be waived—­that I fail, utterly fail to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac.  The range of the poet’s thought is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be greater than the novelist’s.  On these points we will cry quits, and come at once to the vital question—­the creation.  Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet?  Is Eugenie Grandet inferior to Desdemona?  Is her father inferior to Shylock?  Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin?  Can it be said that the apothecary in the “Cousine Bette,” or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine Bette herself is inferior to anything the brain of man has ever conceived?  And it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were equally great.  And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist seems to me richer than that of the dramatist.  Who shall forget those terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house?  Speaking of Vautrin she says, “His look frightens me as if he put his hand on my dress;” and another epigram from the same book, “Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.”  Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes more incisively to the truth of things.  One more; here I can give the exact words:  “La gloire est le soleil des morts.” It would be easy to compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all “Maximes” and “Pensees,” even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and shallow.

Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the “Comedie Humaine.”  I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any important or lasting impression upon my mind.  The rest was like walnuts and wine, an agreeable aftertaste.

But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship of any kind; for save life I could never learn anything correctly.  I am a student only of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets, and alcoves.  I have read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I remember.  To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude,—­study as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight.  But in me the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it uncalled for, as buds from branches.  Contact with the world is in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the composition of my unfortunate “Roses of Midnight.”