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 no