Balzac’s Gambara and Massimilla Doni—what genius he had for selecting names which outwardly and inwardly fitted his character! After reading the former I felt almost tempted into echoing Mr. Moore’s extravagant assertion. Balzac is indeed a magician and not a novelist. What puts him apart from other novelists, even from his technical superior, Flaubert, is his faculty of vision. He is a _Seer_, not a novelist. Any motive he touched, whether usury or music-erotics or patriotism, he vivified with his prophetic imagination. He saw his theme concretely; he saw its origins, its roots in the dead past; and plunging his eyes into the future he saw its ghost, its spiritual aura, its ultimate evolution. Such a man as Balzac might have been a second Bonaparte, a second Spencer. He had science, and he had imagination; and he preferred to be the social historian of the nineteenth century, the greatest romancer that ever lived, and a profound philosopher besides. All modern novelists nest in his books, draw nourishment from them, suck in their very souls from his vast fund of spirituality. The difference between such a giant as Balzac and such a novelist as Thackeray is that the latter draws delightful and artistic pictures of manners; but never turns a soul inside out for us. The best way to describe Balzac is to enumerate the negatives of his contemporaries and successors. All they lacked and lack he had in such amazing prodigality that comparison is not only impossible, it is brutal. Balzac and music! Balzac and women! Balzac and money! Balzac and politics! Or,—Balzac and any subject! The encyclopædic knowledge, extraordinary sympathy and powers of expression—do they not all fairly drench every line the man wrote? He could analyze the art of painting and forsee its future affinities for impressionism—read The Unknown Masterpiece—just as in Gambara he divined Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard Strauss. I am quite sure that Wagner read Balzac. Gambara was finished June, 1837, and there are things in it that could only have been written about Berlioz. The key to the book, however, is passion, not any particular personality. Balzac always searched for the master passion in men and women’s lives. Given the clew-note, he developed the theme into symphonic proportions. It is Andrea’s love of intrigue that leads him to follow the beautiful Marianna, wife of the composer Gambara,—a fantastic creation worthy of Hoffmann. He is an Italian in Paris, who wrote a mass for the anniversary of Beethoven’s death, and also an opera—Mahomet. But that opera! Has such a score ever been dreamed of by any one except Richard Strauss? Gambara is a poor man, looked upon as a lunatic, living at an Italian cook shop kept by Giardini,—the latter one of Balzac’s most delightful discoveries. Born at Cremona, Gambara studied music in its entirety, especially orchestration. To him music was a science and an art—fancy writers of fiction going into the philosophy of