Balzac on the other hand, born as we have seen to confidence, the tonic air of his paradise, might make character, in the sense in which we use it, that of the element exposable to the closest verification, sit or stand for its “likeness” as still as ever it would. It is true that he could, as he often did, resort to fond extravagance, since he was apt at his worst to plunge into agitation for mere agitation’s sake—which is a course that, by any turn, may cast the plunger on the barrenest strand. But he is at his best when the conditions, the whole complex of subdivisible form and pressure, are virtually themselves the situation, the action and the interest, or in other words when these things exhaust themselves, as it were, in expressing the persons we are concerned with, agents and victims alike, and when by such vivified figures, whether victims or agents, they are themselves completely expressed. The three distinguished critics who have best studied him, Taine, Brunetière and now (as well as before this) M. Faguet—the first the most eloquent but the loosest, and the last the closest even if the dryest—are in agreement indeed as to the vast quantity of waste in him, inevitably judging the romanticist as whom he so frequently, speculatively, desperately paraded altogether inferior to the realist whose function he could still repeatedly and richly and for his greater glory exercise. This estimate of his particularly greater glory is of a truth not wholly shared by M. Taine; but the three are virtually at one, where we of course join them, or rather go further than they, as to the enviability, so again to call it (and by which we mean the matchless freedom of play), of his harvesting sense when he gave himself up in fullest measure to his apprehension of the dense wholeness of reality. It was this that led him on and kept him true to that happily largest side of his labour by which he must massively live; just as it is this, the breath of his real geniality, when every abatement is made, that stirs to loyalty those who under his example also take his direction and find their joy in watching him thoroughly at work. We see then how, when social character and evolved type are the prize to be grasped, the facts of observation and certification, unrestingly social and historic too, that form and fondle and retouch it, never relaxing their action, are so easily and blessedly absolute to him that this is what we mean by their virtue.