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

224

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

should flourish in an air so charged, intellectually speaking,
with the " aristocratic " element, becomes for us straightway
the greatest of oddities and at the same time, critically speaking,
one of the most interesting things conceivable.
The interest then springs from its being involved far us in
the " case." We recognise so mnany suggested consequences if
the case is really to prove responsible for it. We ask ourselves
if there be not a connection, we almost tremble lest there
shouldn't be; since what is more obvious than that, if a high
example of exclusive estheticism-as high a one as we are likely
ever to meet-is bound sooner or later to spring a leak, the
general question receives much lighte We recognise here the
value of our author's complete consistency: he would have
kept his bottom sound, so to speak, had he not remained so
long at sea. If those imperfect exponents of his faith whom we
have noted among ourselves fail to flower, for a climax, in any
proportionate way, we make out that they are embarrassed not
so much by any force they possess as by a force-a force of
temperament-that they lack. The anomaly I speak of presents
itself thus as the dilemma in which Signor D'Annunzio's consistency has inexorably landed him; and the disfigurement
breaks out, strikingly enough, in the very forefront of his
picture, at the point where he has most lavished his colour.
It is where he has most trusted and depended that he is most
betrayed, the traitor sharing certainly his tent and his confidence. What is it that in the interest of beauty he most
elaborately builds on if not on the love-affairs of his heroes
and heroines, if not on his exhibition of the free play, the
sincere play, the play closely studied and frankly represented,
of the sexual relation ' It is round this exercise, for him, that
expressible, demonstrable, communicable beauty prevailingly
clusters; a view indeed as to which we all generously go with
him, subject to the reserve for each of us of our own expression
and demonstration. It is these things on his part that break
down, it is his discrimination that falls short, and thereby the
very kind of intellectual authority most implied by his pre