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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

of his character for a closer view, is exactly that the whole
fruitful enterprise was to prove intimately a New England
adventure; illustrating thus at the same time and once more
the innate capacity of New England for leavening the great
American mass on the finer issues.
To have grown up as the accomplished man at large was in
itself at that time to have felt, and even in some degree to have
suffered, this hand of differentiation; the only accomplished
men of the exhibited New England Society had been the
ministers, the heads of the congregations-whom, however,
one docks of little of their credit in saying that their accomplishments and their earnestness had been almost wholly in the
moral order. The advantage of that connection was indeed
what Norton was fundamentally to have enjoyed in his descent,
both on his father's and his mother's side (pre-eminently on
the latter, the historic stock of the Eliots) from a long line of
those stalwart pastoral worthies who had notably formed the
aristocracy of Massachusetts. It was largely, no doubt, to this
heritage of character and conscience that he owed the strong
and special strain of confidence with which he addressed himself to the business of perfect candour toward his fellow-citizens
-his pupils in particular; they, to whom this candour was to
become in the long run the rarest and raciest and most endearing of " treats," being but his fellow-citizens in the making.
This view of an urgent duty would have been a comparatively
slight thing, moreover, without the special preoccupations,
without the love of the high humanities and curiosities and
urbanities in themselves, without the conception of science and
the ingrained studious cast of mind, which had been also an
affair of heredity with him and had opened his eyes betimes to
educative values and standards other than most of those he
saw flourish near at hand. He would defer to dilettantism as
little as to vulgarity, and if he ultimately embraced the fine ideal
of taking up the work that lay close to him at home, and of
irrigating the immediate arid tracts and desert spaces, it was
not from ignorance of the temptation to wander and linger