Important as Stendhal is in the history of modern French fiction, he is dwarfed by the colossal figure of BALZAC.  By virtue of his enormous powers, and the immense quantity and variety of his output, Balzac might be called the Hugo of prose, if it were not that in two most important respects he presents a complete contrast to his great contemporary.  In the first place, his control of the technical resources of the language was as feeble as Hugo’s was mighty.  Balzac’s style is bad; in spite of the electric vigour that runs through his writing, it is formless, clumsy, and quite without distinction; it is the writing of a man who was highly perspicacious, formidably powerful, and vulgar.  But, on the other hand, he possessed one great quality which Hugo altogether lacked—­the sense of the real.  Hugo was most himself when he was soaring on the wings of fancy through the empyrean; Balzac was most himself when he was rattling in a hired cab through the streets of Paris.  He was of the earth earthy.  His coarse, large, germinating spirit gave forth, like the earth, a teeming richness, a solid, palpable creation.  And thus it was he who achieved what Hugo, in Les Miserables, had in vain attempted. La Comedie Humaine, as he called the long series of his novels, which forms in effect a single work, presents, in spite of its limitations and its faults, a picture of the France of that age drawn on the vast scale and in the grand manner of an epic.

The limitations and the faults of Balzac’s work are, indeed, sufficiently obvious and sufficiently grave.  The same coarseness of fibre which appears in his style made him incapable of understanding the delicacies of life—­the refined shades of emotion, the subtleties of human intercourse.  He probably never read Jane Austen; but if he had he certainly would have considered her an utterly pointless writer; and he would have been altogether at sea in a novel by Henry James.  The elusive things that are so important, the indecisive things that are so curious, the intimate things that are so thrilling—­all these slipped through his rough, matter-of-fact grasp.  His treatment of the relations between the sexes is characteristic.  The subject fills a great place in his novels; he approaches it with an unflinching boldness, and a most penetrating gaze; yet he never succeeds in giving a really satisfactory presentment of the highest of those relations—­love.  That eluded him:  its essence was too subtle, too private, too transcendental.  No one can describe love who has not the makings of a poet in him.  And a poet was the very last thing that Balzac was.