to them, make them such dream-stuff as there is all too little of in
this world. If it is true that evil on the whole predominates over good
in the vision of this "Voyant," as Philarete Chasles so justly called
him, two very respectable, and in one case very large, though somewhat
opposed divisions of mankind, the philosophic pessimist and the
convinced and consistent Christian believer, will tell us that this is
at least not one of the points in which it is unfaithful to life. If
the author is closer and more faithful in his study of meanness and
vice than in his studies of nobility and virtue, the blame is due at
least as much to his models as to himself. If he has seldom succeeded
in combining a really passionate with a really noble conception of
love, very few of his countrymen have been more fortunate in that
respect. If in some of his types--his journalists, his married women,
and others--he seems to have sacrificed to conventions, let us
remember that those who know attribute to his conventions such a power
if not altogether such a holy influence that two generations of the
people he painted have actually lived more and more up to his painting
of them.

And last of all, but also greatest, has to be considered the immensity
of his imaginative achievement, the huge space that he has filled for
us with vivid creation, the range of amusement, of instruction, of
(after a fashion) edification which he has thrown open for us all to
walk in. It is possible that he himself and others more or less
well-meaningly, though more or less maladroitly, following his lead,
may have exaggerated the coherence and the architectural design of the
_Comedie_. But it has coherence and it has design; nor shall we find
anything exactly to parallel it. In mere bulk the _Comedie_ probably,
if not certainly, exceeds the production of any novelist of the first
class in any kind of fiction except Dumas, and with Dumas, for various