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

THE NEW NOVEL

259

-but is this all? These are the circumstances of the interestwe see, we see; but where is the interest itself, where and what
is its centre, and how are we to measure it in relation to that? t,
Of course we may in the act of exhaling that plaint (which we
have just expressed at its mildest) well remember how many
people there are to tell us that to " measure t an interest is
none of our affair; that we have but to take it on the cheapest
and easiest terms and be thankful; and that if by our very confession we have been led the imaginative dance the music has
done for us all it pretends to. Which words, however, have
only to happen to be for us the most unintelligent conceivable
not in the least to arrest our wonderment as to where our bedrenched consciousness may still not awkwardly leave us for
the pleasure of appreciation. That appreciation is also a mistake and a priggishness, being reflective and thereby corrosive,
is another of the fond dicta which we are here concerned but to
brush aside-the more closely to embrace the welcome induction that appreciation, attentive and reflective, inquisitive
and conclusive, is in this connection absolutely the golden key
to our pleasure. The more it plays up, the more we recognise
and are able to number the sources of our enjoyment, the
greater the provision made for security in that attitude, which
corresponds, by the same stroke, with the reduced danger of
waste in the undertaking to amuse us. It all comes back to our
amusement, and to the noblest surely, on the whole, we know;
and it is in the very nature of clinging appreciation not to
sacrifice consentingly a single shade of the art that makes for
that blessing. From this solicitude spring our questions, and
not least the one to which we give ourselves for the moment
here-this moment of our being regaled as never yet with the
fruits of the movement (if the name be not of too pompous an
application where the flush and the heat of accident too seem
so candidly to look forth), in favour of the " expression of life "
in terms as loose as may pretend to an effect of expression at all.
The relegation of terms to the limbo of delusions outlived so
far as ever really cultivated becomes of necessity, it will be
plain, the great mark of the faith that for the novelist to show