however, undoubtedly mean that a poet's power of affecting others
presupposes passion in himself; and, as regards the poet, he was
right. But his criticism takes no account whatever of one form of
appeal to the emotions which has been brought by later art to a high
pitch of perfection, but with which the personal feeling of the artist
has not much more to do than the "passions" of an auctioneer's clerk
have to do with the compilation of his inventory. A poet himself,
Horace wrote for poets; to him the pathetic implied the ideal, the
imaginative, the rhetorical; he lived before the age of Realism and
the Realists, and would scarcely have comprehended either the men or
the method if he could have come across them. Had he done so, however,
he would have been astonished to find his canon reversed, and to have
perceived that the primary condition of the realist's success, and
the distinctive note of those writers who have pressed genius into
the service of realism, is that they do _not_ share--that they are
unalterably and ostentatiously free from--the emotions to which
they appeal in their readers. A fortunate accident has enabled us to
compare the treatment which the world's greatest tragic poet and its
greatest master of realistic tragedy have respectively applied to
virtually the same subject; and the two methods are never likely to
be again so impressively contrasted as in _King Lear_ and _Le Père
Goriot_. But, in truth, it must be impossible for any one who feels
Balzac's power not to feel also how it is heightened by Balzac's
absolute calm--a calm entirely different from that stern composure
which was merely a point of style and not an attitude of the heart
with the old Greek tragedians--a calm which, unlike theirs, insulates,
so to speak, and is intended to insulate, the writer, to the end that
his individuality, of which only the electric current of sympathy ever
makes a reader conscious, may disappear, and the characters of the
drama stand forth the more life-like from the complete concealment of