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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

this lack of intensity, but rather an aggravation of it through a
sort of suffusion of the whole thing by the voice and speech of
the author. These things set the subject, whatever it be, afloat
in the upper air, where it takes a happy bath of brightness and
vagueness or swims like a soap-bubble kept up by blowing.
This is no drawback when she is on the ground of her own life,
to which she is tied by a certain number of tangible threads;
but to embark on one of her confessed fictions is to have-after
all that has come and gone, in our time, in the trick of persuasion-a little too much the feeling of going up in a balloon.
We are borne by a fresh cool current and the car delightfully
dangles; but as we peep over the sides we see things-as we
usually know them-at a dreadful drop beneath. Or perhaps a
better way to express the sensation is to say what I have just
been struck with in the re-perusal of " Elle et Lui "; namely
that this book, like others by the same hand, affects the readerand the impression is of the oddest-not as a first but as a
second echo or edition of the immediate real, or in other words
of the subject. The tale may in this particular be taken as
typical of the author's manner; beautifully told, but told, as
if on a last remove from the facts, by some one repeating what
he has read or what he has had from another and thereby
inevitably becoming more general and superficial, missing or
forgetting the "hard "parts and slurring them over and making
them up. Of everything but feelings the presentation is dim.
We recognise that we shall never know the original narrator and
that the actual introducer is the only one we can deal with. But
we sigh perhaps as we reflect that we may never confront her
with her own informant.
To that, however, we must resign ourselves; for I remember
in time that the volume from which I take occasion to speak
with this levity is the work that I began by pronouncing a
precious illustration. With the aid of the disclosures of the
Revue de Paris it was, as I hinted, to show us that no mistakes and no pains are too great to be, in the air of art, triumphantly convertible. Has it really performed this functions I