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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

ledge that Balzac offers himself as universally competent. He
has flights of judgment-on subjects the most special as well
as the most general-that are vertiginous and on his alighting
from which we greet him with a special indulgence. We can
easily imagine him to respond, confessing humorously-if he
had only time-to such a benevolent understanding smile as
would fain hold our own eyes a moment. Then it is that he
would most show us his scheme and his necessities and how
in operation they all hang together. Naturally everything about
everything, though how he had time to learn it is the last thing
he has time to tell us; which matters the less, moreover, as it
is not over the question of his knowledge that we sociably invite
him, as it were (and remembering the two augurs behind the
altar) to wink at us for a sign. His convictions it is that are his
great pardonable " swagger"; to them in particular I refer as
his general operative condition, the constituted terms of his
experiment, and not less as his consolation, his support, his
amusement by the way. They embrace everything in the world
-that is in his world of the so parti-coloured France of his
age: religion, morals, politics, economics, physics, esthetics,
letters, art, science, sociology, every question of faith, every
branch of research. They represent thus his equipment of
ideas, those ideas of which it will never do for a man who
aspires to constitute a State to be deprived. He must take them
with him as an ambassador extraordinary takes with him secretaries, uniforms, stars and garters, a gilded coach and a high
assurance. Balzac's opinions are his gilded coach, in which he
is more amused than anything else to feel himself riding, but
which is indispensably concerned in getting him over the
ground. What more inevitable than thatthey should be intensely
Catholic, intensely monarchical, intensely saturated with the
real genius-as between i830 and i848 he believed it to beof the French character and French institutions e
Nothing is happier for us than that he should have enjoyed
his outlook before the first half of the century closed. He could
then still treat his subject as comparatively homogeneous. Any