piece
of impertinent pedantry. It might just as well be said that
Shakespeare's lords and ladies were not euphuistic enough. I protest
against this attempt to turn a Napoleonic superman of literature, with
a head like that head which Rodin has so admirably recalled for us,
into a bourgeois chronicler of bourgeois mediocrities.

Balzac's characters, to whatever class they belong, bear the royal
and passionate stamp of their demiurgic creator. They all have a
certain magnificence of gesture, a certain intensity of tone, a certain
concentrated fury of movement.

There is something tremendous and awe-inspiring about the task
Balzac set himself and the task he achieved.

One sees him drinking his black coffee in those early hours of the
morning, wrapped in his dressing-gown, and with a sort of clouded
Vulcanian grandeur about him, hammering at his population of
colossal figures amid the smouldering images of his cavernous brain.
He was wise to work in those hours when the cities of men sleep and
the tides of life run low; at those hours when the sick find it easiest
to die and the pulses of the world's heart are scarcely audible. There
was little at such times to obstruct his imagination. He could work
"in the void," and the spirit of his genius could brood over
untroubled waters.

There was something formidable and noble in the way he drove all
light and casual loves, the usual recreations of men of literary talent,
away from his threshold. Like some primordial Prometheus, making
men out of mud and fire, he kept the perilous worshippers of
Aphrodite far-distant from the smoke of his smithy, and refused to
interrupt his cosmic labour for the sake of dalliance.

That high imaginative love of his--itself like one of the great
passions he depicts--which ended, in its unworthy fulfilment, by
dragging him down to the earth, was only one other proof of how
profoundly cerebral and psychic that demonic force was which
drove the immense engine of his energy.

It is unlikely that, as the world progresses and the generations of the
artists follow one another and go their way, there will be another
like him.

Such primal force, capable of evoking a whole world of passionate
living figures, comes only once or twice in the history of a race.
There will be thousands of cleverer psychologists, thousands of
more felicitous stylists, thousands of more exact copiers of reality.

There will never be another Balzac.

VICTOR HUG