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 Rubempre and Gobsec and Pere 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 Rubempre.  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 lé Grand in the Rue Louis lé 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.