as he says in a letter
to Madame Hanska, to have the group of studies of Manners
"represent all social effects"; in the philosophic studies the
causes of those effects: the one exhibits individualities
typified, the other, types individualized: and in the Analytic
Studies he searches for the principles. "Manners are the
performance; the causes are the wings and the machinery. The
principles--they are the author.... Thus man, society and
humanity will be described, judged, analyzed without repetition
and in a work which will be, as it were, 'The Thousand and One
Nights' of the west."

The scheme thus categorically laid down sounds rather dry and
formal, nor is it too easy to understand. But all trouble
vanishes when once the Human Comedy itself, in any example of
it, is taken up; you launch upon the great swollen tide of life
and are carried irresistibly along.

It is plain that with an author of Balzac's productive powers,
any attempt to convey an idea of his quality must perforce
confine itself to a few representative specimens. A few of them,
rightly chosen, give a fair notion of his general
interpretation. What then are some illustrative creations?

In the case of most novelists, although of first rank, it is not
as a rule difficult to define their class and name their
tendency: their temperaments and beliefs are so-and-so, and they
readily fall under the designation of realist or romanticist,
pessimist, or optimist, student of character or maker of plots.
This is, in a sense, impossible with Balzac. The more he be
read, the harder to detect his bias: he seems, one is almost
tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind.
Persons read two or three--perhaps half a dozen of his books--and
then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the
base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been assimilated, it
will be realized that but a phase of Balzac had been seen.

When the passion of creation, the birth-throes of a novel were
on him, he became so immersed in the aspect of life he was
depicting that he saw, felt, knew naught else: externally this
obsession was expressed by his way of life and work while the
story was growing under his hand: his recluse habits, his
monkish abstention from worldly indulgences, the abnormal night
hours of activity, the loss of flesh, so that the robust man who
went into the guarded chamber came out at the end of six weeks
the shadow of himself.

As a consequenc