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

HONORE DE BALZAC

I03

joined with whatever workable minimum of needful intermission, of free observation, of personal experienced Some
small possibility of personal experience and disinterested life,
must at the worst, from deep within or far without, feed and
fortify the strained productive machine. These things were
luxuries that Balzac appears really never to have tasted on any
appreciable scale. His published letters-the driest and most
starved of those of any man of equal distinction-are with the
exception of those to Madame de Hanska, whom he married
shortly before his death, almost exclusively the audible wail of
a galley-slave chained to the oar. M. Zola, in our time, among
the novelists, has sacrificed to the huge plan in something of
the same manner, yet with goodly modern differences that
leave him a comparatively simple instance. His work, assuredly
has been more nearly dried up by the sacrifice than ever Balzac's
was-so miraculously, given the conditions, was Balzac's to
escape the anticlimax. Method and system, in the chronicle of
the tribe of Rougon-Macquart, an economy in itself certainly
of the rarest and most interesting, have spread so from centre
to circumference that they have ended by being almost the only
thing we feel. And then M. Zola has survived and triumphed
in his lifetime, has continued and lasted, has piled up and, if
the remark be not frivolous, enjoyed in all its agrements the reward for which Balzac toiled and sweated in vain. On top of
which he will have had also his literary great-grandfather's
heroic example to start from and profit by, the positive heritage of a fils de famille to enjoy, spend, save, waste. Balzac had
frankly no heritage at all but his stiff subject, and by way of
model not even in any direct or immediate manner that of
the inner light and kindly admonition of his genius. Nothing
adds more to the strangeness of his general performance than
his having failed so long to find his inner light, groped for it
almost ten years, missed it again and again, moved straight
away from it, turned his back on it, lived in fine round about
it, in a darkness still scarce penetrable, a darkness into which we
peep only half to make out the dreary little waste of his numerous oeuvres de jeunesse. To M. Zola was vouchsafed the good