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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

that he had to give out is like nothing else in English poetry,
any more than in English prose, that I recall; and since I am
taking these liberties with him, let me take one too, a little,
with the fruit of another genius shining at us here in association
-with that great placed and timed prose fiction which we owe
to George Eliot and in which her projection of the stage and
scenery is so different a matter. Curious enough this difference
where so many things make for identity - the quantity of
talent, the quantity of knowledge, the high equality (or almost)
of culture and curiosity, not to say of " spiritual life." Each
writer drags along a far-sweeping train, though indeed Browning's spreads so considerably furthest; but his stirs up, to my
vision, a perfect cloud of gold-dust, while hers, in " Romola,"
by contrast, leaves the air about as clear, about as white, and
withal about as cold, as before she had benevolently entered it.
rThis straight saturation of our author's, this prime assimilation
of the elements for which the name of Italy stands, is a single
splendid case, however; I can think of no second one that is
not below it-if we take it as supremely expressed in those of
his lyrics and shorter dramatic monologues that it has most
Lbelped to inspire. The Rome and Tuscany of the early 'fifties
had become for him so at once a medium, a bath of the senses
and perceptions, into which he could sink, in which he could
unlimitedly soak, that wherever he might be touched afterwards he gave out some effect of that immersion. This places
him to my mind quite apart, makes the rest of our poetic
record of a similar experience comparatively pale and abstract.
Shelley and Swinburne-to name only his compeers-are, I
know, a part of the record; but the author of " Men and
Women," of " Pippa Passes," of certain of the Dramatic
Lyrics and other scattered felicities, not only expresses and
reflects the matter; he fairly, he heatedly, if I may use such
a term, exudes and perspires it. Shelley, let us say in the
connection, is a light and Swinburne, let us say, a sound;
\Browning alone of them all is a temperature. We feel it, we
are in it at a plunge, with the very first pages of the thing before
us; to which, I confess, we surrender with a momentum