What Balzac really means, and what is perfectly true, is that the standpoint from which he views society corresponds exactly, as a rule, to the standpoint from which the scientist investigates nature. He never moralises and condemns; he never, in this unlike most of his fellows, allows himself to be led by disgust or enthusiasm to describe otherwise than truthfully; to him, as to the naturalist, nothing is too small, nothing too great to be examined and explained. Seen through the microscope, the spider is larger and more complicatedly organised than the hugest elephant; regarded from the scientific standpoint, the majestic lion is only a pair of jaws upon four legs. The kind of food determines the shape of tooth, jaw, shoulder-blade, muscle, and claw, and explains the majesty. And in exactly the same manner, that which under certain circumstances seems a foul, despicable crime, reveals itself, regarded from another standpoint, to be a miniature edition of one of the grand, brilliant vices of which history tells--and this is Balzac's standpoint. Even in as early a work as _Eugénie Grandet_ we come upon expressions which prove it. The time is approaching when Eugénie will be forced to confess to the miser who is her father that she no longer possesses her ducats, that she has actually given them away. "Three days later," writes Balzac, "a terrible drama was to be enacted--a bourgeois tragedy without poison, dagger, or bloodshed, yet more cruel than any of those which happened in the famous family of the Atrides." This is as much as to say: My middle-class novel is more tragic than your classic tragedy. In _Père Goriot_, when the mistress of the famous boarding-house is loudly and despairingly bewailing the departure of her boarders, Balzac remarks: "The lamentations which Lord Byron has put into the mouth of Tasso are beautiful, but they lack the profound truth of Madame Vauquer's." Which means: The pettiness and vulgarity which I describe, is, vigorously apprehended, more interesting than all your noble generalities. In _César Birotteau_ Balzac not only makes jesting reference in his titles to Montesquieu's famous book on the Roman Empire, but, with the audacity of genius, compares his elaborate, lengthy description of a clever Parisian perfumer's successes and misfortunes with the story of the Trojan wars and the changeful fortunes of Napoleon. "Troy and Napoleon are only heroic epics. May this tale be an epic of middle-class life, of destinies to which no poet has turned his attention, so destitute of all greatness do they appear. Its subject is not a single man, but a whole host of sufferings." Which is as much as to say: In literature nothing is in itself little or great; in a poor hairdresser's struggle for existence I can read a heroic poem; I show how the events of a humble private life, if we connect them with their causes and trace these back to their source, are as important, as interesting and engrossing