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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

really of the fewest in a race to which the very imagination of
it may be said, I think, to have been comparatively denied. The
imagination of it sat irremovably, on the other hand, and as a
matter of course, at the Nohant fireside; where indeed we find
the play and the ravage chiefly interesting through our thus seeing the delicate Chopin, whose semi-smothered appeal remains
peculiarly pathetic, all helpless and foredoomed at the centre
of the whirl. Nothing again strikes us more in the connection
than the familiar truth that interesting persons make everything that concerns them interesting, or seldom fail to redeem
from what might in another air seem but meanness and vanity
even their most compromised states and their greatest wastes of
value. Every one in the particular Nohant drama here exposed
loses by the exposure-so far as loss could be predicated of
amounts which, in general, excepting the said sensibility,
were so scant among them; every one, that is, save the
ruling spirit of all, with the extraordinary mark in her of
the practical defiance of waste and of her inevitable enrichment, for our measure, as by reflection from the surrounding shrinkage. One of the oddest aspects of the scene is
also one of the wretchedest, but the oddity makes it interesting, by the law I just glanced at, in spite of its vulgar side.
How could it not be interesting, we ask as we read, to feel
that Chopin, though far from the one man, was the one
gentleman of the association, the finest set of nerves and
scruples, and yet to see how little that availed him, in exasperated reactions, against mistakes of perverted sympathy sf It is
relevant in a high degree to our view of his great protectress as
reducible at her best to male terms that she herself in this very
light fell short, missed the ideal safeguard which for her friend
had been preinvolved-as of course may be the peril, ever,
with the creature so transmuted, and as is so strikingly exemplified, in the pages before us, when Madame Karenine ingenuously gives us chapter and verse for her heroine's so
unqualified demolition of the person of Madame d'Agoult,
devotee of Liszt, mother to be, by that token, of Richard
Wagner's second wife, and sometime intimate of the author