depths of the dangerous sea. He has that arbitrary, maniacal inventive
imagination which is very rare except in children--and in spite of his
theatrical gestures he has the power of conjuring up scenes of
incredible beauty and terror.



29. BALZAC. LOST ILLUSIONS. COUSIN BETTE. PÉRE GORIOT. HUMAN COMEDY,
_in any translation. Saintsbury's is as good as any_.

Balzac's books create a complete world, which has many points of
contact with reality; but, in a deep essential sense, is the
projection of the novelist's own passionate imagination. A thundering
tide of subterranean energy, furious and titanic, sweeps, with its
weight of ponderous details, through every page of these dramatic
volumes. Every character has its obsession, its secret vice, its
spiritual drug. Even when, as in the case of Vautrin, he lets his
demonic fancy carry him very far, there is a grandeur, an amplitude, a
smouldering flame of passion, which redeem a thousand preposterous
extravagances.

His dramatic psychology is often drowned in the tide of his creative
energy; but though his world is not always the world of our
experience, it is always a world in which we are magnetized to feel at
home. It is consistent with its own amazing laws; the laws of the
incredible Balzacian genius. Profoundly moral in its basic tendency,
the "Human Comedy" seems to point, in its philosophical undercurrent,
at the permanent need in our wayward and childish emotionalism, for
wise and master-guides, both in the sphere of religion and in the
sphere of politics.