e
would have it to be, or be it removed from our mundane reality by the
subtle "other-planetary" influence which is apparent to others, its
complexity, its fullness, its variety, its busy and by no means
unsystematic life and motion, cannot be denied. Why on earth cannot
people be content with asking Platonism from Plato and Balzacity from
Balzac? At any rate, it is Balzacity which will be the subject of the
following pages, and if anybody wants anything else let him go
elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Abstinence from abstract.]

There is hardly likely to be much grumbling at the absence of such
detailed abstract or survey of individual books as has been given in
cases of what may seem to be much less importance. To begin with, such a
survey as is possible[157] exists already from these hands in the
Introductions to the translated edition above referred to, and to
paraphrase or refashion it here would probably occupy a hundred pages,
if not more. Nor would the plan, elsewhere adopted, of analysing afresh
one, or two, or more examples, as representative, be satisfactory.
Although Balzac is in a sense one of the most intensely individual of
all novelists, his individuality, as in a very few others of the
greatest cases, cannot be elicited from particular works. Just as
_Hamlet_ will give you no idea of the probable treatment of _As You Like
It_, so _Eugenie Grandet_ contains no key to _La Cousine Bette_. Even
the groups into which he himself rather empirically, if not quite
arbitrarily, separated the _Comedie_, though they lend themselves a
little more to specification, do not yield very much to the classifier.
The _Comedie_, once more, is a world--a world open to the reader, "all
before him." Chronological order may tell him a little about Balzac, but
it will not tell him very much about Balzac's work that he cannot gain
from the individual books, except in the very earliest stages. There is
no doubt that the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, if not very delightful to the
reader (I have myself read them not without pleasure), are very
instructive; the instruction increases, while the pleasure is actually
multiplied, when you come to _Les Chouans_ and the _Peau de Chagrin_.
But it is, after a fashion, only beyond these that the true Balzac
begins, and the beginning is, to a large extent, a reaction from
previous work in consequence of a discovery that the genius, without
which he had acknowledged that it was all up with him,[158] did not li