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

THE NEW NOVEL

275

or amount of service required on these lines exceeding surely all
other such displayed degrees of energy put together. Nothing
could well interest us more than to see the exemplary value of
attention, attention given by the author and asked of the reader,
attested in a case in which it has had almost unspeakable difficulties to struggle with-since so we are moved to qualify the
particular difficulty Mr. Conrad has " elected " to face: the
claim for method in itself, method in this very sense of attention applied, would be somehow less lighted if the difficulties struck us as less consciously, or call it even less wantonly,
invoked. What they consist of we should have to diverge here
a little to say, and should even then probably but lose ourselves in the dim question of why so special, eccentric and
desperate a course, so deliberate a plunge into threatened
frustration, should alone have seemed open. It has been the
course, so far as three words may here serve, of his so multiplying his creators or, as we are now fond of saying, producers,
as to make them almost more numerous and quite emphatically
more material than the creatures and the production itself in
whom and which we by the general law of fiction expect such
agents to lose themselves. We take for granted by the general
law of fiction a primary author, take him so much for granted
that we forget him in proportion as he works upon us, and
that he works upon us most in fact by making us forget him.
Mr. Conrad's first care on the other hand is expressly to
posit or set up a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first
person singular, possessed of infinite sources of reference, who
immediately proceeds to set up another, to the end that this
other may conform again to the practice, and that even at that
point the bridge over to the creature, or in other words to the
situation or the subject, the thing " produced," shall, if the
fancy takes it, once more and yet once more glory in a gap.
It is easy to see how heroic the undertaking of an effective
fusion becomes on these terms, fusion between what we are
to know and that prodigy of our knowing which is ever half
the very beauty of the atmosphere of authenticity; from the