(EDGAR] HENRY JAMES AND HIS METHOD 237 



and an amazing amount of preparation lies beneath the harmonious 

 beauty of the final result. Wherever the enlightened judgment of 

 posterity may place him he will inevitably be regarded as the most 

 artistic of our novelists, and his work will remain as a standing menace 

 in the path of all the sloppy clever writers who indulge themselves in 

 fiction because of the inviting facility of the form. 



We do not know a novelist until we are familiar both with his 

 world and his method. I have denied myself the pleasure of a journey 

 through the world of Henry James. I cannot avail myself of the 

 copious letters of introduction which would make me free of the 

 society of its inhabitants and admit me on a footing of familiarity 

 with a multitude of people whose friendship would so amply repay 

 cultivation. But some further general observations on his method 

 I may permit myself in conclusion, and I wish more especially to dis- 

 cover the extent of James's indebtedness to the writers for whose 

 theory and practice he professed the most regard. 



Though his own work seems to have few attachments with that 

 of Balzac, he yet proclaimed himself in all modesty and admiration 

 his disciple. What he most valued in him was "his unequalled power 

 of putting people on their feet, placing them before us in their habit 

 as they lived — a faculty nourished by observation as much as one 

 will, but with the inner vision all the while wide-awake, the vision 

 for which ideas are as living as facts and assume an equal intensity." 

 Balzac then possessed the power of evocation to an unrivalled degree 

 alike for his inanimate and human world, but he never contented 

 himself with the mere act of representation. No object and no individual 

 became fully alive beneath his hand until his mind could focus it in 

 significant relation to the whole picture. His inventoriai enthusiasm 

 threatens often to swamp him, but if his boat rocks it still rides the 

 waves. In such a closely woven book as Eugénie Grandet or Père Goriot 

 we perceive abundance indeed, but no actual superfluity in the organ- 

 isation of the environment. Balzac never admitted, as Arnold 

 Bennett seems to do, that the naturalistic novelist's formula "une 

 tranche de la vie" covers all the necessities of art. An indiscriminate 

 slice cut at random from the loaf of life, however artfully buttered or 

 stuffed with currants, is not his affair. A story is not a mere numerical 

 series of happenings narrated with the highest regard for the circum- 

 stantial truth of the report and with commendable felicity in the 

 delineation of the human participants. The loosest picaresque ro- 

 mance must, or should, have some organised centre of interest, if 

 it is only the vagrant personality of the hero. In novels of a closer 

 texture there is no room for sporadic cleverness, and the intensity 

 which is aimed at by Balzac and James is secured by the most scrupu- 



