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PARTISAN REVIEW
mind him about certain doings at the Pension Vauquer and compel
him to protect Lucien, and even after Lucien's death Rastignac will
often summon Vautrin into a dark street.
Such effects would scarcely be possible if it were not for Bal–
zac's masterly invention of retaining the same characters throughout
his novels. And so a ray of light, emerging from the depth of the
whole sequence and bridging a lifetime, can come to cast its turbid
melancholy gleam on that little .manor house in the Dordogne and
the two travelers who halt there. Sainte-Beuve completely failed to
understand this business of retaining names and characters: "This
affectation finally led him to take up a theory that could scarcely
have been falser or more thwarting to what makes a book interesting;
I mean the way he continually re-introduces his characters from one
novel to another, like actors with walk-on parts. Nothing is more dam–
aging to the piquancy which depends on novelty nor to that charm
of the unexpected which gives a novel its appeal. Wherever one
turns, one encounters the same faces." It is Balzac's stroke of genius
that Sainte-Beuve here fails to understand. It can be said, of course,
that Balzac did not hit on it immediately. Some portions of his
great sequences were not linked up by this means till afterwards. What
does that matter? Wagner had composed the "Good Friday Spell"
before he thought of writing
Parsifal,
and put it into the opera later
on. But the additions Balzac made, these lovely things that are
brought in, the new relationships suddenly perceived by his genius
between separate parts of his work, which rejoin each other, come
to life, are henceforth inseparable, are they not his finest creative
intuitions? His sister has told us how overjoyed he was, that day
when he conceived this idea, and I think it is just as magnificent
an idea as if he had conceived it before he began his great work.
It
is a light that dawned, that suddenly encompassed parts of his
work that till then had lain scattered and wan, and which united
them, brought them to life, illuminated them; but that light is none
the less a part of his intention.
Sainte-Beuve's other criticisms are just as absurd. Having up–
braided Balzac for those "refinements of style" which he unfor–
tunately lacked, he then upbraided him for faults of taste which
were only too really his; but for an example picks on a sentence that
