This specially Balzacian quality is, I think, unique. It is like--it
may almost be said to _be_--the poetic imagination, present in
magnificent volume and degree, but in some miraculous way deprived and
sterilized of the specially poetical quality. By this I do not of
course mean that Balzac did not write in verse: we have a few verses
of his, and they are pretty bad, but that is neither here nor there.
The difference between Balzac and a great poet lies not in the fact
that the one fills the whole page with printed words, and the other
only a part of it--but in something else. If I could put that
something else into distinct words I should therein attain the
philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the _primum mobile_, the
_grand arcanum_, not merely of criticism but of all things. It might
be possible to coast about it, to hint at it, by adumbrations and in
consequences. But it is better and really more helpful to face the
difficulty boldly, and to say that Balzac, approaching a great poet
nearer perhaps than any other prose writer in any language, is
distinguished from one by the absence of the very last touch, the
finally constituting quiddity, which makes a great poet different from
Balzac.

Now, when we make this comparison, it is of the first interest to
remember--and it is one of the uses of the comparison, that it
suggests the remembrance of the fact--that the great poets have
usually been themselves extremely exact observers of detail. It has
not made them great poets; but they would not be great poets without
it. And when Eugenie Grandet starts from _le petit banc de bois_ at
the reference to it in her scoundrelly cousin's letter (to take only
one instance out of a thousand), we see in Balzac the same
observation, subject to the limitation just mentioned, that we see in