This navvy-work of production had its influence on the character of his writing. But it was never in Balzac's nature to have understood Gautier's craftsman's delight in the polishing and chasing of diminutive things. Balzac, the working machine, was simply enormous energy so coaxed and trained as to produce an enormous output. The raw material of his rich humanity passed through violent processes. It had but small chance of any very delicate finish. Balzac thought in books and in cycles of books, never in pages, paragraphs, or sentences. Although he was much preoccupied with 'style,' envying the men whose writing would be charming to the ear even if it meant nothing to the mind, the best of his own prose is unbeautiful, rugged, fiercely energetic, peculiarly his own, and therefore not to be grumbled at. He would have liked to write finely, just as he would have liked _la vie splendide_. But his mind, delivering pickaxe blows, or furiously wrestling with great masses of material, could not clothe itself in stately periods. Always, out of any splendour that he made for it, shows a brown, brawny arm, and the splendour becomes an impertinence. He had ideas on art, as he had ideas on science, but his was too large a humanity to allow itself to be subordinate to either. He was too full-blooded a man to be withered by a theory. He was too eager to say what he had in his mouth to be patient in the modulation of his voice. He was almost too much of a man to be an artist. To think of that man fashioning small, perfect poems, who avowed that he wrote his _Contes Drôlatiques_ because he happened to notice the fall in the French birth rate, is to think of a Colossus tinkering at the mechanism of a watch. [His proximity to life.]