"After having done the poetry, the demonstration, of a whole system, I shall do the science in the _Essai sur les forces humaines._ And, on the bases of this palace I shall have traced the immense arabesque of the _Cent Contes drolatiques_!" Quite all that, as we know, was not carried out; but there, in its intention, is the plan; and after twenty years' work the main part of it, certainly, was carried out. Stated with this precise detail, it has something of a scientific air, as of a too deliberate attempt upon the sources of life by one of those systematic French minds which are so much more logical than facts. But there is one little phrase to be noted: "La passion est toute l'humanité." All Balzac is in that phrase. Another French novelist, following, as he thought, the example of the _Human Comedy,_ has endeavoured to build up a history of his own time with even greater minuteness. But _Les Rougon-Macquart_ is no more than system; Zola has never understood that detail without life is the wardrobe without the man. Trying to outdo Balzac on his own ground, he has made the fatal mistake of taking him only on his systematic side, which in Balzac is subordinate to a great creative intellect, an incessant, burning thought about men and women, a passionate human curiosity for which even his own system has no limits. "The misfortunes of the _Birotteaus,_ the priest and the perfumer," he says, in his _Avant-Propos,_ taking an example at random, "are, for me, those of humanity." To Balzac manners are but the vestment of life; it is life that he seeks; and life, to him (it is his own word) is but the vestment of thought. Thought is at the root of all his work, a whole system of thought, in which philosophy is but another form of poetry; and it is from this root of idea that the _Human Comedy_ springs. 2