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

LONDON NOTES

343

she must accommodate herself. She must accept vulgarity or
perish. Some day doubtless she will perish, but for a little
while longer she remembers and struggles. She becomes
indeed, as we look up Piccadilly in the light of this image,
perhaps rather more dramatic than ever-at any rate more
pathetic, more noble in her choked humiliation. Then even
as we pity her we try perhaps to bring her round, to make her
understand a little better. We try to explain that if we are
dreadful to deal with it is only, really, a good deal because we
so detestably grow and grow. There is so horribly much of us
-that's where our style breaks down. Small crowds and paltry
bargains didn't matter, and a little vulgarity-just a very little
-could in other times manage to pass. Our shame, alas, is
our quantity.
I have no sooner, none the less, qualified it so ungraciously
than I ask myself what after all we should do without it. If we
have opened the floodgates we have at least opened them wide,
and it is our very quantity that perhaps in the last resort will
save us. It cuts both ways, as the phrase is-it covers all the
ground; it helps the escape as well as produces the assault.
If retreat for instance at the present juncture is, as I began
by hinting, urgently imposed, it is thanks to our having so much
of everything that we find a bridge for our feet. We hope to get
off in time, but meanwhile even on the spot there are blessed
alternatives and reliefs. I have been trying a number very
hard, but I have expatiated so on the complaint that I have
left little room for the remedy. London reminds one of nothing
so often as of the help she gives one to forget her. One of the
forms actually taken by this happy habit is the ingenious little
exhibition, at the Grafton Galleries, of so-called Dramatic and
Musical Art. The name is rather a grand one and the show has
many gaps; but it profits, as such places in London so often
profit, by the law that makes you mostly care less what you
get into than what you get out of. With its Hogarths and
Zoffanys - none too many, I admit - its other last-century
portraits and relics, its numerous ghosts of Garrick, its old