Read to-day, “Le Rouge et Noir,” which it is sufficient to consider for our purposes, seems somewhat slow in movement, struggling in construction, meticulous in manner.  At times, its interminability recalls “Clarissa Harlowe,” but it possesses the traits’ which were to mark the coming school of novel-writing in France and hence in the modern world:  to wit, freedom in dealing with love in its irregular relation, the tendency towards tragedy, and that subtlety of handling which makes the main interest to depend upon motive and thought rather than upon the external action itself.  “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,”—­that might be the motto.  The young quasi-hero is Julian, an ambitious worldling of no family, and his use of the Church as a means of promotion, his amours with several women and his death because of his love for one of them, are traced with a kind of tortuous revelation of the inner workings of the human heart which in its way declares genius in the writer:  and which certainly makes a work disillusioning of human nature.  Its more external aspect of a study of the politic Church and State, of the rivalry between the reds and the blacks of the state religion, is entirely secondary to this greater purpose and result:  here, for the first time at full length, a writer shows the possibility of that realistic portrayal sternly carried through, no matter how destructive of romantic preconceptions of men and women.  It is the method of Richardson flowering in a time of greater freedom and more cynical questioning of the gods.

II

But giving Stendhal his full mint and cummin of praise, he yet was but the forerunner of a mightier man.  Undoubtedly, he prepared the soil and was a necessary link in the chain of development wherewith fiction was to forge itself an unbreakable sequence of strength.  Balzac was to put out his lesser light, as indeed the refulgence of his genius was to overshine all French fiction, before and since.  It would be an exaggeration to say that the major English novelists of the middle nineteenth century were consciously disciples of Balzac—­for something greater even than he moved them; the spirit of the Time.  But it is quite within bounds to say that of all modern fiction he is the leader and shaper.  Without him, his greatest native follower, Zola, is inconceivable.  He gathers up into himself and expresses at its fullest all that was latent in the striking modern growth whose banner-cry was Truth, and whose method was that of the social scientist.  Here was a man who, early in his career, for the first time in the history of the Novel, deliberately planned to constitute himself the social historian of his epoch and race:  and who, in upwards of a hundred remarkable pieces of fiction in Novel form executed that plan in such fulness that his completed work stands not only as a monument of industry, but as perhaps the most inspiring example of literary synthesis in the history of letters.  In bigness of conception and of construction—­let alone the way in which the work was performed—­the Human Comedy is awe-begetting; it drives one to Shakspere for like largeness of scale.  Such a performance, ordered and directed to a foreseen end, is unique in literature.