ter on the social importance of the _Comedie Humaine_,
Brunetiere tries to persuade us that, before Balzac's time, novelists
in general gave a false presentation of the heroes by making love the
unique preoccupation of life. And he seems to include dramatists in
his accusation, declaring that love as a passion, the love which
Shakespeare and Racine speak of, is a thing exceeding rare, and that
humanity is more usually preoccupied with everything and anything
besides love; love, he says, has never been the great affair of life
except with a few idle people. Monsieur Brunetiere's erudition was
immense, and the nights as well as the days he spent in acquiring his
formidable knowledge may in his case have prevented more than a
passing thought being given to the solicitation of love. If the
eminent critic had been as skilled in psychology as he was in
literature, he would have been more disposed to recognize that, amidst
all the toils and cares of life, love, in some phase, is after all the
mainspring, and that, if it were eliminated from man's nature, the
most puissant factor of his activity would disappear. Love is part of
the huge sub-conscious in man; and the novelist, in making the events
of his fiction turn upon it, does no more than follow nature.

However, it is not exact that all novelists and dramatists, or even
the majority of them, before Balzac's time made love the sole
preoccupation of their heroes. What they did rather--in so far as
their writing was true--was to give a visible relief to it which in
real life is impossible, since it belongs to the invisible, inner
experience. Nor is it exact that Balzac consistently assigns a
secondary place in his novels to love. He does so in his best novels,
but not in some that he thought his best--_The Lily in the Valley_ and
_Seraphita_ for example. The relegation of love to the background in
these novels which happen to be his masterpieces was caused by
something mentioned in a preceding chapter, to wit, that Balzac never
thoroughly felt or understood love as a great and noble passion. And
love, with him, being so oddly mixed up with calculation, it was to be
expected he should succeed best in books in which the dominant
interest was some other passion--an exceptional one. If money plays,
on the contrary, such an intrusive role in his novels, its
introduction was less from voluntary, reasoned choice than from
obsession. He deals with this subject sometimes splendidly, b