Many years ago, in a number of All the Year Round, Charles Dickens
complained that Balzac was very little read in England, and although
since then the public has become more familiar with the great
masterpieces of French fiction, still it may be doubted whether the
Comedie Humaine is at all appreciated or understood by the general run of
novel readers. It is really the greatest monument that literature has
produced in our century, and M. Taine hardly exaggerates when he says
that, after Shakespeare, Balzac is our most important magazine of
documents on human nature. Balzac's aim, in fact, was to do for humanity
what Buffon had done for the animal creation. As the naturalist studied
lions and tigers, so the novelist studied men and women. Yet he was no
mere reporter. Photography and proces-verbal were not the essentials of
his method. Observation gave him the facts of life, but his genius
converted facts into truths, and truths into truth. He was, in a word, a
marvellous combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific
spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples; the former was
entirely his own. The distinction between such a book as M. Zola's
L'Assommoir and such a book as Balzac's Illusions Perdues is the
distinction between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. 'All
Balzac's characters,' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the same ardour
of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured
as dreams. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The
very scullions have genius.' He was, of course, accused of being
immoral. Few writers who deal directly with life escape that charge. His
answer to the accusation was characteristic and conclusive. 'Whoever
contributes his stone to the edifice of ideas,' he wrote, 'whoever
proclaims an abuse, whoever sets his mark upon an evil to be abolished,
always passes for immoral. If you are true in your portraits, if, by
dint of daily and nightly toil, you succeed in writing the most difficult
language in the world, the word immoral is thrown in your face.' The
morals of the personages of the Comedie Humaine are simply the morals of
the world around us. They are part of the artist's subject-matter; they
are not part of his method. If there be any need of censure it is to
life, not to literature, that it should be given. Balzac, besides, is
essentially universal. He sees life from every point of view. He has no
preferences and no prejudices. He does not try to prove anything. He
feels that the spectacle of life contains its own secret. 'II cree un
monde et se tait.'

And what a world it is! What a panorama of passions! What a pell-mell
of men and women! It was said of Trollope that he increased the number
of our acquaintances without adding to our visiting list; but after the
Comedie Humaine one begins to believe that the only real people are the
people who have never existed. Lucien de Rubempre, le Pere Goriot,
Ursule Mirouet, Marguerite Claes, the Baron Hulot, Madame Marneffe, le
Cousin Pons, De Marsay--all bring with them a kind of contagious illusion
of life. They have a fierce vitality about them: their existence is
fervent and fiery-coloured; we not merely feel for them but we see
them--they dominate our fancy and defy scepticism.