But these are "sma' sums, sma' sums," as Bailie Jarvie says; and
smallness of any kind has, whatever it may have to do with Balzac the
man, nothing to do with Balzac the writer. With him as with some
others, but not as with the larger number, the sense of _greatness_
increases the longer and the more fully he is studied. He resembles, I
think, Goethe more than any other man of letters--certainly more than
any other of the present century--in having done work which is very
frequently, if not even commonly, faulty, and in yet requiring that
his work shall be known as a whole. His appeal is cumulative; it
repeats itself on each occasion with a slight difference, and though
there may now and then be the same faults to be noticed, they are
almost invariably accompanied, not merely by the same, but by fresh
merits.

As has been said at the beginning of this essay, no attempt will be
made in it to give that running survey of Balzac's work which is
always useful and sometimes indispensable in treatment of the kind.
But something like a summing up of that subject will here be attempted
because it is really desirable that in embarking on so vast a voyage
the reader should have some general chart--some notes of the soundings
and log generally of those who have gone before him.

There are two things, then, which it is more especially desirable to
keep constantly before one in reading Balzac--two things which, taken
together, constitute his almost unique value, and two things which not
a few critics have failed to take together in him, being under the
impression that the one excludes the other, and that to admit the
other is tantamount to a denial of the one. These two things are,
first, an immense attention to detail, sometimes observed, sometimes