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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

happened to be the genius of eloquence. It is all rapture and all
rage and all literature. The " Lettres d'un Voyageur t" spring
from the thick of the fight; " La Confession d'un Enfant du
Siecle " and " Les Nuits " are immediate echoes of the concert. The lovers are naked in the market-place and perform
for the benefit of society. The matter with them, to the perception of the stupefied spectator, is that they entertained for
each other every feeling in life but the feeling of respect.
What the absence of that article may do for the passion of hate
is apparently nothing to what it may do for the passion of love.
By our unhappy pair at any rate the luxury in question-the
little luxury of plainer folk-was not to be purchased, and in the
comedy of their despair and the tragedy of their recovery nothing is more striking than their convulsive effort either to reach
up to it or to do without it. They would have given for it
all else they possessed, but they only meet in their struggle the
inexorable never. They strain and pant and gasp, they beat
the air in vain for the cup of cold water of their hell. They
missed it in a way for which none of their superiorities could
make up. Their great affliction was that each found in the life
of the other an armoury of weapons to wound. Young as they
were, young as Musset was in particular, they appeared to have
afforded each other in that direction the most extraordinary
facilities; and nothing in the matter of the mutual consideration that failed them is more sad and strange than that even in
later years, when their rage, very quickly, had cooled, they never
arrived at simple silence. For Madame Sand, in her so much
longer life, there was no hush, no letting alone; though it
would be difficult indeed to exaggerate the depth of relative
indifference from which, a few years after Musset's death, such
a production as " Elle et Lui " could spring. Of course there
had been floods of tenderness, of forgiveness; but those, for
all their beauty of expression, are quite another matter. It is
just the fact of our sense of the ugliness of so much of the
episode that makes a wonder and a force of the fine style, all
round, in which it is offered us. That force is in its turn a sort