as a whole, to force us to describe the execution as well as the conception as gigantic.  Had the work been more mechanically pushed to its end for the exact plan’s sake, the perfection of scheme might have been attained at the expense of vitality and inspiration.  Ninety-seven pieces of fiction, the majority of them elaborate novels, the whole involving several thousand characters, would be impressive in any case, but when they come from an author who marvelously reproduces his time and country, creating his scenes in a way to afford us a sense of the complexity of life—­its depth and height, its beauty, terror and mystery—­we can but hail him as Master.

And in spite of the range and variety in Balzac’s unique product, it has an effect of unity based upon a sense of social solidarity.  He conceives it his duty to present the unity of society in his day, whatever its apparent class and other divergencies.  He would show that men and women are members of the one body social, interacting upon each other in manifold relations and so producing the dramas of earth; each story plays its part in this general aim, illustrating the social laws and reactions, even as the human beings themselves play their parts in the world.  In this way Balzac’s Human Comedy is an organism, however much it may fall short of symmetry and completion.

In the outline of the plan we find him separating his studies into three groups or classes:  The Studies of Manners, the Philosophical Studies, and the Analytic Studies.  In the first division were placed the related groups of scenes of Private life, Provincial life, Parisian life, Political life, Military life and Country life.  It was his desire, as he says in a letter to Madame Hanska, to have the group of studies of Manners “represent all social effects”; in the philosophic studies the causes of those effects:  the one exhibits individualities typified, the other, types individualized:  and in the Analytic Studies he searches for the principles.  “Manners are the performance; the causes are the wings and the machinery.  The principles—­they are the author....  Thus man, society and humanity will be described, judged, analyzed without repetition and in a work which will be, as it were, ’The Thousand and One Nights’ of the west.”

The scheme thus categorically laid down sounds rather dry and formal, nor is it too easy to understand.  But all trouble vanishes when once the Human Comedy itself, in any example of it, is taken up; you launch upon the great swollen tide of life and are carried irresistibly along.

It is plain that with an author of Balzac’s productive powers, any attempt to convey an idea of his quality must perforce confine itself to a few representative specimens.  A few of them, rightly chosen, give a fair notion of his general interpretation.  What then are some illustrative creations?