sensibility, and a treatise on the future of Catholicism.  If he describes, as in The Firm of Nucingen, a supper given to Parisian blases, he introduces a system of credit, reports of the Bank and Bureau of Finance, and—­any number of other things!  Speaking of Daniel d’Arthez, that one of his heroes who, with Albert Savarus and Raphael, most nearly resembles himself, he writes:  “Daniel would not admit the existence of talent without profound metaphysical knowledge.  At this moment he was in the act of despoiling both ancient and modern philosophy of all their wealth in order to assimilate it.  He desired, like Moliere, to become a profound philosopher first of all, a writer of comedies afterwards.”  Some readers there are, indeed, who think that philosophy superabounds with Balzac, that the surplus of general hypotheses overflows at times, and that the novels are too prone to digressions.  Be that as it may, it seems incontestible that this was his master faculty, the virtue and vice of his thought.  Let us see, however, by what singular detour this power of generalization—­the antithesis, one might say, of the creative power—­increased in him the faculty of the poetic visionary.

It is important, first of all, to note that this power of the visionary could not be put directly into play.  Balzac had not long enough to live.  The list of his works, year by year, prepared by his sister, shows that from the moment he achieved his reputation till the day of his death he never took time for rest or observation or the study of mankind by daily and close contact, like Moliere or Saint-Simon.  He cut his life in two, writing by night, sleeping by day, and after sparing not a single hour for calling, promenades or sentiment.  Indeed, he would not admit this troublesome factor of sentiment, except at a distance and through letters—­“because it forms one’s style”!  At any rate, that is the kind of love he most willingly admitted—­unless an exception be made of the mysterious intimacies of which his correspondence has left traces.  During his youth he had followed this same habit of heavy labor, and as a result the experience of this master of exact literature was reduced to a minimum; but this minimum sufficed for him, precisely because of the philosophical insight which he possessed to so high a degree.  To this meagre number of positive faculties furnished by observation, he applied an analysis so intuitive that he discovered, behind the small facts amassed by him in no unusual quantity, the profound forces, the generative influences, so to speak.

He himself describes—­once more in connection with Daniel d’Arthez —­the method pursued in this analytical and generalizing work.  He calls it a “retrospective penetration.”  Probably he lays hold of the elements of experience and casts them into a seeming retort of reveries.  Thanks to an alchemy somewhat analogous to that of Cuvier, he was enabled to reconstruct an entire temperament from the smallest detail, and an entire class from a single individual; but that which guided him in his work of reconstruction was always and everywhere the habitual process of philosophers:  the quest and investigation of causes.