Indebted – Henry James and Honoré de Balzac

Abstract:MILLS: This essay traces the development of Henry James's thought about the work, life and legacy of the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. It proposes that over the course of five critical pieces devoted to his precursor, James adopts Balzac as a figure through which to unfold his own pressing concerns regarding the nature and the costs of the artist's creative responsibility. 'Debt' – as a recurring signifier and motif in these writings—witnesses the evolution of Balzac's importance to James as incomparably, terribly responsible.

the metaphorical line separating within from without into an area of 'potential space', 2 Winnicott articulated a class of objects situated therein he called 'transitional'. 3 This word pinpoints the suspension of phenomena between the subjective and the objective realms. The mother's breast is the most well-known instance of a transitional object. Conditioned by its belonging to a region between the baby and the mother, for the baby, the breast is at once a found and a created object. 4 But Winnicott was clear that the term 'transitional' could apply equally to any phenomenon that exhibits an intermediate quality for the subject; a quality of being both joined to and separate from the world.
James's tendency to write of Balzac as if the author were kin or akin to himself perhaps stems from his having removed Balzac to this space between fantasy and reality. In his 1902 introduction to Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, James gives his description of such a subjectively conceived object, imagining Balzac as a cherished antique or objet d'art in the collector's cabinet of his mind: The beauty of this adventure, that of seeing the dust blown off a relation [to Balzac] that had been put away as on a shelf, almost out of reach, at the back of one's mind, consists in finding the precious object not only fresh and intact, but with its firm lacquer still further figured, gilded and enriched. It is all overscored with traces and impressionsvivid, definite, almost as valuable as itself -of the recognitions and agitations it originally produced in us. 5 2 It was not until 1967, in a paper titled 'The Location of Cultural Experience', that Winnicott formulated this concept and retrospectively situated the transitional object there. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London 1971) pp. 95-103. 3 See Winnicott, 'Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena',ibid., If the baby is in health, writes Winnicott, 'he creates the object, but the object was there waiting to be created and to become a cathected object. I tried to draw attention to this aspect of transitional phenomena by claiming that in the rules of the game we all know we will never challenge the baby to elicit an answer to the question: did you create that or did you find it?' 'The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications ', ibid., p. 89. 5 Honoré de Balzac, 1902, in Literary Criticism, vol. ii: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel andMark Wilson (New York 1984) pp. 1156-72: (p. 91). References to this edition of the essays on Balzac are hereafter given in the text. This edition prints the last versions over which the author had editorial control. James lightly revised each of the five essays before they were published in book form. The revisions consist, for the most part, of small changes in phrasing and word substitutions. Those that are relevant to the following argument will be footnoted.
Here the Balzacian 'object' is seen in both its 'found' and its 'created' aspects, poised between the world and the personal imaginary. It is at once an indisputably 'precious object' and has also a private value, made up of the unique patina left upon it by James's handling. By the 1902 essay, James is able to make use of Balzac as the means by which he exploresthrough fantasies about Balzac and his relationship to his creative taskquestions about the nature of the artist's responsibility. These fantasies include both the articulation of an ideal of responsibility and representations of the dangers this ideal involves. It is a method alike to that which James describes in his Preface to 'The Pupil' (1908). In this text, he acknowledges his '[a]ddict[ion] to seeing "through" -one thing through another, accordingly, and still other things through that' (p. 1198). In the passage from which this quotation is drawn, James is discussing his proclivity for focalising a set of circumstances by way of the impression these make upon 'a consciousness' (in this case, little Morgan's) 'highly susceptible of registration ' (p. 1323). Balzac is the medium through which James considers the promises and perils involved in the writer's holding himself responsible to his task to the highest degree.
The 1902 introduction and the 1905 lecture-essay represent the high points of James's investment in Balzac as an object of use for an investigation into the nature and quality of the artist's responsibility. The years during which he composed, published, revised, and republished these pieces were followed by those he devoted to readying volumes of the New York Edition (1907-9) for publication. This included writing some twenty-odd Prefaces to his novels and tales -texts in which the artist's responsibility is a recurring topic. By the time of the Prefaces, James is (to reverse Gervais's formulation) 'writing about himself, his own imagination' as if he were writing of Balzac. The fantasies James once orchestrated around Balzac are now the structures organising his own experiences, or at least the experiences of the Jamesian alter-ego narrating those strange half-fictions of the art life, the Prefaces. James has his own terms for expressing his 'assimilat[ion]' of Balzac in the 1902 introduction: These particular agents exist for us, with the lapse of time, as the substance itself of knowledge: they have been intellectually so swallowed, digested and assimilated that we take their general use and suggestion for granted, cease to be aware of them because they have passed out of sight. But they have passed out of sight simply by having passed into our lives. They have become a part of our personal history, a part of ourselves, very often, so far as we may have succeeded in best expressing ourselves. (p. 90) 124 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY One may lose sight, day to day, of the part played by these formative figures, but only because these 'agents' have been so deeply inscribed as to seem 'a part of ourselves'. Insofar as this process is well under way for James vis-à-vis Balzac by the time of the 1902 introduction, he writes here après-coup.
In the earliest of the essays, however, Balzac is not yet the 'precious object' James can make use of in his explorations. A reader of The Galaxy essays would be hard pressed to catch the note of what James describes in 1913 as his 'all but overriding sympathy' with Balzac (p. 140). Slowly, James will overlay the author with an imaginary gloss that largely involved his dismantling Balzac's reputation for having had a mercenary relation to literary production. James re-cyphers Balzac's life-long indebtedness such that the 'debt' comes to signify an artistic obligation more pressing than any pecuniary one. To see this alchemic process, a certain amount of knowledge about Balzac's reputation at the time James was writing is helpful. Balzac was reputed to have a great hunger for money. This hunger was such that the dedication with which Balzac worked at La Comédie humaine (1799-1850), seems to have been inextricable from his greed. Yet hoping to become rich more swiftly than could be expected by way of writing alone, the novelist successively tried his hand at publishing, printing, journalism, and speculating. He failed at these entrepreneurial efforts, each time suffering acute financial losses. All the while, Balzac continued to write, publish and minutely revise volumes of his Comédie at a rate by all accounts ruinous to his health. 6 A sleepless scribbler with a fiendish coffee habit, he was dead at 51 of an overworked heart. James knew well Hippolyte Taine's 1865 critical study, simply titled Balzac, as well as those of Sainte-Beuve and Théophile Gautier. He had also read the personal reminiscences of Léon Gozlan (Balzac en pantoufles (1856)). 7 He was conversant with the myth of Balzac: the unrelenting rhythm of his labour, his appetite for speculation, his colossal debts. It is the author of reputation and anecdote, a creation of the larger world, that James first introduces to the readership of The Galaxy in 1875. Using a formula of Taine's, James presents Balzac as a 'man of business', a sobriquet he amends to 'a man of business in debt' (my emphasis). This is his first use of a signifier ('debt') that will become crucial to the essay series. He concedes that Balzac was a 'man of business' not only by dint of circumstances but by 'inclination'. That is to say, Balzac 'liked, for itself, the process of manufacture and sale', so much so that (James imagines) had all the author's debts had been paid, he would nonetheless have 'continued to keep his shop' (p. 32). The tone is faintly disdainful, evoking a genteel horror at a too obvious avarice. The jibe meanwhile casts Balzac in the role of his own César Birotteau, the eponymous merchant of the 1837 novel James pithily describes elsewhere as 'the very epic of retail bankruptcy' (p. 148). Moderately successful in commerce, Birotteau disastrously overextends himself when offered the opportunity to invest in a dubious scheme. Although he is eventually reprieved from ruin (but not before the reader has got to know more of the intricacies of bankruptcy than she could ever wish), Birotteau never again engages in business. James implies that Balzac would not have resigned himself to such a dismal fate as doing without business. While Birotteau takes on menial jobs to pay what he owes, in order to disburse his debts, Balzac brokered new ones. Here is a part of James's rendering of Balzac's predicament from his 1877 review of the novelist's correspondence: His letters form a swarming register of schemes and bargains through which he passes like a hero of the circus, riding half a dozen piebald coursers at once [. . .] Balzac was constantly paid in advance by his publishers -paid for works not begun, or barely begun; and the money was as constantly spent before the equivalent had been delivered. Meanwhile more money was needed, and new novels were laid out to obtain it; but prior promises had first to be kept. (p. 73) In the 1875 essay, it is this 'work ethic' of Balzac's -a dedication to literary production indissociable from, because seemingly motivated by, a parlous financial state -that prevents James from identifying with the author to the extent he will in the later essays. In this first essay, he deems the 'great money-question' not only the primary subject of Balzac's novels but his single, great motivation. It is at once 'the supreme inspiration and the aesthetic alloy of his life' (p. 32). The breath suffusing Balzac's efforts was the spirit of capital; coin the baser metal with which he fired his precious aesthetic elements. Consequently, aspects of the texture of Balzac's work invite consideration through a pecuniary optic: the accumulative nature of his style implies the professional writer's payment by the word; his habit of recycling material from his journalism indicative of the miser's law. Such are the signs of that which James describes -in his 1877 review of Balzac's correspondence -as '[t]he grossly, inveterately professional character of all his activity [. . .] the urgency of his consuming money-hunger' (p. 69). 126 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY James seldom writes favourably of amateurism. In his fiction, the term often denotes superfluity, insincerity, or a lack of talent. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Casper Goodwood thinks of Osmond as a 'rather brilliant personage of the amateurish kind, afflicted with a redundancy of leisure which it amused him to work off in little refinements of conversation'. 8 In a different text, Merton Densher self-deprecatingly distinguishes Kate Croy's 'pure talent for life' from his own, 'a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up'. 9 It is unusual, then, to find James writing of amateurism as a desirable quality. In the first of his essays though, the amateur's ethos is distinctly that which 'every great artist who possesses taste' has but that Balzac markedly lacks. He writes that 'in Balzac there is absolutely nothing of the amateur' (p. 34). Here, the word 'amateur' seems to carry the full force of its origins in the Latin amare, 'to love'. 10 It consorts with 'taste'the ability to appreciate an object as though it has nothing to give other than pleasure itself. James seems to be saying that a 'great artist' is always something of an amateur, if only because she pursues her art as a lover would, in quite a different mode from a writer for whom everything is 'grossly, inveterately professional'.
For the contrast, it is worth vaulting ahead momentarily to observe how substantially James's opinion on Balzac's capacity for a love relation to his work changes. Over the course of the essays, James comes to style the author as the consummate artist-paramour whose devotion to his fictive people bestows upon them an inimitable liveliness. In the 1905 lecture-essay 'The Lesson of Balzac', enlarging on Taine's famous epithet '"Balzac aime sa Valérie"' (Valérie Marneffe of La Cousine Bette (1846)), James writes of authorial love as the precondition for the high realism Balzac achieved for his characters: 'It was by loving them [. . .] that he knew them ' (pp. 131, 132). This love is also the basis for the striking autonomy Balzac's characters exhibit: 'their standing on their feet and going of themselves and acting out their characters' (pp. 131-2). As Ruth Yeazell points out, 'the novelist's "love" for his characters' is a quality that 'James persistently associates with respect for their freedom'. 11 It is a freedom that James imagines comes somewhat at the expense of the author of these characters. Balzac is portrayed, especially in the later essays, as subject to the demands of his creations. This is one elaboration of the phantasy of superlative responsiveness and the costs incurred that James will reprise in the Prefaces. Throughout these texts, he reassigns the language of love, autonomy and subjection to his own experiences with the products of his imagination. In the Preface to The Wings of the Dove (1908), he presents Kate Croy as an imperious presence whose 'terms' regarding her presentation James as her author had (note the delicate litotes) 'far from overrated'. Put otherwise, the character required more writing than James had foreseen. Consequently, he marvels in retrospect at '[h]ow much and how often, and in what connexions and with what almost infinite variety, must he [the writer] be a dupe, that of his prime object, to be at all measurably a master, that of his actual substitute for it' (p. 1295). Here the aesthetic command with which James is so often identified he ascribes to his having first been subject to the deceptions practised by his creations. It is also of interest that James presents the writer here as a 'master' only over his 'substitute' for the 'prime object', not over the object itself. He thereby leaves the autonomy of the object intact, attenuating the mastery he invokes.
In the earliest of the essays, the 1875 piece, there are signs of what will become his project to uncouple Balzac's pecuniary ambition from his literary deeds. In one place, James points to the texture of Balzac's work -so carefully revised -as suggestive of a drive other than 'money-hunger' moving the novelist's pen: The tissue of his tales is always extraordinarily firm and hard; it may not at every point be cloth of gold, but it has always a metallic rigidity. It has been worked over a dozen times, and the work can never be said to belong to light literature. (pp. 37-8) The appearance of the text's having been 'worked over a dozen times' hints at the presence of an artistic ideal, the striving towards which has caused Balzac to temper his efforts with a revisory meticulousness, a leisurely 'finger[ing] of style'. 12 In his 1877 review of the correspondence, James notes Balzac's preoccupation in these letters with daily calculating the credit of work accrued against the debts owed. Again, the letters hardly indicate that their author cherished an artistic 'ideal', but James counters that to come to this conclusion would be to negate the evidence of Balzac's prose (p. 72). He emphasises the meticulousness with which Balzac honed these texts, in spite of the threat of 'promises, pledges, projects, contracts' (p. 72). James writes that 'Balzac's way of hurrying was all his own; it was a sternly methodical haste and might have been mistaken, in a more lightly-weighted 12 Henry James, 'The Middle Years', in Terminations (London 1895) p. 180. 128 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY genius, for elaborate trifling. The close texture of his work never relaxed' (p. 73). His point seems to be that the novelist's style evinces an odd disdain for economy: Balzac took pains to revise, augment, and intensify his text where he might instead have been expected simply to move on to the next order of business. This 'sternly methodical haste' seems far from the author whom Sainte-Beuve described as '"the grossest, greediest example of literary vanity that he had ever known"' (p. 77). James marshals his evidence in order to aim at an aspect of what he calls the 'légende' of Balzac (p. 32). This is the narrative he inherits from Taine, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and Golan, among others. It involves a formula regarding the relationship between Balzac's art and his financial debts: the amount Balzac worked was in direct proportion to the amount of money that he owed; he had little choice but to ameliorate the latter with the former. Given all readers now know of James's own uncomfortable dealings with and feelings about the literary marketplace, it is not surprising that any object he sought to install in the place of an intimate identification would have first to be dissociated from such a narrative. 13 I think it is for this reason that in both the 1875 and the 1877 essays James speculates that Balzac may have magnified the extent of his debts. In the first essay, he proposes that the novelist 'amused himself with representing this pecuniary incubus as far more mysteriously and heroically huge than it was' (p. 34). And in the 1877 review of the correspondence, he professes perplexity as to why Balzac's debts 'should bloom so perennially' given his 'heroic' labour and the 'meagre pattern' of his 'domestic economy' (p. 73). In the same review, James places scare quotes around these '"debts"', introducing a note of incredulity, as if to ask what reality there was to these fantastic '"debts"that dusky, vaguely outlined, insatiable maw which we see grimacing for ever behind [Balzac]' (p. 83). The choice of 'dusky' and 'vaguely outlined' further casts the veracity of the '"debts"' in doubt.
If Balzac had given a dramatic caste to his 'pecuniary incubus' this would accord with his famed enjoyment of the unstable boundaries between art and life. As James phrases it, '[t]he things he invented were as real to him as the things he knew, and his actual experience is overlaid with a thousand thicknesses, as it were, of imaginary experience' (p. 36). More importantly, by offering another story about Balzac's debts, James interposes some distance between the novelist and the 'money-hunger' reputed to have motivated his artistic efforts. In the 1877 review, by way of his choice of excerpts from Balzac's letters, James tacitly offers a reason as to why the author may have fabricated the heft of his debts and so harped upon them.
Citing letters to the novelist's sister and mother in which Balzac begs their forgiveness for his filial neglect, James intimates that Balzac's '"debts"' served as the pretext for his monomaniacal passion for work: perhaps this insistence on debts 'inexorable and fixed' was the means by which Balzac justified having 'almost wholly resolved himself into the worker' (p. 77). For '[a] man could not be such a worker as Balzac and be much else besides' (p. 81).
In addition to recasting Balzac's debts as a prodigious excuse, James employs a craftier, more decisive method of uncoupling the author's literary labour from his desire for financial gain. It takes the form of a substitution. Between James's 1877 essay on the correspondence and his 1902 introduction, a gap of almost twenty-five years, Balzac's monetary debts go missing. In the last three of the essays, James makes no mention of the author's finances. Until the last, he acknowledges that Balzac's great creative talent is especially fired on the topic of money and of 'things' more broadly, but he no longer connects the novelist's passion for work to the 'insatiable maw' of his financial losses. Instead, in the 1902 introduction, the 1905 lecture-essay, and the 1913 review, James emphasises the size of Balzac's 'huge conceived and accepted task', all the while linking the intensity with which the novelist worked to the magnitude of this creative undertaking (p. 123). This task is variously described by James across the five essays. At his most restrained, in 1913, it is '[Balzac's] plan for a complete picture of the manners and aspects of his country and his period' (p. 140). In 1902, with an illustrative vividness to rival Balzac's own: Balzac's plan was simply to do everything that could be done. He proposed to himself to 'turn over' the great garden [of life] from north to south and from east to west; a task -immense, heroic, to this day immeasurable -that he bequeathed us the partial performance of, a prodigious ragged clod, in the twenty monstrous years representing his productive career, years of concentration and sacrifice the vision of which still makes us ache. (p. 92) From 1902 onwards, this 'immense', 'immeasurable', 'prodigious' creative task takes the place of the overwhelming monetary debts originally viewed by James to be the driving force behind Balzac's writing. Another kind of obligation, an artistic one, has come quietly to replace the pecuniary kind. This substitution of one debt for another is indexed at a more local level by the shifting significance of 'business' over the course of the essays. Kathleen Lawrence has observed that James weakens the connection of 'business' to 130 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY commerce. 14 He comes to use the word to designate the creative task or an endeavour, as with this example from the 1902 introduction: 'we can think, frankly, of no one else with an equal amount of business on his hands who would either have so put himself out for aspects or made them almost by themselves a living subject' (p. 98). James here remarks on the indefatigable pains Balzac takes to bring his mise-en-scène to life, notwithstanding the absurdly grand total he has tasked himself with rendering. By the time of James's 1905 'The Lesson of Balzac', the language of debt, credit, profligacy and ruin is used almost entirely to refer to aesthetic matters. Transposed to this field, Balzac's chronic indebtedness is transvalued so as to become the pre-eminent sign of his artistic greatness and superiority to the 'cheapness' of the literary marketplace. Balzac was 'the last of the novelists to do the thing handsomely' (p. 133). James imagines that the novelist spared nothing in the process of composing his characters and his opus more broadly. Liberally, magnanimously, Balzac gave his creative resources, his health, his very fund of life to the task at hand. To this end, James comes to celebrate the author's eventual physical and creative bankruptcy as proof of the art-life well lived. Balzac's is 'the lesson that there is no convincing art that is not ruinously expensive' (p. 133). ' [B]elonging to the class of the hand-made', his work is ultimately positioned in opposition to those novels James describes as 'article[s] of commerce', 'showing on every side the stamp of the machine' (p. 134).
In a final turn of the screw, the indebtedness for which James celebrates Balzac in 'The Lesson' is transmitted to the author's readers and successors. It is a complex rhetorical manoeuvre but in essence James comes to present Balzac as possessing an intrinsic fund of talent which, in spite of himself, he could never finally spend. That the novelist attempted nonetheless to ruin himself on behalf of his art, leaving the art of the fiction thus liberally entailed, is the reason novel-lovers are forever in his debt. For his part, James acknowledges that he is writing about Balzac as an emulous fellow-worker, who has learned from him more of the lessons of the engaging mystery of fiction than from any one else, and who is conscious of so large a debt to repay that it has had positively to be discharged in instalments, as if one could never have at once all the required cash in hand. (p. 121) With this idea of an obligation 'discharged in instalments', James invites readers to view the essays on Balzac as a concatenated series, a potentially endless series of disbursements ('as if one could never have at once all the required cash in hand' (emphasis added)). He captures something of the perdurable quality of his imagined debt to Balzac (and debt as it recurs in the essays generally) in an image from the peroration of 'The Lesson'. Here James figures himself, alongside all practitioners in the art of fiction, paying a kind of eternal homage to Balzac as they endlessly revolve, 'circulating without motion', around a statuesque form: '[s]o far as we do move, we move round him; every road comes back to him; he sits there, in spite of us, so massively, for orientation' (p. 139). 15 By recasting for himself the connections between Balzac, the author's debts and his labour so that this triad is free of the taint of trade, James retrieves the author from the side of a coarse reality, installing him in a space where objects are conditioned by desire and phantasy -or in James's words, 'figured, gilded and enriched'. Once there, between reality and imagination, we can think of Balzac as a prop or even a Jamesian 'ficelle' with which James stages a serious creative concern: the nature and quality of the artist's responsibility to his creative task -or 'subject' as James often prefers, according it thereby the dignity of subjectivity. From the very beginning of his career, these questions of responsibility preoccupy James. Roderick Hudson (1875), for instance, published the same year as the first essay on Balzac, is an extended meditation on the responsibilities of the artist to his talents, his family, his friends. In what follows, I propose that James casts Balzac as the bearer of a superlative sense of responsibility to his task, elaborating '"through'" him the vicissitudes of such an accountability.
As early as his 1875 piece, James writes of Balzac having represented no less than 'everything' that played a part in 'the civilization of his time'. It was to be a 'complete portrait' (my emphasis): Balzac proposed to himself to illustrate by a tale or a group of tales every phase of French life and manners during the first half of the nineteenth century. To be colossally and exhaustively complete -complete not only 15 Brad Evans, 'Relating in Henry James (The Artwork of Networks)', Henry James Review, 36/1 (Winter 2015) pp. 1-23: 5. It could be that James is playing here with the idea of Auguste Rodin's sculpture of Balzac, Monument to Balzac (1898). It is not clear how he would have seen the sculpture, which may explain why his imaginary statue features Balzac seated while Rodin's has the author standing. Rodin's sculpture was commissioned in 1891 by the Société des Gens de Lettres, and a full-size plaster model was displayed in 1898 at a salon in the Champ de Mars. After coming under criticism, however, the model was rejected by the Société and Rodin moved it to his home in Meudon. 132 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY in the generals but in the particulars -to touch upon every salient point, to illuminate every typical feature, to reproduce every sentiment, every idea, every person, every place, every object, that has played a part, however minute, however obscure, in the life of the French peoplenothing less than this was his programme. (pp. 39-40) Variations upon this idea appear not only across the five essays but often in multiple places within individual pieces. Its repetition (as well as James's resounding but also, perhaps, stuck or frozen 'every' 16 ) has the effect of suggesting that the scale upon which Balzac conceived of his obligations is not easily assimilated to thought. These formal gestures to a failure of comprehension evoke what James will later confirm: the 'sublimity' of Balzac's 'undertaking'. In his 1905 lecture-essay, James writes, '[t]he whole thing, it is impossible not to keep repeating, was what he deemed treatable. One really knows in all imaginative literature no undertaking to compare it with for courage, good faith and sublimity' (p. 107). It seems 'impossible not to keep repeating' because this doing of '[t]he whole thing' seems itself an impossibility and a problem that cannot be solved must be repeated.
On the other hand, by describing Balzac's projected subject as a 'whole', James appears to accord the subject compassable limits. The same logic might apply to his remark that the novelist's responsibilities were to 'everything', or that it was his proposition to be 'complete'. Yet the notion of 'exhaustively complete' is swiftly broken down by James into a seemingly inexhaustible list of requisite items: 'every salient point [. . .] every typical feature, every sentiment, every idea, every person, every place, every object'. Balzac's subject becomes wildly expansive, endless. 'Complete', for Balzac, meant 'complete not only in the generals but in the particulars'. James sketches not only an extensive plane, composed of 'salient point[s]' and 'typical features' traversed by 'sentiment[s]' and 'idea[s]', but also an intensive depth, made of 'every person, every place, every object'. We can think here of Illusions perdues (1837-43). The spreading breadth of this novel and its sequels includes the history of paper production, the mores of the new journalism, and the recondite procedures of civil law, with, along the axis of depth, the travails of David and È ve at the Angoulême pulping house and the adventures of Lucien. 'Quantity and intensity', James writes in 1905, 'are at once and together [Balzac's] sign' (p. 124). 16 James would go on to add further instances of 'every' and 'everything' to these essays; it is plainly one of his keywords in relation to the novelist. For example, in the original text of his critical introduction to The Two Young Brides, trans. Lady Mary Loyd, with introduction by Henry James (London 1902), the sentence 'Balzac's plan was simply to do all' (p. viii) is changed to 'Balzac's plan was simply to do everything' (p. 112): Notes on Novelists, With Some Other Notes (New York 1914).
There is no doubt that, for the later James, Balzac's unparalleled commitment to his project represents the great source of his artistic achievements. In 1905, James writes of the 'envy' one can feel thinking of all the 'human cases' and 'personal predicaments' available to Balzac. 'It was', James continues, 'up to his chin, constantly, that he sank in his illusionnot as the weak and timid in this line do, only up to his ankles or his knees' (p. 128). As we have seen, James attributes the vitality of Balzac's people and scenes to this wholehearted response. But given the extraordinary number of cases and predicaments that must be assumed to make up 'every phase of French life and manners during the first half of the nineteenth century', what are the chances of Balzac sinking not only 'up to his chin' but altogether above his head in the matter? As James puts it in the 1902 essay, if one is proposing to take a subject 'as a whole [. . .] you must be careful to take some quantity that will not hug you to death' (p. 103). In fact, the essays, early and late, all ascribe Balzac's harrowed and untimely end to what is at one and the same time a spectacular sinking into a vast illusion and a failure to be careful. The act betokens Balzac's 'courage, good faith and sublimity' as an artist, but it was also a choice incompatible with human life. In the review of the correspondence from 1877, James points out that even the life Balzac did have was a deathly one, given it was spent 'fastened to the writing desk' (p. 74). Later in the review, he compares Balzac with Dickens in the manner of their endings: '[t]hey succumbed to the task that they had laid upon themselves' (p. 89). In 1902, James describes Balzac as a self-made 'victim' ('it is doubtless his own fault') of the 'intensity with which he saw his general matter as a whole' (p. 103). Imagining Balzac in the grip of such a vision is nothing if not generative of ambivalence for James: it captures an ideal of artistic responsibility, while making at the same time a trap of this ideal. No doubt his ambivalence is in part why James writes not only of the 'envy' but of the 'terror' with which one might think 'of the nature and the effort of the Novelist', a vocation that attained its 'highest expression' in Balzac (p. 122) This conundrum whereby the zeniths of creative achievement are to be found on the other side of a costly commitment recurs with some regularity in the Prefaces. In the Preface to Daisy Miller (1909), for example, James remarks on the intensity with which all the artist's creative subjects strive 'completely to express [themselves]'. It is, he writes, the simplest truth about a human entity, a situation, a relation, an aspect of life, however small, on behalf of which the claim to charmed attention is made, [that it] strains ever, under one's hand, more intensely, most intensely, to justify that claim; strains ever, as it were, toward the uttermost end or aim of one's meaning or of its own 134 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY numerous connexions; struggles at each step, and in defiance of one's raised admonitory finger, fully and completely to express itself. (p. 1278) One of the many striking things about this passage is not only the autonomy James ascribes to aesthetic phenomena, but the good intentions imputed to their tendency to contest any limits placed upon their self-expression. This effort of the subject to resist the writer's repressive 'hand' is desirable insofar as this disobedience is an attempt to 'justify' the artist's attraction to the subject in the first place. For the sake of her task, therefore, the artist is reliant upon the subject's power to throw off her creative authority. Perhaps this is why, in the essays, Balzac is invariably presented as something of a willing victim. In 1902, describing Balzac's predicament as itself a 'whole thing' (indexing its defiance of a neat solution, perhaps), James writes: It was the having wanted to do so much that was the trap, whatever possibilities of glory might accompany the good faith with which he fell into it. What accompanies us as we frequent him is a sense of the deepening ache of that good faith with the increase of his working consciousness, the merciless development of his huge subject and of the rigour of all the conditions. We see the whole thing quite as if Destiny had said to him: 'You want to "do" France, presumptuous, magnificent, miserable man -the France of revolutions, revivals, restorations, of Bonapartes, Bourbons, republics, of war and peace, of blood and romanticism, of violent change and intimate continuity, the France of the first half of your century? Very well; you most distinctly shall, and you shall particularly let me hear, even if the great groan of your labour do fill at moments the temple of letters, how you like the job.' (p. 100) Whatever egoism there may have been in Balzac's undertaking, it is seen as very much secondary to the sincere intention 'to "do" France' which James calls 'good faith'. Death, both virtual and actual, is one consequence James associates with the kind of responsibility he envisions Balzac to have assumed. Then there is also the threat of there being no (formal) end at all. Shapely form is one of the principal values, for James, of the novel art, but how should the artist go about imposing limits upon a 'whole' with such 'misty edges and far reverberations' (p. 41)? James represents this impossibility by juxtaposing two metaphorical structures: first, he acknowledges that the vast geography of Balzac's subject matter -'the extraordinary number and length of his radiating and ramifying corridors' -was the author's 'luxury' as a writer. But in the next moment, he has converted Balzac's bountiful house of fiction into a 'labyrinth in which he finally lost himself' (p. 127). James repeatedly makes