And yet the novel, as he conceived it, gave him the best of opportunities for putting his results before the world. If we allow ourselves to set all our attention on politics and finance and social theory, we lose in life all but the smell of blue-books, and the grey colour of Stock Exchange returns. If Balzac had written science, and not stories, we should have only had the ideas of his novels without that passionate presentment of concrete things that gives those ideas their vitality. Indeed, the novels are far greater than the ideas, just as the poetic, seeing man in Balzac was greater than the scientist. Weariless in distinguishing man from man, type from type, specimen from specimen, by the slightest indication of the clay, he was able in novels, as he could never have done in works of science, to give the colour of each man's life expressed in his actions, in his talk, in his choice of clothes, in the furniture of his room. The action of all novels, like that of all plays, is performed in the brain of the reader or spectator. The novelist's and dramatist's characters are like pieces on a chessboard, symbols of possibilities not obviously expressed. In older fiction these possibilities were left so vague that the reader could adopt any part he chose, without in the least interfering with the story, independent as that was of personal character. Never before Balzac made them had the chessmen assumed so much of human detail. In his books they are no longer pegs of wood, depending for their meanings on the reader's generosity, for their adventures on the ingenuity of the author. They make their moves in their own rights. The hero of a Balzac novel is not the reader, in borrowed clothes, undergoing a series of quite arbitrary experiences. He cannot be made to do what the author requires, but fills his own suits, and has a private life. Balzac knows and makes his reader feel that his characters have not leapt ready-made into the world to eat and drink through a couple of hundred pages and vanish whence they came. They have left their mark on things, and things have left their mark on them. They have lived in pages where he has not seen them, and Balzac never drags them to take a part in existences to which they do not belong. I can remember no case where Balzac uses a stock scene, a room, or a garden, or a valley that would do for anything. There was only one room, one valley, one garden, where the characters could have said those words, lost that money, or kissed those kisses, and Balzac's stupendous energy is equal not only to pouring life into his people, but also to forcing the particular scene upon his canvas with such vivid strokes that every cobble seems to have a heart, and every flower in a pot to sway its blossoms with the sun. Even in the short stories, where he often follows gods that are not his own, writing of madness like a Hoffmann, and of intrigue like a Boccaccio, his peculiar genius is apparent in the environments.