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 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."

sure

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 scries 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 lics, 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

who have studied him narrowly, Henri Beyle (Stendhal), is probably, to a certain extent, one of the determining causes of Balzac's literary career, and of some of the peculiarities of his talent. We say this reservedly, because Balzac would have been Balzac had Stendhal never existed; but Stendhal, perhaps, helped him to be himself a little sooner. The analogies and dissimilarities too between the two men are as great as between the two authors; but neither has any analogy with any one else, save the other alone. Stendhal's individuality is not Balzac's, but it is almost as strong as his, and that is where they are of the same kind; Stendhal is undoubtedly Balzac's precursor, he heralds and announces, though he is not exactly like him. Many of the peculiarities of La Comédie Humaine (take the Conjuration des Treize, for instance) may be traced back to that strange book, Le Rouge et le Noir; and the Physiologie du Mariage owes as much to Stendhal's Traité de l'Amour as to Brillat Savarin's Physiologie du Goût. But there is one immense difference between them-Stendhal has no conviction. When, in the Chartreuse de Parme, he gives us that wonderful description of the battle of Waterloo, as he himself lived through it, he neither believes in himself nor in the battle of Waterloo. Had Balzac written it, he would have believed in every line he wrote; as he would, if he were still alive, believe in the genuineness of the sixty-million-and-tenth sabre-hilt that might be dug up on the immortal plain itself, and offered to him as that of the first horseman of the Vieille Garde who fled. This being premised, let it be remarked parenthetically, that as a mere work of art (but as such alone) the Chartreuse de Parme is infinitely superior to any thing Balzac ever wrote; a truth of which no one was more intimately persuaded than Balzac himself.

If we had to point out in whom this quality of conviction (so rare amongst French writers of fiction) is exhibited at the present time, we could point only to the name of the younger Alexandre Dumas. Out of Balzac's large and varied intellectual estate, young Dumas (and he is the only one) has inherited this faculty of belief; and it is to that alone that he owes the honour of being singled out for notice from amidst the insignificant tribe of his contemporaries by two of the best (and one of them the severest) critics in Europe-Gutzkow and Gustave Planche. Alexandre Dumas fils is full of belief, as was Balzac; but, "alas," as Gutzkow justly laments, "belief in what? in whom?" In that alone which in the intellectual and moral world is unhealthy. He inherits also strikingly one of Balzac's most striking faults -a tendency to surrender himself completely to the impression of outward objects., Here Stendhal is likewise superior to both. The latter renders to himself a cooler account of his impressions;

and instead of obeying them always, puts them aside, banishes them, until they obey him; he then recalls them, and reproduces them at a distance. Balzac and his disciple, young Dumas, both commit the fault of registering immediately the impression they have not yet mastered; and the first evil result of this is the distorted proportion it induces-the violation of perspective, so

to say.

But we feel we have already transgressed our limits; and we hasten to retrace our steps, and recur for the last time to what has occasioned, if it does not excuse, our prolixity. We have been drawn on to what our readers may consider, perhaps, too great a length by the exceeding importance we cannot avoid attaching to Balzac as an exponent of the true state of civilisation in modern France. And, in this sense, he fully justifies our remark, that his worth is, in reality, dependent precisely upon that one peculiarity, which at first sight seems to diminish it— his intense, but exclusive, nationality. Balzac is, perhaps, the one writer of modern France most read by us, and least understood; and he is so for the reason that he is so exclusively French. He is for France what Dickens and Thackeray both are for England. No class escapes him, and no characteristic of that class passes unnoticed. We have studied the man minutely, because, as we said, in the man is to be found the mainspring of the author, his raison d'être; and we measure the importance of the author by the deep insight he affords us into the social life of his country. Any one may know France without reading Balzac, but no one can read Balzac without knowing France.

ART. IV. MR. SPURGEON AND HIS POPULARITY. The New Park-Street Pulpit, containing Sermons preached and revised by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, Minister of the Chapel, during the year 1855. Vol. I. London: Alabaster and Passmore. 1856. THE unhappy catastrophe which brought Mr. Spurgeon's name so prominently before the public a couple of months ago, has exposed him not unnaturally to a great deal of unpopularity. The propensity to find fault with a popular man, especially if he is a popular preacher, has given his critics plenty of business. Nothing, of course, is more easy and obvious than to say that it is an offence against good manners, and almost against the police themselves, to collect together large crowds of people to listen to irreverent familiarity, low buffoonery, and coarse railing upon

sacred subjects; nor does it require any great profundity or charity to suggest that Mr. Spurgeon is a mere impostor, a wretched hypocrite, who uses the Surrey Gardens for exactly the same purposes on Sunday for which other speculators on the public appetite for excitement employ them on the other days of the week. To us such criticism appears to be open to the double objection that it attacks a man who is placed by circumstances in a very painful position, and that it is a singularly feeble and inadequate solution of one of the most interesting of all possible problems. Ordinary candour must enable every one to see that the accident which occurred at the Surrey Gardens might have occurred to any body else as well as to Mr. Spurgeon, and that no one is to blame except those who caused the confusion. The question why several thousand people came together to listen to Mr. Spurgeon still remains to be answered; and we can scarcely conceive a question of greater interest to those who really wish to find the way to the hearts and understandings of large masses of their fellow-creatures. A young man of ordinary education, and without advantages of position or connection, has something to say which many thousand people weekly flock to hear. The question how and why this happens is surely one which cannot but be interesting to those who have had much experience of the utter failure of so large a number of the members of Mr. Spurgeon's profession to interest their congregations upon any subject whatever.

The most obvious answer to the question is no doubt to be found in Mr. Spurgeon's style. Any one, it is said, who will condescend to be a buffoon can collect an audience. Mr. Spurgeon's comic sermons and Mr. Robson's comic songs are popular for the same reason, though the one exhibition is in its proper place and the other is not. Many stories, more or less comic and more or less true, are very generally quoted in illustration of this opinion; but after carefully reading the thick and closely printed volume of sermons mentioned at the head of this article, we can conscientiously say that such stories do their subject considerable injustice. Coarseness, vulgarity, and sometimes even rant, is no doubt to be found in them in abundance; but they are by no means of the essence of Mr. Spurgeon's style, and might, we think, be expunged without affecting its force.

For example, in comparing the sufferings of the Christian with those of our Lord, we find (p. 13): "All you have to bear is as nothing compared with his mighty sufferings. Take courage; face it again like a man; never say die. Let not your patience be gone; take up your cross daily," &c. The introduction of the language of the ring in such a connection shows a want both of education and sensibility; but it is the phrase