acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind
of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy
scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death
of Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been
able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of
pleasure. I remember it when I laugh. But Balzac is no more a
realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it. I
admit, however, that he set far too high a value on modernity of
form, and that, consequently, there is no book of his that, as an
artistic masterpiece, can rank with Salammbo or Esmond, or The
Cloister and the Hearth, or the Vicomte de Bragelonne.

CYRIL. Do you object to modernity of form, then?

VIVIAN. Yes. It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result.
Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising. It cannot
help being so. The public imagine that, because they are
interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be
interested in them also, and should take them as her subject-
matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things
makes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The only beautiful things,
as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As
long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any
way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our
sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live,
it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art's subject-matter we
should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have
no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind. It
is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are
such an admirable motive for a tragedy. I do not know anything in