to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the poet's
thought is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be
greater than the novelist's. On these points we will cry quits, and come at
once to the vital question--the creation. Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet? Is
Eugénie Grandet inferior to Desdemona? Is her father inferior to Shylock?
Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin? Can it be said that the apothecary in the
"Cousine Bette," or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine Bette herself is
inferior to anything the brain of man has ever conceived? And it must not
be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage
of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of
the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of
gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more
vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were
equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I
speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist
seems to me richer than that of the dramatist. Who shall forget those
terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house?
Speaking of Vautrin she says, "His look frightens me as if he put his hand
on my dress;" and another epigram from the same book, "Woman's virtue is
man's greatest invention." Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes
more incisively to the truth of things. One more; here I can give the exact
words: "_La gloire est le soleil des morts._" It would be easy to
compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all "Maximes" and
"Pensées," even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and
shallow.

Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated
in the "Comédie Humaine." I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other
books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any
important or lasting impression upon my mind. The rest was like walnuts and