In the literal and even the etymological sense of the word _naturalism_--that is, without taking account of the way in which Émile Zola and some other Italians have _perverted its nature_--no one can question that Balzac was a naturalist. One might as well deny that Victor Hugo was a romanticist! Everybody to-day knows that neither the freedom of his vocabulary, nor some very detailed descriptions in _Notre Dame de Paris_ and especially in _Les Misérables_, nor his coarse popular jokes, often in doubtful taste if not sometimes worse, nor yet the interest in social questions which characterised him from the very first--that nothing of all this, I say, prevents Victor Hugo from having been, up to the day of his death, _the_ romanticist; we may rest assured that in whatever way romanticism shall be defined, he will always be, in the history of French literature, its living incarnation. Balzac, on the other hand, will always be the living incarnation of naturalism. And surely, if to be a naturalist is to confine the field of one's art to the observation of contemporary life, and to try to give a complete and adequate representation thereof, not drawing back or hesitating, not abating one tittle of the truth, in the depiction of ugliness and vice; if to be a naturalist is, like a portrait-painter, to subordinate every æsthetic and moral consideration to the law of likeness--then it is impossible to be more of a naturalist than Balzac. But with all this, since his imagination is unruly, capricious, changeable, with a strong tendency to exaggeration, audacious, and corrupt; since he, as much as any of his contemporaries, feels the need of startling us; since he habitually writes under the dominion of a kind of hallucinatory fever sufficient of itself to mark what we may call the romantic state of mind--romanticism is certainly not absent from the work of this naturalist, but on the contrary would fill and inspire the whole of it, were that result not prevented by the claims, or conditions, of observation. A romantic imagination, struggling to triumph over itself, and succeeding only by confining itself to the study of the model--such may be the definition of Balzac's imagination or genius; and, in a way, to justify this definition by his work we need only to distinguish clearly his _nouvelles_ from his novels. Balzac's _nouvelles_ represent the share of romanticism in his work. _La Grande Bretèche_ is the typical romantic narrative, and we may say as much of _The Unknown Masterpiece_. The observer shuts his eyes; he now looks only within himself; he imagines "what might have been"; and he writes _An Episode under the Terror_. It is for him a way of escape from the obsession of the real: "The real is strait; the possible is vast."