invented or imagined; and secondly; a faculty of regarding these
details through a mental lens or arrangement of lenses almost peculiar
to himself, which at once combines, enlarges, and invests them with a
peculiar magical halo or mirage. The two thousand personages of the
_Comedie Humaine_ are, for the most part, "signaled," as the French
official word has it, marked and denoted by the minutest traits of
character, gesture, gait, clothing, abode, what not; the transactions
recorded are very often given with a scrupulous and microscopic
accuracy of reporting which no detective could outdo. Defoe is not
more circumstantial in detail of fact than Balzac; Richardson is
hardly more prodigal of character-stroke. Yet a very large proportion
of these characters, of these circumstances, are evidently things
invented or imagined, not observed. And in addition to this the
artist's magic glass, his Balzacian speculum, if we may so say (for
none else has ever had it), transforms even the most rigid observation
into something flickering and fanciful, the outline as of shadows on
the wall, not the precise contour of etching or of the camera.

It is curious, but not unexampled, that both Balzac himself when he
struggled in argument with his critics and those of his partisans who
have been most zealously devoted to him, have usually tried to exalt
the first and less remarkable of these gifts over the second and
infinitely more remarkable. Balzac protested strenuously against the
use of the word "gigantesque" in reference to his work; and of course
it is susceptible of an unhandsome innuendo. But if we leave that
innuendo aside, if we adopt the sane reflection that "gigantesque"
does not exceed "gigantic," or assert as constant failure of
greatness, but only indicates that the magnifying process is carried
on with a certain indiscriminateness, we shall find none, I think,
which so thoroughly well describes him.