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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

play-bills and prints, its echoes of dead plaudits and its very
thin attendance, it happens to be for the moment a quiet bower
in the bear-garden. It is a " scratch " company, but only-and
I can scarce say why-in the portion in which the portraits of
the day prevail is the impression vulgar. Even there indeed
this suspicion receives a grand lift from Mr. Whistler's exquisite image of Henry Irving as the Philip of Tennyson's
" Queen Mary." To pause before such a work is in fact to be
held to the spot by just the highest operation of the charm one
has sought there-the charm of a certain degree of melancholy
meditation. Meditation indeed forgets Garrick and Hogarth
and all the handsome heads of the Kembles in wonder reintensified at the attitude of a stupid generation toward an art and a
taste so rare. Wonder is perhaps after all not the word to use,
for how should a stupid generation, liking so much that it does
like and with a faculty trained to coarser motions, recognise in
Mr. Whistler's work one of the finest of all distillations of the
artistic intelligence ~ To turn from his picture to the rest of the
show-which, of course, I admit, is not a collection of masterpieces-is to drop from the world of distinction, of perception,
of beauty and mystery and perpetuity, into-well, a very
ordinary place. And yet the effect of Whistler at his best is
exactly to give to the place he hangs in-or perhaps I should
say to the person he hangs for-something of the sense, of the
illusion, of a great museum. He isolates himself in a manner
all his own; his presence is in itself a sort of implication of a
choice corner. Have we in this a faint foresight of the eventual turn of the wheel-of one of the nooks of honour, those
innermost rooms of great collections, in which our posterity
shall find him e Look at him at any rate on any occasion, but
above all at his best, only long enough, and hallucination sets
in. We are in the presence of one of the prizes marked with
two stars in the guide-book; the polished floor is beneath us
and the rococo roof above; the great names are ranged about,
and the eye is aware of the near window, in its deep recess, that
overhangs old gardens or a celebrated square.