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

MATILDE SERAO

245

place is that by the operation of a singular law no place speedily
appears to be left for anything else; and the effect of that in
turn is greatly to modify, first, the truth of things, and second,
with small delay, what may be left them of their beauty. We
find ourselves wondering after a little whether there may not
really be more truth in the world misrepresented according to
our own familiar fashion than in such a world as that of
Madame Serao's exuberant victims of Venus. It is not only
that if Venus herself is notoriously beautiful her altar, as
happens, is by no means always proportionately august; it is
also that we draw, in the long run, small comfort from the
virtual suppression, by any painter, of whatever skill-and the
skill of this particular one fails to rise to the height-of every
relation in life but that over which Venus presides. In " Fior
di Passione " and the several others of a like connection that I
have named the suppression is really complete; the common
humanities and sociabilities are wholly absent from the picture.
The effect of this is extraordinarily to falsify the total show
and to present the particular affair-the intimacy in hand for
the moment, though the moment be but brief-as taking place
in a strange false perspective, a denuded desert which experience surely fails ever to give us the like of and the action
of which on the faculty of observation in the painter is anything
but favourable. It strikes at the root, in the impression producible and produced, of discrimination and irony, of humour
and pathos. Our present author would doubtless contend on
behalf of the works I have mentioned that pathos at least does
abound in them-the particular bitterness, the inevitable despair
that she again and again shows to be the final savour of the cup
of passione. It would be quite open to her to urge-and she
would be sure to do so with eloquence-that if we pusillanimously pant for a moral, no moral really can have the force of
her almost inveterate evocation of the absolute ravage of Venus,
the dry desolation that in nine cases out of ten Venus may
be perceived to leave behind her. That, however, but half
meets our argument-which bears by no means merely on the