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

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

troubled air in which it was born. Yet how can we do less than
applaud a composition throwing off as it goes such a passage
as the splendid group of pages cited by Madame Karenine
from the incident of the heroine's causing herself to be rowed
over to the island in her Italian lake on that summer afternoon
when the sense of her situation had become sharp for her to
anguish, in order to take stock of the same without interruption
and see, as we should say to-day, where she is e The whole
thing has the grand manner and the noblest eloquence, reaching out as it does on the spot to the lesson and the moral of the
convulsions that have been prepared in the first instance with
such complacency, and illustrating in perfection the author's
faculty for the clear re-emergence and the prompt or, as we
may call it, the paying reaction. The case is put for her here as
into its final nutshell you may " live " exactly as you like,
that is live in perfect security and fertility, when such breadth
of rendering awaits your simply sitting down to it. Is it not true,
we say, that without her breadth our wonderful woman would
have been " nowhere " f-whereas with it she is effectively and
indestructibly at any point of her field where she may care to
pretend to stand.
This biographer, I must of course note, discriminates with
delicacy among her heroine's felicities and mistakes, recognising that some of the former, as a latent awkwardness in them
developed, inevitably parted with the signs that distinguished
them from the latter; but I think we feel, as the instances
multiply, that no regret could have equalled for us that of our
not having the display vivid and complete. Once all the elements of the scarce in advance imaginable were there it would
have been a pity that they should not offer us the show of their
full fruition. What more striking show, for example, than that,
as recorded by Madame Karenine in a footnote, the afflicted
parent of Solange should have lived to reproduce, or rather, as
she would herself have said, to " arrange " the girlish character
and conduct of that young person, so humiliating at the time
to any near relation, let alone a mother, in the novel of " Made