d together;
and this is the main justification for his syllabus of it as the "Comedy."
Some part never came out of his head into print; we have numerous titles of
work (sometimes spoken of in his letters as more or less finished) of which
no trace remains, or only fragmentary MS. sketches. One apparently
considerable book, _La Bataille_, which was to be devoted to the battle of
Essling, and for which he actually visited the ground, is frequently
referred to as in progress from the time of his early letters to Madame
Hanska onwards; but it has never been found. Another result of this
relation was the constant altering, re-shaping, re-connecting of the
different parts. That if Balzac had lived as long as Hugo, and had
preserved his faculties as well, he could never have finished the
_Comedie_, is of course obvious: the life of Methuselah, with the powers of
Shakespeare, would not suffice for that. But that he never would--even if
by some impossibility he could--is almost equally certain. Whether there is
any mark of decline in his latest work has been disputed, but there could
hardly have been farther advance, and the character of the whole, not easy
to define, is much less hard to comprehend, if prejudice be kept out of the
way. That character was put early, but finally, by Victor Hugo in his
funeral discourse on Balzac, whose work he declared, with unusual
terseness, among other phrases of more or less gorgeous rhetoric, to be
"observation and imagination." It may be doubted whether all the volumes
written on Balzac (a reasoned catalogue of the best of which will be found
below) have ever said more than these three words, or have ever said it
more truly if the due stress be laid upon the "and." On the other side,
most of the mistakes about him have arisen from laying undue stress on one
of the two qualities, or from considering them separately rather than as
inextricably mixed and blended. It is this blending which gives him his
unique position. He is an observer of the most exact, the most minute, the
most elaborate; but he suffuses this observation with so strange and
constant an imaginative quality that he is, to some careful and experienced
critics, never quite "real"--or almost always something more than real. He
seems accustomed to create in a fashion which is not so much of the actual
world as of some other, possible but not actual--no matter whether he deals
with money or with love, with Paris or with the provinces