DEDICATED, In remembrance of many pleasant and instructive hours spent in his society, to the sculptor AUGUSTE RODIN, whose statue of Balzac, with its fine, synthetic portraiture, first tempted the author to write this book. PASSY, PARIS, 1910.
Excusing himself for not undertaking to write a life of Balzac,Monsieur Brunetiere, in his study of the novelist publishedshortly before his death, refused somewhat disdainfully to admitthat acquaintance with a celebrated man's biography hasnecessarily any value. "What do we know of the life ofShakespeare?" he says, "and of the circumstances in which Hamletor Othello was produced? If these circumstances were betterknown to us, is it to be believed and will it be seriouslyasserted that our admiration for one or the other play would beaugmented?" In penning this quirk, the eminent critic would seemto have wilfully overlooked the fact that a writer's life may havemuch or may have little to do with his works. In the case ofShakespeare it was comparatively little—and yet we should be gladto learn more of this little. In the case of Balzac it was much.His novels are literally his life; and his life is quite as fullas his books of all that makes the good novel at once profitableand agreeable to read. It is not too much to affirm that any onewho is acquainted with what is known to-day of the strangelychequered career of the author of the Comedie Humaine is in abetter position to understand and appreciate the different partswhich constitute it. Moreover, the steady rise of Balzac'sreputation, during the last fifty years, has been in some degreeowing to the various patient investigators who have gatheredinformation about him