he would describe all.  He brought an encyclopaedic knowledge to bear upon his task; he can give an exact account of the machinery of a provincial printing-press; he can write a dissertation on the methods of military organization; he can reveal the secret springs in the mechanism of Paris journalism; he is absolutely at home in the fraudulent transactions of money-makers, the methods of usurers, the operations of high finance.  And into all this mass of details he can infuse the spirit of life.  Perhaps his masterpiece in realistic description is his account of La Maison Vauquer—­a low boarding-house, to which he devotes page after page of minute particularity.  The result is not a mere dead catalogue:  it is a palpitating image of lurid truth.  Never was the sordid horror which lurks in places and in things evoked with a more intense completeness.

Undoubtedly it is in descriptions of the sordid, the squalid, the ugly, and the mean that Balzac particularly excels.  He is at his greatest when he is revealing the horrible underside of civilization—­the indignities of poverty, the low intrigues of parasites, the long procession of petty agonies that embitter and ruin a life.  Over this world of shadow and grime he throws strange lights.  Extraordinary silhouettes flash out and vanish; one has glimpses of obscure and ominous movements on every side; and, amid all this, some sudden vision emerges from the darkness, of pathos, of tenderness, of tragic and unutterable pain.

Balzac died in 1850, and at about that time the Romantic Movement came to an end.  Victor Hugo, it is true, continued to live and to produce for more than thirty years longer; but French literature ceased to be dominated by the ideals of the Romantic school.  That school had accomplished much; it had recreated French poetry, and it had revolutionized French prose.  But, by the very nature of its achievement, it led the way to its own supersession.  The spirit which animated its doctrines was the spirit of progress and of change; it taught that there were no fixed rules for writing well; that art, no less than science, lived by experiment; that a literature which did not develop was dead.  Therefore it was inevitable that the Romantic ideal itself should form the stepping-stone for a fresh advance.  The complex work of Balzac unites in a curious way many of the most important elements of the old school and of the new.  Alike by his vast force, his immense variety, his formlessness, his lack of critical and intellectual power, he was a Romantic; but he belonged to the future in his enormous love of prosaic detail, his materialist cast of mind, and his preoccupation with actual facts.

CHAPTER VII

THE AGE OF CRITICISM