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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

them the esthetic importance, any more than the moral, that
their narrator claims for them and in his elaborate insistence
on which he has so hopelessly lost his way. If they were important-by which I mean if they showed in any other light
than that of their particular erotic exercise-they would justify
the claim made for them with such superior art. They have no
general history, since their history is only, and immediately
and extravagantly, that of their too cheap and too easy romance.
Why should the career of the young man be offered as a sample
of pathetic, of tragic, of edifying corruption '-in which case
it might indeed be matter for earnest exhibition. The march of
corruption, the insidious influence of propinquity, opportunity,
example, the ravage of false estimates and the drama of sterilising passion-all this is a thinkable theme, thinkable especially
in the light of a great talent. But for Andrea Sperelli there is
not only no march, no drama, there is not even a weakness to
give him the semblance of dramatic, of plastic material; he is
solidly, invariably, vulgarly strong, and not a bit more corrupt
at the end of his disorders than at the beginning. His erudition,
his intellectual accomplishments and elevation, are too easily
spoken for; no view of him is given in which we can feel or
taste them. Donna Maria is scarcely less signal an instance of
the apparent desire on the author's part to impute a " value "
defeated by his apparently not knowing what a value is. She is
apparently an immense value for the occasions on which the
couple secretly meet, but how is she otherwise one s and what
becomes therefore of the beauty, the interest, the pathos, the
struggle, or whatever else, of her relation-relation of character,
of judgment, even of mere taste-to her own collapse ' The
immediate physical sensibility that surrenders in her is, as
throughout, exquisitely painted; but since nothing operates
for her, one way or the other, but that familiar faculty, we are
left casting about us almost as much for what else she has to
give as for what, in any case, she may wish to keep.
The author's view of the whole matter of durations and
dates, in these connections, gives the scale of " distinction "