undred pages as Balzac did unfailingly. I cannot
think that this is due in the least to the laborious interweaving of
his books into a single scheme; I could believe that in general a book
of Balzac's suffers, rather than gains, by the recurrence of the old
names that he has used already elsewhere. It is an amusing trick, but
exactly what is its object? I do not speak of the ordinary "sequel,"
where the fortunes of somebody are followed for another stage, and
where the second part is simply the continuation of the first in a
direct line. But what of the famous idea of making book after book
overlap and encroach and entangle itself with the rest, by the device
of setting the hero of one story to figure more or less obscurely in a
dozen others? The theory is, I suppose, that the characters in the
background and at the corners of the action, if they are Rastignac and
Camusot and Nucingen, retain the life they have acquired elsewhere,
and thereby swell the life of the story in which they reappear. We are
occupied for the moment with some one else, and we discover among his
acquaintances a number of people whom we already know; that fact, it
is implied, will add weight and authority to the story of the man in
the foreground--who is himself, very likely, a man we have met
casually in another book. 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.