PREFACE

All existence is interpretation. As living human beings we are interpreters of our own nature through experience of its possibilities. Confronted by its depths, we are attracted to its heights through the drawing power of our ideals, a power that impels us upward, however strong the gravity of our sensuous nature, What is natural is succeeded by what is possible.

It is this order, necessity, and result that is portrayed by Balzac in the books under consideration. Their language is the language of Humanity on its way out of the slough of Animality onward to Divinity—the crown of glory that is destiny accomplished. Read with the intellect, they will be valued as the work of literary genius; read with the soul, they will be appreciated as the work of a seer. Nature, our relation to Nature, and the possibilities enfolded in this relation, possibilities that begin with her servant and end only with her master, are sketched by his hand according to the illumination in his soul that revealed them. What is written from illumination must needs be read in the same light, though it be