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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

we call it, if it isn't " done," as we say-and as it so often
declines to be-the work itself of course isn't likely to be;
and there we may dismiss it.
The first thing we do is to cast about for some centre in our
field; seeing that, for such a purpose as ours, the subject might
very nearly go a-begging with none more definite than the
)author has provided for it. I find that centre in the embracing
consciousness of Caponsacchi, which, coming to the rescue of
our question of treatment, of our search for a point of control,
practically saves everything, and shows itself moreover the
[only thing that can save. The more we ask of any other part of
our picture that it shall exercise a comprehensive function, the
more we see that particular part inadequate; as inadequate
even in the extraordinarily magnified range of spirit and reach
of intelligence of the atrocious Franceschini as in the sublime
passivity and plasticity of the childish Pompilia, educated to
the last point though she be indeed by suffering, but otherwise
so untaught that she can neither read nor write. The magnified
state is in this work still more than elsewhere the note of the
intelligence, of any and every faculty of thought, imputed by
our poet to his creatures; and it takes a great mind, one of the
greatest, we may at once say, to make these persons express and
confess themselves to such an effect of intellectual splendour.
He resorts primarily to their sense, their sense of themselves
and of everything else they know, to exhibit them, and has for
this purpose to keep them, and to keep them persistently and
inexhaustibly, under the fixed lens of his prodigious vision. He
thus makes out in them boundless treasures of truth-truth
even when it happens to be, as in the case of Count Guido, but
a shining wealth of constitutional falsity. Of the extent to which
he may after this fashion unlimitedly draw upon them his exposure of Count Guido, which goes on and on, though partly,
I admit, by repeating itself, is a wondrous example. It is not
too much to say of Pompilia-Pompilia pierced with twenty
wounds, Pompilia on her death-bed, Pompilia but seventeen
years old and but a fortnight a mother-that she acquires an