The ‘Contes’ are thirty in number, divided into “dixains,” each with its appropriate prologue and epilogue.  They purport to have been collected in the abbeys of Touraine, and set forth by the Sieur de Balzac for the delight of Pantagruelists and none others.  Not merely the spirit but the very language of Rabelais is caught with remarkable verve and fidelity, so that from the point of view of style Balzac has never done better work.  A book which holds by Rabelais on the one hand and by the Queen of Navarre on the other is not likely, however, to appeal to that part of the English and American reading public that expurgates its Chaucer, and blushes at the mention of Fielding and Smollett.  Such readers will do well to avoid the ‘Contes drolatiques;’ although, like ‘Don Juan,’ they contain a great deal of what was best in their author, of his frank, ebullient, sensuous nature, lighted up here at least by a genuine if scarcely delicate humor.  Of direct suggestion of vice Balzac was, naturally, as incapable as he was of smug puritanism; but it must be confessed that as a raconteur his proper audience, now that the monastic orders have passed away, would be a group of middle-aged club-men.

The ‘Comedie humaine’ is divided into three main sections:  first and most important, the ‘Etudes de moeurs’ (Studies of Manners), second the ‘Etudes philosophiques’ (Philosophic Studies), and finally the ’Etudes analytiques’ (Analytic Studies).  These divisions, as M. Barriere points out in his ‘L’Oeuvre de H. de Balzac’ (The Work of Balzac), were intended to bear to one another the relations that moral science, psychology, and metaphysics do to one another with regard to the life of man, whether as an individual or as a member of society.  No single division was left complete at the author’s death; but enough was finished and put together to give us the sense of moving in a living, breathing world, no matter where we make our entry.  This, as we have insisted, is the real secret of his greatness.  To think, for example, that the importance of ‘Seraphita’ lies in the fact that it gives Balzac’s view of Swedenborgianism, or that the importance of ’Louis Lambert’ lies in its author’s queer theories about the human will, is entirely to misapprehend his true position in the world of literature.  His mysticism, his psychology, his theories of economics, his reactionary devotion to monarchy, and his idealization of the Church of Rome, may or may not appeal to us, and have certainly nothing that is eternal or inevitable about them; but in his knowledge of the human mind and heart he is as inevitable and eternal as any writer has ever been, save only Shakespeare and Homer.