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 Pere
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
the hand that moves them.

Of this kind of art Horace, as has been said, knew nothing, and his
canon only applies to it by the rule of contraries. Undoubtedly, and
in spite of the marvels which one great genius has wrought with it, it
is a form lower than the poetic--essentially a prosaic, and in many
or most hands an unimaginative, form of art; but for this very reason,
that it demands nothing of its average practitioner but a keen eye for
facts, great and small, and a knack of graphically recording them, it
has become a far more commonly and successfully cultivated form of
art than any other. As to the question who _are_ its p