illusions are honest, wholesome, every-day people, who have the air of wandering homelessly about among them, without definite direction; and the mists are full of a luminosity which, in spite of them, we know for common-sense and poetry.  What is useful in any review of Goethe’s methods is the recognition of the fact, which it must bring, that the greatest master cannot produce a masterpiece in a new kind.  The novel was too recently invented in Goethe’s day not to be, even in his hands, full of the faults of apprentice work.

V.

In fact, a great master may sin against the “modesty of nature” in many ways, and I have felt this painfully in reading Balzac’s romance—­it is not worthy the name of novel—­’Le Pere Goriot,’ which is full of a malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art.  After that exquisitely careful and truthful setting of his story in the shabby boarding-house, he fills the scene with figures jerked about by the exaggerated passions and motives of the stage.  We cannot have a cynic reasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic; we must have a lurid villain of melodrama, a disguised convict, with a vast criminal organization at his command, and

        “So dyed double red”

indeed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the horrified spectators with his glare.  A father fond of unworthy children, and leading a life of self-denial for their sake, as may probably and pathetically be, is not enough; there must be an imbecile, trembling dotard, willing to promote even the liaisons of his daughters to give them happiness and to teach the sublimity of the paternal instinct.  The hero cannot sufficiently be a selfish young fellow, with alternating impulses of greed and generosity; he must superfluously intend a career of iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by nothing but the most cataclysmal interpositions.  It can be said that without such personages the plot could not be transacted; but so much the worse for the plot.  Such a plot had no business to be; and while actions so unnatural are imagined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who really think about it.  To Balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in his better mood he gave us such biographies as ‘Eugenie Grandet,’ but because he wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify the externals of life, to portray faithfully the outside of men and things.  It was still held that in order to interest the reader the characters must be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that “heroes” and “heroines” existed all around us, and that these abnormal beings needed only to be discovered in their several humble disguises, and then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy of the creatures of the poets.  How false that notion was, few but the critics, who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told.  Some of these poor fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, and that human feelings and motives, as God made them and as men know them, are not good enough for novel-readers.