Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

98

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

that the old families most shine out for him, images of strange
colour and form, but " felt "as we say, to their finger-tips, and
extraordinarily interesting as a mark of the high predominance
-predominance of character, of cleverness, of will, of general
4 "personality " —that almost every scene of the Comedy attributes to women. It attributes to them in fact a recognised, an
uncontested supremacy; it is through them that the hierarchy
of old families most expresses itself; and it is as surrounded by
them even as some magnificent indulgent pasha by his overflowing seraglio that Balzac sits most at his ease. All of which
reaffirms-if it be needed-that his inspiration, and the sense
of it, were even greater than his task. And yet such betrayals
of spontaneity in him make for an old friend at the end of the
chapter no great difference in respect to the pathos-since it
amounts to that-of his genius-ridden aspect. It comes to us
as we go back to him that his spirit had fairly made of itself
a cage in which he was to turn round and round, always unwinding his reel, much in the manner of a criminal condemned
to hard labour for life. The cage is simply the complicated but
dreadfully definite French world that built itself so solidly in
and roofed itself so impenetrably over him.
It is not that, caught there with him though we be, we ourselves prematurely seek an issue: we throw ourselves back, on
the contrary, for the particular sense of it, into his ancient
superseded comparatively rococo and quite patriarchal Francepatriarchal in spite of social and political convulsions; into
his old-time antediluvian Paris, all picturesque and all workable, full, to the fancy, of an amenity that has passed away;
into his intensely differentiated sphere of la province, evoked
in each sharpest or faintest note of its difference, described
systematically as narrow and flat, and yet attaching us if only
by the contagion of the author's overflowing sensibility. He
feels in his vast exhibition many things, but there is nothing
he feels with the communicable shocks and vibrations, the sustained fury of perception-not always a fierceness of judgment,
which is another matter-that la province excites in him. Half