But farther than this; with all his care for minute touches and his broad and painstaking observation, it is not so much life, after all, as a vision of life which he gives.  This contradicts what was said early in the present chapter:  but the two statements stand for the change likely to come to any student of Balzac:  his objective personality at last resolves itself into a vividly personal interpretation.  His breadth blinds one for a while, that is all.  Hence Balzac may be called an incurable romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist.  Like all first-class art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction.  He said in the Preface to “Pere Goriot” that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but “a possibly better world.”  He has done so.  The most untrue thing in a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life?  Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer than truth.  Balzac understood this, remembered it in his heart.  He is too big as man and artist to be confined within the narrow realistic formula.  While, as we have seen, he does not take sides on moral issues, nor allow himself to be a special pleader for this or that view, his work strikes a moral balance in that it shows universal humanity—­not humanity tranced in metaphysics, or pathologic in analysis, or enmeshed in sensualism.  In this sense, Balzac is a great realist.  There is no danger of any novelist—­any painter of life—­doing harm, if he but gives us the whole.  It is the story-teller who rolls some prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him:  he who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his audience.  Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of representing things as they are.  But this matters not, if only a writer’s nature be large and vigorous enough to report of humanity in a trustworthy way.  Balzac was much too well endowed in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual meaning.

In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty of the social historian was more than to give a statement of present conditions—­the social documents of the moment,—­variable as they might be for purposes of deduction.  He insisted that the coming,—­perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be prophesied;—­those future ameliorations, whether individual or collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast.  Let me again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man who is called arch-realist of his day:  “The novelist should depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better world.”  In the very novel where he said it ("Pere Goriot”) he may seem to have violated the principle:  but taking his fiction in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the pronunciamento exemplifies his practice.