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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

and confusions enough, but the thick tradition, no more at the
most than half smothered, lay under them all. So the whole
of his faith and no small part of his working omniscience were
neither more nor less than that historic sense which I have
spoken of as the spur of his invention and which he possessed
as no other novelist has done. We immediately feel that to
name it in connection with him is to answer every question he
suggests and to account for each of his idiosyncrasies in turn.
The novel, the tale, however brief, the passage, the sentence by
itself, the situation, the person, the place, the motive exposed,
the speech reported-these things were in his view history,
with the absoluteness and the dignity of history. This is the
source both of his weight and of his wealth. What is the historic sense after all but animated, but impassioned knowledge
seeking to enlarge itself ~ I have said that his imagination did
the whole thing, no other explanation-no reckoning of the
possibilities of personal saturation-meeting the mysteries of
the case. Therefore his imagination achieved the miracle of
absolutely resolving itself into multifarious knowledge. Since
history proceeds by documents he constructed, as he needed
them, the documents too-fictive sources that imitated the
actual to the life. It was of course a terrible business, but at
least in the light of it his claims to creatorship are justifiedwhich is what was to be shown.
IV
It is very well even in the sketchiest attempt at a portrait of
his genius to try to take particulars in their order: one peeps
over the shoulder of another at the moment we get a-feature
into focus. The loud appeal not to be left out prevails among
them all, and certainly with the excuse that each as we fix it
seems to fall most into the picture. I have so indulged myself
as to his general air that I find a whole list of vivid contributive
marks almost left on my hands. Such a list, in any study of
Balzac, is delightful for intimate edification as well as for the