He is a poet and idealist, and thus akin to the Romanticists--though he lacks their perfection of diction--in his feeling for the beauty of atmospheric effects, and also in his enthusiasm for music, which he loved passionately. The description of Montriveau's emotions when the cloistered Duchesse de Langeais plays in the church of Spain--and Balzac tells us that the sound of the organ bears the mind through a thousand scenes of life to the infinite which parts earth from heaven, and that through its tones the luminous attributes of God Himself pierce and radiate--is totally unrealistic both in moral tone, and in its accentuation of the power of the higher emotions. His intense admiration for Sir Walter Scott--an admiration which he expresses time after time in his letters--is a further proof of his sympathy for the school of thought, which glorified the picturesque Middle Ages above every other period of history. Whichever school, however, may claim Balzac, it is an undisputed fact that he possessed in a high degree that greatest of all attributes --the power of creation of type. Le Pere Goriot, Balthazar Claes, Old Grandet, La Cousine Bette, Le Cousin Pons, and many other people in Balzac's pages, are creations; they live and are immortal. He has endowed them with more splendid and superabundant vitality than is accorded to ordinary humanity. To do this, something is required beyond keenness of vision. The gift of seeing vividly--as under a dazzling light--to the very kernel of the object stripped of supernumerary circumstance, is indeed necessary for the portrayal of character; but although Dickens, as well as Balzac, possessed this faculty to a high degree, his people are often qualities personified, or impossible monsters. For the successful creation of type, that power in which Balzac is akin to Shakespeare, it is necessary that a coherent whole shall be formed, and that the full scope of a character shall be realised, with its infinite possibilities on its own plane, and its impotence to move a hairsbreadth on to another. The mysterious law which governs the conduct of life must be fathomed; so that, though there may be unexpected and surprising developments, the artistic sense and intuition which we possess shall not be outraged, and we shall still recognise the abiding personality under everything. Balzac excels in this; and because of this power, and also because--at a time when Byronic literature was in the ascendant, and it was the fashion to think that the quintessence of beauty could be found by diving into the depths of one's own being--he came forward without pose or self-consciousness, as a simple observer of the human race, the world will never cease to owe him a debt of gratitude, and to rank him among her greatest novelists.