The effect of this singular combination of qualities, apparently the
most opposite, may be partly anticipated, but not quite. It results
occasionally in a certain shortcoming as regards _verite vraie_,
absolute artistic truth to nature. Those who would range Balzac in
point of such artistic veracity on a level with poetical and universal
realists like Shakespeare and Dante, or prosaic and particular
realists like Thackeray and Fielding, seem not only to be utterly
wrong but to pay their idol the worst of all compliments, that of
ignoring his own special qualifications. The province of Balzac may
not be--I do no think it is--identical, much less co-extensive, with
that of nature. But it is his own--a partly real, partly fantastic
region, where the lights, the shades, the dimensions, and the physical
laws are slightly different from those of this world of ours, but with
which, owing to the things it has in common with that world, we are
able to sympathize, which we can traverse and comprehend. Every now
and then the artist uses his observing faculty more, and his
magnifying and distorting lens less; every now and then he reverses
the proportion. Some tastes will like him best in the one stage; some
in the other; the happier constituted will like him best in both.
These latter will decline to put _Eugenie Grandet_ above the _Peau de
Chagrin_, or _Le Pere Goriot_ above the wonderful handful of tales
which includes _La Recherche de l'Absolu_ and _Le Chef-d'oeuvre
Inconnu_, though they will no doubt recognize that even in the first
two named members of these pairs the Balzacian quality, that of
magnifying and rendering grandiose, is present, and that the martyrdom
of Eugenie, the avarice of her father, the blind self-devotion of
Goriot to his thankless and worthless children, would not be what they
are if they were seen through a perfectly achromatic and normal
medium.