of Balzac know, the scheme and adjustment
of his comedy varied so remarkably as time went on that it can hardly be
said to have, even in its latest form (which would pretty certainly have
been altered again), a distinct and definite character. Its so-called
scenes are even in the mass by no means exhaustive, and are, as they
stand, a very "cross," division of life: nor are they peopled by
anything like an exhaustive selection of personages. Nor again is
Balzac's genius by any means a mere vindication of the famous definition
of that quality as an infinite capacity of taking pains. That Balzac had
that capacity--had it in a degree probably unequaled even by the dullest
plodders on record--is very well known, is one of the best known things
about him. But he showed it for nearly ten years before the genius came,
and though no doubt it helped him when genius had come, the two things
are in his case, as in most, pretty sufficiently distinct. What the
genius itself was I must do my best to indicate hereafter, always
beseeching the reader to remember that all genius is in its essence and
quiddity indefinable. You can no more get close to it than you can get
close to the rainbow, and your most scientific explanation of it
will always leave as much of the heart of the fact unexplained as the
scientific explanation of the rainbow leaves of that.

Honore de Balzac was born at Tours on the 16th of May, 1799, in the same
year which saw the birth of Heine, and which therefore had the honor
of producing perhaps the most characteristic writers of the nineteenth
century in prose and verse respectively. The family was a respectable
one, though its right to the particle which Balzac always carefully
assumed, subscribing himself "_de_ Balzac," was contested. And there
appears to be no proof of their connection with Jean Guez de Balzac,
the founder, as some will have him, of modern French prose, and the
contemporary and fellow-reformer of Malherbe. (Indeed, as the novelist
pointed out with sufficient pertinence, his earlier namesake had no
hereditary right to the name at all, and merely took it from some
property.) Balzac's father, who, as the _zac_ pretty surely indicates,
was a southerner and a native of Languedoc, was fifty-three years old at
the birth of his son, whose Christian name was selected on the ordinary
principle of accepting that of the saint on whose day he was born.
Balzac the elder had been a barrister before the Revol