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

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

20o7

bility that his plan has originally made them; they remain
exasperated, erotic, hysterical, either homicidally or suicidally
determined, cut off from any personal source of life that does
not poison them; notwithstanding all of which they neither
starve dramatically nor suffer us to starve with them. How then
is this seemingly inevitable catastrophe prevented e We ask it
but to find on reflection that the answer opens the door to their
historian's whole secret. The unfortunates are deprived of any
enlarging or saving personal relation, that is of any beneficent
reciprocity; but they make up for it by their relation both to
the idea in general and to the whole world of the senses, which
is the completest that the author can conceive for them. He
may be described as thus executing on their behalf an artistic
volte-face of the most effective kind, with results wonderful to
note. The world of the senses, with which he surrounds them
-a world too of the idea, that is of a few ideas admirably expressed-yields them such a crop of impressions that the need
of other occasions to vibrate and respond, to act or to aspire, is
superseded by their immense factitious agitation. This agitation runs its course in strangely brief periods-a singular note,
the brevity, of every situation; but the period is while it lasts,
for all its human and social poverty, quite inordinately peopled
and furnished. The innumerable different ways in which his
concentrated couples are able to feel about each other and about
their enclosing cage of golden wire, the nature and the art of
Italy-these things crowd into the picture and pervade it, lighting it scarcely less, strange to say, because they are things
of bitterness and woe.
It is one of the miracles of the imagination; the great shining
element in which the characters flounder and suffer becomes
rich and beautiful for them, as well as in so many ways for us,
by the action of the writer's mind. They not only live in his
imagination, but they borrow it from him in quantities; indeed
without this charitable advance they would be poor creatures
enough, for they have in each case almost nothing of their own.
On the aid thus received they start, they get into motion; it