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

16 NOTES ON NOVELISTS
the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life,
and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic-or maenadic-foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and " I could wish my days to be bound
each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, and
whether I wish it or not.... I remember very well your attitude to life-this
conventional surface of it. You have none of that curiosity for the social stage
directions, the trivial ficelles of the business; it is simian; but that is how the
wild youth of man is captured.
The whole letter is enchanting.
But no doubt there is something great in the half success that has attended
the effort of turning into an emotional region Bald Conduct without any appeal,
or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious and constitutive facts of life. Not
that conduct is not constitutive, but dear! it's dreary! On the whole, conduct
is better dealt with on the cast-iron " gentleman " and duty formula, with as
little fervour and poetry as possible; stoical and short.
The last letter of all, it will have been abundantly noted, has,
with one of those characteristically thrown-out references to
himself that were always half a whim, half a truth and all a
picture, a remarkable premonition. It is addressed to Mr.
Edmond Gosse.
It is all very well to talk of renunciation, and of course it has to be done. But
for my part, give me a roaring toothache! I do like to be deceived and to
dream, but I have very little use for either watching or meditation. I was not
born for age..... I am a childless, rather bitter, very clear-eyed, blighted
youth. I have, in fact, lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to
descend the hill. I am going at it straight. And where I have to go down it is
a precipice.... You can never write another dedication that can give the same
pleasure to the vanished Tusitala.
Two days later he met his end in the happiest form, by the
straight swift bolt of the gods. It was, as all his readers know,
with an admirable unfinished thing in hand, scarce a quarter
written-a composition as to which his hopes were, presumably
with much justice and as they were by no means always, of the
highest. Nothing is more interesting than the rich way in
which, in " Weir of Hermiston " and " Catriona," the predominant imaginative Scot reasserts himself after gaps and
lapses, distractions and deflections superficially extreme.
There are surely few backward jumps of this energy more
joyous and & pieds joints, or of a kind more interesting to a
critic. The imaginative vision is hungry and tender just in