hich it has.

If he were all the while fussing about his style in the exhausting
Flaubert manner, the rich dim reek of all this time-mellowed
humanity would never strike our senses as it does. Thus much one
can see quite clearly from reading de Maupassant, Flaubert's pupil,
whose stark and savage strokes of clean-cut visualisation never
attain the imaginative atmosphere or Rabelaisian aplomb of Balzac's
rural scenes.

But supreme as he is in his provincial towns and villages, one cannot
help associating him even more intimately with the streets and
squares and river banks of Paris.

I suppose Balzac has possessed himself of Paris and has ransacked
and ravished its rare mysteries more completely than any other
writer.

I once stayed in a hotel called the Louis le Grand in the Rue Louis le
Grand, and I shall never forget the look of a certain old Parisian
Banking-House, now altered into some other building, which was
visible through the narrow window of my high-placed room. That
very house is definitely mentioned somewhere in the Human
Comedy; but mentioned or not, its peculiar Balzacian air, crowded
round by sloping roofs and tall white houses, brought all the great
desperate passionate scenes into my mind.

I saw old Goriot crying aloud upon his "unkind daughters." I saw
Baron Hulot dragged away from the beseeching eyes and clinging
arms of his last little inamorata to the bedside of his much wronged
wife. I saw the Duchesse de Langeais, issuing forth from the
chamber of her victim-victor, pale and tragic, and with love and
despair in her heart.

It is the thing that pleases me most in the stories of Paul Bourget that
he has continued the admirable Balzacian tradition of mentioning
the Paris streets and localities by their historic names, and of giving
circumstantial colour and body to his inventions by thus placing
them in a milieu which one can traverse any hour of the day,
recalling the imaginary scenes as if they were not imaginary, and
reviving the dramatic issues as if they were those of real people.

A favourite objection to Balzac among aesthetic critics is that his
aristocratic scenes are lacking in true refinement, lacking in the
genuine air and grace of such fastidious circles. I do not give a fig
for that criticism. To try and limit a great imaginative spirit, full of
passionate fantasy and bizarre inventions, to the precise and petty
reproduction of the tricks of any particular class seems to me a