Balzac’s Recurring Characters by Anthony R. Pugh (review)

l1UMANJ.Ut.~ 307 parenthetical and bracketed statements, and the overuse of colon and semi-colon constructions leave the reader with a sense of disjointedness and fragmentation. This problem might, in part, be less noticeable had the author managed to offset the complexity and variability of her materials by a more judicious introduction of quotations, as well as by creating a coherent flow in her own prose. However, as the following quotation, which is not atypical, indicates, the prolix nature of the materials has led to a rather prolix methoc! of presentation: But the Women and Roses speaker is ready to accept any woman and none will leave the magic circle. The Pauline passage describing similar frustration uses similar diction: 'dazzled by my wealth' (880), 'all so floated, nought was fixed and firm' (882). Compare, in Women and Roses, 'a dazzling drift.' '... go / Floating the women,' 'how shall I fix you?' So also does Aprile: '... dazzled by shapes, ... / Shapes clustered there to rule thee, not obey ... bright to thy despair? / Didst thou ne'er gaze on each by turns, and ne'er / Resolve to single out one ... those spells '" that charmed so long / Thine eyes, float fast, confuse thee, bear thee off, / As whirling snow-drifts blind a man ..: Again compare, in Women and Roses, 'great shapes of the antique time' and 'Round and round, like a dance of snow / In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go / Floating the women ..: The two early artistic dilemmas are romantic: the artists must choose, bind themselves to the specific, the finite. This is a theme informing Browning's three early poems, and in his plays and Bells and Pomegranates poems, the importance of the specific act is stressed. The man of words rather than action (Djabal, Chiappino). the man of over-hasty action (Trasham) [sic], the small triggers that set off certain actions (Pippa Passes), the pleasure in action (Cavalier Tunes, How They Brought the Good News), the heroic act (Incident of the French Camp), the saintly act (The Boy and the Angel): except for the love-poems, nearly every 1.842 and 1.845 poem centres on an important act. In Men and Women virtually none of the lyrics or dramatic monologues does so, and not all the romances (I am using Browning's 1863 classification) (p 191). I am not implying that Browning's Lyrics is seriously deficient in its content. As noted above, it does have many new things to tell liS, especially about individual poems. I would suggest, however, that Browning's Lyrics is a book to be read in parts at various times and not as a c9ntinuous whole in one or two sittings. Approached in this manner the reader will, without doubt, complete this book in agreement with Professor Cook that she has 'had the sense of approaching the centre of Browning's imagination, of perceiving something of its structure, of watching it work from the inside out' (p 302). (THOMAS J. COLLINS) Anthony R. Pugh, Balzac's Recurring Characters. University of Toronto Press, xxix, 510, $25.00 The technique of reappearing characters, one of the distinctive features of Balzac's work, has often been discussed, so that the main lines of the 30l) LETTERS IN CANADA development of the device and the critical problems it poses for the general reader are well known. Professor Pugh's excellent study is remarkable for the thoroughness with which the subject is treated. It is the result of years of his own work, profits from the many critical studies devoted to Balzac since the ~949-50 anniversary year, and may be said to mark the culmination of a line of research (textual variations in Balzac editions) first undertaken systematically by a group at the University of Chicago in the twenties and thirties. Professor Pugh has adopted a rigorous historical approach (like Canfield, but in contrast to Preston and Lotte who deal mainly with Balzac's definitive text). He examines separately, in chronological order, each of Balzac's works (and revised editions) from Le Demier Chouan of ~829 to the final corrections in Balzac's copy of the Fume edition of the Comedie humaine. He also includes fragments and drafts, and...