BALZAC

The real value of the creations of men of genius is to make richer

and more complicated what might be called the imaginative margin

of our normal life.

We all, as Goethe says, have to bear the burden of humanity--we

have to plunge into the bitter waters of reality, so full of sharp rocks

and blinding spray. We have to fight for our own hand. We have to

forget that we so much as possess a soul as we tug and strain at the

resistant elements out of which we live and help others to live.

It is nonsense to pretend that the insight of philosophers and the

energy of artists help us very greatly in this bleak wrestling. They

are there, these men of genius, securely lodged in the Elysian fields

of large and free thoughts--and we are here, sweating and toiling in

the dust of brutal facts.

The hollow idealism that pretends that the achievements of literature

and thought enter profoundly into the diurnal necessity which prods

us forward is a plausible and specious lie. We do not learn how to

deal craftily and prosperously with the world from the Machiavels

and Talleyrands. We do not learn how to love the world and savour

it with exquisite joy from the Whitmans and Emersons. What we do

is to struggle on, as best we may; living by custom, by prejudice, by

hope, by fear, by envy and jealousy, by ambition, by vanity, by love.

They call it our "environment," this patched up and piecemeal

panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither and

thither; and they call it our "heredity," this confused and twisted

amalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions,

which drives us backward and forward from within. But there is

more in the lives of the most wretched of us than this blind struggle.

There are those invaluable, unutterable moments, which we have _to

ourselves,_ free of the weight of the world. There are the moments--the

door of our bedroom, of our attic, of our ship's cabin, of our

monastic cell, of our tenement-flat, shut against the intruder--when

we can enter the company of the great shadows and largely and

freely converse with them to the forgetting of all vexation.

At such times, it is to the novelists, to the inventors of stories, that

we most willingly turn for the poppied draught that we crave. The

poets hurt us with the pang of too dear beauty. They remind us too

pitifully of what we have missed. There is too much Rosemary

which is "for remembrance" about their songs; too many dead

violets between their leaves!

But on the large full tide of a great human romance, we can forget

all our troubles. We can live in the lives of people who resemble

ourselves and yet are not ourselves. We can put our own misguided

life into the sweet distance, and see it--it also--as an invented story;

a story that may yet have a fortunate ending!

The philosophers and even the poets are too anxious to convert us to

their visions and their fancies. There is the fatal odour of the prophet

in their perilous rhetoric, and they would fain lay their most noble

fingers upon our personal matters. They want to make us moral or

immoral. They want to thrust their mysticism, their materialism,

their free love, or their imprisoned thoughts, down our reluctant

throats.

But the great novelists are up to no such mischief; they are dreaming

of no such outrage. They are telling their stories of the old eternal

dilemmas; stories of love and hate and fear and wonder and madness;

stories of life and death and strength and weakness and perversion;

stories of loyalty and treachery, of angels and devils, of things seen

and things unseen. The greatest novelists are not the ones that deal

in sociological or ethical problems. They are the ones that make us

forget sociological and ethical problems. They are the ones that deal

with the beautiful, mad, capricious, reckless, tyrannous passions,

which will outlast all social systems and are beyond the categories

of all ethical theorising.

First of all the arts of the world was, they say, the art of dancing.

The aboriginal cave-men, we are to believe, footed it in their long

twilights to tunes played on the bones of mammoths. But I like to

fancy, I who have no great love for this throwing abroad of legs and

arms, that there were a few quiet souls, even in those days, who

preferred to sit on their haunches and listen to some hoary greybeard

tell stories, stories I suppose of what it was like in still earlier days,

when those lumbering Diplodocuses were still snorting in the

remoter marshes.

It was not, as a matter of fact, in any attic or ship's cabin that I read

the larger number of Balzac's novels. I am not at all disinclined to

explain exactly and precisely where it was, because I cannot help

feeling that the way we poor slaves of work manage to snatch an

hour's pleasure, and the little happy accidents of place and

circumstance accompanying such pleasure, are a noteworthy part of

the interest of our experience. It was, as it happens, in a cheerful

bow-window in the Oxford High Street that I read most of Balzac;

read him in the dreamy half-light of late summer afternoons while

the coming on of evening seemed delayed by something golden in

the drowsy air which was more than the mere sinking of the sun

behind the historic roofs.

Oxford is not my Alma Mater. The less courtly atmosphere which

rises above the willows and poplars of the Cam nourished my

youthful dreams; and I shall probably to my dying day never quite

attain the high nonchalant aloofness from the common herd proper

to a true scholar.

It was in the humbler capacity of a summer visitor that I found

myself in those exclusive purlieus, and it amuses me now to recall

how I associated, as one does in reading a great romance, the

personages of the Human Comedy with what surrounded me then.

It is a far cry from the city of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater to

the city of Vautrin and Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré and

Gobsec and Père Goriot and Diane de Maufrigneuse; and the great

Balzacian world has the power of making every other milieu seem a

little faded and pallid. But one got a delicious sense of contrast

reading him just there in those golden evenings, and across the

margin of one's mind floated rich and thrilling suggestions of the

vast vistas of human life. One had the dreamy pleasure that some

sequestered seminarist might have, who, on a sunny bench, under

high monastic walls, reads of the gallantries and adventures of the

great ungodly world outside.

Certainly the heavy avalanches of scoriac passion which rend their

way through the pages of the Human Comedy make even the

graceful blasphemies of the Oscar Wilde group, in those fastidious

enclosures, seem a babyish pretence of naughtiness.

I remember how I used to return after long rambles through those

fields and village lanes which one reads about in "Thyrsis," and

linger in one of the cavernous book-shops which lie--like little

Bodleians of liberal welcome--anywhere between New College and

Balliol, hunting for Balzac in the original French. Since then I have

not been able to endure to read him in any edition except in that very

cheapest one, in dusty green paper, with the pages always so

resistently uncut and tinted with a peculiar brownish tint such as I

have not seemed to find in any other volumes. What an enormous

number of that particular issue there must be in Paris, if one can find

so many of them still, sun-bleached and weather-stained, in the old

book-shops of Oxford!

Translations of Balzac, especially in those "editions de luxe" with

dreadful interpretative prefaces by English professors, are odious to

me. They seem the sort of thing one expects to find under

glass-cases in the houses of cultured financiers. They are admirably

adapted for wedding presents. And they have illustrations! That is

really too much. A person who can endure to read Balzac, or any

other great imaginative writer, in an edition with illustrations, is a

person utterly outside the pale. It must be for barbarians of this sort

that the custom has arisen of having handsome young women,

representing feminine prettiness in general, put upon the covers of

books in the way they put them upon chocolate boxes. I have seen

even "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" prostituted in this manner. It is all

on a par with every other aspect of modern life. Indeed it may be

said that what chiefly distinguishes our age from previous ages is its

habit of leaving nothing to the imagination.

On the whole, Balzac must still be regarded as the greatest novelist

that ever lived. Not to love Balzac is not to love the art of fiction,

not to love the huge restorative pleasure of wandering at large

through a vast region of imaginary characters set in localities and

scenes which may be verified and authenticated by contact with

original places.

I would flatly refuse to two classes of persons, at any rate, any claim

to be regarded as genuine lovers of fiction. The first class are those

who want nothing but moral support and encouragement. These are

still under the illusion that Balzac is a wicked writer. The second

class are those who want nothing but neurotic excitement and

tingling sensual thrills. These are under the illusion that Balzac is a

dull writer.

There is yet a third class to whom I refuse the name of lovers of

fiction. These are the intellectual and psychological maniacs who

want nothing but elaborate social and personal problems, the

elucidation of which may throw scientific light upon anthropological

evolution. Well! We have George Eliot to supply the need of the

first; the author of "Homo Sapiens" to supply the need of the second;

and Paul Bourget to deal with the last.

It is difficult not to extend our refusal of the noble title of real

Fiction-Lovers to the whole modern generation. The frivolous craze

for short books and short stories is a proof of this.

The unfortunate illusion which has gone abroad of late that a thing

to be "artistic" must be concise and condensed and to the point,

encourages this heresy. I would add these "artistic" persons with

their pedantry of condensation and the "exact phrase" to all the

others who don't really love this large and liberal art. To a genuine

fiction-lover a book cannot be too long. What causes such true

amorists of imaginative creation real suffering is when a book

comes to an end. It can never be enjoyed again with quite the same

relish, with quite the same glow and thrill and ecstasy.

To listen to certain fanatics of the principle of unity is to get the

impression that these mysterious "artistic qualities" are things that

may be thrust into a work from outside, after a careful perusal of,

shall we say, Flaubert's Letters to Madame Something-or-other, or a

course of studies of the Short Story at Columbia University. Chop

the thing quite clear of all "surplusage and irrelevancy"; chop it clear

of all "unnecessary detail"; chop the descriptions and chop the

incidents; chop the characters; "chop it and pat it and mark it with

T," as the nursery rhyme says, "and put it in the oven for Baby and

me!" It is an impertinence, this theory, and an insult to natural

human instincts.

Art is not a "hole and corner" thing, an affair of professional

preciosities and discriminations, a set of tiresome rules to be learned

by rote.

Art is the free play of generous and creative imaginations with the

life-blood of the demiurgic forces of the universe in their veins.

There is a large and noble joy in it, a magnanimous nonchalance and

aplomb, a sap, an ichor, a surge of resilient suggestion, a rich

ineffable magic, a royal liberality.

Devoid of the energy of a large and free imagination, art dwindles

into an epicene odalisque, a faded minion of pleasure in a perfumed

garden. It becomes the initiatory word of an exclusive Rosicrucian

order. It becomes the amulet of an affected superiority, the signet

ring of a masquerading conspiracy.

The habitation of the spirit of true art is the natural soul of man, as it

has been from the beginning and as it will be to the end. The soul of

man has depths which can only be fathomed by an art which breaks

every rule of the formalists and transgresses every technical law.

The mere fact that the kind of scrupulous artistry advocated by these

pedants of "style" is a kind that can be defined in words at all writes

its own condemnation upon it. For the magical evocations of true

genius are beyond definition.

As Goethe says the important thing in all great art is just what

cannot be put in words. Those who would seek so to confine it are

the bunglers who have missed the mark themselves, and "they

like"--the great critic adds malignantly--"they like to be together."

The so-called rules of technique are nothing when you come to

analyse them but a purely empirical and pragmatic deduction from

the actual practise of the masters. And every new master creates new

laws and a new taste capable of appreciating these new laws. There

is no science of art. These modern critics, with their cult of "the

unique phrase" and the "sharply defined image," are just as

intolerant as the old judicial authorities whose prestige they scout;

just as intolerant and just as unilluminating.

It is to the _imagination_ we must go for a living appreciation of

genius, and many quite simple persons possess this, to whom the

jargon of the studios is empty chatter.

No human person has a right to say "Balzac ought to have put more

delicacy, more subtlety into his style," or to say, "Balzac ought to

have eliminated those long descriptions." Balzac is Balzac; and that

ends it. If you prefer the manner of Henry James, by all means read

him and let the other alone.

There is such a thing as the mere absence of what the "little masters"

call style being itself a quite definite style.

A certain large and colourless fluidity of manner is often the only

medium through which a vision of the world can be expressed at all;

a vision, that is to say, of a particular kind, with the passion of it

carried to a particular intensity.

In America, at this present time, the work of Mr. Theodore Dreiser

is an admirable example of this sort of thing. Mr. Dreiser, it must be

admitted, goes even beyond Balzac in his contempt for the rules; but

just as none of the literary goldsmiths of France convey to us the

flavour of Paris as Balzac does, so none of the clever writers of

America convey to us the flavour of America as Mr. Dreiser does.

Indeed I am ready to confess that I have derived much light in

regard to my feeling for the demonic energy of the great Frenchman

from watching the methods of this formidable American. I discern in

Mr. Dreiser the same obstinate tenacity of purpose, the same occult

perception of subterranean forces, the same upheaving, plough-like

"drive" through the materials of life and character.

Balzac is undoubtedly the greatest purely creative genius that has

ever dealt with the art of fiction. It is astonishing to realise how

entirely the immense teeming world through which he leads us is the

product of unalloyed imagination.

Experience has its place in the art of literature; it would be foolish to

deny it; but the more one contemplates the career of Balzac the more

evident does it become that his art is the extreme opposite of the art

of the document-hunters and the chroniclers.

The life which he habitually and continually led was the life of the

imagination. He lived in Paris. He knew its streets, its tradesmen, its

artists, its adventurers, its aristocratic and its proletarian demi

monde.

He came from the country and he knew the country; its peasants, its

farmers, its provincial magnates, its village tyrants, its priests, its

doctors, its gentlemen of leisure.

But when one comes to calculate the enormous number of hours he

spent over his desk, night after night, and day after day, one comes

to see that there was really very scant margin left for the conscious

collecting of material. The truth is he lived an abnormally sedentary

life. Had he gone about a little more he would probably have lived

much longer. The flame of his genius devoured him, powerful and

titanic though his bodily appearance was, and unbounded though his

physical energy. He _lived by the imagination_ as hardly another

writer has ever done and his reward is that, as long as human

imagination interests itself in the panorama of human affairs, his

stories will remain thrilling. How little it really matters whether this

story or the other rounds itself off in the properly approved way!

Personally I love to regard all the stories of Balzac as one immense

novel--of some forty volumes--dealing with the torrential life of the

human race itself as it roars and eddies in its huge turbulency with

France and Paris for a background. I am largely justified in this view

of Balzac's work by his own catholic and comprehensive title--The

Human Comedy--suggestive certainly of a sort of uniting thread

running through the whole mass of his productions. I am also

justified by his trick of introducing again and again the same

personages; a device which I daresay is profoundly irritating to the

modern artistic mind, but which is certainly most pleasing to the

natural human instinct.

This alone, this habit of introducing the same people in book after

book, is indicative of how Balzac belongs to the company of the

great natural story-tellers. A real lover of a story wants it to go on

forever; wants nobody in it ever to die; nobody in it ever to

disappear; nobody in it ever to round things off or complete his life's

apprenticeship, with a bow to the ethical authorities, in that

annoying way of so many modern writers.

No wonder Oscar Wilde wept whenever he thought of the death of

Lucien de Rubempré. Lucien should have been allowed at least one

more "avatar." That is one of the things that pleases me so much in

that old ten-penny paper edition published by the great Paris house.

We have a list of the characters in the index, with all their other

appearances on the stage; just exactly as if it were real life! It was all

real enough at any rate to Balzac himself, according to that beautiful

tale of how he turned away from some troublesome piece of

personal gossip with the cry:

"Come back to actualities! Come back to my books!"

And in the old ideal platonic sense it _is_ the true reality, this

reproduction of life through the creative energy of the imagination.

The whole business of novel writing lies in two things; in the

creating of exciting situations and imaginatively suggestive

characters--and in making these situations and characters _seem

real._

They need not be dragged directly forth from personal experiences.

One grows to resent the modern tendency to reduce everything to

autobiographical reminiscence. These histories of free-thinking

young men breaking loose from their father's authority and running

amuck among Paris studios and Leicester Square actresses become

tedious and banal after a time. Such sordid piling up of meticulous

detail, drawn so obviously from the writer's own adventures, throws

a kind of grey dust over one's interest in the narrative.

One's feeling simply is that it is all right and all true; that just in

this casual chaotic sort of way the impact of life has struck oneself as

one drifted along. But there is no more in it than a clever sort of

intellectual photography, no more in it than a more or less moralised

version of the ordinary facts of an average person's life-story.

One is tempted to feel that, after all, there is a certain underlying

justification for the man in the street's objection to this kind of

so-called "realism." We have a right after all to demand of art

something more than a clever reproduction of the experiences we

have undergone. We have a right to demand something creative,

something exceptional, something imaginative, something that lifts

us out of ourselves and our ordinary environments, something that

has _deep holes_ in it that go down into unfathomable mystery,

something that has vistas, horizons, large and noble perspectives,

breadth, sweep, and scope.

The truth is that these grey psychological histories of typical young

persons, drearily revolting against dreary conventions, are, in a deep

and inherent sense, false to the mystery of life.

One feels certain that even the clever people who write them have

moods and impulses far more vivid and thrilling, far more abnormal

and bizarre, than they have the audacity to put into their work. A

sort of perverted Puritanism restrains them. They have the diseased

conscience of modern art, and they think that nothing can be true

which is not draggle-tailed and nothing can be real which is not

petty and unstimulating. And all the while the maddest, beautifulest

fantasticalest things are occurring every day, and every day the great

drunken gods are tossing the crazy orb of our fate from hand to hand

and making it shine with a thousand iridescent hues! The natural

man takes refuge from these people's drab perversions of the

outrageous reality, in the sham wonders of meretricious romances

which are not real at all.

What we cry out for is something that shall have about it the

liberating power of the imagination and yet be able to convince us of

its reality. We need an imaginative realism. We need a romanticism

which has its roots in the solid earth. We need, in fact, precisely

what Balzac brings.

So far from finding anything tedious or irksome in the heavy

massing up of animate and inanimate back-grounds which goes on

all the while in Balzac's novels, I find these things most germane to

the matter. What I ask from a book is precisely this huge weight of

formidable verisimilitude which shall surround me on all sides and

give firm ground for my feet to walk on. I love it when a novel is

thick with the solid mass of earth-life, and when its passions spring

up volcano-like from flaming pits and bleeding craters of torn and

convulsed materials. I demand and must have in a book a

four-square sense of life-illusion, a rich field for my imagination to

wander in at large, a certain quantity of blank space, so to speak,

filled with a huge litter of things that are not tiresomely pointing to

the projected issue.

I hold the view that in the larger aspects of the creative imagination

there is room for many free margins and for many materials that are

not slavishly symbolic. I protest from my heart against this

tyrannous "artistic conscience" which insists that every word

"should tell" and every object and person referred to be of "vital

importance" in the evolution of the "main theme."

I maintain that in the broad canvas of a nobler, freer art there is

ample space for every kind of digression and by-issue. I maintain

that the mere absence of this self-conscious vibrating pressure upon

one string gives to a book that amplitude, that nonchalance, that

huge friendly discursiveness, which enables us to breathe and loiter

and move around and see the characters from all sides--from behind

as well as from in front! The constant playing upon that one string of

a symbolic purpose or a philosophical formula seems to me to lead

invariably to a certain attenuation and strain. The imagination grows

weary under repeated blows upon the same spot. We long to

debouch into some path that leads nowhere. We long to meet some

one who is interesting in himself and does nothing to carry anything

along.

Art of this tiresomely technical kind can be taught to any one. If this

were all--if this were the one thing needful--we might well rush off

en masse to the lecture-rooms and acquire the complete rules of the

Short Story. Luckily for our pleasant hours there is still, in spite of

everything, a certain place left for what we call genius in the

manufacture of books; a place left for that sudden thrilling lift of the

whole thing to a level where the point of the interest is not in the

mere accidents of one particular plot but in the vast stream of the

mystery of life itself.

Among the individual volumes of the Human Comedy, I am inclined

to regard "Lost Illusions"--of which there are two volumes in that

ten-penny edition--as the finest of all, and no one who has read that

book can forget the portentous weight of realistic background with

which it begins.

After "Lost Illusions" I would put "Cousin Bette" as Balzac's

master-piece, and, after that, "A Bachelor's Establishment." But I lay

no particular stress upon these preferences. With the exception of

such books as "The Wild Ass's Skin" and the "Alkahest" and

"Seraphita," the bulk of his work has a sort of continuous interest

which one would expect in a single tremendous prose epic dealing

with the France of his age.

Balzac's most remarkable characteristic is a sort of exultant reveling

in every kind of human passion, in every species of desire or greed

or ambition or obsession which gives a dignity and a tragic grandeur

to otherwise prosaic lives. There is a kind of subterranean torrent of

blind primeval energy running through his books which focusses

itself in a thick smouldering fuliginous eruption when the moment

or the occasion arises. The "will to power," or whatever else you

may call it, has never been more terrifically exposed. I cannot but

feel that as a portrayer of such a "will to power" among the obstinate,

narrow, savage personages of small provincial towns, no one has

approached Balzac.

Here, in his country scenes, he is a supreme master; and the tough,

resistant fibre of his slow-moving, massively egotistic provincials,

with their backgrounds of old houses full of wicked secrets and

hoarded wealth, lends itself especially well to his brooding

materialistic imagination, ready to kindle under provocation into

crackling and licking flames.

His imagination has transformed, for me at least, the face of more

than one country-side. Coming in on a windy November evening,

through muddy lanes and sombre avenues of the outskirts of any

country town, how richly, how magically, the lights in the scattered

high walled houses and the faces seen at the windows, suggest the

infinite possibilities of human life! The sound of wheels upon

cobblestones, as the street begins and as the spire of the church rises

over the moaning branches of its leafless elm-trees has a meaning

for me now, since I have read Balzac, different from what it had

before. Is that muffled figure in the rumbling cart which passes me

so swiftly the country doctor or the village priest, summoned to the

death-bed of some notorious atheist? Is the slender white hand

which closes those heavy shutters in that gloomy house the hand of

some heart-broken Eugenie, desolately locking herself up once more,

for another lonely night, with her sick hopes and her sacred

memories?

I feel as though no one but Balzac has expressed the peculiar

brutality, thick, impervious, knotted and fibrous like the roots of the

tree-trunks at his gate, of the small provincial farmer in England as

well as in France.

I am certain no one but Balzac--except it be some of the rougher,

homelier Dutch painters--has caught the spirit of those mellow,

sensual "interiors" of typical country houses, with their mixture of

grossness and avarice and inveterate conservatism; where an odour

of centuries of egotism emanates from every piece of furniture

against the wall and from every gesture of every person seated over

the fire! One is plunged indeed into the dim, sweet, brutal heart of

reality here, and the imagination finds starting places for its

wanderings from the mere gammons of dried bacon hanging from

the smoky rafters and the least gross repartee and lewd satyrish jest

of the rustic Grangousier and Gargamelle who quaff their

amber-coloured cider under the flickering of candles.

If he did not pile up his descriptions of old furniture, old warehouses,

old barns, old cellars, old shops, old orchards and old gardens, this

thick human atmosphere--overlaid, generation after generation, by

the sensual proclivities of the children of the earth--would never

possess the unction of verisimilitude which it has.

If he were all the while fussing about his style in the exhausting

Flaubert manner, the rich dim reek of all this time-mellowed

humanity would never strike our senses as it does. Thus much one

can see quite clearly from reading de Maupassant, Flaubert's pupil,

whose stark and savage strokes of clean-cut visualisation never

attain the imaginative atmosphere or Rabelaisian aplomb of Balzac's

rural scenes.

But supreme as he is in his provincial towns and villages, one cannot

help associating him even more intimately with the streets and

squares and river banks of Paris.

I suppose Balzac has possessed himself of Paris and has ransacked

and ravished its rare mysteries more completely than any other

writer.

I once stayed in a hotel called the Louis le Grand in the Rue Louis le

Grand, and I shall never forget the look of a certain old Parisian

Banking-House, now altered into some other building, which was

visible through the narrow window of my high-placed room. That

very house is definitely mentioned somewhere in the Human

Comedy; but mentioned or not, its peculiar Balzacian air, crowded

round by sloping roofs and tall white houses, brought all the great

desperate passionate scenes into my mind.

I saw old Goriot crying aloud upon his "unkind daughters." I saw

Baron Hulot dragged away from the beseeching eyes and clinging

arms of his last little inamorata to the bedside of his much wronged

wife. I saw the Duchesse de Langeais, issuing forth from the

chamber of her victim-victor, pale and tragic, and with love and

despair in her heart.

It is the thing that pleases me most in the stories of Paul Bourget that

he has continued the admirable Balzacian tradition of mentioning

the Paris streets and localities by their historic names, and of giving

circumstantial colour and body to his inventions by thus placing

them in a milieu which one can traverse any hour of the day,

recalling the imaginary scenes as if they were not imaginary, and

reviving the dramatic issues as if they were those of real people.

A favourite objection to Balzac among aesthetic critics is that his

aristocratic scenes are lacking in true refinement, lacking in the

genuine air and grace of such fastidious circles. I do not give a fig

for that criticism. To try and limit a great imaginative spirit, full of

passionate fantasy and bizarre inventions, to the precise and petty

reproduction of the tricks of any particular class seems to me a piece

of impertinent pedantry. It might just as well be said that

Shakespeare's lords and ladies were not euphuistic enough. I protest

against this attempt to turn a Napoleonic superman of literature, with

a head like that head which Rodin has so admirably recalled for us,

into a bourgeois chronicler of bourgeois mediocrities.

Balzac's characters, to whatever class they belong, bear the royal

and passionate stamp of their demiurgic creator. They all have a

certain magnificence of gesture, a certain intensity of tone, a certain

concentrated fury of movement.

There is something tremendous and awe-inspiring about the task

Balzac set himself and the task he achieved.

One sees him drinking his black coffee in those early hours of the

morning, wrapped in his dressing-gown, and with a sort of clouded

Vulcanian grandeur about him, hammering at his population of

colossal figures amid the smouldering images of his cavernous brain.

He was wise to work in those hours when the cities of men sleep and

the tides of life run low; at those hours when the sick find it easiest

to die and the pulses of the world's heart are scarcely audible. There

was little at such times to obstruct his imagination. He could work

"in the void," and the spirit of his genius could brood over

untroubled waters.

There was something formidable and noble in the way he drove all

light and casual loves, the usual recreations of men of literary talent,

away from his threshold. Like some primordial Prometheus, making

men out of mud and fire, he kept the perilous worshippers of

Aphrodite far-distant from the smoke of his smithy, and refused to

interrupt his cosmic labour for the sake of dalliance.

That high imaginative love of his--itself like one of the great

passions he depicts--which ended, in its unworthy fulfilment, by

dragging him down to the earth, was only one other proof of how

profoundly cerebral and psychic that demonic force was which

drove the immense engine of his energy.

It is unlikely that, as the world progresses and the generations of the

artists follow one another and go their way, there will be another

like him.

Such primal force, capable of evoking a whole world of passionate

living figures, comes only once or twice in the history of a race.

There will be thousands of cleverer psychologists, thousands of

more felicitous stylists, thousands of more exact copiers of reality.

There will never be another Balzac.