l conditions of a great imaginative
literature. It is not a new theory, but it has never before universally
characterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself,
when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it,
realism will perish too. Every true realist instinctively knows this,
and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels
himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of
overmoralizing. In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for
destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He
cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy
of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material
world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the
equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain
shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth
lives. In criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods
and misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grown
people would still like to play with. He cannot keep terms with "Jack
the Giant-killer" or "Puss-in-Boots," under any name or in any place,
even when they reappear as the convict Vautrec, or the Marquis de
Montrivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen Noblemen. He must say to himself that
Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Balzac, he was Dumas; he
was not realistic, he was romanticistic.

III

Such a critic will not respect Balzac's good work the less for contemning
his bad work. He will easily account for the bad work historically, and
when he has recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it. In
his view no living man is a type, but a character; now noble, now
ignoble; now grand, now little; complex, full of vicissitude. He will
not expect Balzac to be always Balzac, and will be perhaps even more
attracted to the study of him when he was trying to be Balzac than when
he had become so. In 'Cesar Birotteau,' for instance, he will be
interested to note how Balzac stood at the beginning of the great things
that have followed since in fiction. There is an interesting likeness
between his work in this and Nicolas Gogol's in 'Dead Souls,' which
serves to illustrate the simultaneity of the literary movement in men of
such widely separated civilizations and conditions. Both represent their
characters with the touch of exagg