sentation of facts. Tartuffe has a good time of it in Balzac instead of meeting with an appropriate punishment, he flourishes and thrives, and we look on with a smile not altogether devoid of complacency. Shall we' not take the world as it is, and be amused at the 'Comédie Humaine,' rather than fruitlessly rage against it? It will be played out whether we like it or not, and we may as well adapt our tastes to our circumstances.

Ought we to be shocked at this extravagant cynicism; to quote it, as respectable English journalists used to do, as a proof of the awful corruption of French society, or to regard it as semi-humorous exaggeration? I can't quite sympathise with people who take Balzac seriously. I cannot talk about the remorseless skill with which he tears off the mask from the fearful corruptions of modern society, and penetrates into the most hidden motives of the human heart; nor can I infer from his terrible pictures of feminine suffering that for every one of those pictures a woman's heart had been tortured to death. This, or something like this, I have read; and I can only say that I don't believe a word of it. Balzac, indeed, as compared with our respectable romancers, has the merit of admitting passions whose existence we scrupulously ignore; and the further merit that he takes a far wider range of sentiment, and does not hold by the theory that

the life of a man or a woman closes at the conventional end of a third volume. But he is above all things a dreamer, and his dreams resemble nightmares. Powerfully as his actors are put upon the stage, they seem to me to be, after all, 'such stuff as dreams are made of.' A genuine observer of life does not find it so highly spiced, and draws more moderate conclusions. Balzac's characters run into typical examples of particular passions rather than genuine human beings; they are generally monomaniacs. Balthazar Claes, who gives up his life to search for the philosopher's stone, is closely related to them all; only we must substitute for the philosopher's stone some pet passion, in which the whole nature is absorbed. They have the unnatural strain of mind which marks the approach to madness. It is not ordinary daylight which illuminates Balzac's dreamland, but some fantastic combination of Parisian lamps, which tinges all the actors with an unearthly glare, and distorts their features into extravagant forms. The result has, as I have said, a strange fascination; but one is half-ashamed of yielding, because one feels that it is due to the use of rather unholy drugs. The vapours that rise from his magic caldron and shape themselves into human forms smell unpleasantly of sulphur, or perhaps of Parisian

sewers.

The highest poetry, like the noblest morality, is the product of a thoroughly healthy mind. A diseased tendency in one respect is certain to make itself manifest in the other. Now Balzac, though he shows some powers which are unsurpassed or unequalled, possessed a mind which, to put it gently, was not exactly well-regulated. He took a pleasure in dwelling upon horrors from which a healthy imagination shrinks, and rejoiced greatly in gloating over the mysteries of iniquity. I do not say that this makes his work immoral in the ordinary sense. Probably few people who are likely to read Balzac would be any the worse for the study. But, from a purely artistic point of view, he is injured by his morbid tendencies. The highest triumph of style is to say what everybody has been thinking in such a way as to make it new; the greatest triumph of art is to make us see the poetical side of the commonplace life around Balzac's ambition was, doubtless, aimed in that direction. He wished to show that life in Paris or at Tours was as interesting to the man of real insight as any more ideal region. In a certain sense, he has accomplished his purpose. He has discovered food for a dark and powerful imagination in the most commonplace details of daily life. But he falls short in so far as he is unable to represent things as they are, and has a taste for

us.

impossible horrors. There are tragedies enough all round us for him who has eyes to see. Balzac is not content with the materials at hand, or rather he has a love for the more exceptional and hideous manifestations. Therefore the 'Comédie Humaine,' instead of being an accurate picture of human life, and appealing to the sympathies of all human beings, is a collection of monstrosities, whose vices are unnatural, and whose virtues are rather like their vices. One feels that there is something narrow and artificial about his work. It is intensely powerful, but it is not the highest kind of power. He makes the utmost of the gossip of a club smoking-room, or the scandal of a drawing-room, or perhaps of a country public-house; but he represents a special phase of manners, and that not a particularly pleasant one, rather than the more fundamental and permanent sentiments of mankind. When shall we see a writer who can be powerful without being spasmodic, and pierce through the surface of society without seeking for interest in its foulest abysses? That, I suppose, will happen when we have another Shakspeare.

DE QUINCEY.

LITTLE more than fourteen years ago there passed from among us a man who held a high and very peculiar position in English literature. For seventy-three years De Quincey had been carrying on an operation, which, for want of a better term, we must describe as living, but which would be more fitly described by some mode of speech indicating an existence on the confines of dreamland and reality. In 1821 he first published the work with which his name is most commonly associated, and at uncertain intervals he gave tokens to mankind of his continued presence on earth. What his life may have been in the intervals seems to have been at times unknown even to his friends. He began by disappearing from school and from his family, and seems to have fallen into the habit of temporary eclipses. At one moment he dropped upon his acquaintance from the clouds; at another he would vanish into utter darkness for weeks or months together. One day he came to dine with Christopher