There was a logic, a completeness, in the groundwork of the scheme, that would have sterilised the imagination of a man with less exuberant vitality. Compare for a moment the _Comédie Humaine_ with the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott meant to Balzac what Maria Edgeworth had meant to himself. He had seen in her an attempt to paint Irish country and character, and had decided to do the same for Scotland. Balzac after those ten years of bad mediæval stories, those ten years of labour for the Rachel of his own soul, saw in him an attempt to paint Scottish country and character, and decided to do the same for France. But, whereas Scott had been brought up on the _Reliques of English Poetry_, and in the country of purple heather, grey rock, and leaping stream, Balzac was nourished on philosophy and science, and spent his youth in a Paris lodging. Scott saw men rather than kinds of man. Bailie Nicol Jarvie is more Nicol Jarvie than Bailie. Balzac comes at life in a much more scientific spirit. 'Does not Society make of man,' he asks, as Chaucer has unconsciously asked before him, 'as many different men as there are varieties in zoology? The differences between a soldier, a labourer, an administrator, an idler, a savant, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a pauper, a priest, are, though more difficult to seize, as considerable as those that distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the sea-calf, the goat, etc.' Balzac made up his mind to collect specimens of the social species, not pressed and dried, like the old 'Characters' of the seventeenth century, but exhibited alive and in their natural surroundings. He was to make a world with the colour of contemporary France, an 'august lie, true in its details,' a world complete in itself, a world in which all the characters were to show the impress of that state of life to which it should please Balzac to call them. That was the idea that turned the Waverley Novels into the _Comédie Humaine_, that the idea whose exposition by a less full-blooded professor would have been so readily precise, so readily dull in its precision. [Illustration: HONORÉ DE BALZAC] [Physical energy and the task of writing.]