IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
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chand est quelquelois digne d'etre celie d'un prince
,
dans la
Societe la femme ne se trouve pas toujours etre la femelle d'un
male");
he also refers to dramatic conflicts
in
love, which seldom
occur among animals, and the different degrees of intelligence
in
different men. The epitomizing sentence reads:
"VEtat social a des
hasards que ne se permet pas la Nature, car il est la Nature plus la
Societe."
Inaccurate and macroscopic as this passage is, badly as it
suffers from the
proton pseudos
of the underlying comparison, it
yet contains an instinctive historical insight
("les habitudes, les vete–
ments, les paroles, les demeures
. . .
changent au gre des civilisa–
tions";
there is much, too, of dynamism and vitalism ("
si quelques
savants n'admettent encore que l'A nimalite se transborde dans
l'Humanite par un immense courant de vie .
..").
The particular
possibilities of comprehension between man and man are not men–
tioned-not even
in
the negative fonnulation that, as compared
with man, the animal lacks them; on the contrary, the relative sim–
plicity of the social and psychological life of animals is presented
as an objective fact, and only at the very end is there any indica–
tion of the subjective character of such judgments: " ...
les habitudes
de chaque animal sont,
a
nos yeux du moins, constamment semblables
en tout temps.
.. ."
After this transition from biology to human history, Balzac
continues with a polemic against the prevailing type of historical
writing and reproaches it with having long neglected the history of
manners; this is the task which
he
has set himself. He does not
mention the attempts at a history of manners which had been made
since the eighteenth century (Voltaire ) ; hence there is no analysis
setting forth the distinction between
his
presentation of manners and
that of his possible predecessors; only Petronius is named. Con–
sidering the difficulties of his task (a drama with three or four
thousand characters) he feels encouraged by the example of Walter
Scott; so here we are completely within the world of Romantic His–
toricism. Here too clarity of thought is often impaired by striking
and fanciful formulations; for example
"Iaire concurrence
a
l'Etat–
Civil"
is equivocal, and the statement
"le hasard est le plus grand
romancier du monde"
requires some explanation if it is to tally with
its author's historical attitude. But a number of important and
characteristic motifs emerge successfully: above all the concept of
