bills; and to these "picked" duns he committed the care of his reputation. Half a dozen such filled the adjacent communes of Sèvres and Ville d'Avray with the echoes of their loud attempts to force an entrance into our author's dwelling; and their lamentations on the bootlessness of the undertaking were so lively, that no one dreamed of asking what might be the amount of the sums thus clamoured for-usually a few hundred francs.

In a small way, nevertheless, Balzac had certain embarrassments; arising more from his eccentricities, however, than from absolute deficiency of money. He was constantly in hot-water with his neighbours, and had become the perpetual butt for the "papier timbré" of a dozen tribunals, from the very nature of the singular property he had persisted in buying. As we have said, Les Jardies consisted of a house built after his own plans, and perched upon the top of a hill so steep, that the alleys of what the owner was pleased to term his "garden" realised but too perfectly the ideal of a facilis descensus, and were literally only practicable to such persons as had mastered the process of steadying themselves by artificial means. Round this strange pyramidal pleasaunce Balzac must needs go and build up a wall, which of course was for ever being carried away by storms of wind or rain, to which it could not oppose any sufficient resistance, and spreading itself out full-length amongst his neighbours' carrots and turnips. Who shall say how many times the wall went trespassing, and was reconstructed, and took to its wonted ways again? At last Balzac bethought him of buying the bit of land on the other side, and rebuilt his wall (never reflecting that it was now no longer needed), quaintly remarking that "it cost dear, but that it was a comfort to be able to tumble to pieces on your own ground," and that "his wretched wall could now die in its own bed." What Balzac would have done with enormous sums of money, had he ever gained them, is not a problem that his most intimate friends have been able to solve; yet that he did yield to the vague but perpetual attraction of the philosopher's stone to the full as much (and in the same way) as the alchemists of the middle ages, is a fact not to be denied. At one time this is represented by Mahomet's ring, which Balzac firmly believes has falien into his possession, and with which he is for instantly setting forth, with three of his friends, to the court of the Great Mogul, who is to give him fifteen or twenty millions for the sacred gem. At another time it takes the form of an infallible treasure to be brought to light by a finding-rod, which gold, no matter where or how deeply hidden, irresistibly attracts, and by the help whereof Balzac is persuaded he shall discover at St. Domingo the vast sums Toussaint L'Ouverture had concealed; for that he did conceal them, Balzac positively knows.

There would be no end if we were to enumerate all the hallucinations of Balzac's brain on this subject. The nearest approach to any thing practical was his sudden notion of writing for the theatre; a resolution never suited to his talent, but adopted suddenly one fine day, de parti pris, as the French say. Victor Hugo had gone to pay a visit to Balzac, and breakfast with him at Les Jardies. The two were very slightly acquainted with cach other. Before an hour was over, what was inevitable had occurred. Balzac, who, as we have said, was utterly divested of any thing in the shape of affectation, had become the gaping, devouring auditor of Victor Hugo. The latter speedily indulged himself in his usual practice of holding forth, and was far too pompous and affected not to seize hold of his host by every fibre of his pre-eminently gullible nature. Hugo expatiated on the facility of making a fortune by the drama, to which Balzac had never dreamt of turning his thoughts:

"Hugo," says Léon Gozlan, who was present, "appeared to Balzac's dazzled vision as an enchanter, who caused diamond mines to open beneath his feet. He explained to him the real meaning of the words droits d'auteur, of which the sense to his listener's ears had till then been obscure and incomplete. Gains achieved in Paris! Gains achieved in the provinces! Here for three acts, there for five; and then 'revivals,' and premiums, and sale of tickets, and a host of small benefits besides. Often four hundred francs in a night! and all that-all that silver and gold-all these five-franc pieces and Napoleons-to be gained while the author is sleeping, or walking about with his hands in his pockets! After his first effort of creation, the metallic shower pours down upon him while he sits quiet doing nothing."

This, we may easily believe (having once the key to the man's character) tempted Balzac in the light of a financial operation, une affaire. "I am certain," says his biographer, "that these details, given him by Hugo with the precision of a clerk of the court of accounts, were the main cause of the rage for dramatic authorship which seized upon Balzac, and never left him from that hour to the hour of his death." This, indeed, is the only possible explanation of the sudden mania for the stage which afflicted the author of Eugenie Grandet in the latter period of his career. Never was any writer of fiction, perhaps, so totally deficient in the species of talent required for animating the characters of a drama. As we have so often, in the course of these pages, observed, Balzac's mode of creation was purely descriptive; he wrote merely to describe, to bring to the knowledge of others what he knew himself; and if he could have found any better and surer means than writing for making the public familiar with what to him were realities, he would have instantly adopted that This point granted (and we do not believe any one has

ever dreamt of disputing it), it becomes evident that Balzac's genius was the very reverse of dramatic, since the active, as distinguished from the descriptive mode of invention, is essentially requisite for the drama.

Of this Balzac had, we suspect, some glimmering notion himself; for no sooner had he decided that "the thing to be done" was to write plays, than he at once, and in the most methodical way, set about discovering a collaborateur, who was to furnish subject, plot, and incidents, whilst Balzac undertook to supply the dialogue. His choice fell upon an unhappy young man of the name of Lassailly, who some few years later died in a madhouse; and assuredly there would be nothing strange if a disposition to insanity had been fostered by his abode at Les Jardies in the "lion's den," as his more independent comrades denominated Balzac's residence. The tortures which our author contrived to inflict on his literary coadjutor were, as usual, foreordained by Balzac in a very specific and minute preliminary adjustment of their mutual relations. A man of some note, who is but just dead, and who used to be called the Napoleon of the press, -the originator of the Siècle, the Droit, the Liberté, the Charivari, and a dozen other journals, Armand Dutacq, gave very striking testimony to Balzac's genius for this kind of transaction. We may get some conception of the warmth of this man's admiration for Balzac, when we know that to the hour of his death he professed to feel only two absorbing aspirations-the one to originate a paper in comparison with which the Times should seem but a penny print, the other to edit a really complete edition of Balzac's works. Yet this person once confessed that he had never read one line of Balzac's publications; " but," he used to add, "I have read, and I possess in autograph, every agreement, every traité he ever drew up with his publishers; and these are master-pieces of genius." Of course Balzac, who would willingly have drawn up written contracts with his butcher and baker, did not let slip so good an opportunity of verbalising his intentions as was here offered. He framed a traité with Lassailly, in virtue of which the latter was to be lodged, fed, and in every respect cared for; while he, in his turn, was to construct skeletons of plays for Balzac to dress up and animate. Poor Lassailly, who shall paint the tortures he underwent? In the dead of the night, either a bell that would have awakened the Seven Sleepers scared his dreams, or Balzac in person, lamp in hand, wrapped in his monk-like dressing-gown, stood over him, glowering into his very soul with his intensely-luminous eyes, and calling to him like the voice of inexorable fate, "What have you found, Lassailly?” As might be expected, Lassailly never "found" any thing. As to Balzac, he did not trouble himself to seek; that was not his

business; he had awarded to himself another kind of activity in the partnership, and he looked upon his miserable partner as bound to execute the work for which he was engaged--an obligation which he never did or could discharge. Night after night the same colloquy took place. "I saw Frederick to-day; he is hungry and thirsty for a drama that shall make all Paris rave; but where is this drama that shall make all Paris rave? Voilà!" And "Voilà!" would echo the unhappy object of the demand, trying to look wise. "Have you got that drama, Lassailly?" "Not quite," would be the reply. Then you have it in part?" would rejoin the inflexible tormentor. Why you see, I wish you would give me a notion of what you think. ... I am sure if we were to put our ideas together-" "Our ideas!" Balzac would repeat, indignantly. "It is not my business to have any. You are half-asleep, Lassailly" (of course he was, poor wretch); "take some rest, if that is necessary for your imagination; I will come again in an hour, or else ring."

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The end of the association was, that Lassailly ran away, and never heard the name of the Jardies without a thrill of terror; and Balzac took upon himself the hopeless task of writing for the theatre de parti pris; in which province of art, so entirely unsuited to his peculiar genius, his repeated failures are only too well known. The only part of Balzac's talent that could in any degree be applied to the drama was the mechanical part. It is in the list of his characters (take, for instance, either Quinola or Vautrin) that you find the only trace of his individuality. When these characters have to act, to be, they fail in their purpose, are all at fault, and cease to inspire any interest in the public. But in his dramatis persone you find, to borrow Léon Gozlan's words, "breathing the same air, occupying the same ground, a motley crowd of dukes and duchesses, swindlers and lacqueys, who seem destined never to be jostled together, and in whose strange juxtaposition lay precisely Balzac's idée fixe." This is quite true; and here, too, lay the secret of the superiority of his works, so long as those works were produced by the merely descriptive method. The whole of that long series of volumes which form La Comédie Humaine, draw their existence from, and owe their worth to, the prevalence of the tragi-comical element. To describe this tragi-comedy, the presence whereof was manifest to his sense on every side, externally and palpably, Balzac's genius was sufficient; to have put all this vast tragicomedy in action; to have reproduced this world from within; to have made it live without describing it,-for this only a Shakespeare could have sufficed. To this height Balzac not only never rose, but he never put his foot upon the first round of the ladder that leads to such an eminence. What we have said will, we think,

G

show that society exercised a far greater influence upon Balzac than Balzac exercised upon society. His was an essentially absorbent nature, and by no means one of those which of themselves, and from themselves, give forth what entire generations are to absorb. If this is in one sense the cause of the limitation of his talent, it is also the cause of its intensity; and what at first sight may seem to diminish his power as a writer, is found upon maturer examination to be the mainspring of that power.

Balzac's works have been imperfectly named; instead of being entitled La Comédie Humaine, they should have been called La Comédie Humaine en France, for they do not at all depict the comedy in which men and women are actors all over the world, but only and exclusively the comedy that human nature enacts in France. No hero or heroine of Balzac's could be other than a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman; no scene of any one of his books could take place in any other country. Nay, more than this, his creations live only in his own age. Balzac does not, to use Pascal's fine expression, "wander in times that are not his own;" on the contrary, he keeps within all the realities that compass him round. That very tendency we have pointed out, to be eternally "settling" somebody's affairs; that rage for figures; that strong instinct for "administration," are the especial characteristics, as they are one of the incoherencies, of the most unpunctual, most unbusiness-like nation upon earth. Balzac's principal originality in France lies, as we have said, in his sincerity, in his want of affectation. The race of authors generally, amongst our neighbours, is a race in which the author predominates over the man, and in which consequently the national characteristics are soon lost in those of the corporation, if we may so call it. With Balzac, the man predominating completely over the author, the marks of nationality have never been effaced. It has been often said, that the writer of the Comédie Humaine descended from Rabelais in a literary sense, and had great affinity with Molière; but such an assertion evidently needs qualification. The conceptions of both Rabelais and Molière embrace mankind, typify all men; whereas Balzac's conceptions typify Frenchmen only. Where is the land to which Panurge cannot belong? and of what country may not Alceste or Tartuffe be natives? But can this be said of any of Balzac's creations? can they find the vital conditions they require any where out of the atmosphere of French civilisation? If we had not already too much enlarged upon our subject, it would not be difficult to show where really lie Balzac's literary affinities, from whom he derives them, and who derives them from him. A writer very little read in this country, not perhaps generally known even in his own, but enthusiastically admired by those