"What do you mean?" falters Mrs. Ogi.

"It's what I need for a story! I want to get all the details of it-the trembling of your lips, the look in your eyes. Hold it now! It is copy!"

"I think you are out of your mind," says Mrs. Ogi; and her face assumes a quite different expression.

Says her husband: "I am the artist, and I feed on life. My fellow humans suffer, and a voice within me cries: 'Magnificent!' Anguish writes itself upon their features, and I whisper: "There is a great moment!' They are utterly abased, and I think: 'Here is my chance of immortality!'"

Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are a monster! I have always known it."

"I am one among thousands of monsters, ranging the earth, competing furiously for their prey. I explore the whole field of human experience; I climb the mountain peaks, I ransack the starry spaces, I rummage the dustbins of history, collecting great significant moments, climaxes of emotion, drama, suspense, thrill; when I find it, I slap my knee, like Thackeray writing the scene of Becky Sharp caught in adultery, and exclaiming: "There is a stroke of genius!' I see tears falling, and I think: "That will sell! Out of that cry of despair I shall make a feast! From this tale of tragedy I shall build a new house! Upon this heap of anguish I shall leap to fame! I shall enlarge my ego, expand in the admiration of my fellow-men, enjoying dominion over their emotions and their thoughts. Also, of course, I shall not forget my fellow-women, their thrills and ecstasies; I shall have gorgeous apartments, furnished with barbaric splendor, to which will come brilliant and fascinating admirers-"

Says Mrs. Ogi: "Is this a dream you want me to psychoanalyze ?"

"No," says her husband, "it is simply the soul of Balzac which I am putting before you: the most perfect type of the predatory artist that has existed in human history; the art for art's sake ideal incarnate; genius divorced from conscience, save only as applied to the art work itself—the inexorable duty of portraying the utmost conceivable energy, fury, splendor, terror, sublimity, melodrama, pity, elegance, greed, horror, cruelty, anguish,

beauty, passion, worship, longing, wickedness, glory, frenzy, majesty and delight."

This predatory artist, living in a predatory world, and portraying predatory emotions, does not seem to us a propagandist, simply because of the complete identity which exists between him and the thing he portrays. It is the world which came into existence after the French revolution, and has prevailed ever since. The masses made the revolution, hoping to profit from it; but the merchants and bankers and lawyers took over the power. Alone, this class in France could not have succeeded; but they had the help of England-it is the triumph of British gold, taking charge of the continent and making it over in the image of the "shop-keeper": the bourgeois world, a society in which everybody seeks money, and having obtained it, spends it upon the getting of more money, or upon the expansion of his personality through the power of money to dominate and impress other men. Those who succeed enjoy, while those who fail are trampled; such is the "Comédie Humaine," as Balzac exhibits it in a total of eighty-five works of prose fiction, not counting dramas, essays and reviews.

He was born of a bourgeois family and educated for a lawyer. But he wanted to write, and because his family would not support him, he went away and starved most hideously in a garret. The hunger which he there acquired was not merely of the stomach and the senses, but of the intellect and soul. He became a ferocious, almost an insane worker. He was greedy for facts, and never forgot anything; he acquired a whole universe of detail, names, places, technical terms, the appearances of persons and things, human characteristics, anecdotes, conversations. He wove these into his stories, he constructed vast panoramas of French society, colossal processions marching past without end. The bulk of his work is so enormous that you may spend your lifetime reading Balzac, exploring the lives of his two or three thousand characters.

What will you know when you get through? You will know French bourgeois civilization, high and low, rich and poor, good and evil. You will observe the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer; you will discover the greedy devouring the good and patient and

honest-and then coming to ruin through their own insensate desires. It is brilliant, vivid, as real as genius can make it, and at first you are enthralled. How marvelous, to learn about the world without the trouble of going into it! But after you have read for a month or two, another feeling steals over you, a feeling of familiarity: you know all this, why read any more? Life is odious and cruel, it makes you ill; your one thought becomes, can anything be done about it? Is there any remedy? And from that moment you are done with Balzac.

For, so far as this "Comédie Humaine" is concerned, there is no remedy. Balzac was so much a part of his own corrupt age that he could not have conceived of a co-operative world. He saw the class struggle, of course -and took his stand on the side of his money. A passionate Tory, he referred to "the two eternal truths, the monarchy and the Catholic church." His attitude to politics was summed up in the formula that the people must be kept "under the most powerful yoke possible." You find in his novels tremendous loads of philosophic and scientific learning, practically all of it utter trash. Henry James disposes of him in the sentence: "He was incapable of a lucid reflexion." The nearest approach to a definite proposition to be got out of his writings is the notion that desire, imagination and intellect are the destroyers of life. Of course, if that be true, civilization is doomed, and it is a waste of time to seek moral codes or understanding, or even to produce art.

Such a view was, of course, simply the reflex of the predatory artist's own greed for money, luxury, fame and power. He lived alternately for art and Mammon. He would shut himself up alone in a secret place and write for weeks, even months, without seeing anyone. He would start work at midnight, clad in a white Benedictine robe, with a black skull-cap, by the light of a dozen candles, and under the stimulus of many pots of coffee. Having thus completed a masterpiece, he would emerge to receive the applause of Paris, carrying a cane with an enormous jeweled head. Having made another fortune and paid a small part of what he called his "floating debt," he would plunge into the wholesale purchasing of silks and satins and velvets, furniture and carpets and tapestries and jewels and "objects of art," vast store-rooms

full of that junk whereby the bourgeois world sets forth the emptiness of its mind and the futility of its aims. Lacking money enough, his maniac imagination would evolve new schemes-book publishing, paper manufacturing, a journal, a secret society, silver mines in Sardinia, the buried treasure of Toussaint l'Ouverture, each of which he was sure was going to turn him into a millionaire overnight.

Balzac gives prominence to that type of men whom the French call "careerists"; that is to say, men who set out to make their fortune, at any cost of honor, decency and fair play. Balzac admired such men-for the simple reason that he himself was that kind. In his later years he met a wealthy Polish lady, Madame Hanska, who became his mistress; writing to his sister about it, he set forth what this meant to him, and his language was such as a "confidence man" would use, writing to a woman confederate. The alliance, he wrote, would give him access to the great world, and "opportunity for domination."

Is the work of such a man propaganda? If you accept the common dogma that blind egotistical instinct, and the portrayal and glorification thereof, constitute art, while the effort to understand life, and to reconstruct it into a thing of order and sense and dignity, is propaganda -why then undoubtedly the "Comédie Humaine" of Honoré de Balzac is pure and unadulterated art. If, on the other hand, you admit my contention that a man who is born into a money-ravenous world, and who absorbs its poisoned atmosphere, and sets himself to the task of portraying it, not merely as real and inevitable, but as glorious, magnificent, fascinating, sublime-if you admit with me that such a man is a propagandist, why then you must reconcile yourself to enduring the opposition of all orthodox literary critics.

CHAPTER LXI

THE OLD COMMUNARD

Victor Hugo was born in 1802, three years later than Balzac. He grew up in the same world, but was not satisfied to contemplate its diseases; he sought remedies, and became a convert to revolutionary ideals, and so all critics

agree that his work is marred by propaganda. He lived to be eighty-three years old, and went on writing and working to the very end, so that the story of his life carries us through practically the whole of the nineteenth century. We shall follow it, and then come back and retrace parts of the same story in the lives of other artists, French, German, British and American.

Hugo's father was a revolutionary soldier who rose to be a general in Napoleon's army. As a little boy the poet followed the armies from place to place in Switzerland, Italy and Spain. His mother was a Royalist, and the boy had an old Catholic priest for a tutor, and was taught the old dogmas, literary as well as religious and political. His conversion into a revolutionist was not completed until the age of forty-six. Having been brought about by contact with daily events, this conversion was of tremendous influence upon the thought of Europe.

He was a child of genius, and his prodigious activity began early. We find him composing a tragedy at the age of fourteen, and at the age of seventeen publishing a journal with the title of the "Literary Conservator." He gets married upon a pension of a thousand francs, conferred upon him by King Louis XVIII, who has been put upon the throne to preserve Catholic reaction. Then comes King Charles X, who makes him a knight of the Legion of Honor at the age of twenty-three. But gradually the young poet's "throne and altar stuff" begins to shown signs of independent thought; he composes a play in which Richelieu is portrayed as master of his king, and this is considered unsuitable for such ticklish times; the censor bars it, and the young poet's personal intercession with the king does not avail.

All this time, you understand, French art is still under the sway of the so-called "classical" ideals of Voltaire and Racine; tragic dramatists have to obey the "three unities," or they cannot get produced. But by 1830 the French people are sick of reaction, and ready to make their revolution again. As part of the change comes a surge of "romanticism" in the arts. Shakespeare is played in Paris for the first time; and Victor Hugo publishes a drama on the theme of Cromwell, with a preface in which he commits the blasphemy of declaring that Racine is "not a dramatist"! In the midst of the new