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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

strikes me (to give an instance) as singularly fine, but the subject
belongs none the less to the hapless order of those that fail to
profit by the dramatic form though they have sacrificed the
highest advantages of the literary. A play-even the bestpays so tremendously by what it essentially can not do for the
comparatively little it practically can, that a mistake in the
arithmetic of this positive side speedily produces a wide
deviation. In other words the spectator, and still more the
reader, sees such a theme as that of " Denise," which may be
described as the evolution of a view, presented most in accordance with its nature when the attempt is not made to present
it in accordance with the nature of the theatre. It is the nature
of the theatre to give its victims, in exchange for melancholy
concessions, a vision of the immediate not to be enjoyed in any
other way; and consequently when the material offered it to
deal with is not the immediate, but the contingent, the derived,
the hypothetic, our melancholy concessions have been made in
vain and the inadequacy of the form comes out. In " Francillon," partly perhaps because the thing has nothing to do with
anybody's duty-least of all with the heroine's, which would
be surely to keep off the streets-the form happens to be remarkably adequate. The question is of the liberty of the protagonist,
the right of a wronged and indignant wife to work out her
husband's chastisement in the same material as his sin, work
it out moreover on the spot, as a blow is repaid by a blow,
exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The play
has all the kinds of life that the theatre can achieve, because
in the first place Dumas, though acting as the wife's advocate,
has had the intelligence to give us a solution which is only a
scenic sequence and not a real, still less a " philosophic," one;
and because in the second it deals with emotions and impulses, which can be shown by the short measure, and not
with reflections and aspirations, which can be shown but by
the long.
I am not pretending to take things in turn, but a critic with a
generous memory of the spell of Dumas should not, how