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

320

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

romantic and esthetic age still visibly, palpably, in solution
there; and wonderful and dreadful through something of a
similar tissue of matchless and ruthless consistencies and immoralities. I make to my hand, as this infatuated reader, my
Italy of the eve of the eighteenth century-a vast painted and
gilded rococo shell roofing over a scenic, an amazingly figured
and furnished earth, but shutting out almost the whole of our
own dearly-bought, rudely-recovered spiritual sky. You see I
have this right, all the while, if I recognise my suggested
material, which keeps coming and coming in the measure of
my need, and my duty to which is to recognise it, and as handrsomely and actively as possible. The great thing is that I have
such a group of figures moving across so constituted a scenefigures so typical, so salient, so reeking with the old-world
character, so impressed all over with its manners and its morals,
and so predestined, we see, to this particular horrid little
Ldrama. And let me not be charged with giving it away, the idea
of the latent prose fiction, by calling it little and horrid; let
me not-for with my contention I can't possibly afford toappear to agree with those who speak of the FranceschiniComparini case as a mere vulgar criminal anecdote.
It might have been such but for two reasons-counting only
the principal ones; one of these our fact that we see it so,
I repeat, in Browning's inordinately-coloured light, and the
other-which is indeed perhaps but another face of the same
-that, with whatever limitations, it gives us in the rarest
Fmanner three characters of the first importance. I hold three
a great many; I could have done with it almost, I think, if
there had been but one or two; our rich provision shows you
at any rate what I mean by speaking of our author's performance as above all a preparation for something. Deeply he felt
that with the three-the three built up at us each with an equal
genial rage of reiterative touches-there couldn't eventually
not be something done (artistically done, I mean) if someone
(would only do it. There they are in their old yellow Arezzo,
that miniature milder Florence, as sleepy to my recollection
as a little English cathedral city clustered about a Close, but