It is a pleasure to meet M. Émile Faguet[5] on the same ground of mastered critical method and in the same air of cool deliberation and conclusion that so favoured his excellent study of Flaubert in the rich series to which the present volume belongs. It was worth while waiting these many years for a Balzac to get it at last from a hand of so firm a grip, if not quite of the very finest manipulative instinct. It can scarce ever be said of M. Faguet that he tends to play with a subject, at least a literary one; but nobody is better for circling his theme in sound and easy pedestrian fashion, for taking up each of its aspects in order, for a sense, above all, of the order in which they _should_ be taken, and for then, after doing them successively justice, reaching the point from which they appear to melt together. He thus gives us one of those literary portraits the tradition of which, so far at least as they are the fruit of method, has continued scantily to flourish among ourselves. We cannot help thinking indeed that an ideally authoritative portrait of Balzac would be the work of some pondering painter able to measure the great man’s bequest a little more from within or by a coincidence of special faculty, or that in other words the particular initiation and fellow-feeling of some like—that is not too unlike—imaginative projector as well are rather wanted here to warm and colour the critical truth to the right glow of appreciation. Which comes to saying, we quite acknowledge, that a “tribute” to Balzac, of however embracing an intention, may still strike us as partly unachieved if we fail to catch yearning and shining through it, like a motive in a musical mixture or a thread of gold in a piece of close weaving, the all but overriding sympathy of novelist with novelist. M. Faguet’s intelligence at any rate sweeps his ground clear of the anecdotal, the question-begging reference to odds and ends of the personal and superficial, in a single short chapter, and, having got so promptly over this second line of defence, attacks at once the issue of his author’s general ideas—matters apt to be, in any group of contributors to a “series” of our own, exactly what the contributor most shirks considering.