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

198

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

And we have had particularly before us, in verse, I must add,
"Francescada Rimini," with the great impression a great actress
has enabled this drama to make.
Only I must immediately in this connection also add that
Signor D'Annunzio's plays are, beside his novels, of decidedly
minor weight; testifying abundantly to his style, his romantic
sense and his command of images, but standing in spite of their
eloquence only for half of his talent, largely as he yet appears
in " II Fuoco " to announce himself by implication as an intending, indeed as a pre-eminent dramatist.) The example is
interesting when we catch in the fact the opportunity for comparing with the last closeness the capacity of the two rival
canvases, as they become for the occasion, on which the picture
of life may be painted. The closeness is never so great, the
comparison never so pertinent, as when the separate efforts are
but different phases of the same talent. It is not at any rate
under this juxtaposition that the infinitely greater amplitude of
portrayal resident in the novel strikes us least. It in fact strikes
us the more, in this quarter, for Signor D'Annunzio, that his
plays have been with one exception successes. We must none
the less take " Francesca " but for a success of curiosity; on the
part of the author I mean even more than on the part of the
public. It is primarily a pictorial and ingenious thing and, as
a picture of passion, takes, in the total collection, despite its
felicities of surface and arrangement, distinctly a " back seat."
Scarcely less than its companions it overflows with the writer's
plenitude of verbal expression, thanks to which, largely, the
series will always prompt a curiosity and even a tenderness in
any reader interested precisely in this momentous question of
" style in a play 't-interested in particular to learn by what
esthetic chemistry a play would as a work of art propose to
eschew it. It is in any such connection so inexpugnable that
we have only to be cheated of it in one place to feel the subject
cry aloud for it, like a sick man forsaken, in another.
I may mention at all events the slightly perverse fact that,