When Balzac takes in hand the description of a town or a house or a
workshop, he may always be suspected, at first, of abandoning himself
entirely to his simple, disinterested craving for facts. There are
times when it seems that his inexhaustible knowledge of facts is
carrying him where it will, till his only conscious purpose is to set
down on paper everything that he knows. He is possessed by the lust of
description for its own sake, an insatiable desire to put every detail
in its place, whether it is needed or no. So it seems, and so it is
occasionally, no doubt; there is nothing more tiresome in Balzac than
his zest, his delight, his triumph, when he has apparently succeeded
in forgetting altogether that he is a novelist. He takes a proper
pride in Grandet or Goriot or Lucien, of course; but his heart never
leaps quite so high, it might be thought, as when he sees a chance for
a discourse upon money or commerce or Italian art. And yet the result
is always the same in the end; when he has finished his lengthy
research among the furniture of the lives that are to be evoked, he
has created a scene in which action will move as rapidly as he
chooses, without losing any of its due emphasis. He has illustrated,
in short, the way in which a pictorial impression, wrought to the
right pitch, will speed the work of drama--will become an effective
agent in the book, instead of remaining the mere decorative
introduction that it may seem to be.
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