oyalty 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