was the first of European writers to inaugurate
the novel without denouement, and to give the world examples of the
literary torso whose beauty and charm consist not in its completeness,
but in the vigor and life-like animation of the lines, features, and
contours of a detached trunk.

It is not surprising, therefore, that when we come to study the dramas
of Balzac we find that the very qualities that give effectiveness to a
stage representation are wanting in them. For the qualities which make
a realistic tale impressive render a play intolerable. Thus Balzac's
stage pieces are interesting, exciting and vivid in many passages, but
they cannot stand the searching glare of the footlights. Balzac, in
the first place, looked upon the drama as a department of literature
inferior to that of romance, and somewhat cavalierly condescended to
the stage without reckoning on either its possibilities or its
limitations. He did not take to play-writing because he had exhausted
his vein of fiction, but because he was in need of money. This was
during the last years of his life. In this period he wrote the five
plays which are included in the authorized edition of his works.

Balzac's first play was _Vautrin_, and Vautrin appears as the name of
the most astonishing and most original character which Balzac has
created and introduced in the five or six greatest novels of the
Comedy. So transcendent, super-human and satanic is Vautrin, Herrera,
or Jacques Collin, as he is indifferently called, that a French critic
has interpreted this personage as a mere allegorical embodiment of the
seductions of Parisian life, as they exist side by side with the
potency and resourcefulness of crime in the French metropolis.

Vautrin is described in the _Comedie Humaine_ as the tempter and
benefactor of Lucien de Rubempre, whom he loves with an intense
devotion, and would exploit as a power and influence in the social,
literary and political world. The deep-dyed criminal seems to live a
life of pleasure, fashion and social rank in the person of this
protege. The abnormal, and in some degree quixotic, nature of this
attachment is a purely Balzacian conception, and the contradictions
involved in this character, with all the intellectual and physical
endowments which pertain to it, are sometimes such as to bring the
sublime in perilous proximity to the ridiculous. How such a fantastic
creation can be so treated as to do less violence to the laws of
arti