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

48

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

creative intelligence. " Vrite," as I have intimated, the production in which they might most have been reflected, is a production unrenewed and unrefreshed by them, spreads before
us as somehow flatter and greyer, not richer and more relieved,
by reason of them. They really arrived, I surmise, too late in
the day; the imagination they might have vivified was already
fatigued and spent.
I must not moreover appear to say that the power to evoke
and present has not even on the dead level of " Verite " its occasional minor revenges. There are passages, whole pages, of the
old full-bodied sort, pictures that elsewhere in the series would
in all likelihood have seemed abundantly convincing. Their
misfortune is to have been discounted by our intensified, our
finally fatal sense of the procidd& Quarrelling with all conventions, defiant of them in general, Zola was yet inevitably to
set up his own group of them-as, for that matter, without a
sufficient collection, without their aid in simplifying and making
possible, how could he ever have seen his big ship into port e
Art welcomes them, feeds upon them always; no sort of form
is practicable without them. It is only a question of what
particular ones we use-to wage war on certain others and
to arrive at particular forms. The convention of the blameless
being, the thoroughly "scientific" creature possessed impeccably of all truth and serving as the mouthpiece of it and of the
author's highest complacencies, this character is for instance
a convention inveterate and indispensable, without whom the
" sympathetic" side of the work could never have been achieved.
Marc in " Verite," Pierre Froment in " Lourdes" and in
Rome," the wondrous representatives of the principle of reproduction in " Fecondite," the exemplary painter of" L'TEuvre,"
sublime in his modernity and paternity, the patient Jean Macquart of " La Debacle," whose patience is as guaranteed as the
exactitude of a well-made watch, the supremely enlightened
Docteur Pascal even, as I recall him, all amorous nepotism
but all virtue too and all beauty of life-such figures show us
the reasonable and the good not merely in the white light of the