The relegation of love to the background in
these novels which happen to be his masterpieces was caused by
something mentioned in a preceding chapter, to wit, that Balzac never
thoroughly felt or understood love as a great and noble passion. And
love, with him, being so oddly mixed up with calculation, it was to be
expected he should succeed best in books in which the dominant
interest was some other passion--an exceptional one. If money plays,
on the contrary, such an intrusive role in his novels, its
introduction was less from voluntary, reasoned choice than from
obsession. He deals with this subject sometimes splendidly, but, at
other times, he wearies. Had money filled a smaller part of his work,
the work would not have been lost.
In fine, with its beauties and its ugliness, its perfections and its
shortcomings, the _Comedy_ is the illumination cast by a master-mind
upon the goings-out and comings-in of his contemporaries, the creation
of a more universal and representative history of social life than had
been previously written. Having considerable ethical value, it is
worth still more on account of the ways it opens towards the fiction
of the future.
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