te," or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine Bette herself is
inferior to anything the brain of man has ever conceived? And it must not
be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage
of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of
the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of
gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more
vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were
equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I
speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist
seems to me richer than that of the dramatist. Who shall forget those
terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house?
Speaking of Vautrin she says, "His look frightens me as if he put his hand
on my dress;" and another epigram from the same book, "Woman's virtue is
man's greatest invention." Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes
more incisively to the truth of things. One more; here I can give the exact
words: "_La gloire est le soleil des morts._" It would be easy to
compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all "Maximes" and
"Pensees," even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and
shallow.

Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated
in the "Comedie Humaine." I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other
books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any
important or lasting impression upon my mind. The rest was like walnuts and
wine, an agreeable aftertaste.

But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship of
any kind; for save life I could never learn anything correctly. I am a
student only of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have read
very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I
remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my
utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave
inquietude,--study as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of
ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to frequent the
haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my
nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it
uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the
generating force; without it what inventi