These intricately moving bobbins are all subject to a set of objects or one in particular. Brobdingnag is fascinated by one object, for instance; one at once another vitality. He bangs up against it wildly at regular intervals, blackens it, contemplates it, moves round it and dreams. All such fascination is religious. Moran’s damp napkins are the altar-cloths of his rough illusion. Julie’s bruises are the markings on an idol. These studies of rather primitive people are studies in a Savage worship and attraction. Moran rolls between his tables ten million times in a realistic rhythm that is as intense and superstitious as the figures of a war-dance. He worships his soup, his damp napkins, the lump of flesh that rolls everywhere with him called Madam Moran. All religion has the mechanism of the celestial bodies, has a dance. When we wish to renew our idols, or break up the rhythm of our naivety, the effort postulates a respect which is the summit of devoutness. II I would present these puppets, then, as carefully selected specimens of religious fanaticism. With their attendant objects or fetishes they live and have a regular food for vitality. They are not creations, but puppets. You can be as exterior to them, and live their life as little, as the showman grasping from beneath and working about a Polichinelle. They are only shadows of energy, and not living beings. Their mechanism is a logical structure and they are nothing but that. Sam Weller, Jingle, Malvolio, Bouvard, and Pecuchet, the “commissaire” in _Crime and Punishment_, do not live; they are congealed and frozen into logic, and an exuberant, hysterical truth. They transcend life and are complete cyphers, but they are monuments of dead imperfection. Their only reference is to themselves, and their only significance their egoism. The great intuitive figures of creation live with the universal egoism of the Poet. They are not picturesque and over palpable. They are supple with this rare impersonality; not stiff with a common egotism. The “realists” of the Flaubert, Maupassant, and Tchekoff school are all satirists. “Realism”, understood as applied to them, implies either photography or satire. Satire, the great Heaven of ideas, where you meet the Titans of red laughter, is just below Intuition, and Life charged with black Illusion. III When we say “types of humanity”, we mean violent individualities, and nothing stereotyped. But Othello, Falstaff and Pecksniff attract, in our memory, a vivid following. All difference is energy, and a category of humanity a relatively small group, and not the myriads suggested by a generalisation.