As for the peculiar accent and stir of life, the life behind the story, Balzac's manner of finding and expressing it is always interesting. He seems to look for it most readily, not in the nature of the men and women whose action makes the story, or not there to begin with, but in their streets and houses and rooms. He cannot think of his people without the homes they inhabit; with Balzac to imagine a human being is to imagine a province, a city, a corner of the city, a building at a turn of the street, certain furnished rooms, and finally the man or woman who lives in them. He cannot be satisfied that the tenor of this creature's existence is at all understood without a minute knowledge of the things and objects that surround it. So strong is his conviction upon this point that it gives a special savour to the many pages in which he describes how the doorway is approached, how the passage leads to the staircase, how the parlour-chairs are placed, in the house which is to be the scene of his drama. These descriptions are clear and business-like; they are offered as an essential preliminary to the story, a matter that must obviously be dealt with, once for all, before the story can proceed. And he communicates his certainty to the reader, he imposes his belief in the need for precision and fullness; Balzac is so sure that every detail must be known, down to the vases on the mantelpiece or the pots and pans in the cupboard, that his reader cannot begin to question it. Everything is made to appear as important as the author feels it to be.

His manner is well to be watched in EugÉnie Grandet. That account of the great bare old house of the miser at Saumur is as plain and straightforward as an inventory; no attempt is made to insinuate the impression of the place by hints and side-lights. Balzac marches up to it and goes steadily through it, until our necessary information is complete, and there he leaves it. There is no subtlety in such a method, it seems; a lighter, shyer handling of the facts, more suggestion and less statement, might be expected to make a deeper effect. And indeed Balzac's confident way is not one that would give a good result in most hands; it would produce the kind of description that the eye travels over unperceivingly, the conscientious introduction that tells us nothing. Yet Balzac contrives to make it tell everything; and the simple explanation is that he, more than anyone else, knows everything. The place exists in his thought; it is not to him the mere sensation of a place, with cloudy corners, uncertain recesses, which only grow definite as he touches and probes them with his phrases. A writer of a different sort, an impressionist who is aware of the effect of a scene rather than of the scene itself, proceeds inevitably after another fashion; if he attempted Balzac's method he would have to feel his way tentatively, adding fact to fact, and his account would consist of that mechanical sum of details which makes no image. Balzac is so thoroughly possessed of his image that he can reproduce it inch by inch, fact by fact, without losing the effect of it as a whole; he can start from the edge of his scene, from a street of old houses, from the doorstep of one old house, and leave a perfectly firm and telling impression behind him as he proceeds. When his description is finished and the last detail in its place, the home of the Grandets is securely built for the needs of the story, possessing all the significance that Balzac demands of it.

It will presently be seen that he demands a great deal. I said that his drama has always the benefit of a reserve of force, stored up for it beforehand in the general picture; and though in this picture is included the fortunes and characters of the men and women, of the Grandets and their neighbours, a large part of it is the material scene, the very walls that are to witness the coming events. The figure of Grandet, the old miser, is indeed called up and accounted for abundantly, in all the conditions of his past; but the house too, within and without, is laid under strict contribution, is used to the full in the story. It is a presence and an influence that counts throughout—and counts particularly in a matter that is essential to the book's effect, a matter that could scarcely be provided for in any other way, as it happens. Of this I shall speak in a moment; but at once it is noticeable how the Maison Grandet, like the Maison Vauquer, helps the book on its way. It incarnates all the past of its old owner, and visibly links it to the action when the story opens. The elaborate summary of Grandet's early life, the scrupulously exact account of the building of his prosperity, is brought to an issue in the image of the "cold, dreary and silent house at the upper end of the town," from whence the drama widens again in its turn. How it is that Balzac has precisely the right scene in his mind, a house that perfectly expresses his donnÉe and all its associations—that, of course, is Balzac's secret; his method would be nothing without the quality of his imagination. His use of the scene is another matter, and there it is possible to reckon how much of his general effect, the sense of the moral and social foundation of his story, is given by its inanimate setting. He has to picture a character and a train of life, and to a great extent he does so by describing a house.

Beyond old Grandet and the kind of existence imposed upon his household, the drama needs little by way of preparation. The miser's daughter EugÉnie, with her mother, must stand out clearly to the fore; but a very few touches bring these two women to life in their shadowy abode. They are simple and patient and devoted; between the dominance of the old man and the monotony of the provincial routine EugÉnie and her mother are easily intelligible. The two local aspirants to the girl's fortune, and their supporters on either side—the Cruchotins and the Grassinistes—are subsidiary figures; they are sufficiently rendered by their appearance in a flock, for a sociable evening with the Grandets. The faithful maid-servant, the shrewd and valiant Nanon, is quickly sketched. And there, then, is the picture that Balzac prepares for the action, which opens with the arrival of Charles, EugÉnie's young and unknown cousin. Except for Charles, all the material of the drama is contained in the first impression of the household and the small country-town; EugÉnie's story is implied in it; and her romance, from the moment it begins, inherits the reality and the continuity of the experience. Charles himself is so light a weight that in his case no introduction is needed at all; a single glance at him is enough to show the charm of his airy elegance. His only function in the story is to create the long dream of EugÉnie's life; and for that he needs nothing but his unlikeness to the Cruchotins and the Grassinistes. They and EugÉnie, therefore, between them, provide for his effect before he appears, they by their dull provinciality, she by her sensitive ignorance. The whole scene, on the verge of the action, is full of dormant echoes, and the first movement wakes them. The girl placed as she is, her circumstances known as they are, all but make the tale of their own accord; only the simple facts are wanting, their effect is already in the air.

And accordingly the story slips away from its beginning without hesitation. In a sense it is a very slight story; there is scarcely anything in it but EugÉnie's quick flush of emotion, and then her patient cherishing of its memory; and this simplicity may seem to detract, perhaps, from the skilfulness of Balzac's preparation. Where there is so little in the way of incident or clash of character to provide for, where the people are so plain and perspicuous and next to nothing happens to them, it should not be difficult to make an expressive scene for the drama and its few facts. All that occurs in the main line of the story is that EugÉnie falls in love with her cousin, bids him good-bye when he goes to make his fortune in the Indies, trustfully awaits him for a number of years, and discovers his faithlessness when he returns. Her mother's death, and then her father's, are almost the only events in the long interval of Charles's absence. Simple indeed, but this is exactly the kind of story which it is most puzzling to handle. The material is scanty, and yet it covers a good many years; and somehow the narrative must render the length of the years without the help of positive and concrete stuff to fill them. The whole point of the story is lost unless we are made to feel the slow crawling of time, while EugÉnie waited; but what is there in her life to account for the time, to bridge the interval, to illustrate its extent? Balzac has to make a long impression of vacuity; EugÉnie Grandet contains a decidedly tough subject.

In such a case I suppose the first instinct of almost any story-teller would be to lengthen the narrative of her loneliness by elaborating the picture of her state of mind, drawing out the record of expectancy and patience and failing hope. If nothing befalls her from without, or so little, the time must be filled with the long drama of her experience within; the centre of the story would then be cast in her consciousness, in which there would be reflected the gradual drop of her emotion from glowing newness to the level of daily custom, and thence again to the chill of disillusion. It is easy to imagine the kind of form which the book would take. In order to assure its full value to EugÉnie's monotonous suffering, the story would be given from her point of view, entirely from hers; the external facts of her existence would all be seen through her eyes, making substance for her thought. We should live with EugÉnie, throughout; we should share her vigil, morning and evening, summer and winter, while she sat in the silent house and listened to the noises of life in the street, while the sun shone for others and not for her, while the light waned, the wind howled, the snow fell and hushed the busy town—still EugÉnie would sit at her window, still we should follow the flow of her resigned and uncomplaining meditations; until at last the author could judge that five years, ten years, whatever it may be, had been sufficiently shown in their dreary lapse, and that Charles might now come back from the Indies. So it would be and so it would have to be, a novelist might easily feel. How else could the due suggestion of time be given, where there is so little to show for it in dramatic facts?

But Balzac's treatment of the story is quite unexpected. He lays it out in a fashion that is worth noting, as a good example of the freedom of movement that his great pictorial genius allowed him. With his scene and its general setting so perfectly rendered, the story takes care of itself on every side, with the minimum of trouble on his part. His real trouble is over when the action begins; he is not even disturbed by this difficulty of presenting the sense of time. The plan of EugÉnie Grandet, as the book stands, seems to have been made without any regard to the chief and most exacting demand of the story; where another writer would be using every device he could think of to mark the effect of the succeeding years, Balzac is free to tell the story as straightforwardly as he chooses. To EugÉnie the great and only adventure of her life was contained in the few days or weeks of Charles's first visit; nothing to compare with that excitement ever happened to her again. And Balzac makes this episode bulk as largely in the book as it did in her life; he pauses over it and elaborates it, unconcerned by the fact that in the book—in the whole effect it is to produce—the episode is only the beginning of EugÉnie's story, only the prelude to her years of waiting and watching.

He extends his account of it so far, nevertheless, that he has written two thirds of the book by the time the young man is finally despatched to the Indies. It means that the duration of the story—and the duration is the principal fact in it—is hardly considered at all, after the opening of the action. There is almost no picture of the slowly moving years; there is little but a concise chronicle of the few widely spaced events. Balzac is at no pains to sit with EugÉnie in the twilight, while the seasons revolve; not for him to linger, gazing sympathetically over her shoulder, tenderly exploring her sentiments. He is actually capable of beginning a paragraph with the casual announcement, "Five years went by in this way," as though he belonged to the order of story-tellers who imagine that time may be expressed by the mere statement of its length. Yet there is time in his book, it is very certain—time that lags and loiters till the girl has lost her youth and has dropped into the dull groove from which she will evidently never again be dislodged. Balzac can treat the story as concisely as he will, he can record EugÉnie's simple experience from without, and yet make the fading of her young hope appear as gradual and protracted as need be; and all because he has prepared in advance, with his picture of the life of the Grandets, a complete and enduring impression.

His preliminary picture included the representation of time, secured the sense of it so thoroughly that there is no necessity for recurring to it again. The routine of the Maison Grandet is too clearly known to be forgotten; the sight of the girl and her mother, leading their sequestered lives in the shadow of their old tyrant's obsession, is a sensation that persists to the end of their story. Their dreary days accumulate and fill the year with hardly a break in its monotony; the next year and the next are the same, except that old Grandet's meanness is accentuated as his wealth increases; the present is like the past, the future will prolong the present. In such a scene EugÉnie's patient acquiescence in middle age becomes a visible fact, is divined and accepted at once, without further insistence; it is latent in the scene from the beginning, even at the time of the small romance of her youth. To dwell upon the shades of her long disappointment is needless, for her power of endurance and her fidelity are fully created in the book before they are put to the test. "Five years went by," says Balzac; but before he says it we already see them opening and closing upon the girl, bearing down upon her solitude, exhausting her freshness but not the dumb resignation in which she sits and waits. The endlessness, the sameness, the silence, which another writer would have to tackle somehow after disposing of the brief episode of Charles's visit, Balzac has it all in hand, he can finish off his book without long delay. His deliberate approach to the action, through the picture of the house and its inmates, has achieved its purpose; it has given him the effect which the action most demands and could least acquire by itself, the effect of time.

And there is no doubt that the story immensely gains by being treated in Balzac's way, rather than as the life of a disappointed girl, studied from within. In that case the subject of the book might easily seem to be wearing thin, for the fact is that EugÉnie has not the stuff of character to give much interest to her story, supposing it were seen through her eyes. She is good and true and devoted, but she lacks the poetry, the inner resonance, that might make a living drama of her simple emotions. Balzac was always too prosaic for the creation of virtue; his innocent people—unless they may be grotesque as well as innocent, like Pons or Goriot—live in a world that is not worth the trouble of investigation. The interest of EugÉnie would infallibly be lowered, not heightened, by closer participation in her romance; it is much better to look at it from outside, as Balzac does for the most part, and to note the incidents that befell her, always provided that the image of lagging time can be fashioned and preserved. As for that, Balzac has no cause to be anxious; it is as certain that he can do what he will with the subject of a story, handle it aright and compel it to make its impression, as that he will fail to understand the sensibility of a good-natured girl.

I cannot imagine that the value of the novelist's picture, as preparation for his drama, could be proved more strikingly than it is proved in this book, where so much is expected of it. EugÉnie Grandet is typical of a natural bent on the part of any prudent writer of fiction, the instinct to relieve the climax of the story by taxing it as little as possible when it is reached. The climax ought to complete, to add the touch that makes the book whole and organic; that is its task, and that only. It should be free to do what it must without any unnecessary distraction, and nothing need distract it that can be dealt with and despatched at an earlier stage. The climax in Grandet is not a dramatic point, not a single incident; it lies in the slow chill that very gradually descends upon EugÉnie's hope. Balzac carefully refrains from making the book hinge on anything so commonplace as a sudden discovery of the young man's want of faith. The worst kind of disappointment does not happen like that, falling as a stroke; it steals into a life and spreads imperceptibly. Charles's final act of disloyalty is only a kind of coda to a drama that is practically complete without it. Here, then, is a climax that is essentially pictorial, an impression of change and decay, needing time in plenty above all; and Balzac leads into it so cunningly that a short summary of a few plain facts is all that is required, when it comes to the point. He saves his climax, in other words, from the burden of deliberate expatiation, which at first sight it would seem bound to incur; he leaves nothing for it to accomplish but just the necessary touch, the movement that declares and fulfils the intention of the book.

There is the same power at work upon material even more baffling, apparently, in La Recherche de l'Absolu. The subject of that perfect tale is of course the growth of a fixed idea, and Balzac was faced with the task of showing the slow aggravation of a man's ruin through a series of outbreaks, differing in no way one from another, save in their increasing violence. Claes, the excellent and prosperous young burgher of Douai, pillar of the old civic stateliness of Flanders, is dragged and dragged into his calamitous experiments by the bare failure (as he is persuaded) of each one in turn; each time his researches are on the verge of yielding him the "absolute," the philosopher's stone, and each time the prospect is more shining than before; success, wealth enough to restore his deepening losses a thousand times over, is assured by one more attempt, the money to make it must be found. And so all other interest in life is forgotten, his pride and repute are sacrificed, the splendid house is gradually stripped of its treasures, his family are thrust into poverty; and he himself dies degraded, insane, with success—surely, surely success, this time—actually in his grasp. That is all, and on that straight, sustained movement the book must remain throughout, reiterating one effect with growing intensity—always at the pitch of high hope and sharp disappointment, always prepared to heighten and sharpen it a little further. There can be no development through any variety of incident; it is the same suspense and the same shock, again and again, constantly more disastrous than before.

Here, too, Balzac amasses in his opening picture the reserve of effect that he needs. He recognizes the ample resource of the dignity, the opulence, the worth, the tradition inherited by families like that of Claes—merchant-princes of honourable line, rulers of rich cities, patrons of great art. The house of Claes, with its fine architecture, its portraits, its dark furniture and gleaming silver, its garden of rare tulips—Balzac's imagination is poured into the scene, it is exactly the kind of opportunity that he welcomes. He knows the place by heart; his description of it is in his most methodical style. Steadily it all comes out, a Holbein-picture with every orderly detail duly arranged, the expression of good manners, sound taste and a solid position. On such a world, created as he knows how to create it, he may draw without hesitation for the repeated demands of the story; the protracted havoc wrought by the man's infatuation is represented, step by step, as the visible scene is denuded and destroyed. His spirit is worn away and his sanity breaks down, and the successive strokes that fall on it, instead of losing force (for the onlooker) by repetition, are renewed and increased by the sight of the spreading devastation around him, as his precious things are cast into the devouring expense of his researches. Their disappearance is the outward sign of his own personal surrender to his idea, and each time that he is thrown back upon disappointment the ravage of the scene in which he was placed at the beginning of the book is more evident than before. It spreads through his pictures and treasures to his family, and still further into his relations with the respectable circle about him. His position is shaken, his situation in that beautiful Holbein-world is undermined; it is slowly shattered as his madness extends. And having built and furnished that world so firmly and richly, Balzac can linger upon its overthrow as long as is necessary for the rising effect of his story. He has created so much that there is plenty to destroy; only at last, with the man's dying cry of triumph, is the wreck complete.

Thus the climax of the story, as in Grandet, is laid up betimes in the descriptive picture. It is needless, I suppose, to insist on the esthetic value of economy of this kind. Everybody feels the greater force of the climax that assumes its right place without an effort, when the time comes, compared with that in which a strain and an exaggerated stress are perceptible. The process of writing a novel seems to be one of continual forestalling and anticipating; far more important than the immediate page is the page to come, still in the distance, on behalf of which this one is secretly working. The writer makes a point and reserves it at the same time, creates an effect and holds it back, till in due course it is appropriated and used by the page for which it is intended. It must be a pleasure to the writer, it is certainly a great pleasure to the critic, when the stroke is cleanly brought off. It is the same pleasure indeed; the novelist makes the stroke, but the critic makes it again by perceiving it, and is legitimately satisfied by the sense of having perceived it with good artistry. It is spoilt, of course, if the stroke is handled tactlessly and obtrusively; the art of preparation is no art if it betrays itself at the outset, calling attention to its purpose. By definition it is unrecognizable until it attains its end; it is the art of rendering an impression that is found to have been made, later on, but that evades detection at the moment. The particular variety I have been considering is one of which Balzac is a great master; and perhaps his mastery will appear still more clearly if I look at a book in which his example is not followed in this respect. It is a finer book, for all that, than most of Balzac's.

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