beneath the dignity of his inquiry.  He feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives.  In criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods and misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grown people would still like to play with.  He cannot keep terms with “Jack the Giant-killer” or “Puss-in-Boots,” under any name or in any place, even when they reappear as the convict Vautrec, or the Marquis de Montrivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen Noblemen.  He must say to himself that Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Balzac, he was Dumas; he was not realistic, he was romanticistic.

III

Such a critic will not respect Balzac’s good work the less for contemning his bad work.  He will easily account for the bad work historically, and when he has recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it.  In his view no living man is a type, but a character; now noble, now ignoble; now grand, now little; complex, full of vicissitude.  He will not expect Balzac to be always Balzac, and will be perhaps even more attracted to the study of him when he was trying to be Balzac than when he had become so.  In ‘Cesar Birotteau,’ for instance, he will be interested to note how Balzac stood at the beginning of the great things that have followed since in fiction.  There is an interesting likeness between his work in this and Nicolas Gogol’s in ‘Dead Souls,’ which serves to illustrate the simultaneity of the literary movement in men of such widely separated civilizations and conditions.  Both represent their characters with the touch of exaggeration which typifies; but in bringing his story to a close, Balzac employs a beneficence unknown to the Russian, and almost as universal and as apt as that which smiles upon the fortunes of the good in the Vicar of Wakefield.  It is not enough to have rehabilitated Birotteau pecuniarily and socially; he must make him die triumphantly, spectacularly, of an opportune hemorrhage, in the midst of the festivities which celebrate his restoration to his old home.  Before this happens, human nature has been laid under contribution right and left for acts of generosity towards the righteous bankrupt; even the king sends him six thousand francs.  It is very pretty; it is touching, and brings the lump into the reader’s throat; but it is too much, and one perceives that Balzac lived too soon to profit by Balzac.  The later men, especially the Russians, have known how to forbear the excesses of analysis, to withhold the weakly recurring descriptive and caressing epithets, to let the characters suffice for themselves.  All this does not mean that ‘Cesar Birotteau’ is not a beautiful and pathetic story, full of shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good art struggling to free itself from self-consciousness.  But it