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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

especially as he met the difficulty, met it with an inveteracy
which shows how it can be met; and full of interest for
readers of English speech is the reflection he causes us to make
as to the possibility of success at all comparable among ourselves. I have spoken of his groans and imprecations, his interminable waits and deep despairs; but what would these things
have been, what would have become of him and what of his
wrought residuum, had he been condemned to deal with a
form of speech consisting, like ours, as to one part, of " that "t
and " which "; as to a second part, of the blest "' it," which
an English sentence may repeat in three or four opposed references without in the least losing caste; as to a third face of all
the " tos " of the infinitive and the preposition; as to a fourth
of our precious auxiliaries " be " and " do"; and as to a fifth,
of whatever survives in the language for the precious art of
pleasing y Whether or no the fact that the painter of " life"
among us has to contend with a medium intrinsically indocile, on certain sides, like our own, whether this drawback
accounts for his having failed, in our time, to treat us, arrested
and charmed, to a single case of crowned classicism, there is
at any rate no doubt that we in some degree owe Flaubert's
counterweight for that deficiency to his having, on his own
ground, more happily triumphed. By which I do not mean
that "Madame Bovary " is a classic because the " thats," the
" its" and the " tos " are made to march as Orpheus and his
lute made the beasts, but because the element of order and
harmony works as a symbol of everything else that is preserved
for us by the history of the book. The history of the book
remains the lesson and the important, the delightful thing,
remains above all the drama that moves slowly to its climax.
It is what we come back to for the sake of what it shows us.
We see-from the present to the past indeed, never alas from
the present to the future-how a classic almost inveterately
grows. Unimportant, unnoticed, or, so far as noticed, contested,
unrelated, alien, it has a cradle round which the fairies but
scantly flock and is waited on in general by scarce a hint of
significance. The significance comes by a process slow and