The French imagination had tended for some time to desert that psychology in abstract° which had been at once the glory and the limi tation of the great classical authors, and to pay more attention to the setting and the bacic ground of fictitious characters. Diderot par ticularly, who on several grounds might be called a herald of Balzac (and resembled him in vitality, variety of lcnowledge, fertility, hasty and unequal execution), had done much to carry into pure literature a spirit of curiosity about the common things of life, a new multiplicity of interests and concern for reality, and some of the results of natural science. But the ro mantic contemporaries of Balzac, most of whom were irresistibly allured by the prestige of the old and the distant, used the extension of imagi native matter to enhance the picturesque value of descriptions, rather than to enrich the defi nition of human types; for their interest in characters is generally insufficient, being de pendent upon an introspection distorted as often as not by a morbid vanity. Balzac is unique m this, that with a searching modernity of out look which omits none of the sensible elements of life from his imaginary world, he is yet essentially the restorer of the old, patient, con structive psychology and of the drarna of in ternal action. It is remarkable how much of the spirit of the grand siecle survives in his work; how much of La Bruyire in the brilliant pages of moral analysis, of Corneille in some of his heroes of the will, of Moliere in the smiling sanity of his attitude toward a neces sarily imperfect society, of Racine in the sym pathetic presentment of absolute passions and their victims! Balzac's personages—even the secondary figures—are at once individuals and types. They live with the intense life of living men and women; and we accept them as great moral symbols. They are highly differentiated, particularized with an unsurpassable sureness of detail; but they are also, one and all, in• formed by an idea—so that, though there is only one Goriot, he sums up all the tragedy of a primal affection run to seed and despitefully entreated; and there is only one Baron Hulot, but he contains all the shame of elderly profli gacy, bringing disaster on whole families; and Cesar Birotteau is inimitable, but he stands for all that is sterling as well as all that is ridicu lous in the middle class.
In the vitality of his creatures Balzac is not inferior to Shakespeare himself. But we be lieve not only in the people he made, but in the whole world of 'The Human Comedy,' and accept it as a rival of reality. This mastery of illusion the very highest virtue in a writer of fiction, 'does not depend upon veracity or exacti tude of detail (a test which upon the whole he sustains triumphantly), but is simply the power to imagine strongly. It is true that in this case a system of composition which discarded chap ters, or rather made of each novel (by the con tinual reappearance of old friends among the characters) a chapter in the whole work, is a powerful help to illusion; so of course are the accumulation of circumstances, and especially perhaps the variety and distribution of interests, in which Balzac's astonishing invention seems to play the part of chance.
The work of Balzac displays at one view the whole capacity of the form of literature called fiction, its scope and possibility of content The ordinary tone of the French novel had once been heroic and pastoral; then it had tended to caricature and to the parodying of court memoirs; and later the ideal had been to amuse one class by showing the manners of another. The picturesque romance had been succeeded by ((realisticp satires upon society and, with the advent of the philosophes, the novel became a pamphlet, a vehicle of moral or political doc trines. Perhaps all these phases are repre sented in 'La Comedie Humaine' ; the novel according to Balzac is simply a universal instru ment like Homer's epic or Shakespeare's drama. The ineffaceable mark of his achieve ment upon his successors is that, since Balzac, the novel in France is not a toy but a serious art. Balzac indeed would not have been con tent with the qualification; half the preface already referred to is an apology for the novel considered as a work of science and a means of propaganda, and to him— to his precept rather than to his practice—must be traced the arro gant pretensions of some modern writers of fiction, their sermons and sociology and what Flaubert so disdainfully called their manie de conclure. A work of imagination does not need
the protection of a political creed or a scientific hypothesis; it is Balzac's weakest side that, while he sinks what we call his personality almost always, he frequently obtrudes fallible opinions — matter for argument — into the do main of the imagination. His royalism is an interesting fact, but in his novels it is irrele vant; the same is true of many of his political prophecies. It should be added that he seldom intervenes directly in the discussion of scien tific theories (which hold a somewhat important place in his novels), though with characteristic credulity he identifies himself expressly with the speculations of the phrenologists! There was a mystic in Balzac, and that section of his work, 'Philosophical Studies,' which deals with the solitary adventures of the mind in regions beyond the world of sense, is strangely original and fascinating.
He was, in some degree reluctantly, an artist—a prodigious though an imperfect artist. His defects of form have been exaggerated. His style, like Saint-Simon's, is vigorous and vivid in default of correctness, and full of for tunate phrases; but he was wanting in the sense of idiom, and the effort to condense his thought often produced a clumsy syntax and obscurity. Haste no doubt accounts for some base coin age, repetition and inadequate expressions. As of other writers of his stature it may be said of him that his fecundity was necessarily waste ful, so that a part of his work is greater than the whole. This exuberance, a certain worship of the excessive, a stupendous confidence for which no design is too large, and a preference for the expressive over the symmetrical, for color over draughtsmanship, are characteris tics which he shares with several great French men of his generation—the generation con ceived in camps and lulled by the guns of Austerlitz, which grew up haunted by a vision of heroical accomplishment. Honore de Balzac stands beside Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet and Hector Berlioz and 'Eugene Delacroix—a giant among giants, a perennial force among the intellectual forces of the world. See PERE GORIOT; EUGENIE GRANDET; CESAR BIROTTEAU; MAGIC SKIN, THE Bibliography.—The best edition of the com plete works of Honore de Balzac is the 'Edition Definitive' (in 24 volumes, Paris 1869-76). Uniform with it are the letters to Mme. Hanslca, (Lettres l'Etrangere,' posthumously published in 1899. There exist numerous English trans lations of individual novels. Prof. G. Saints bury in the general edition of a complete Eng lish translation of a (Human Comedy,' by various hands, in 40 volumes (London 1895 98). The letters to Mme. Hanska have been translated by D. F. Hannigan— (Love Letters of Balzac' (London 1901). Among biograph ical and critical studies of Balzac the more valuable are the following: L. Gozlau, (Balzac chez luP(1862); E. Bire, (Balzac) (1897) ; Le Breton, (Balzac, l'homme et rceuvre) (1905); F. Brunetiere; 'H. de Vicomte Spoet boerch de Louvenjoul, 'Histoire des ceuvres de Balzac) (1880) ; 'La Genese d'un Roman de Balzac' —'Les Paysans' (1901); 'Un pays perdu d'H. de Balzac) (1903). The short life of her brother by Mme. Surville (Laure de Balzac), first published in 1858, is included in the volume of the 'Edition Definitive' contain ing Balzac's general correspondence. In Eng lish Mr. Frederick Wadmore has written a 'Life of Balzac); and a better-informed study by Miss M. F. Sandars appeared in 1904. Con suit also Chapman, J. J., 'Great Genius' —in cluding Euripides, Shakespeare, Balsac (New York 1915); Faguet, E., (Balzac) (Paris 1913, and trans. with notes Boston 1914); Gillette, F. B., 'Title Index to the Works of Honore de Balzac' (Boston 1909); James, H., 'Notes on Novelists) (New York 1914) ; Lilly, W. S., (Balzac Re-Read' (Nineteenth Century and After, New York 1916).
F. Y. Eocsis.