It ought to make, it must make, his
situation peculiarly real and intelligible that we find him surrounded
by familiar friends of our own; and that is the artistic reason of the
amazing ingenuity with which Balzac keeps them all in play.
Less artistic and more mechanical, I take it, his ingenuity seems than
it did of old. I forget how few are the mistakes and contradictions of
which Balzac has been convicted, in the shuffling and re-shuffling of
his characters; but when his accuracy has been proved there still
remains the question of its bearing upon his art. I only touch upon
the question from a single point of view, when I consider whether the
density of life in so many of his short pieces can really owe
anything to the perpetual flitting of the men and women from book to
book. Suppose that for the moment Balzac is evoking the figure and
fortunes of Lucien de Rubempre, and that a woman who appears
incidentally in his story turns out to be our well-remembered
Delphine, Goriot's daughter. We know a great deal about the past of
Delphine, as it happens; but at this present juncture, in Lucien's
story, her past is entirely irrelevant. It belongs to another
adventure, where it mattered exceedingly, an adventure that took place
before Lucien was heard of at all. As for his story, and for the
reality with which it may be endowed, this depends solely upon our
understanding of _his_ world, _his_ experience; and if Delphine's old
affairs are no part of it, our previous knowledge of her cannot help
us with Lucien.
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