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

"THE RING AND THE BOOK"

307

features of the twenty faces-either of one or of another of
these-that the structure turns to the outer day and that we
can, as it were, sit down before and consider at our comparative
ease. I say comparative advisedly, for I cling to the dear old
tradition that Browning is " difficult " —which we were all
brought up on and which I think we should, especially on a
rich retrospective day like this, with the atmosphere of his
great career settling upon us as much as possible, feel it a shock
to see break down in too many places at once. Selecting my
ground, by your kind invitation, for sticking in and planting
before you, to flourish so far as it shall, my little sprig of bay,
I have of course tried to measure the quantity of ease with
which our material may on that noted spot allow itself to be
treated. There are innumerable things in " The Ring and the
Book "-as the comprehensive image I began with makes it
needless I should say; and I have been above all appealed to
by the possibility that one of these, pursued for a while through
the labyrinth, but at last overtaken and then more or less confessing its identity, might have yielded up its best essence as
a grateful theme under some fine strong economy of prose
treatment. So here you have me talking at once of prose and j
seeking that connection to help out my case.
From far back, from my first reading of these volumes, which
took place at the time of their disclosure to the world, when I
was a fairly young person, the sense, almost the pang, of the
novel they might have constituted sprang sharply from them;
so that I was to go on through the years almost irreverently, all
but quite profanely if you will, thinking of the great loose and
uncontrolled composition, the great heavy-hanging cluster of
related but unreconciled parts, as a fiction of the so-called
historic type, that is as a suggested study of the manners and
conditions from which our own have more or less traceably
issued, just tragically spoiled-or as a work of art, in other
words, smothered in the producing. To which I hasten to add
my consciousness of the scant degree in which such a fresh
start from our author's documents, such a re-projection of