Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/21

Rh best—of Scott's books, and in many of his other models, for setting slowly to work; and he abused that precedent here in the most merciless manner. If two-thirds of the first chapter had been cut away, and the early part of the second had been not less courageously thinned, the book would probably have twice the hold that it at present has on the imagination. As it is, I have known some readers (and I have no doubt that they are fairly representative) who honestly avowed themselves to be "choked off" by the endless vacillations and conversations of Hulot at the "Pilgrim," by the superabundant talk at the inn, and generally by the very fault which, as I have elsewhere noticed, Balzac represents in a brother novelist, the fault of giving the reader no definite grasp of story. Balzac could not deny himself the luxury of long conversations; but he never had, and at this time had less than at any other, the art which Dumas possessed in perfection—the art of making the conversation tell the story. Until, therefore, the talk between the two lovers on the way to the Vivetière, the action is so obscure, so broken by description and chat, and so little relieved, except in the actual skirmish and wherever Marche-a-Terre appears, by real business, that it cannot but be felt as fatiguing. It can only be promised that if the reader will bear up or skip intelligently till this point he will not be likely to find any fault with the book afterwards. The jour sans lendemain is admirable almost throughout.

This unfortunate effect is considerably assisted by the working of one of Balzac's numerous and curious crochets. Those who have only a slight acquaintance with the Comédie Humaine must have noticed that chapter-divisions are for the most part wanting in it, or are so few and of such enor-