SOURCE: Beebe, Maurice. “Honoré de Balzac: The Novelist as Creator.” In Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce, pp. 175-96. New York: New York University Press, 1964.

In the following essay, Beebe assesses the work of French writer Honoré de Balzac and concludes that contrary to most appraisals of Balzac, as a writer, he was both a romantic and a realist.

“The crossroad of sensibility and social history,” we have seen, is the area from which the finest fiction comes.¹ Because the greatest novelists achieve a balance between individual vision and the life which they must use in their art, they seem to reside midway between the Ivory Tower and the Sacred Fount. Such a novelist was Honoré de Balzac. When we consider his total work after his early apprenticeship as a hack writer, we must be impressed by its evenness...