hich the
work was performed--the Human Comedy is awe-begetting; it drives
one to Shakspere for like largeness of scale. Such a
performance, ordered and directed to a foreseen end, is unique
in literature.

As Balzac thus gave birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention,
to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his
story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite
intention: to become the Secretary of an Age of which he
declared society to be the historian. He wished to exhibit man
in his species as he was to be seen in the France of the
novelist's era, just as a naturalist aims to study beast-kind,
segregating them into classes for zoological investigation.
Later, Balzac's great successor (as we shall see) applied this
analogy with more rigid insistence upon the scientific method
which should obtain in all literary study. The survey proposed
covered a period of about half a century and included the
Republic, the Empire and the Restoration: it ranged through all
classes and conditions of men with no appearance of prejudice,
preference or parti-pris (this is one of the marvels of Balzac),
thus gaining the immense advantage of an apparently complete and
catholic comprehension of the human show. Of all modern
novelists, Balzac is the one whose work seems like life instead
of an opinion of life; he has the objectivity of Shakspere. Even
a Tolstoy set beside him seems limited.

This idea of a plan was not crystallized into the famous title
given to his collective works--La Comedie Humaine--until 1842,
when but eight years of life remained to him. But four years
earlier it had been mentioned in a letter, and when Balzac was
only a little over thirty, at a time when his better-known books
were just beginning to appear, he had signified his sense of an
inclusive scheme by giving such a running title to a group of
his stories as the familiar "Scenes from Private Life"--to
which, in due course, were added other designations for the
various parts of the great plan. The encyclopedic survey was
never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the
laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation
of an almost incredible amount of human data. As for finishing
the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects
its place in literature. Neither Spenser's "Faery Queen" nor
Wordsworth's "The Excursion" was completed, and, per contra, it
were as well for Browning if "The Ring an