neither and can read but one, who will object to any comparison being
drawn between the Dramatist and the Novelist; but I confess that I--if
the inherent superiority of verse over prose, which I admit
unhesitatingly, be waived--that I fail, utterly fail 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.