ABSTRACT
With him began—and were it not for Dostoeffsky the authors might say "ended" as well—the concept of the novel as an encyclopaedia of the inner universe. But Balzac fed his novels with reality from an additional source. As portrayer of his contemporaries and as statistician of the relative, Balzac devoted the minutest study to the moral, political, and aesthetic values of things. In a word, he investigated money values, and introduced them into his novels. All the persons of his novels calculate the cost of their actions, just as the authors, likewise, have willy-nilly to do. In the plans Balzac made for his Comedie humaine, the authors find that forty of the novels he had contemplated putting into the series were never written. Had Balzac been able to complete his stupendous scheme, his work would have passed into the realm of the inconceivable. It would have become a monster, scaring subsequent writers by the magnitude of its inaccessibility.
