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.
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