The Human Comedy: Introductions and Appendix | Page 4

as he seemed to be, and very reasonably seemed, to his friends
when as yet the genius had not come to him, and when he was
desperately striving to discover where his genius lay in those
wonderous works which "Lord R'Hoone," and "Horace de Saint
Aubin," and others obligingly fathered for him.

It must be the business of these introductions to give what assistance
they may to discover where it did lie; it is only necessary, before taking
up the task in the regular biographical and critical way of the
introductory cicerone, to make two negative observations. It did not lie,
as some have apparently thought, in the conception, or the outlining, or
the filling up of such a scheme as the /Comedie Humaine/. In the first
place, the work of every great writer, of the creative kind, including
that of Dante himself, is a /comedie humaine/. All humanity is latent in
every human being; and the great writers are merely those who call
most of it out of latency and put it actually on the stage. And, as
students of Balzac know, the scheme and adjustment of his comedy
varied so remarkably as time went on that it can hardly be said to have,
even in its latest form (which would pretty certainly have been altered
again), a distinct and definite character. Its so-called scenes are even in
the mass by no means exhaustive, and are, as they stand, a very "cross,"
division of life: nor are they peopled by anything like an exhaustive
selection of personages. Nor again is Balzac's genius by any means a
mere vindication of the famous definition of that quality as an infinite
capacity of taking pains. That Balzac had that capacity--had it in a
degree probably unequaled even by the dullest plodders on record--is
very well known, is one of the best known things about him. But he
showed it for nearly ten years before the genius came, and though no
doubt it helped him when genius had come, the two things are in his
case, as in most, pretty sufficiently distinct. What the genius itself was I
must do my best to indicate hereafter, always beseeching the reader to
remember that all genius is in its essence and quiddity indefinable. You
can no more get close to it than you can get close to the rainbow, and
your most scientific explanation of it will always leave as much of the
heart of the fact unexplained as the scientific explanation of the
rainbow leaves of that.

Honore de Balzac was born at Tours on the 16th of May, 1799, in the
same year which saw the birth of Heine, and which therefore had the
honor of producing perhaps the most characteristic writers of the
nineteenth century in prose and verse respectively. The family was a
respectable one, though its right to the particle which Balzac always

carefully assumed, subscribing himself "/de/ Balzac," was contested.
And there appears to be no proof of their connection with Jean Guez de
Balzac, the founder, as some will have him, of modern French prose,
and the contemporary and fellow-reformer of Malherbe. (Indeed, as the
novelist pointed out with sufficient pertinence, his earlier namesake had
no hereditary right to the name at all, and merely took it from some
property.) Balzac's father, who, as the /zac/ pretty surely indicates, was
a southerner and a native of Languedoc, was fifty-three years old at the
birth of his son, whose Christian name was selected on the ordinary
principle of accepting that of the saint on whose day he was born.
Balzac the elder had been a barrister before the Revolution, but under it
he obtained a post in the commissariat, and rose to be head of that
department for a military division. His wife, who was much younger
than himself and who survived her son, is said to have possessed both
beauty and fortune, and was evidently endowed with the business
faculties so common among Frenchwomen. When Honore was born,
the family had not long been established at Tours, where Balzac the
elder (besides his duties) had a house and some land; and this town
continued to be their headquarters till the novelist, who was the eldest
of the family, was about sixteen. He had two sisters (of whom the elder,
Laure, afterwards Madame Surville, was his first confidante and his
only authoritative biographer) and a younger brother, who seems to
have been, if not a scapegrace, rather a burden to his friends, and who
later went abroad.
The eldest boy was, in spite of Rousseau, put out to nurse, and at seven
years old was sent to the Oratorian grammar-school at Vendome, where
he stayed another seven years, going through, according to his own
account, the future experiences and performances