ld seem;
but perhaps it is a fine distinction that criticism can afford to pass
by.

XV

As for the peculiar accent and stir of life, the life behind the
story, Balzac's manner of finding and expressing it is always
interesting. He seems to look for it most readily, not in the nature
of the men and women whose action makes the story, or not there to
begin with, but in their streets and houses and rooms. He cannot think
of his people without the homes they inhabit; with Balzac to imagine a
human being is to imagine a province, a city, a corner of the city, a
building at a turn of the street, certain furnished rooms, and finally
the man or woman who lives in them. He cannot be satisfied that the
tenor of this creature's existence is at all understood without a
minute knowledge of the things and objects that surround it. So strong
is his conviction upon this point that it gives a special savour to
the many pages in which he describes how the doorway is approached,
how the passage leads to the staircase, how the parlour-chairs are
placed, in the house which is to be the scene of his drama. These
descriptions are clear and business-like; they are offered as an
essential preliminary to the story, a matter that must obviously be
dealt with, once for all, before the story can proceed. And he
communicates his certainty to the reader, he imposes his belief in
the need for precision and fullness; Balzac is so sure that every
detail _must_ be known, down to the vases on the mantelpiece or the
pots and pans in the cupboard, that his reader cannot begin to
question it. Everything is made to appear as important as the author
feels it to be.

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 m