udios 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