286
PARTISAN R'EVIEW
the first time in the sociological sense .and which was to have such a
successful career (Taine seems to have adopted it from Balzac), he
learned from Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, who for his part had transferred
it from physical science to biology; now it makes its way from
biology to sociology. The biologism present in Balzac's mind, as
may be deduced from the names he cites, is mystical, speculative,
and vitalistic; however, the model-concept, the principle "animal"
or "man" is not taken as immanent but, so to speak, as a real
Platonic idea; the various genera and species are only
((formes
exttfrieures";
furthermore, they are themselves given not as changing
in accordance with their inner laws but as fixed (a soldier, a work–
man, etc., like a lion, an ass). The particular meaning of the concept
"milieu," as he uses it in his novels, he here seems not to have fully
realized. Not the word, but the thing- milieu in the social sense–
existed long before him; Montesquieu unmistakably has the concept;
but wher",as Montesquieu g-ives much more consideration to natural
conditions (climate, soil) than to those which spring from human
history, and whereas he .attempts to construe the different milieux as
unchanging model-concepts to which the appropriate constitutional
and legislative models can be applied, Balzac in practice remains
entirely within the orbit of the historical and perpetually changing
structural elements of his milieux; and no reader alTives unassisted at
the idea which Balzac appears to maintain in his preface, that he
is concerned only with the type "man" or with generic types
("soldier," "shopkeeper"): what we see is the concrete individual
figure with its own physique and its own history, sprung from the
immanence of the historical, social, physical, etc. situation; not "the
soldier" but, for example, Colonel Brideau, discharged after the fall
of Napoleon, ruined and leading the life of an adventurer in Is–
soudun
(La Rabouilleuse).
After his bold comparison of zooiogical with sociological dif–
ferentiation, however, Balzac attempts to bring out the distinguish–
ing characteristics of
la Societe
as against
la Nature;
he sees them
above all in the far greater multifariousness of human life and human
customs, as well as in the possibility-nonexistent in the animal
kingdom-of changing from one species to another
(((l'epicier
...
devient pair de France, et Ie noble descend parfois au dernier rang
social";
furthermore, different species mate
((la femme d'un mar-
