e 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 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 Frenc