As Balzac thus gave birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention, to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite intention:  to become the Secretary of an Age of which he declared society to be the historian.  He wished to exhibit man in his species as he was to be seen in the France of the novelist’s era, just as a naturalist aims to study beast-kind, segregating them into classes for zoological investigation.  Later, Balzac’s great successor (as we shall see) applied this analogy with more rigid insistence upon the scientific method which should obtain in all literary study.  The survey proposed covered a period of about half a century and included the Republic, the Empire and the Restoration:  it ranged through all classes and conditions of men with no appearance of prejudice, preference or parti-pris (this is one of the marvels of Balzac), thus gaining the immense advantage of an apparently complete and catholic comprehension of the human show.  Of all modern novelists, Balzac is the one whose work seems like life instead of an opinion of life; he has the objectivity of Shakspere.  Even a Tolstoy set beside him seems limited.

This idea of a plan was not crystallized into the famous title given to his collective works—­La Comedie Humaine—­until 1842, when but eight years of life remained to him.  But four years earlier it had been mentioned in a letter, and when Balzac was only a little over thirty, at a time when his better-known books were just beginning to appear, he had signified his sense of an inclusive scheme by giving such a running title to a group of his stories as the familiar “Scenes from Private Life”—­to which, in due course, were added other designations for the various parts of the great plan.  The encyclopedic survey was never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation of an almost incredible amount of human data.  As for finishing the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects its place in literature.  Neither Spenser’s “Faery Queen” nor Wordsworth’s “The Excursion” was completed, and, per contra, it were as well for Browning if “The Ring and the Book” had not been.  In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one recognizes Hercules from the feet.  Had this mighty story-teller and student of humanity carried out his full intention there would have been nearly 150 pieces of fiction; of the plan-on-paper he actually completed ninety-seven, two-thirds of the whole, and enough to illustrate the conception.  And it must be remembered that Balzac died at fifty.  One result of the incompletion, as Brunetiere has pointed out, is to give disproportionate treatment to certain phases of life, to the military, for instance, for which Balzac has twenty-four stories on his list, whereas only two, “The Chouans” and “A Passion in the Desert,” were executed.  But surely, sufficient was done, looking to the comedy