ost towards
demonstrating the interdependence of the various branches of
knowledge, this honour being reserved to Comte. But the transference
of the minute causalities of life into fiction was systematized by
him. He made the thing an artistic method, using it with the same
power, though not the same chasteness, as George Eliot after him. His
employment was not very logical--how could it be when the guiding mind
was in chronic fermentation? He gives us this contradiction that human
thought is at once the grandeur and destruction of life--an opinion
imbued with ecclesiasticism, confusing thought with passion. It is
passion alone which disintegrates; and, in the _Comedie Humaine_, such
monomaniacs as Grandet, Claes, and Hulot are destroyed not by their
thought but their desire.

Balzac's pessimism is not philosophic. In him it was not the despair
of an intellect that had worn itself out in vainly seeking for the
solution of the riddle of the universe, vainly striving after a theory
that should reconcile nature's brute law with the human demand for
justice and immanent goodness. By original temperament an optimist, he
changed and grew pessimistic with the untoward happenings of his
agitated career, and under the fostering of his native self-esteem.
Possibly too, as Le Breton asserts, a secondary cause was his having
imbibed the pretentious doctrines of the Romantic school, the disdains
of the young artistic bloods of 1830, who held their clan composed the
loftier, super-human race, the only one that counted. Berlioz carried
this folly of pride to its highest pitch. In his _Memoirs_, he
declared that the public (of course excluding himself) were an
infamous tag-rag-and-bob-tail. The people of Paris, he protested, were
more stupid and a hundred times more ferocious, in their caperings and
revolutionary grimaces, than the baboons and orang-outangs of Borneo.
Balzac at times adopted and expressed similar opinions. Gozlan relates
that one day the owner of Les Jardies said to him in the attic of his
hermitage: "Come, let us spit upon Paris." The novelist imagined that
talents of the kind he possessed ought to be admitted to every honour;
and his hatred of the Revolution and Republicanism was more because he
believed they were inimical to art--and his art--than because they had
cast down a throne. His bitterness was to some extent excusable, for
he was exploited much during his lifetime, and had, even to the end,
to bend his nec