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

HONORE DE BALZAC

Il3

HONORE DE BALZAC
1913
IT is a pleasure to meet M. Smile Faguet ' on the same ground
of mastered critical method and in the same air of cool deliberation and conclusion that so favoured his excellent study of
Flaubert in the rich series to which the present volume belongs.
It was worth while waiting these many years for a Balzac to get
it at last from a hand of so firm a grip, if not quite of the very
finest manipulative instinct. It can scarce ever be said of M.
Faguet that he tends to play with a subject, at least a literary
one; but nobody is better for circling his theme in sound and
easy pedestrian fashion, for taking up each of its aspects in
order, for a sense, above all, of the order in which they should
be taken, and for then, after doing them successively justice,
reaching the point from which they appear to melt together.
He thus gives us one of those literary portraits the tradition of
which, so far at least as they are the fruit of method, has continued scantly to flourish among ourselves. We cannot help
thinking indeed that an ideally authoritative portrait of Balzac
would be the work of some pondering painter able to measure
the great man's bequest a little more from within or by a coincidence of special faculty, or that in other words the particular
initiation and fellow-feeling of some like-that is not too unlike-imaginative projector as well are rather wanted here to
warm and colour the critical truth to the right glow of appreciation. Which comes to saying, we quite acknowledge, that a
" tribute " to Balzac, of however embracing an intention, may
still strike us as partly unachieved if we fail to catch yearning
and shining through it, like a motive in a musical mixture or a
thread of gold in a piece of close weaving, the all but overriding
1 Balzac. Par Sfmile Faguet, de 1'Academie Fran9aise. Les Grands Ecrivains Frangais. Paris, Hachette, I913.