ndividualizing it, and significance to the individuals
by rendering them typical. At the top of the cone he treated, in his
analytical studies, of the principles whence causes and effects
proceed. The manners and morals at the base, he said, were the
spectacle; the causes above were the side-scenes; and the principles
at the top were the author.

Coming to the subdivisions, he explains that his _Scenes of Private
Life_ deal with humanity's childhood and adolescence, and the errors
of these, in short, with the period of budding passions; the _Scenes
of Provincial Life_, with passions in full development--calculation,
interest, ambition, etc.; the _Scenes of Parisian Life_, with the
peculiar tastes, vices and temptations of capitals, that is to say,
with passion unbridled. The interpretation assigned to these
categories is a fanciful one. Passions are born and bred and produce
their full effect in every place and phase of life. They may assume
varying forms in divers surroundings, but such variation has no
analogy with change of age. Only by forcing the moral of his stories
was the author able to give them these secondary significations.
Indeed, he was often in straits to decide in which category he ought
to class one and another novel. _Pere Goriot_ was originally in the
_Scenes of Parisian Life_, where it has a certain _raison d'etre_.
Ultimately, it found its way into the _Scenes of Private Life_. And a
greater alteration was made by removing _Madame Firmiani_ and the
_Woman-Study_ from the _Philosophic Studies_, and placing them also in
the _Private Life_ series.

Be it granted that the plan of the _Comedy_ was grandiose in its
scope; it was none the less doomed in its execution to suffer for its
ambitiousness, since an attempt was made to subordinate imagination to
science in a domain where the rights of imagination were paramount.

That which Balzac has best rendered in it is the struggle for life on
the social plane; and that which forms its most legitimate claim to be
deemed in some measure a whole is the general reference to this in all
the so-called parts. Before the Revolution, the action of the law was
narrower, being chiefly limited to members of one class. With the fall
of ancient privilege the sphere of competition was opened to the
entire nation; and, instead of nobles contending with nobles,
churchmen with churchmen, tradesmen with tradesmen, there was an
interpenetration of combatants over all the fie