Experience, indeed, and observation (to speak with only apparent paradox), though they played an important, yet played only a subordinate part at any time in the great Balzacian achievement. Victor Hugo, in what was in effect a funeral oration, described that achievement as "un livre qui est l'Observation et qui est l'Imagination." But no one familiar with the Victorian rhetoric will mistake the _clou_, the dominating and decisive word of that sentence. It is the conjunction. Hugo meant to draw attention to the astonishing _union_ of Imagination with Observation--two things which, except in the highest poetry, are apt to be rather strangers to each other--and by putting Imagination last he meant also doubtless that this was the dominating--the masculine--element in the marriage. In the immense volume of discussion of Balzac which the long lifetime succeeding his death has seen, and which thickened and multiplied towards the close of the last century and a little later--owing to the conclusion of the _Edition Definitive_ with its additions and illustrative matter--this point has perhaps been too frequently lost sight of. The great critics who were his contemporaries and immediate survivors were rather too near. The greatest of the later batch, M. Brunetiere, was a little too eager to use Balzac as a stick to beat the Romantics with for one thing, and to make him out a pioneer of all succeeding French fiction for another. But, quite early, Philarete Chasles hit the white by calling him a _voyant_ (a word slightly varying in signification from our "seer"), and recently a critic of less repute than Brunetiere, but a good one--M. Le Breton--though perhaps sometimes not quite fair to Balzac, recognises his Romanticism, his _frenesie_, and so the Imagination of which the lunatic and the lover are--and of which the devotee of Romance in verse and prose should be--compact. Nevertheless it would be of course highly improper, and in fact absurd, to deny the "observation"--at least in detail of all kinds. Although--as we have seen and may see again when we come to Naturalism and look back--M. Brunetiere was quite wrong in thinking that Balzac _introduced_ "interiors" to French, and still more wrong in thinking that he introduced them to European, novel-writing, they undoubtedly make a great show in his work--are, indeed, one of its chief characteristics. He actually overdoes them sometimes; the "dragging" of _Les Chouans_ is at least partly due to this, and he never got complete mastery of his tendency that way. But undoubtedly this tendency was also a source of power.