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

I02

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

His votaries and expositors are so numerous that the Balzac
library of comment and research must be, of its type, one of
the most copious. M. de Lovenjoul has laboured all round the
subject; his " Histoire des CEuvres " alone is another crowded
octavo of 400 pages; in connection with which I must mention
Miss Wormeley, the devoted American translator, interpreter,
worshipper, who in the course of her own studies has so often
found occasion to differ from M. de Lovenjoul on matters of
fact and questions of date and of appreciation. Miss Wormeley,
M. Paul Bourget and many others are examples of the passionate piety that our author can inspire. As I turn over the encyclopedia of his characters I note that whereas such works usually
commemorate but the ostensibly eminent of a race and time,
every creature so much as named in the fictive swarm is in this
case preserved to fame: so close is the implication that to have
been named by such a dispenser of life and privilege is to be, as
we say it of baronets and peers, created. He infinitely divided
moreover, as we know, he subdivided, altered and multiplied
his heads and categories-his " Vie Parisienne," his " Vie de
Province," his "Vie Politique," his "Parents Pauvres," his
" &tudes Philosophiques," his " Splendeurs et Miseres des
Courtisanes," his " Envers de l'Histoire Contemporaine " and
all the rest; so that nominal reference to them becomes the
more difficult. Yet without prejudice either to the energy of
conception with which he mapped out his theme as with chalk
on a huge blackboard, or to the prodigious patience with which
he executed his plan, practically filling in with a wealth of illustration, from sources that to this day we fail to make out, every
compartment of his table, M. de Lovenjoul draws up the list,
year by year, from i822 to i848, of his mass of work, giving
us thus the measure of the tension represented for him by
almost any twelvemonth. It is wholly unequalled, considering
the quality of Balzac's show, by any other eminent abundance.
I must be pardoned for coming back to it, for seeming unable to leave it; it enshrouds so interesting a mystery. How
was so solidly systematic a literary attack on life to be con