novelists was a purely psychological realism; it was concerned with the
delicately shifting states of mind of a few chosen persons, and with
nothing else. Balzac worked on a very different plan. He neglected the
subtleties of the spirit, and devoted himself instead to, displaying the
immense interest that lay in those prosaic circumstances of existence
which the older writers had ignored. He showed with wonderful force that
the mere common details of everyday life were filled with drama, that,
to him who had eyes to see, there might be significance in a ready-made
suit of clothes, and passion in the furniture of a boarding-house. Money
in particular gave him an unending theme. There is hardly a character in
the whole vast range of his creation of whose income we are not exactly
informed; and it might almost be said that the only definite moral that
can be drawn from _La Comédie Humaine_ is that the importance of money
can never be over-estimated. The classical writers preferred to leave
such matters to the imagination of the reader; it was Balzac's great
object to leave nothing to the imagination of the reader. By ceaseless
effort, by infinite care, by elaborate attention to the minutest
details, he would describe _all_. He brought an encyclopaedic knowledge
to bear upon his task; he can give an exact account of the machinery of
a provincial printing-press; he can write a dissertation on the methods
of military organization; he can reveal the secret springs in the
mechanism of Paris journalism; he is absolutely at home in the
fraudulent transactions of money-makers, the methods of usurers, the
operations of high finance. And into all this mass of details he can
infuse the spirit of life. Perhaps his masterpiece in realistic
description is his account of La Maison Vauquer--a low boarding-house,
to which he devotes page after page of minute particularity. The result
is not a mere dead catalogue: it is a palpitating image of lurid truth.
Never was the sordid horror which lurks in places and in things evoked
with a more intense completeness.