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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

comparative desert of the inselective where our imagination has
itself to hunt out or call down (often among strange witnessed
flounderings or sand-storms) such analogies as may mercifully
" put" the thing. Mrs. Wharton not only owes to her cultivated art of putting it the distinction enjoyed when some ideal
of expression has the whole of the case, the case once made its
concern, in charge, but might further act for us, were we to
follow up her exhibition, as lighting not a little that question
of " tone," the author's own intrinsic, as to which we have
just seen Mr. Conrad's late production rather tend to darken
counsel. " The Custom of the Country" is an eminent instance of the sort of tonic value most opposed to that baffled
relation between the subject-matter and its emergence which
we find constituted by the circumvallations of " Chance."
Mrs. Wharton's reaction in presence of the aspects of life
hitherto, it would seem, mainly exposed to her is for the most
part the ironic-to which we gather that these particular aspects
have so much ministered that, were we to pursue the quest,
we might recognise in them precisely the saturation as to which
we a moment ago reserved our judgment. " The Custom of
the Country " is at any rate consistently, almost scientifically
satiric, as indeed the satiric light was doubtless the only one
in which the elements engaged could at all be focussed together.
But this happens directly to the profit of something that, as we
read, becomes more and more one with the principle of
authority at work; the light that gathers is a dry light, of
great intensity, and the effect, if not rather the very essence,
of its dryness is a particular fine asperity. The usual " creative "
conditions and associations, as we have elsewhere languished
among them, are thanks to this ever so sensibly altered; the
general authoritative relation attested becomes clear-we move
in an air purged at a stroke of the old sentimental and romantic
values, the perversions with the maximum of waste of perversions, and we shall not here attempt to state what this makes
for in the way of esthetic refreshment and relief; the waste
having kept us so dangling on the dark esthetic abyss. A shade
of asperity may be in such fashion a security against waste, and