Balzac worked contemporaneously with the Romantic movement, but he worked outside it, and its influence upon him is felt only in an occasional pseudo-romanticism, like the episode of the pirate in La Femme de Trente Ans. His vision of humanity was essentially a poetic vision, but he was a poet whose dreams were facts. Knowing that, as Mme. Necker has said, "the novel should be the better world," he knew also that "the novel would be nothing if, in that august lie, it were not true in details." And in the Human Comedy he proposed to himself to do for society more than Buffon had done for the animal world.
"There is but one animal," he declares, in his Avant-Propos, with a confidence which Darwin has not yet come to justify. But "there exists, there will always exist, social species, as there are zoological species." "Thus the work to be done will have a triple form: men, women, and things; that is to say, human beings and the material representation which they give to their thought; in short, man and life." And, studying after nature, "French society will be the historian, I shall need to be no more than the secretary." Thus will be written "the history forgotten by so many historians, the history of manners." But that is not all, for "passion is the whole of humanity." "In realizing clearly the drift of the composition, it will be seen that I assign to facts, constant, daily, open, or secret, to the acts of individual life, to their causes and principles, as much importance as historians had formerly attached to the events of the public life of nations." "Facts gathered together and painted as they are, with passion for element," is one of his definitions of the task he has undertaken. And in a letter to Mme. de Hanska, he summarises every detail of his scheme.
"The Études des Mœurs will represent social effects, without a single situation of life, or a physiognomy, or a character of man or woman, or a manner of life, or a profession, or a social zone, or a district of France, or anything pertaining to childhood, old age, or maturity, politics, justice, or war, having been forgotten.
"That laid down, the history of the human heart traced link by link, the history of society made in all its details, we have the base....
"Then, the second stage is the Études philosophiques, for after the effects come the causes. In the Études des Mœurs I shall have painted the sentiments and their action, life and the fashion of life. In the Études philosophiques I shall say why the sentiments, on what the life....
"Then, after the effects and the causes, come the Études analytiques, to which the Physiologie du mariage belongs, for, after the effects and the causes, one should seek the principles....
"After having done the poetry, the demonstration, of a whole system, I shall do the science in the Essai sur les forces humaines. And, on the bases of this palace I shall have traced the immense arabesque of the Cent Contes drolatiques!"
Quite all that, as we know, was not carried out; but there, in its intention, is the plan; and after twenty years' work the main part of it, certainly, was carried out. Stated with this precise detail, it has something of a scientific air, as of a too deliberate attempt upon the sources of life by one of those systematic French minds which are so much more logical than facts. But there is one little phrase to be noted: "La passion est toute l'humanité." All Balzac is in that phrase.
Another French novelist, following, as he thought, the example of the Human Comedy, has endeavoured to build up a history of his own time with even greater minuteness. But Les Rougon-Macquart is no more than system; Zola has never understood that detail without life is the wardrobe without the man. Trying to outdo Balzac on his own ground, he has made the fatal mistake of taking him only on his systematic side, which in Balzac is subordinate to a great creative intellect, an incessant, burning thought about men and women, a passionate human curiosity for which even his own system has no limits. "The misfortunes of the Birotteaus, the priest and the perfumer," he says, in his Avant-Propos, taking an example at random, "are, for me, those of humanity." To Balzac manners are but the vestment of life; it is life that he seeks; and life, to him (it is his own word) is but the vestment of thought. Thought is at the root of all his work, a whole system of thought, in which philosophy is but another form of poetry; and it is from this root of idea that the Human Comedy springs.