This preface, one of the most important documents in literary history, must be carefully studied by all who would comprehend Balzac in his entirety.  It cannot be too often repeated that Balzac’s scientific and historical aspirations are important only in so far as they caused him to take a great step forward in the development of his art.  The nearer the artist comes to reproducing for us life in its totality, the higher the rank we assign him among his fellows.  Tried by this canon, Balzac is supreme.  His interweaving of characters and events through a series of volumes gives a verisimilitude to his work unrivaled in prose fiction, and paralleled only in the work of the world-poets.  In other words, his use of co-ordination upon a vast scale makes up for his lack of delicacy and sureness of touch, as compared with what Shakespeare and Homer and Chaucer have taught us to look for.  Hence he is with them even if not of them.

This great claim can be made for the Balzac of the ‘Comedie humaine’ only; it could not be made for the Balzac of any one masterpiece like ‘Le Pere Goriot,’ or even for the Balzac of all the masterpieces taken in lump and without co-ordination.  Balzac by co-ordination has in spite of his limitations given us a world, just as Shakespeare and Homer have done; and so Taine was profoundly right when he put him in the same category with the greatest of all writers.  When, however, he added St. Simon to Shakespeare, and proclaimed that with them Balzac was the greatest storehouse of documents that we have on human nature, he was guilty not merely of confounding genres of art, but also of laying stress on the philosophic rather than on the artistic side of fiction.  Balzac does make himself a great storehouse of documents on human nature, but he also does something far more important, he sets before us a world of living men and women.

To have brought this world into existence, to have given it order in the midst of complexity, and that in spite of the fact that death overtook him before he could complete his work, would have been sufficient to occupy a decade of any other man’s life; but he, though harassed with illness and with hopes of love and ambition deferred, was strong enough to do more.  The year 1840 saw the appearance of ‘Pierrette,’ and the establishment of the ill-fated ‘Revue parisienne.’  The following year saw ‘Ursule Mirouet,’ and until 1848 the stream of great works is practically unbroken.  The ‘Splendeurs et miseres’ and the ’Parents pauvres’ have been named already, but to these must be added ’Un Menage de garcon’ (A Bachelor’s House-keeping), ‘Modeste Mignon,’ and ’Les Paysans’ (The Peasants).  The three following years added nothing to his work and closed his life, but they brought him his crowning happiness.  On March 14th, 1850, he was married to Mme. Hanska, at Berditchef; on August 18th, 1850, he died at Paris.