{129} History of English Dramatic Poetry, ed. 1879, vol. ii. pp.437- 447.  In a later part of his noble and invaluable work (vol. iii. p.188) the author quotes a passage from “the induction to A Warning for Fair Women, 1599 (to which Shakespeare most assuredly contributed).”  It will be seen that I do not shrink from admitting the full weight of authority which can be thrown into the scale against my own opinion.  To such an assertion from the insolent organs of pretentious ignorance I should be content with the simple rejoinder that Shakespeare most assuredly did nothing whatever of the sort; but to return such an answer in the present case would be to write myself down—­and that in company to which I should most emphatically object—­as something very decidedly more—­and worse—­than an ass.

{137} Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence as with all reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman.  The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honore de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire.  Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the distinction indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.

“I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an observer should be Balzac’s great popular title to fame.  To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary.  All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself.  All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams.  From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his Human Comedy are keener after living, more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us.  In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius.  Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will.  It is actually Balzac himself.  And as all the beings of the outer world presented themselves to his mind’s eye in strong relief and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their lights.  Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see everything, to bring everything to sight, to guess everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the principal lines, so as to preserve the perspective of the whole.  He reminds me sometimes of those etchers who are never satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main scratches of the plate.  From