Thus completed, the entire work has its geography and its own genealogy, its localities and their concomitants, its personages and their deeds. It has its own armorial, its nobility and middle class, its artisans, its peasants, and its army. It is a world in itself. But its most striking feature is the admirable unity preserved throughout; and this unity is undoubtedly due to a suggestion derived from the works of Sir Walter Scott, whom Balzac considered as a gifted sculptor who chiseled magnificent figures and draped them with genius and sublimity, but, while presenting the seductive effects of a marvelous analysis, left them lacking in synthesis and totally unrelated. “The Waverley Novels,” he said,[15] “resemble the Musée de la Rue des Petits-Augustins, in which each object, while magnificent in design, relates but to itself. Genius is complete only when to the faculty of creating it joins the power of coördinating its creations. The gifts of observation and description are in themselves insufficient; they must tend to a certain result. The Scotch bard was possessed of too clear a vision not to have understood this axiom, but its understanding assuredly came too late.” To this reflection the unity of the “Comédie Humaine” is probably due; and that it may not be objected that certain of its passages are unrelated to the others, it is well to note that Balzac died too suddenly to be able to connect the broken threads, which in any event are but few and far between. But the task of rendering his work at once interesting and instructive was one of much greater difficulty than that of Scott’s, who drew his characters from former days, when every class of society was clearly defined, and clothed them from a wardrobe opulent with historical effects; whereas Balzac was obliged to offer in clear relief the almost imperceptible differences of the types of yesterday and to-day, that through an equality of fortune and education have destroyed the contrasts which once existed between the different degrees of the social order. Aided, however, by that peculiar intuition which never forsook him, he chose from among the physiognomies of his epoch an assortment of those fugitive traits which are imperceptible to the eyes of the vulgar; and in scrutinizing face after face, attentive to the changes of expression and inflections of voice, he was enabled to present a series of individualities which are far more realistic than those of his illustrious predecessor.