His originality is entirely undisputed. It would not be a difficult task to point out the buried hands which modeled the grandiose figure of Hugo, and the tombs ransacked by Shakespeare are still open to inspection; but Balzac was totally without literary ancestry. The influence of Scott and Hoffmann, at that time enormous, possibly presided at the conception of some of his earlier works, and brought to them strength from the massiveness of the one and coloring from the unexpectedness of the other; they were perhaps the transitory models of a necessary apprenticeship, in which the masters were soon to be neglected and surpassed. Aside from this early schooling, Balzac is indebted to no one,—neither to the Greeks nor to the Romans, to the Italian school, to the Trouvères of feudal France nor to the Minnesingers of the Middle Ages; and even where Hoffmann is not, he at least is entirely modern and absolutely original; for the fantastic effects of the former were drawn from Micromegas, who had already extracted them from Cyrano de Bergerac,—a well into which, it may be noted, Voltaire himself has dipped; and in this respect, that it may not be objected that the “Contes Drolatiques” are but a continuation of Rabelais, Béroalde de Verville, and the Reine de Navarre, it is well to point out that where but the female was seen by these writers Balzac discovered the woman, a difference surely as great as between the bottle and the wine. And here perhaps a word may be said in regard to the present Realistic school, of which he was the founder, and whose influence is daily becoming more noticeable and apparent. The term _present_ Realistic school is used advisedly; for though it was only about twenty-five or thirty years ago that realism began to be seriously considered, it is erroneous to suppose that it is of purely modern origin. For realism as expressed in literature is but the sentiment of the obvious and the true; and in the days when art was a splendid novelty, the first poets, as also the first painters, sought their inspirations directly from the primal source of all reality,—that is, from Nature herself. Nature, therefore, is the mother of realism, artistically considered, and Homer was its first exponent; for not only was the actuality of his subject never neglected for the purely ideal, but it was also a first experience.