So it comes that his mastership of whatever given identity might be in question, and much more of the general identity of his rounded (for the artistic vision), his compact and containing France, the fixed, felt frame to him of the vividest items and richest characteristics of human life, can really not be thought of as a matter of degrees of confidence, as acquired or built up or cumbered with verifying fears. He _was_ the given identity and, on the faintest shade of a hint about it caught up, became one with it and lived it—this in the only way in which he could live, anywhere or at any time: which was by losing himself in its relation to his need or to what we call his voracity. Just so his mind, his power of apprehension, worked _naturally_ in the interest of a society disclosed to that appetite; on the mere approach to the display he inhaled information, he recognised himself as what he might best be known for, an historian unprecedented, an historian documented as none had not only ever been, but had ever dreamed of being—and even if the method of his documentation can leave us for the most part but wondering. The method of his use of it, or of a portion of it, we more or less analyse and measure; but the wealth of his provision or outfit itself, the crammed store of his categories and _cadres_, leaves us the more stupefied as we feel it to have been honestly come by. All this is what it is impossible not to regard as in itself a fundamental felicity as no _confrère_ had known; so far, indeed, as Balzac suffered _confrères_ or as the very nature of his faculty could be thought of for them. M. Brunetière’s monograph of some years ago, which is but a couple of degrees less weighty, to our sense, than this of M. Faguet before us, justly notes that, whatever other felicity may have graced the exercise of such a genius, for instance, as that rare contemporary George Sand, she was reduced well-nigh altogether to drawing upon resources and enjoying advantages comparatively vague and unassured. She had of course in a manner her special resource and particular advantage, which consisted, so to speak, in a finer feeling about what she did possess and could treat of with authority, and particularly in a finer command of the terms of expression, than any involved in Balzac’s “happier” example. But her almost fatal weakness as a novelist—an exponent of the art who has waned exactly as, for our general long-drawn appreciation, Balzac has waxed—comes from her having had to throw herself upon ground that no order governed, no frame, as we have said, enclosed, and no safety attended; safety of the sort, we mean, the safety of the constitutive, illustrative fact among facts, which we find in her rival as a warm socialised air, an element supremely assimilable.