Repertory of the Comedie Humaine Part 1 | Page 8

his correspondence has left traces.
During his youth he had followed this same habit of heavy labor, and as
a result the experience of this master of exact literature was reduced to

a minimum; but this minimum sufficed for him, precisely because of
the philosophical insight which he possessed to so high a degree. To
this meagre number of positive faculties furnished by observation, he
applied an analysis so intuitive that he discovered, behind the small
facts amassed by him in no unusual quantity, the profound forces, the
generative influences, so to speak.
He himself describes--once more in connection with Daniel d'Arthez--
the method pursued in this analytical and generalizing work. He calls it
a "retrospective penetration." Probably he lays hold of the elements of
experience and casts them into a seeming retort of reveries. Thanks to
an alchemy somewhat analogous to that of Cuvier, he was enabled to
reconstruct an entire temperament from the smallest detail, and an
entire class from a single individual; but that which guided him in his
work of reconstruction was always and everywhere the habitual process
of philosophers: the quest and investigation of causes.
It is due to this analysis that this dreamer has defined almost all the
great principles of the psychological changes incident to our time. He
saw clearly, while democracy was establishing itself with us on the
ruins of the ancient regime, the novelty of the sentiments which these
transfers from class to class were certain to produce. He fathomed
every complication of heart and mind in the modern woman by an
intuition of the laws which control her development. He divined the
transformation in the lives of artists, keeping pace with the change in
the national situation; and to this day the picture he has drawn of
journalism in /Lost Illusions/ ("A Distinguished Provincial at Paris")
remains strictly true. It seems to me that this same power of locating
causes, which has brought about such a wealth of ideas in his work, has
also brought about the magic of it all. While other novelists describe
humanity from the outside, he has shown man to us both from within
and without. The characters which crowd forth from his brain are
sustained and impelled by the same social waves which sustain and
impel us. The generative facts which created them are the same which
are always in operation about us. If many young men have taken as a
model a Rastignac, for instance, it is because the passions by which this
ambitious pauper was consumed are the same which our age of

unbridled greed multiplies around disinherited youth. Add to this that
Balzac was not content merely to display the fruitful sources of a
modern intellect, but that he cast upon them the glare of the most ardent
imagination the world has ever known. By a rare combination this
philosopher was also a man, like the story-tellers of the Orient, to
whom solitude and the over-excitement of night-work had
communicated a brilliant and unbroken hallucination. He was able to
impart this fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of
/Arabian Nights/ country, where all the passions, all the desires of real
life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the dreams
brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not
understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of Balzac's is
more real than the actual world, and that they devoted their energies to
imitating it?
It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that
Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating
influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he
defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the
oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive influences.
It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central portions of the
nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread the /Comedie
Humaine/. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr and
Christophe for this /Repertory/. Thanks to them, we shall the more
easily traverse the long galleries, painted and frescoed, of this
enormous palace,--a palace still unfinished, inasmuch as it lacks those
Scenes of Military Life whose titles awaken dreams within us: /Forced
Marches/; /The Battle of Austerlitz/; /After Dresden/. Incontestably,
Tolstoy's /War and Peace/ is an admirable book, but how can we help
regretting the loss of the painting of the Grand Army and of our Great
Emperor, by Balzac, our Napoleon of letters?
PAUL BOURGET.

REPERTORY OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE

A
ABRAMKO, Polish Jew of gigantic strength, thoroughly devoted to the
broker, Elie Magus, whose porter he was, and whose daughter and
treasures he guarded with the aid of three fierce dogs, in 1844, in a