The idea of joining his separate books together and forming them into a coherent whole was one that matured slowly in Balzac’s mind. Its genesis is to be found in his first collection of short novels published in 1830 under the titles: Scenes of Private Life, and containing The Vendetta, Gobseck, The Sceaux Ball, The House of the Tennis-playing Cat, A Double Family, and Peace in the Household. Between these stories there was no real connexion except that certain characters in one casually reappeared or were alluded to in another. By 1832, the Scenes of Private Life had been augmented, and, in a second edition, filled four volumes. The additions comprised The Message, The Bourse, The Adieu, The Cure of Tours, and several chapters of The Woman of Thirty Years Old, some of which had previously come out as serials in the Revue de Paris or the Mode.
It has already been related how the novelist all at once realized what a gain his literary production might have in adopting a plan and building up a social history of his epoch. And, in fact, this conception did stimulate his activity for some time, serving too, as long as it was uncrystallized, to concentrate his visions upon objective realities.
Needing, between 1834 and 1837, a more comprehensive title for the rapidly increasing list of his works, he called them Studies of Manners and Morals in the Nineteenth Century, subdividing them into Scenes of Private Life, Scenes of Parisian Life, and Scenes of Provincial Life. However, some things he had written were classible conveniently neither under the specific names nor under the generic one. These outsiders he called Tales and Philosophic Novels, subsequently shortening the title, between 1835 and 1840, to Philosophic Studies. The question was what wider description could be chosen which might embrace also this last category. Writing to Madame Hanska in 1837, he used the expression Social Studies, telling her that there would be nearly fifty volumes of them. Either she, or he himself, must, on reflection, have judged the title unsatisfactory, for no edition of his works ever bore this name. Most likely the thought occurred to him that such an appellation was more suitable to a strictly scientific treatise than to fiction.
The expression Comedie Humaine, which he ultimately adopted, is said to have been suggested to him by his whilom secretary, the Count Auguste de Belloy, after the latter’s visit to Italy, during which Dante’s Divine Comedy had been read and appreciated. But already, some years prior to this journey, the novelist would seem to have had the Italian poet’s masterpiece before his mind. In his Girl with the Golden Eyes, he had spoken of Paris as a hell which, perhaps, one day would have its Dante. De Belloy’s share in the matter was probably an extra persuasion added to Balzac’s own leaning, or the Count may have been the one to substitute the word human.27
27 A communication has been made to me, while writing this book, by Monsieur Hetzel, the publisher, tending to show that his father, who was also known in the literary world, had a large share in the choice of the Comedie Humaine as a title.
Madame Hanska was at once informed of the choice. “The Comedie Humaine, such is the title of my history of society depicted in action,” he told her in September 1841. And when, between 1841 and 1842, Hetzel, together with Dubochet and Turne, brought out sixteen octavo volumes of his works illustrated, they each carried his name, while a preface set forth the reasons which had led the author to choose it. Thereafter, every succeeding edition was similarly styled, including Houssiaux’ series in 1855, and the series of Calmann-Levy, known as the definitive one, between 1869 and 1876.
Against the appellation itself no objection can reasonably be made. Balzac’s fiction takes in a world — an underworld might appropriately be said — of Dantesque proportions. As soon as it was fully fledged, it started with a large ambition. “My work,” he said to Zulma Carraud in 1834, “is to represent all social effects without anything being omitted from it, whether situation of life, physiognomy, character of man or woman, manner of living, profession, zone of social existence, region of French idiosyncrasy, childhood, maturity, old age, politics, jurisdiction, war.” And in the Forties the same intention was stated as clearly. “I have undertaken the history of the whole of society. Often have I summed up my plan in this simple sentence: A generation is a drama in which four or five thousand people are the chief actors. This drama is my book.”
When Hetzel decided to publish a so-far complete edition of the Comedie, he induced the novelist to insert a preface composed for the occasion. Balzac wished at first to use an old preface that he had written in conjunction with Felix Davin, and placed, under the latter’s signature, at the beginning of the Study of Manners and Morals in the Nineteenth Century. Hetzel objected to this, and urged that so important an undertaking ought to be preceded by an author’s apology. His advice was accepted, and the preface was developed into a veritable doctrine and defence. Here are some of its essential passages:—
“The Comedie Humaine,” says Balzac, “first dawned on my brain like a dream — one of those impossible projects, it seemed, that are caressed and allowed to fly away; a chimera which smiles, shows its woman’s face, and forthwith unfolds its wings, mounting again into a fancied heaven. But the chimera, as many chimeras do, changed into reality. It had its commands and its tyranny to which I was obliged to yield.
“It was born from a comparison between humanity and animality. It would be an error to believe that the great quarrel which in recent times has arisen between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire is concerned with a scientific innovation. The unity of composition involved in it had already, under other terms, occupied the greatest minds of the two preceding centuries. On reading over again the extraordinary works of such mystic writers as Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, etc., who have studied the relations of science with the infinite, and the writings of the finest geniuses in natural history, such as Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., one finds in the monads of Leibnitz, in the organic molecules of Buffon, in the vegetative force of Needham, in the jointing of similar parts of Charles Bonnet — who was bold enough to write in 1760: ‘The animal vegetates like the plant;’ one finds, I say, the rudiments of the beautiful law of self for self on which the unity of composition reposes. There is only one animal. The Creator has made use only of one and the same pattern for all organized beings. The animal is a principle which acquires its exterior form, or, to speak more exactly, the differences of its form, in the surroundings in which it is called upon to develop. The various zoologic species result from these differences. The proclamation and upholding of this system, in harmony, moreover, with the ideas we have of the Divine power, will be the eternal honour of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who was the vanquisher of Cuvier on this point of high science, and whose triumph was acknowledged in the last article written by the great Goethe.”
Continuing his exposition, the novelist says all men resemble each other, but in the same manner as a horse resembles a bird. They are also divided into species. These species differ according to social surroundings. A peasant, a tradesman, an artist, a great lord are as distinct from each other as a wolf is from a sheep. Besides, there is another thing peculiar to man, viz. that male and female are not alike, whereas among the rest of the animals, the female is similar to the male. The wife of a shopkeeper is sometimes worthy to be the spouse of a prince, and often a prince’s wife is not worth an artist’s. Then, again, there is this difference. The lower animals are strictly dependent on circumstances, each species feeding and housing itself in a uniform manner. Man has not such uniformity. In Paris, he is not the same as in a provincial town; in the provinces, not the same as in rural surroundings. When studying him, there are many things to be considered — habitat, furniture, food, clothes, language. In fine, the subject taken up by a novelist who wishes to treat it properly, comprises man as an integral portion of a social species, woman as not peculiarly belonging to any, and entourage from its widest circumference of country down to the narrowest one of home.
“But,” he goes on, “how is it possible to render the drama of life interesting, with the three or four thousand varying characters presented by a society? How please at the same time the philosopher, and the masses who demand poetry and philosophy under striking images? If I conceived the importance and poetry of this history of the human heart, I saw no means of execution; for, down to our epoch, the most celebrated narrators had spent their talent in creating one or two typical characters, in depicting one phase of life. With this thought, I read the works of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, the modern trouvere, was then giving a gigantic vogue to a kind of composition unjustly called secondary. Is it not really harder to compete with the registry of births, marriages, and deaths by means of Daphnis and Chloe, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Ossian, Julie d’Etanges, My Uncle Toby, Werther, Rene, Corinne, Adolphe, Gil Blas, Paul and Virginia, Jeanie Deans, Claverhouse, Ivanhoe, Manfred, Mignon, than to arrange facts almost similar among all nations, to seek for the spirit of laws fallen into decay, to draw up theories which lead people astray, or, as certain metaphysicians, to explain what exists? First of all, nearly all these characters, whose existence becomes longer, more genuine than that of the generations amid which they are made to be born, live only on condition of being a vast image of the present. Conceived in the womb of the century, the whole human heart moves beneath their outward covering; it often conceals a whole philosophy. Walter Scott, therefore, raised to the philosophic value of history the novel — that literature which from century to century adorns with immortal diamonds the poetic crown of the countries where letters are cultivated. He put into it the spirit of ancient times; he blended in it at once drama, dialogue, portraiture, landscape, description; he brought into it the marvellous and the true, those elements of the epopee; he made poetry mingle in it with the humblest sorts of language. But having less invented a system than found out his manner in the ardour of work, or by the logic of this work, he had not thought of linking his compositions to each other so as to co-ordinate a complete history, each chapter of which would have been a novel and each novel an epoch. Perceiving this want of connection, which, indeed does not render the Scotchman less great, I saw both the system that was favourable to the execution of my work, and the possibility of carrying it out. Although, so to speak, dazzled by the surprising fecundity of Walter Scott, always equal to himself and always original, I did not despair, for I found the reason of such talent in the variety of human nature. Chance is the greatest novelist in the world.To be fertile, one has only to study it. French society was to be the historian. I was to be only the secretary. By drawing up an inventory of virtues and vices, by assembling the principal facts of passions, by painting characters, by choosing the principal events of society, by composing types through the union of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I should succeed in writing the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners and morals. With much patience and courage, I should realize, with regard to France in the nineteenth century, the book we all regret which Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, India have not unfortunately left about their civilizations, and which like the Abbe Barthelemy, the courageous and patient Monteil had essayed for the Middle Ages, but in a form not very attractive.”
One may well believe the novelist when he explains that “it was no small task to depict the two or three thousand prominent figures of an epoch,” representing typical phases in all existences, which, says he, “is one of the accuracies I have most sought for. I have tried to give a notion also of the different parts of our beautiful land. My work has its geography, as it has its genealogy and its families, its places and things, its persons and its facts, as it has its blazonry, its nobles and its commoners, its artisans and its peasants, its politicians and its dandies, its army, in fine, its epitome of life — all this in its settings and galleries.”
The Human Comedy, as finally arranged and classified in 1845, had three chief divisions: Studies of Manners and Morals, Philosophic Studies, Analytic Studies; and the first of these was subdivided into Scenes of Private Life, Scenes of Provincial Life, Scenes of Parisian Life, Scenes of Military Life, Scenes of Political Life, Scenes of Country Life.
Even if we include the unwritten books, the diminution from first to second and from second t............