Dante and Shakespeare, in Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great poets do
not as a rule _accumulate_ detail. Balzac does, and from this very
accumulation he manages to derive that singular gigantesque vagueness
--differing from the poetic vague, but ranking next to it--which I
have here ventured to note as his distinguishing quality. He bewilders
us a very little by it, and he gives us the impression that he has
slightly bewildered himself. But the compensations of the bewilderment
are large.

For in this labyrinth and whirl of things, in this heat and hurry of
observation and imagination, the special intoxication of Balzac
consists. Every great artist has his own means of producing this
intoxication, and it differs in result like the stimulus of beauty or
of wine. Those persons who are unfortunate enough to see in Balzac
little or nothing but an ingenious piler-up of careful strokes--a man
of science taking his human documents and classing them after an
orderly fashion in portfolio and deed-box--must miss this intoxication
altogether. It is much more agreeable as well as much more accurate to
see in the manufacture of the _Comedie_ the process of a Cyclopean
workshop--the bustle, the hurry, the glare and shadow, the steam and
sparks of Vulcanian forging. The results, it is true, are by no means
confused or disorderly--neither were those of the forges that worked
under Lipari--but there certainly went much more to them than the
dainty fingering of a literary fretwork-maker or the dull rummagings
of a realist _a la Zola_.

In part, no doubt, and in great part, the work of Balzac is
dream-stuff rather than life-stuff, and it is all the better for that.
What is better than dreams? But the coherence of his visions, their
bulk, their solidity, the way in which they return to us and we return