Balzac is considered the father of modern realism. This is partly due to the fact that he presented in a forceful manner the principles upon which he worked. He desired to put the life of France, city, provincial, military and official, within the covers of his books. It is interesting to remember that he wrote at a period in which men were perhaps more interested in the reason and purpose of human life than they had ever been before. Those scientific discoveries, which were finally to lead the way to our present theories of evolution, were bringing men to a realization that the religious dogmas upon which they had founded their faith were weakening. It was difficult for a thinking man to believe that the world had been made out of whole cloth, but a few thousand years before. Science was in the air; faiths were shattered. Balzac turned to man to determine anew his nature. His was the huge task of presenting man in all his loves and hates, purposes and motives, works and joys. He attempted it, and there has been a great army of writers following in his footsteps. Their aim has been to give a realistic cross section of certain aspects of life, allowing the reader to draw inferences as to its meaning and his personal relation to it. This is realism. It is most unfortunate that in our country the word has become synonymous with books of a sordid and erotic nature. Realism in literature should show us life as it is, and as life is neither all sordid nor all erotic, neither should literature present only those aspects. The function of this type of literature is a great and important one. The supreme realist has a God-given power of seeing and feeling the forces and emotions that make up human living. He sees and examines life as if under a microscope, and with this peculiar power he must have the faculty of expression. You may ask how we can apply the words contained in such a novel to our own life? We all feel that there is a great advantage in "understanding life." We try to analyze our own and our friends’ ways of living. Let us go to great novels and see what we find there. Was it a child who said, when going through the British Museum, that he liked the sculpture better than the paintings because he could walk around the sculpture? He spoke more wisely than he knew. The same simile may be applied to the realistic novel. In reading it we may walk about and examine life. From day to day, as we live things happen so rapidly, the world is passing before us so fast that, unless you have a supreme intellect, it is impossible to examine the pageant but from one point of view. You can but look at the front of the picture. It is flat, there is but little perspective.