in the works of others not novelists: Benjamin Constant, Mme. de Staël, Chateaubriand, in Adolphe, Corinne, René. At once we are in the Romantic movement, a movement which begins lyrically among poets, and at first with a curious disregard of the more human part of humanity.
Balzac worked contemporaneously with the Romantic movement, but he worked outside it, and its influence upon him is felt only in an occasional pseudo-romanticism, like the episode of the pirate in La Femme de Trente Ans. His vision of humanity was essentially a poetic vision, but he was a poet whose dreams were facts. Knowing that, as Mme. Necker has said, "the novel should be the better world," he knew also that "the novel would be nothing if, in that august lie, it were not true in details." And in the Human Comedy he proposed to himself to do for society more than Buffon had done for the animal world.
"There is but one animal," he declares, in his Avant-Propos, with a confidence which Darwin has not yet come to justify. But "there exists, there will always exist, social species, as there are zoological species."
