th, lends itself especially well to his brooding
materialistic imagination, ready to kindle under provocation into
crackling and licking flames.

His imagination has transformed, for me at least, the face of more
than one country-side. Coming in on a windy November evening,
through muddy lanes and sombre avenues of the outskirts of any
country town, how richly, how magically, the lights in the scattered
high walled houses and the faces seen at the windows, suggest the
infinite possibilities of human life! The sound of wheels upon
cobblestones, as the street begins and as the spire of the church rises
over the moaning branches of its leafless elm-trees has a meaning
for me now, since I have read Balzac, different from what it had
before. Is that muffled figure in the rumbling cart which passes me
so swiftly the country doctor or the village priest, summoned to the
death-bed of some notorious atheist? Is the slender white hand
which closes those heavy shutters in that gloomy house the hand of
some heart-broken Eugenie, desolately locking herself up once more,
for another lonely night, with her sick hopes and her sacred
memories?

I feel as though no one but Balzac has expressed the peculiar
brutality, thick, impervious, knotted and fibrous like the roots of the
tree-trunks at his gate, of the small provincial farmer in England as
well as in France.

I am certain no one but Balzac--except it be some of the rougher,
homelier Dutch painters--has caught the spirit of those mellow,
sensual "interiors" of typical country houses, with their mixture of
grossness and avarice and inveterate conservatism; where an odour
of centuries of egotism emanates from every piece of furniture
against the wall and from every gesture of every person seated over
the fire! One is plunged indeed into the dim, sweet, brutal heart of
reality here, and the imagination finds starting places for its
wanderings from the mere gammons of dried bacon hanging from
the smoky rafters and the least gross repartee and lewd satyrish jest
of the rustic Grangousier and Gargamelle who quaff their
amber-coloured cider under the flickering of candles.

If he did not pile up his descriptions of old furniture, old warehouses,
old barns, old cellars, old shops, old orchards and old gardens, this
thick human atmosphere--overlaid, generation after generation, by
the sensual proclivities of the children of the earth--would never
possess the unction of verisimilitude w