In Dickens’s biography, which is nearly half again as long as that of Balzac and nearly two and a half times as long as that of Hugo, we encounter such words and phrases as “masterpieces” and “wonderful books.” No books of his surpassed the early chapters of _Great Expectations_ in “perfection of technique or in the mastery of all the resources of the novelist’s art.” Here, as in many other places, patriotic license has obviously been permitted to run wild. Where, outside of provincial England, will you find another critic, no matter how appreciative of Dickens’s talent, who will agree that he possessed “perfection of technique” and a “mastery of all the resources of the novelist’s art”? But, as if this perfervid rhetoric were not sufficiently extreme, Swinburne is quoted as saying that to have created Abel Magwitch alone is to be a god indeed among the creators of deathless men. (This means that Dickens was a god beside the mere mundane creator of Lucien de Rubempré, Goriot, and Eugénie Grandet.) And, again, on top of this unreasoned enthusiasm, it is added that in “intensity and range of creative genius he can hardly be said to have any modern rival.” Let us turn to Balzac who was not, according to this encyclopædia, even Dickens’s rival in intensity and range of creative genius. Here we find derogatory criticism which indeed bears out the contention of Dickens’s biographer that the author of _David Copperfield_ was superior to the author of _Lost Illusions_. Balzac, we read, “is never quite real.” His style “lacks force and adequacy to his own purpose.” And then we are given this final bit of insular criticism: “It is idle to claim for Balzac an absolute supremacy in the novel, while it may be questioned whether any single book of his, or any scene of a book, or even any single character or situation, is among the very greatest books, scenes, characters, situations in literature.” Alas, poor Balzac!—the inferior of both Dickens and Thackeray—the writer who, if the judgment of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is to be accepted, created no book, scene, character or situation which is among the greatest! Thus are the world’s true geniuses disparaged for the benefit of moral English culture. De Vigny receives adverse criticism. He is compared unfavorably to Sir Walter Scott, and is attacked for his “pessimistic” philosophy. De Musset “had genius, though not genius of that strongest kind which its possessor can always keep in check”—after the elegant and repressed manner of English writers, no doubt. De Musset’s own character worked “against his success as a writer,” and his break with George Sand “brought out the weakest side of his moral character.” (Again the church-bell _motif_.) Gautier, that sensuous and un-English Frenchman, wrote a book called _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ which was “unfitted by its subject, and in parts by its treatment, for general perusal.”