The Human Comedy: Introductions and Appendix | Page 8

romance-novel of his later time; and, though dealing with war and love chiefly, inclines in conception distinctly to the latter. Corentin, Hulot, and other personages of the actual Comedy (then by no means planned, or at least avowed) appear; and though the influence of Scott is in a way paramount* on the surface, the underwork is quite different, and the whole scheme of the loves of Montauran and Mademoiselle de Verneuil is pure Balzac.
* Balzac was throughout his life a fervent admirer of Sir Walter, and I think Mr. Wedmore, in his passage on the subject, distinctly undervalues both the character and the duration of this esteem. Balzac was far too acute to commit the common mistake of thinking Scott superficial--men who know mankind are not often blind to each other's knowledge. And while Mr. Wedmore seems not to know any testimony later than Balzac's /thirty-eighth/ year, it is in his /forty-sixth/, when all his own best work was done, except the /Parents Pauvres/, that he contrasts Dumas with Scott saying that /on relit Walter Scott/, and he does not think any one will re-read Dumas. This may be unjust to the one writer, but it is conclusive as to any sense of "wasted time" (his own phrase) having ever existed in Balzac's mind about the other.
It would seem as if nothing but this sun of popular approval had been wanting to make Balzac's genius burst out in full bloom. Although we have a fair number of letters for the ensuing years, it is not very easy to make out the exact sequence of production of the marvelous harvest which his genius gave. It is sufficient to say that in the three years following 1829 there were actually published the /Physiologie du Mariage/, the charming story of /La Maison du Chat- que-Pelote/, the /Peau de Chagrin/, the most original and splendid, if not the most finished and refined, of all Balzac's books, most of the short /Contes Philosophiques/, of which some are among their author's greatest triumphs, many other stories (chiefly included in the /Scenes de la Vie Privee/) and the beginning of the /Contes Drolatiques/.*
* No regular attempt will after this be made to indicate the date of production of successive works, unless they connect themselves very distinctly with incidents in the life or with general critical observations. At the end of this introduction will be found a full table of the /Comedie Humaine/ and the other works. It may perhaps be worth while to add here, that while the labors of M. de Lovenjoul (to whom every writer on Balzac must acknowledge the deepest obligation) have cleared this matter up almost to the verge of possibility as regards the published works, there is little light to be thrown on the constant references in the letters to books which never appeared. Sometimes they are known, and they may often be suspected, to have been absorbed into or incorporated with others; the rest must have been lost or destroyed, or, which is not quite impossible, have existed chiefly in the form of project. Nearly a hundred titles of such things are preserved.
But without a careful examination of his miscellaneous work, which is very abundant and includes journalism as well as books, it is almost as impossible to come to a just appreciation of Balzac as it is without reading the early works and letters. This miscellaneous work is all the more important because a great deal of it represents the artist at quite advanced stages of his career, and because all its examples, the earlier as well as the later, give us abundant insight on him as he was "making himself." The comparison with the early works of Thackeray (in /Punch/, /Fraser/, and elsewhere) is so striking that it can escape no one who knows the two. Every now and then Balzac transferred bodily, or with slight alterations, passages from these experiments to his finished canvases. It appears that he had a scheme for codifying his "Physiologies" (of which the notorious one above mentioned is only a catchpenny exemplar and very far from the best) into a seriously organized work. Chance was kind or intention was wise in not allowing him to do so; but the value of the things for the critical reader is not less. Here are tales--extensions of the scheme and manner of the /Oeuvres de Jeunesse/, or attempts at the /goguenard/ story of 1830--a thing for which Balzac's hand was hardly light enough. Here are interesting evidences of striving to be cosmopolitan and polyglot--the most interesting of all of which, I think, is the mention of certain British products as "mufflings." "Muffling" used to be a domestic joke for "muffin;" but whether some wicked Briton deluded Balzac into the idea that it was the proper form