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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

ness of notation, once the tide of the copious as a condition of
the thorough had fairly set in e
So, to express it briefly, the possibility of hugging the shore
of the real as it had not, among us, been hugged, and of pushing inland, as far as a keel might float, wherever the least opening seemed to smile, dawned upon a few votaries and gathered
further confidence with exercise. Who could say, of course,
that Jane Austen had not been close, just as who could ask if
Anthony Trollope had not been copious.-just as who could
not say that it all depended on what was meant by these terms e
The demonstration of what was meant, it presently appeared,
could come but little by little, quite as if each tentative adventurer had rather anxiously to learn for himself what might
be meant-this failing at least the leap into the arena of some
great demonstrative, some sudden athletic and epoch-making
authority. Who could pretend that Dickens was anything but
romantic, and even more romantic in his humour, if possible,
than in pathos or in queer perfunctory practice of the " plot "e
Who could pretend that Jane Austen didn't leave much more
untold than told about the aspects and manners even of the
confined circle in which her muse revolved e Why shouldn't it
be argued against her that where her testimony complacently
ends the pressure of appetite within us presumes exactly to
begin e, Who could pretend that the reality of Trollope didn't
owe much of its abundance to the diluted, the quite extravagantly watered strain, no less than to the heavy hand, in which
it continued to be ladled out c' Who of the younger persuasion
would not have been ready to cite, as one of the liveliest opportunities for the critic eager to see representation searching, such
a claim for the close as Thackeray's sighing and protesting
" look-in " at the acquaintance between Arthur Pendennis and
Fanny Bolton, the daughter of the Temple laundress, amid the
purlieus of that settlemente The sentimental habit and the
spirit of romance, it was unmistakably chargeable, stood out
to sea as far as possible the moment the shore appeared to offer
the least difficulty to hugging, and the Victorian age bristled