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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

count. If this passion but too often exhales a tepid breath in
much other fiction-much other of ours at least-that is apt
to come decidedly less from the writer's sense of proportion
than from his failure of art, or in other words of intensity. It
is rarely absent by intention or by intelligence, it is pretty well
always there as the theoretic principal thing-any difference
from writer to writer being mostly in the power to put the
principal thing effectively forward. It figures as a pressing,
an indispensable even if a perfunctory motive, for example, in
every situation devised by Walter Scott; the case being simply
that if it doesn't in fact attractively occupy the foreground this
is because his hand has had so native, so much greater, an ease
for other parts of the picture. What makes Balzac so preeminent and exemplary that he was to leave the novel a far
other and a vastly more capacious and significant affair than he
found it, is his having felt his fellow-creatures (almost altogether for him his contemporaries) as quite failing of reality,
as swimming in the vague and the void and the abstract, unless
their social conditions, to the last particular, their generative
and contributive circumstances, of every discernible sort, enter
for all these are " worth " into his representative attempt.
This great compound of the total looked into and starting up
in its element, as it always does, to meet the eye of genius and
patience half way, bristled for him with all its branching connections, those thanks to which any figure could be a figure but
by showing for endlessly entangled in them.
So it was then that his huge felicity, to re-emphasise our
term, was in his state of circulating where recognitions and
identifications didn't so much await as rejoicingly assault him,
having never yet in all the world, grudged or at the best suspected feeders as they were at the board where sentiment
occupied the head, felt themselves so finely important or subject to such a worried intention. They hung over a scene as to
which it was one of the forces of his inspiration that history
had lately been there at work, with incomparable energy and
inimitable art, to pile one upon another, not to say squeeze