In the case of most novelists, although of first rank, it is not as a rule difficult to define their class and name their tendency:  their temperaments and beliefs are so-and-so, and they readily fall under the designation of realist or romanticist, pessimist, or optimist, student of character or maker of plots.  This is, in a sense, impossible with Balzac.  The more he be read, the harder to detect his bias:  he seems, one is almost tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind.  Persons read two or three—­perhaps half a dozen of his books—­and then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been assimilated, it will be realized that but a phase of Balzac had been seen.

When the passion of creation, the birth-throes of a novel were on him, he became so immersed in the aspect of life he was depicting that he saw, felt, knew naught else:  externally this obsession was expressed by his way of life and work while the story was growing under his hand:  his recluse habits, his monkish abstention from worldly indulgences, the abnormal night hours of activity, the loss of flesh, so that the robust man who went into the guarded chamber came out at the end of six weeks the shadow of himself.

As a consequence of the consecration to the particular task (as if it embraced the one view of existence), the reader perhaps experiences a shock of surprise in passing from “The Country Doctor” to “Pere Goriot.”  But the former is just as truly part of his interpretation as the latter.  A dozen fictions can be drawn from the body of his production which portray humanity in its more beautiful, idealistic manifestations.  Books like “The Country Doctor” and “Eugenic Grandet” are not alone in the list.  And how beautiful both are!  “The Country Doctor” has all the idyllic charm of setting which a poetic interpretation of life in a rural community can give.  Not alone Nature, but human nature is hymned.  The kindly old physician, whose model is the great Physician himself, is like Chaucer’s good parson, an unforgettable vision of the higher potentialities of the race.  Such a novel deserves to be called quite as truly romance and prose poem, save that Balzac’s vraisemblance, his gift for photographic detail and the contemporaneousness of the setting, make it modern.  And thus with “Eugenie Grandet” the same method applied in “The Country Doctor” to the study of a noble profession in a rural atmosphere, is here used for the portrait of a good woman whose entourage is again that of simple, natural conditions.  There is more of light and shade in the revelation of character because Eugenie’s father, the miser—­a masterly sketch—­furnishes a dark background for her radiant personality.  But the same effect is produced, that of throwing into bold relief the sweet, noble, high and pure in our common humanity.  And in this case it is a girl of humble station far removed from the shams and shameful passions of the