What Balzac undertook was to write the whole "human tale of this wide world"--that is, to represent in fiction all the manifold phases and aspects of human life and character. He calls the entire series of his novels "The Human Comedy." This title, we have seen it stated, was not original with Balzac, but was adopted by him at the suggestion of a friend who hit upon it as a kind of balance and contrast to Dante's expression, "Divine Comedy." It is not quite a cynic conception of human character and human destiny that Balzac intended thus to express. Still, on the other hand, his view of human nature and human life cannot be said to be genial. The disagreeable preponderates in his fiction--the disagreeable one must call it, rather than the tragic. For true tragedy there is not height enough. In reading Balzac, you breathe for the most part an atmosphere of the not merely common, but--vulgar. Of course, the novelist himself would have said, Very well, such is man, and such is life. This one need not deny, but one can say, It was at least not desirable that readers should be obliged to feel the novelist to be himself vulgar, along with his characters. There is such a thing as refined dealing with people not refined. Realism was Balzac's aim, and realism was the rock on which Balzac suffered double shipwreck. In seeking to be realistic, he became vulgar; and in seeking to be realistic, he became unreal. For there is an air of unreality diffused everywhere over the pages, meant to be realistic or nothing, of this voluminous writer. Balzac evolved the personages of his fiction out of his own consciousness. They are none of them human beings, such as you meet in the real world. They are _simulacra_, images, bodiless projections, of the author's own mind. They move over his canvas like the specters thrown by the magic-lantern on its screen.