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

74

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

thing other, part of a reference, a tone, a passage, a page, that
the simple may enjoy it for its least bearing and the initiated
for its greatest. That surely is to be a writer of the first order,
to resemble when in the hand and however closely viewed a
shapely crystal box, and yet to be seen when placed on the
table and opened to contain innumerable compartments,
springs and tricks. One is ornamental either way, but one is
in the second way precious too.
The crystal box then figures the style of " Salammbo8 and
"Saint-Antoine " in a greater degree than that of " Bovary,"
because, as the two former express the writer's romantic side,
he had in them, while equally covering his tracks, still further
to fare and still more to hunt. Beyond this allusion to their
completing his duality I shall not attempt closely to characterise
them; though I admit that in not insisting on them I press
most lightly on the scale into which he had in his own view cast
his greatest pressure. He lamented the doom that drove him
so oddly, so ruefully, to choose his subjects, but he lamented
it least when these subjects were most pompous and most
exotic, feeling as he did that they had then after all most affinity
with his special eloquence. In dealing with the near, the
directly perceived, he had to keep down his tone, to make the
eloquence small; though with the consequence, as we have
seen, that in spite of such precautions the whole thing mostly
insists on being ample. The familiar, that is, under his touch,
took on character, importance, extension, one scarce knows
what to call it, in order to carry the style or perhaps rather, as
we may say, sit with proper ease in the vehicle, and there was
accordingly a limit to its smallness; whereas in the romantic
books, the preferred world of Flaubert's imagination, there was
practically no need of compromise. The compromise gave him
throughout endless trouble, and nothing would be more to the
point than to show, had I space, why in particular it distressed
him. It was obviously his strange predicament that the only
spectacle open to him by experience and direct knowledge was
the bourgeois, which on that ground imposed on him succes