ABSTRACT
The critical response to Balzac throughout most of the nineteenth century was almost exclusively French. Common to all the critics represented, however, is the recognition that Balzac was a phenomenon who posed a problem when considered according to existing aesthetic and moral criteria. In nineteenth-century France, Balzac's status as a writer, his moral and political standpoints, and the precise source of his unique novelistic universe, were still more controversial subjects. Henry James, however, stands out as virtually the only major literary figure writing in English to devote himself to Balzac's work before the 1890s. Oscar Wilde actually claimed, in conversation with Edmond de Goncourt, that the only Englishman to have read Balzac was the poet Swinburne. It was in 1889, significantly, that George Moore published his eulogistic essay devoted to some of Balzac's lesser known compositions; he professed to find 'more wisdom and more divine imagination in Balzac than in any other writer'.
