surprise that you have said nothing about the two novelists whom
you are always reading, Balzac and George Meredith. Surely they
are realists, both of them?

VIVIAN. Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos
illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered
everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything,
except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except
articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talks
about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and
it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism
of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or
rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on
speaking terms with his father. By deliberate choice he has made
himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and
after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt against the
noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite sufficient of
itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means he has
planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
wonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable
combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.
The latter he bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely
his own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola's
L'Assommoir and Balzac's Illusions Perdues is the difference
between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. 'All
Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the same
ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as
deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to the
muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.' A steady
course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our