But when one comes to calculate the enormous number of hours he spent over his desk, night after night, and day after day, one comes to see that there was really very scant margin left for the conscious collecting of material. The truth is he lived an abnormally sedentary life. Had he gone about a little more he would probably have lived much longer. The flame of his genius devoured him, powerful and titanic though his bodily appearance was, and unbounded though his physical energy. He _lived by the imagination_ as hardly another writer has ever done and his reward is that, as long as human imagination interests itself in the panorama of human affairs, his stories will remain thrilling. How little it really matters whether this story or the other rounds itself off in the properly approved way! Personally I love to regard all the stories of Balzac as one immense novel--of some forty volumes--dealing with the torrential life of the human race itself as it roars and eddies in its huge turbulency with France and Paris for a background. I am largely justified in this view of Balzac's work by his own catholic and comprehensive title--The Human Comedy--suggestive certainly of a sort of uniting thread running through the whole mass of his productions. I am also justified by his trick of introducing again and again the same personages; a device which I daresay is profoundly irritating to the modern artistic mind, but which is certainly most pleasing to the natural human instinct. This alone, this habit of introducing the same people in book after book, is indicative of how Balzac belongs to the company of the great natural story-tellers. A real lover of a story wants it to go on forever; wants nobody in it ever to die; nobody in it ever to disappear; nobody in it ever to round things off or complete his life's apprenticeship, with a bow to the ethical authorities, in that annoying way of so many modern writers. No wonder Oscar Wilde wept whenever he thought of the death of Lucien de Rubempré. Lucien should have been allowed at least one more "avatar." That is one of the things that pleases me so much in that old ten-penny paper edition published by the great Paris house. We have a list of the characters in the index, with all their other appearances on the stage; just exactly as if it were real life! It was all real enough at any rate to Balzac himself, according to that beautiful tale of how he turned away from some troublesome piece of personal gossip with the cry: "Come back to actualities! Come back to my books!" And in the old ideal platonic sense it _is_ the true reality, this reproduction of life through the creative energy of the imagination. The whole business of novel writing lies in two things; in the creating of exciting situations and imaginatively suggestive characters--and in making these situations and characters _seem real._