years of his life such actual "want of pence" as vexed him was not
due, as it had been earlier, to the fact that the pence refused to
come in, but only to imprudent management of them, it certainly cannot
be said that Honore de Balzac, the most desperately hard worker in all
literature for such time as was allotted him, and perhaps the man of
greatest genius who was ever a desperately hard worker, falsified that
most uncomfortable but truest of proverbs--"Hard work never made
money."

If, however, he was but scantily rewarded with the money for which he
had a craving (not absolutely, I think, devoid of a touch of genuine
avarice, but consisting chiefly of the artist's desire for pleasant
and beautiful things, and partly presenting a variety or phase of the
grandiose imagination, which was his ruling characteristic), Balzac
had plenty of the fame, for which he cared quite as much as he cared
for money. Perhaps no writer except Voltaire and Goethe earlier made
such a really European reputation; and his books were of a kind to be
more widely read by the general public than either Goethe's or
Voltaire's. In England (Balzac liked the literature but not the
country, and never visited England, though I believe he planned a
visit) this popularity was, for obvious reasons, rather less than
elsewhere. The respectful vogue which French literature had had with
the English in the eighteenth century had ceased, owing partly to the
national enmity revived and fostered by the great war, and partly to
the growth of a fresh and magnificent literature at home during the
first thirty years of the nineteenth in England. But Balzac could not
fail to be read almost at once by the lettered; and he was translated
pretty early, though not perhaps to any great extent. It was in
England, moreover, that by far his greatest follower appeared, and
appeared very shortly. For it would be absurd in the most bigoted