ABSTRACT
Leslie Stephen is commonly regarded as the second most eminent English critic of the Victorian age after Matthew Arnold. He was, amongst other things, editor of The Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography. Having devoted a long article to Balzac's novels in The Fortnightly Review, he returned to the subject of Balzac at the end of his review of Taine's History of English Literature, published in the same magazine two years later. Certainly at times Stephen seems determined to convince his reader of the ridiculousness both of what Balzac has to say and of the fictional situations he contrives. The English readers of Balzac may be unjust in calling him immoral, in the sense that he actually approves of vice, but he is immoral in the sense that he enjoys gloating over morbid products of a corrupt civilization.
