suspected it, _The Human Comedy_ was alive, was confusedly moving, was slowly shaping itself, in his brain. This point must be clearly seen before he can be understood or appreciated at his true value. However much interest a monograph on some animal or plant may have in itself--and that interest, no doubt, is often great--it has far more through the relations it bears to other monographs and to the whole field of knowledge of which its subject is only a fragmentary part. So it is with Balzac's novels and stories. Their interest is not limited to themselves. They bring out one another's value and significance, they illustrate and give importance to each other; they have, outside themselves, a justification for existence. This will become clear if we compare Mérimée's _Mateo Falcone_, for instance, with _A Seashore Drama_ (1835). The subject is the same: in each case it is a father who constitutes himself justiciary of the honour of his race. But while Mérimée's work, though perhaps better written or at least engraved with deeper tooling, is after all nothing but an anecdote, a sensational news-item, a story of local manners, Balzac's is bound up with a whole mass of ideas, not to say a whole social philosophy, of which it is, properly speaking, only a _chapter;_ and of which _The Conscript_ (1831) is another. But why did Balzac confine some of his subjects within the narrow limits of the _nouvelle_, while he expanded others to the dimensions of epic, we might say, or of history? It was because, though analogies are numerous between natural history and what we may call social history or the natural history of society, yet their resemblance is not complete nor their identity absolute. There are peculiarities or variations of passion which, though physiologically or pathologically interesting, are _socially_ insignificant and can be left out of account: for instance, _A Passion in the Desert_ (1830), or _The Unknown Masterpiece_ (1831). It is rare, in art, for the passionate pursuit of progress to result only, as with Frenhofer, in jumbling the colours on a great painter's canvas; and, even were this less rare, artists are not very numerous! So, if the writer gave to his narrative of this painful but infrequent adventure as full a development, if he diversified and complicated it with as many episodes and details as the adventures of Baron Hulot in _Cousin Bette_ or those of Madame de Mortsauf in _The Lily in the Valley_, he would thereby attribute to it, _socially_ or _historically_, an importance it does not possess. He would err, and would make us err with him, regarding the true proportions of things. He would represent the humanity which he was attempting to depict, in a manner far from consistent with reality. Hence may be deduced the æsthetics of the _nouvelle_, and its distinction from the _conte_, and also from the _roman_ or novel.