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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

those gathered in after the writer's death-the mutilations,
suppressions and other freedoms then used, for that matter,
being now exposed. If no plot of her most bustling fiction
ever thickened at the rate at which those agitations of her inner
circle at which we have glanced multiplied upon her hands
through the later 'forties, so we are tempted to find her rather
less in possession of her great moyens when handling the
artificial presentation than when handling what we may call
the natural. It is not too much to say that the long letter
addressed to the cynical Solange in April '52, and which these
pages give us in extensor would have made the fortune of any
mere interesting " story " in which one of the characters might
have been presented as writing it. It is a document of the highest
psychological value and a practical summary of all the elements
of the writer's genius, of all her indefeasible advantages; it is
verily the gem of her biographer's collection. Taken in connection with a copious communication to her son, of the
previous year, on the subject of his sister's character and vices,
and of their common experience of these, it offers, in its ease of
movement, its extraordinary frankness and lucidity, its splendid
apprehension and interpretation of realities, its state, as it were,
of saturation with these, exactly the kind of interest for which
her novels were held remarkable, but in a degree even above
their maximum. Such a letter is an effusion of the highest price;
none of a weight so baffling to estimation was probably ever
inspired in a mother by solicitude for a clever daughter's possibilities. Never surely had an accomplished daughter laid under
such contribution a mother of high culture; never had such remarkable and pertinent things had to flow from such a source;
never in fine was so urgent an occasion so admirably, so inimitably risen to. Marvellous through it all is the way in which,
while a common recognition of the " facts of life," as between
two perfectly intelligent men of the world, gives the whole
diapason, the abdication of moral authority and of the rights of
wisdom never takes place. The tone is a high implication of
the moral advantages that Solange had inveterately enjoyed and
had decided none the less to avail herself of so little; which