Written in 1842 by Honoré de Balzac, a French critical realist in the 9th century. Human Comedy is a masterpiece created by Balzac all his life. It is a collection of 96 works composed of novels, novellas and short stories. "Human Comedy" is divided into three parts: custom research, philosophy research and analysis research. It exposes the decay and decline of nobles from a wide range of social life and reveals the evil and deceptive nature of the capitalist world. 1834, halfway through the completion of this masterpiece, Balzac instructed the novelist Wen Da at that time to write a preface to introduce his views. 1842 wrote the preface to human comedy, which further clarified his writing origin, plan and artistic thought.

Starting from the influence and decisive role of natural environment on animals, The Preface of Human Comedy discusses the relationship between man and environment, draws a materialistic view that environment determines characters, and reveals Balzac's realistic thought of creating typical characters by creating typical environments. The Preface to Human Comedy analyzes the differences between "various types" of human society and the complex types of animal world, and shows his desire to create a typical "various types" of human society, which shows the great writer's purpose of showing the "custom history" of society at that time by creating "various types". Balzac said: "French society will be a historian, and I am just its secretary. List bad habits and virtues, collect the main facts of lust, portray the personality, select the main events in society, and combine the characteristics of several characters with the same nature into typical characters, so that I may be able to write a history that many historians have forgotten to write, that is, the history of customs. " His so-called "compilation", "collection", "description", "selection", "combination" and "kneading" are actually typical ideas.

Balzac also compared his "History of Customs" with the works of English novelist Scott, and thought that Scott only raised the novel to the position of historical philosophy, and put the two elements of surprise and truth-epic into the novel, without thinking of linking the works, while his own works linked each work through three or four thousand characters he created, making it a "complete history". Balzac believes that "the writer's law, the writer becomes a writer, and the writer can compete with politicians, which is his choice of human things and his absolute loyalty to certain principles." Balzac wrote human comedy under the illumination of "two eternal truths" of religion and monarch, but he broke through his own world view in his creative practice. Through the preface of Human Comedy, we can see that this is mainly the result of his creative method of strictly imitating reality. Engels called this phenomenon that the image is greater than the thought because of strictly imitating reality "the greatest victory of realism".