within and without. The characters which crowd forth from his brain
are sustained and impelled by the same social waves which sustain and
impel us. The generative facts which created them are the same which
are always in operation about us. If many young men have taken as a
model a Rastignac, for instance, it is because the passions by which
this ambitious pauper was consumed are the same which our age of
unbridled greed multiplies around disinherited youth. Add to this that
Balzac was not content merely to display the fruitful sources of a
modern intellect, but that he cast upon them the glare of the most
ardent imagination the world has ever known. By a rare combination
this philosopher was also a man, like the story-tellers of the Orient,
to whom solitude and the over-excitement of night-work had
communicated a brilliant and unbroken hallucination. He was able to
impart this fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of
_Arabian Nights_ country, where all the passions, all the desires of
real life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the
dreams brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not
understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of
Balzac's is more real than the actual world, and that they devoted
their energies to imitating it?

It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that
Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating
influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he
defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the
oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive
influences. It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central
portions of the nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread
the _Comedie Humaine_. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr
and Christophe for this _Repertory_. Thanks to them, we shall the more