Turning to the longer books, the old double difficulty of selection and omission comes on one in full force. There are, I suppose, few Balzacians who have not special favourites, but probably _Eugenie Grandet_, _Le Pere Goriot_, and the two divisions of _Les Parents Pauvres_ would unite most suffrages. If I myself--who am not exactly a Balzacian, though few can admire him more, and not very many, I think, have had occasion for knowing his work better--put _Eugenie Grandet_ at the head of all the "scenes" of ordinary life, it is most certainly not because of its inoffensiveness. It _is_ perhaps partly because, in spite of that inoffensiveness, it fixes on one a grasp superior to anything of Beyle's and equal to anything of Flaubert's or Maupassant's. But the real cause of admiration is the nature of the grasp itself. Here, and perhaps here only--certainly here in transcendence--Balzac grapples with, and vanquishes, the bare, stern, unadorned, unbaited, ironic facts of life. It is not an intensely interesting book; it is certainly not a delightful one; you do not want to read it very often. Still, when you have read it you have come to one of the ultimate things: the _flammantia moenia_ of the world of fiction forbid any one to go further at this particular point. And when this has been said of a novel, all has been said of the quality of the novelist's genius, though not of its quantity or variety. [Sidenote: _Le Pere Goriot_ and _Les Parents Pauvres_.] The other three books selected have greater "interest" and, in the case of the _Parents Pauvres_ at least, much greater variety; but they do not seem to me to possess equal consummateness. _Le Pere Goriot_ is in its own way as pathetic as _Eugenie Grandet_, and Balzac has saved its pathos from being as irritating as that of the all but idiotic grandfather in _The Old Curiosity Shop_. But the situation still has a share of that fatal helpless ineffectiveness which Mr. Arnold so justly denounced. Of the remaining pair, _La Cousine Bette_ is, I suppose, again the favourite; but I am not a backer. I have in other places expressed my opinion that if Valerie Marneffe is part-model[163] of Becky Sharp, which is not, I believe, absolutely certain, the copy far--indeed infinitely--exceeds the original, and not least in the facts that Becky is attractive while Valerie is not, and that there is any amount of possibility in her. I should not wonder if, some day, a novelist took it into his head to show Becky as she would have been if she had had those thousands a year for which, with their accompanying chances of respectability, she so pathetically sighed. Now Valerie is, and always must have been, a _catin_, and nothing else. Lisbeth, again, though I admit her possibility, is not, to me, made quite probable. Hulot, very possible and probable indeed, does not interest or amuse me, and the angelic Adeline is good but dull. In fact the book, by its very