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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

makes their common basis of " passion,"' desire, enchantment,
aversion. The essence of the situation is the same in " II Trionfo "
and " II Fuoco " as in " L'Innocente ": the temporarily united
pair devour each other, tear and rend each other, wear each other
out through a series of erotic convulsions and nervous reactions
that are made interesting-interesting to us-almost exclusively
by the special wealth of their consciousness. The medium in
which they move is admirably reflected in it; the autumn light
of Venice, the afterglow of her past, in the drama of the elderly
actress and the young rhetorician of " II Fuoco t; the splendour
of the summer by the edge of the lower Adriatic in that of the
two isolated erotomaniacs of " II Trionfo," indissolubly linked at
last in the fury of physical destruction into which the man
drags the woman by way of retribution for the fury of physical
surrender into which she has beguiled him.
As for " L'Innocente " again, briefly, there is perhaps nothing
in it to match the Roman passages of " II Piacere"; but the
harmony of the general, the outer conditions pervades the
picture; the sweetness of the villeggiatura life, the happiness
of place and air, the lovability of the enclosing scene, all at
variance with the sharpness of the inner tragedy. The inner
tragedy of " L'Innocente " has a concentration that is like the
carrying, through turns and twists, upstairs and down, of some
cup filled to the brim, of which no drop is yet spilled; such
cumulative truth rules the scene after we have once accepted the
postulate. It is true that the situation as exhibited involves for
Giuliana, the young wife, the vulgarest of adventures; yet she
becomes, as it unfolds, the figure of the whole gallery in whom
the pathetic has at once most of immediate truth and of investing poetry. I much prefer her for beauty and interest to Donna
Maria in " II Piacere," the principal other image of faith and
patience sacrificed. We see these virtues as still supreme in her
even while she faces, in advance, her ordeal, in respect to which
it has been her hope, in fact her calculation, that her husband
will have been deceived about the paternity of her child; and
she is so truthfully touching when this possibility breaks down