His manner is well to be watched in Eugenie 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.
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