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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

a thing that, wherever he looked, he saw not only condoned
but acclaimed and rewarded. He lived, as he felt, in an age of
mean production and cheap criticism, the practical upshot of
which took on for him a name that was often on his lips. He
called it the hatred of literature, a hatred in the midst of which,
the most literary of men, he found himself appointed to suffer.
I may not, however, follow him in that direction-which would
take us far; and the less that he was for himself after all, in spite
of groans and imprecations, a man of resources and remedies,
and that there was always his possibility of building himself in.
This he did equally in all his books-built himself into
literature by means of a material put together with extraordinary art; but it leads me again to the question of what
such a stiff ideal imposed on him for the element of exactitude.
This element, in the romantic, was his merciless law; it was
perhaps even in the romantic that-if there could indeed be
degrees for him in such matters-he most despised the loose
and the more-or-less. To be intensely definite and perfectly
positive, to know so well what he meant that he could at every
point strikingly and conclusively verify it, was the first of his
needs; and if in addition to being thus synthetically final he
could be strange and sad and terrible, and leave the cause of
these effects inscrutable, success then had for him its highest
savour. We feel the inscrutability in those memorable few
words that put before us Frederic Moreau's start upon his vain
course of travel, " II connut alors la melancholic des paquebots;" an image to the last degree comprehensive and embracing, but which haunts us, in its droll pathos, without our
quite knowing why. But he was really never so pleased as
when he could be both rare and precise about the dreadful. His
own sense of all this, as I have already indicated, was that
beauty comes with expression, that expression is creation, that
it makes the reality, and only in the degree in which it is,
exquisitely, expression; and that we move in literature through
a world of different values and relations, a blest world in which
we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything