It is for this reason that one hesitates to endorse the opinions quoted above as to the filiation of all or most subsequent French fiction upon Balzac. Of course he had a great influence on it; such a genius, in such circumstances, could not but have. The "interior" business was largely followed and elaborated; it might be argued--though the contention would have to be strictly limited and freely provisoed--that Naturalism in general--as the "Rougon-Macquart" scheme certainly was in particular--was a sort of bastard of the _Comedie_. Other points of relationship might be urged. But all this would leave the most characteristic Balzacities untouched. In the most obvious and superficial quality--pessimistic psychology--the other novelist dealt with in this chapter--Beyle--is far more of a real origin than Balzac is. If one takes the most brilliant of his successors outside the Naturalist school--Flaubert and Feuillet--very little that is really Balzacian will be found in either. At least _Madame Bovary_ and _M. de Camors_--which, I suppose, most people would choose to represent the greatest genius and the most flexible talent of the Second Empire in novel-writing--seem to me to show hardly anything that is like Balzac. The Goncourts have something of degraded Balzacianism on its lower side in them, and Zola approaches, at least in his "apocalyptic" period, something like a similar though less offensive degradation of the higher. But I can hardly conceive anything less like Balzac's work than Maupassant's. [Sidenote: And its own character.] For the fact is that the real Balzac lies--to and for me--almost entirely in that _aura_ of other-worldliness of which I have spoken. It is in the revelation of this other world, so like ours and yet not the same; in the exploration of its continents; in the frequentation of its inhabitants; that the pleasure which he has to give consists. How he came himself to discover it is as undiscoverable as how his in some sort analogue Dickens, after pottering not unpleasantly with Bozeries, "thought of Mr. Pickwick," and so of the rest of _his_ human (and extra-human) comedy. But the facts, in both cases fortunately, remain. And it may be possible to indicate at least some qualities and characteristics of the fashion in which he dealt with this world when he _had_ discovered it. In _Les Chouans_ he had found out not so much it, as the way to it; in the books between that and _La Peau de Chagrin_ he was over the border, and with _La Peau_ itself he had "crossed Jordan,"--it was all conquest and extension--as far as permitted--of territory afterwards. [Sidenote: The "occult" element.]