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

2i6

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

which a great feeling on the painter's part ever gives to small
things. With this ampler truth the last page of the book is
above all invested, the description of the supreme momentfor some time previous creeping nearer and nearer-at which
the delirious protagonist beguiles his vaguely but not fully
suspicious companion into coming out with him toward the
edge of a dizzy place over the sea, where he suddenly grasps
her for her doom and the sense of his awful intention, flashing
a light back as into their monstrous past, makes her shriek for her
her life. She dodges him at the first betrayal, panting and
trembling.
" Are you crazy s " she cried with wrath in her throat. " Are you crazy C"
But as she saw him make for her afresh in silence, as she felt herself seized with
still harsher violence and dragged afresh toward her danger, she understood it
all in a great sinister flash which blasted her soul with terror. " No, no, Giorgio!
Let me go! Let me go! Another minute-listen, listen! Just a minute! I
want to say-!" She supplicated, mad with terror, getting herself free and
hoping to make him wait, to put him off with pity. "A minute! Listen! I love
you! Forgive me! Forgive me! " She stammered incoherent words, desperate,
feeling herself overcome, losing her ground, seeing death close. " Murder!"
she then yelled in her fury. And she defended herself with her nails, with her
teeth, biting like a wild beast. " Murder! " she yelled, feeling herself seized by
the hair, felled to the ground on the edge of the precipice, lost. The dog meanwhile barked out at the scuffle. The struggle was short and ferocious, as between
implacable enemies who had been nursing to this hour in the depth of their souls
an intensity of hate. And they plunged into death locked together.
The wonder-working shrine of the Abruzzi, to which they
have previously made their way, is a local Lourdes, the resort
from far and wide of the physically afflicted, the evocation of
whose multitudinous presence, the description of whose unimaginable miseries and ecstasies, grovelling struggles and supplications, has the mark of a pictorial energy for such matters
not inferior to that of Smile Zola-to the degree even that the
originality of the pages in question was, if I remember rightly,
rather sharply impugned in Paris. D'Annunzio's defence, however, was easy, residing as it does in the fact that to handle any
subject successfully handled by Zola (his failures are another
matter) is quite inevitably to walk more or less in his footsteps,