town.  The conventional contrast would be to present in another novel some woman of the city as foul as this daughter of Grandet is fair.  Not so Balzac.  He is too broad an observer of humanity, and as artist too much the master for such cheap effects of chiaroscuro.  In “The Duchess De Langeais” e sets his central character amidst the frivolities of fashion and behold, yet another beautiful type of the sex!  As Richardson drew his Pamela and Clarissa, so Balzac his Eugenie and the Duchess:  and let us not refrain from carrying out the comparison, and add, how feeble seems the Englishman in creation when one thinks of the half a hundred other female figures, good and bad, high and low, distinctly etched upon the memory by the mordant pen of the Frenchman!

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,