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!