hman!

Then if we turn to that great tragedy of family, "Pere Goriot,"
the change is complete. Now are we plunged into an atmosphere of
greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the
bourgeois street air of Paris. In this tale of thankless
daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness
possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet
fascinated eye. The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame
Vautrin's boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells!
Compare it with Dickens' Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you
have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius.

Suppose, now, the purpose be to reveal not a group or community,
but one human soul, a woman's this time: read "A Woman of
Thirty" and see how the novelist,--for the first time--and one
is inclined to add, for all time,--has pierced through the
integuments and reached the very quick of psychologic exposure.
It is often said that he has created the type of young-old, or
old-young woman: meaning that before him, novelists overlooked
the fact that a woman of this age, maturer in experience and
still ripe in physical charms, is really of intense social
attraction, richly worth study. But this is because Balzac knows
that all souls are interesting, if only we go beneath the
surface. The only work of modern fiction which seems to me so
nakedly to lay open the recesses of the human spirit as does "A
Woman of Thirty" is Meredith's "The Egoist"; and, of course,
master against master, Balzac is easily the superior, since the
English author's wonderful book is so mannered and grotesque.
Utter sympathy is shown in these studies of femininity, whether
the subject be a harlot, a saint or a patrician of the Grande
Monde.

If the quest be for the handling of mankind en masse, with big
effects of dark and light: broad brush-work on a canvas suited
to heroical, even epic, themes,--a sort of fiction the later
Zola was to excel in--Balzac will not fail us. His work here is
as noteworthy as it is in the fine detailed manner of his most
realistical modern studies--or in the searching analysis of the
human spirit. "The Chouans" may stand for this class: it has all
the fire, the color, the elan that emanate from the army and the
call of country. We have flashed before us one of those
reactionary movements, after the French Revolution, which take
on a magic romanticism because they culminate in the name of
Napoleon. Wh