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

THE NEW NOVEL

28i

not weeding, illustrational and not itself starved of illustration,
or starved of referability and association, which is the same
thing, as meets the eye in any glance that leaves Mr. Wells
at Mr. Wells's best-inspired hour out of our own account. The
truth is, however, that Mrs. Wharton is herself here out of our
account, even as we have easily recognised Mr. Galsworthy and
Mr. Maurice Hewlett to be; these three authors, with whatever differences between them, remaining essentially votaries of
selection and intention and being embodiments thereby, in each
case, of some state over and above that simple state of possession of much evidence, that confused conception of what the
44 slice " of life must consist of, which forms the text of our
remarks. Mrs. Wharton, her conception of the " slicet" so
clarified and cultivated, would herself of course form a text in
quite another connection, as Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Galsworthy
would do each in his own, which we abstain from specifying;
but there are two or three grounds on which the author of
" Ethan Frome,/" The Valley of Decision " and " The House
of Mirth," whom we brush by with reluctance, would point the
moral of the treasure of amusement sitting in the lap of method
with a felicity peculiarly her own. If one of these is that she
too has clearly a saturation-which it would be ever so interesting to determine and appreciate-we have it from her not in
the crude state but in the extract, the extract that makes all
the difference for our sense of an artistic economy. If the
extract, as would appear, is the result of an artistic economy,
as the latter is its logical motive, so we find it associated in Mrs.
Wharton with such appeals to our interest, for instance, as the
fact that, absolutely sole among our students of this form, she
suffers, she even encourages, her expression to flower into some
sharp image or figure of her thought when that will make the
thought more finely touch us. Her step, without straying, encounters the living analogy, which she gathers, in passing, without awkwardness of pause, and which the page then carries on
its breast as a trophy plucked by a happy adventurous dash, a
token of spirit and temper as well as a proof of vision. We note
it as one of the kinds of proof of vision that most fail us in that
T