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

IIO

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

of asking ourselves, who has created from top to toe the most
brilliant, the most historic, the most insolent, above all the
most detailed and discriminated of aristocracies e Balzac carried
the uppermost class of his comedy, from the princes, dukes,
and unspeakable duchesses down to his poor barons de province,
about in his pocket as he might have carried a tolerably befingered pack of cards, to deal them about with a flourish of
the highest authority whenever there was the chance of a game.
He knew them up and down and in and out, their arms, infallibly supplied, their quarterings, pedigrees, services, intermarriages, relationships, ramifications and other enthralling
attributes. This indeed is comparatively simple learning; the
real wonder is rather when we linger on the ground of the
patrician consciousness itself, the innermost, the esoteric, the
spirit, temper, tone-tone above all-of the titled and the
proud. The questions multiply for every scene of the comedy;
there is no one who makes us walk in such a cloud of them.
The clouds elsewhere, in comparison, are at best of questions
not worth asking. Was the patrician consciousness that figured
as our author's model so splendidly fatuous as he-almost without irony, often in fact with a certain poetic sympathy-everywhere represents it e His imagination lives in it, breathes its
scented air, swallows this element with the smack of the lips
of the connoisseur; but I feel that we never know, even to the
end, whether he be here directly historic or only quite misguidedly romantic. The romantic side of him has the extent
of all the others; it represents in the oddest manner his escape
from the walled and roofed structure into which he had built
himself-his longing for the vaguely-felt outside and as much
as might be of the rest of the globe. But it is characteristic of
him that the most he could do for this relief was to bring the
fantastic into the circle and fit it somehow to his conditions.
Was his tone for the duchess, the marquise but the imported
fantastic, one of those smashes of the window-pane of the real
that reactions sometimes produce even in the stubborn,' or are
we to take it as observed, as really reported, as, for all its
difference from our notion of the natural-and, quite as much,