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

HONORE DE BALZAC

Io09

fine humour of the thing; we proceed from one of the items
of his breathing physiognomy to the other with quite the same
sense of life, the same active curiosity, with which we push
our way through the thick undergrowth of one of the novels.
The difficulty is really that the special point for which we at
the moment observe him melts into all the other points, is
swallowed up before our eyes in the formidable mass. The
French apply the happiest term to certain characters when they
speak of them as entiers, and if the word had been invented
for Balzac it could scarce better have expressed him. He is
"entire " as was never a man of his craft; he moves always
in his mass; wherever we find him we find him in force; whatever touch he applies he applies it with his whole apparatus.
He is like an army gathered to besiege a cottage equally with
a city, and living voraciously in either case on all the country
about. It may well be, at any rate, that his infatuation with the
idea of the social, the practical primacy of " the sex " is the
article at the top of one's list; there could certainly be no
better occasion than this of a rich reissue of the " Deux Jeunes
Mariees " for placing it there at a venture. Here indeed precisely we get a sharp example of the way in which, as I have
just said, a capital illustration of one of his sides becomes,
just as we take it up, a capital illustration of another. The
correspondence of Louise de Chaulieu and Renee de Maucombe is in fact one of those cases that light up with a great
golden glow all his parts at once. We needn't mean by this
that such parts are themselves absolutely all golden-given the
amount of tinsel for instance in his view, supereminent, transcendent here, of the old families and the great ladies. What
we do convey, however, is that his creative temperament finds
in such data as these one of its best occasions for shining out.
Again we fondly recognise his splendid, his attaching swagger
-that of a " bounder " of genius and of feeling; again we see
how, with opportunity, its elements may vibrate into a perfect
ecstasy of creation.
Why shouldn't a man swagger, he treats us to the diversion