinct of
observation, of the draughtsman are a great part of the equipment of the
playwright. Augier notes that truth is everywhere in Labiche's work, and
Augier is right. He is before everything a dramatist: an artist, that
is, whose function is to tell a story in action and by the mouths of its
personages; and whimsical and absurd as he loves to be, he is never
either the one or the other at the expense of nature. He is often
careless and futile: he will squander--(as in _Vingt-neuf Degres a
l'Ombre_ and _l'Avare en Gants_ _Jaunes_)--an idea that rightly belongs
to the domain of pure comedy on the presentation of a most uproarious
farce. But he is never any falser to his vocation than this. Now and
then, as in _Moi_ and _le Voyage de M. Pe