o a certain attenuation and strain. The imagination grows
weary under repeated blows upon the same spot. We long to
debouch into some path that leads nowhere. We long to meet some
one who is interesting in himself and does nothing to carry anything
along.

Art of this tiresomely technical kind can be taught to any one. If this
were all--if this were the one thing needful--we might well rush off
en masse to the lecture-rooms and acquire the complete rules of the
Short Story. Luckily for our pleasant hours there is still, in spite of
everything, a certain place left for what we call genius in the
manufacture of books; a place left for that sudden thrilling lift of the
whole thing to a level where the point of the interest is not in the
mere accidents of one particular plot but in the vast stream of the
mystery of life itself.

Among the individual volumes of the Human Comedy, I am inclined
to regard "Lost Illusions"--of which there are two volumes in that
ten-penny edition--as the finest of all, and no one who has read that
book can forget the portentous weight of realistic background with
which it begins.

After "Lost Illusions" I would put "Cousin Bette" as Balzac's
master-piece, and, after that, "A Bachelor's Establishment." But I lay
no particular stress upon these preferences. With the exception of
such books as "The Wild Ass's Skin" and the "Alkahest" and
"Seraphita," the bulk of his work has a sort of continuous interest
which one would expect in a single tremendous prose epic dealing
with the France of his age.

Balzac's most remarkable characteristic is a sort of exultant reveling
in every kind of human passion, in every species of desire or greed
or ambition or obsession which gives a dignity and a tragic grandeur
to otherwise prosaic lives. There is a kind of subterranean torrent of
blind primeval energy running through his books which focusses
itself in a thick smouldering fuliginous eruption when the moment
or the occasion arises. The "will to power," or whatever else you
may call it, has never been more terrifically exposed. I cannot but
feel that as a portrayer of such a "will to power" among the obstinate,
narrow, savage personages of small provincial towns, no one has
approached Balzac.

Here, in his country scenes, he is a supreme master; and the tough,
resistant fibre of his slow-moving, massively egotistic provincials,
with their backgrounds of old houses full of wicked secrets and
hoarded weal