It may freely be pronounced interesting that whereas, in her instinct for her highest security, she threw herself upon the consideration of love as the _type_ attraction or most representable thing in the human scene, so, assuredly, no student of that field has, in proportion to the thoroughness of his study, felt he could afford to subordinate or almost even to neglect it to anything like the tune in which we see it put and kept in its place through the parts of the Comédie Humaine that most count. If this passion but too often exhales a tepid breath in much other fiction—much other of ours at least—that is apt to come decidedly less from the writer’s sense of proportion than from his failure of art, or in other words of intensity. It is rarely absent by intention or by intelligence, it is pretty well always there as the theoretic principal thing—any difference from writer to writer being mostly in the power to put the principal thing effectively forward. It figures as a pressing, an indispensable even if a perfunctory motive, for example, in every situation devised by Walter Scott; the case being simply that if it doesn’t in fact attractively occupy the foreground this is because his hand has had so native, so much greater, an ease for other parts of the picture. What makes Balzac so pre-eminent and exemplary that he was to leave the novel a far other and a vastly more capacious and significant affair than he found it, is his having felt his fellow-creatures (almost altogether for him his contemporaries) as quite failing of reality, as swimming in the vague and the void and the abstract, unless their social conditions, to the last particular, their generative and contributive circumstances, of every discernible sort, enter for all these are “worth” into his representative attempt. This great compound of the total looked into and starting up in its element, as it always does, to meet the eye of genius and patience half way, bristled for him with all its branching connections, those thanks to which any figure could _be_ a figure but by showing for endlessly entangled in them.