would be a little short-sighted,
and only excusable because of the way in which the word "genius" is too
commonly bandied about. As a matter of fact, there is not so very much
genius in the world; and a great deal of more than fair performance is
attainable and attained by more or less decent allowances or exhibitions
of talent. In prose, more especially, it is possible to gain a very
high place, and to deserve it, without any genius at all: though it is
difficult, if not impossible, to do so in verse. But what Balzac felt
(whether he was conscious in detail of the feeling or not) when he used
these words to his sister Laure, what his critical readers must feel
when they have read only a very little of his work, what they must feel
still more strongly when they have read that work as a whole--is that
for him there is no such door of escape and no such compromise. He had
the choice, by his nature, his aims, his capacities, of being a genius
or nothing. He had no little gifts, and he was even destitute of some of
the separate and indivisible great ones. In mere writing, mere style,
he was not supreme; one seldom or never derives from anything of his the
merely artistic satisfaction given by perfect prose. His humor, except
of the grim and gigantic kind, was not remarkable; his wit, for a
Frenchman, curiously thin and small. The minor felicities of the
literature generally were denied to him. _Sans genie, il etait flambe_;
_flambe_ as he seemed to be, and very reasonably seemed, to his friends
when as yet the genius had not come to him, and when he was desperately
striving to discover where his genius lay in those wonderous works
which "Lord R'Hoone," and "Horace de Saint Aubin," and others obligingly
fathered for him.

It must be the business of these introductions to give what assistance
they may to discover where it did lie; it is only necessary, before
taking up the task in the regular biographical and critical way of the
introductory cicerone, to make two negative observations. It did
not lie, as some have apparently thought, in the conception, or the
outlining, or the filling up of such a scheme as the _Comedie Humaine_.
In the first place, the work of every great writer, of the creative
kind, including that of Dante himself, is a _comedie humaine_. All
humanity is latent in every human being; and the great writers are
merely those who call most of it out of latency and put it actually on
the stage. And, as students