And that canon is sound enough, no doubt, in the sense in which it was meant, and in its relation to the person to whom it was addressed.  A tragic drama, peopled with heroes who set forth their woes in frigid and unimpassioned verse, will unquestionably leave its audience as cold as itself.  Nor is this true of drama alone.  All poetry, indeed, whether dramatic or other, presupposes a sympathetic unity of emotion between the poet and those whom he addresses; and to this extent it is obviously true that he must feel before they can.  Horace, who was (what every literary critic is not) a man of the world and an observer of human nature, did not, of course, mean that this capacity for feeling was all, or even the chief part, of the poetic faculty.  He must have seen many an “intense” young Roman make that pathetic error of the young in all countries and of all periods—­the error of mistaking the capacity of emotion for the gift of expression.  He did, 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 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.