But his work does not merely suffer from the absence of certain good qualities; it is also marred by the presence of positively bad ones.  Balzac was not simply a realist.  There was a romantic vein in him, which occasionally came to the surface with unfortunate results.  When that happened, he plunged into the most reckless melodrama, revelled in the sickliest sentiment, or evolved the most grotesque characters, the most fantastic plots.  And these lapses occur quite indiscriminately.  Side by side with some detailed and convincing description, one comes upon glaring absurdities; in the middle of some narrative of extraordinary actuality, one finds oneself among hissing villains, disguises, poisons, and all the paraphernalia of a penny novelette.  Balzac’s lack of critical insight into his own work is one of the most singular of his characteristics.  He hardly seems to have known at all what he was about.  He wrote feverishly, desperately, under the impulsion of irresistible genius.  His conceptions crowded upon him in vivid, serried multitudes—­the wildest visions of fantasy mixed pell-mell with the most vital realizations of fact.  It was not for him to distinguish; his concern was simply, somehow or other, to get them all out:  good, bad, or indifferent, what did it matter?  The things were in his brain; and they must be expressed.

Fortunately, it is very easy for the reader to be more discriminating than Balzac.  The alloy is not inextricably mingled with the pure metal—­the chaff may be winnowed off, and the grain left.  His errors and futilities cannot obscure his true achievement—­his evocation of multitudinous life.  The whole of France is crammed into his pages, and electrified there into intense vitality.  The realism of the classical novelists was a purely psychological realism; it was concerned with the delicately shifting states of mind of a few chosen persons, and with nothing else.  Balzac worked on a very different plan.  He neglected the subtleties of the spirit, and devoted himself instead to, displaying the immense interest that lay in those prosaic circumstances of existence which the older writers had ignored.  He showed with wonderful force that the mere common details of everyday life were filled with drama, that, to him who had eyes to see, there might be significance in a ready-made suit of clothes, and passion in the furniture of a boarding-house.  Money in particular gave him an unending theme.  There is hardly a character in the whole vast range of his creation of whose income we are not exactly informed; and it might almost be said that the only definite moral that can be drawn from La Comedie Humaine is that the importance of money can never be over-estimated.  The classical writers preferred to leave such matters to the imagination of the reader; it was Balzac’s great object to leave nothing to the imagination of the reader.  By ceaseless effort, by infinite care, by elaborate attention to the minutest details,