Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes

by Henry James

He represents for me the mysterious meaning of the power of style, not violable by any one, and least of all ever by myself in my own person.

And elsewhere:—

The sublime hands of Violante [the beauty and interest of hands play a great part, in general, in the picture], pressing out in drops the essence of the tender flowers and letting them fall bruised to the ground, performed an act which, as a symbol, corresponded perfectly to the character of my style; this being ever to extract from a thing its very last scent of life, to take from it all it could give and leave it exhausted. Was not this one of the most important offices of my art of life?

The book is a singularly rich exhibition of an inward state, the state of private poetic intercourse with things, the kind of current that in a given personal experience flows to and fro between the imagination and the world. It represents the esthetic consciousness, proud of its conquests and discoveries, and yet trying, after all, as with the vexed sense of a want, to look through other windows and eyes. It goes all lengths, as is of course indispensable on behalf of a personage constituting a case. “I firmly believe that the greatest sum of future dominion will be precisely that which shall have its base and its apex in Rome”—such being in our personage the confidence of the “Latin” spirit. Does it not really all come back to style? It was to the Latin spirit that the Renaissance was primarily vouchsafed; and was not, for a simplified statement, the last word of the Renaissance the question of taste? That is the esthetic question; and when the Latin spirit after many misadventures again clears itself we shall see how all the while this treasure has been in its keeping. Let us as frankly as possible add that there is a whole side on which the clearance may appear to have made quite a splendid advance with Signor D’Annunzio himself.

But there is another side, which I have been too long in coming to, yet which I confess is for me much the more interesting. No account of our author is complete unless we really make out what becomes of that esthetic consistency in him which, as I have said, our own collective and cultivated effort is so earnestly attempting and yet so pathetically, if not so grotesquely, missing. We are struck, unmistakably, early in our acquaintance with these productions, by the fact that their total beauty somehow extraordinarily fails to march with their beauty of parts, and that something is all the while at work undermining that bulwark against ugliness which it is their obvious theory of their own office to throw up. The disparity troubles and haunts us just in proportion as we admire; and our uneasy wonderment over the source of the weakness fails to spoil our pleasure only because such questions have so lively an interest for the critic. We feel ourselves somehow in presence of a singular incessant leak in the effect of distinction so artfully and copiously produced, and we apply our test up and down in the manner of the inquiring person who, with a tin implement and a small flame, searches our premises for an escape of gas. The bad smell has, as it were, to be accounted for; and yet where, amid the roses and lilies and pomegranates, the thousand essences and fragrances, can such a thing possibly be? Quite abruptly, I think, at last (if we have been much under the spell) our test gives us the news, not unaccompanied with the shock with which we see our escape of gas spring into flame. There is no mistaking it; the leak of distinction is produced by a positive element of the vulgar; and that the vulgar should flourish in an air so charged, intellectually speaking, with the “aristocratic” element, becomes for us straightway the greatest of oddities and at the same time, critically speaking, one of the most interesting things conceivable.

The interest then springs from its being involved for us in the “case.” We recognise so many suggested consequences if the case is really to prove responsible for it. We ask ourselves if there be not a connection, we almost tremble lest there shouldn’t be; since what is more obvious than that, if a high example of exclusive estheticism—as high a one as we are likely ever to meet—is bound sooner or later to spring a leak, the general question receives much light? We recognise here the value of our author’s complete consistency: he would have kept his bottom sound, so to speak, had he not remained so long at sea. If those imperfect exponents of his faith whom we have noted among ourselves fail to flower, for a climax, in any proportionate way, we make out that they are embarrassed not so much by any force they possess as by a force—a force of temperament—that they lack. The anomaly I speak of presents itself thus as the dilemma in which Signor D’Annunzio’s consistency has inexorably landed him; and the disfigurement breaks out, strikingly enough, in the very forefront of his picture, at the point where he has most lavished his colour. It is where he has most trusted and depended that he is most betrayed, the traitor sharing certainly his tent and his confidence. What is it that in the interest of beauty he most elaborately builds on if not on the love-affairs of his heroes and heroines, if not on his exhibition of the free play, the sincere play, the play closely studied and frankly represented, of the sexual relation? It is round this exercise, for him, that expressible, demonstrable, communicable beauty prevailingly clusters; a view indeed as to which we all generously go with him, subject to the reserve for each of us of our own expression and demonstration. It is these things on his part that break down, it is his discrimination that falls short, and thereby the very kind of intellectual authority most implied by his pretension. There is according to him an immense amenity that can be saved—saved by style—from the general wreck and welter of what is most precious, from the bankruptcy determined more and more by our basely democratic conditions. As we watch the actual process, however, it is only to see the lifeboat itself founder. The vulgarity into which he so incongruously drops is, I will not say the space he allots to love-affairs, but the weakness of his sense of “values” in depicting them.

We begin to ask ourselves at an early stage what this queer passion may be in the representation of which the sense of beauty ostensibly finds its richest expression and which is yet attended by nothing else at all—neither duration, nor propagation, nor common kindness, nor common consistency with other relations, common congruity with the rest of life—to make its importance good. If beauty is the supreme need so let it be; nothing is more certain than that we can never get too much of it if only we get it of the right sort. It is therefore on this very ground—the ground of its own sufficiency—that Signor D’Annunzio’s invocation of it collapses at our challenge. The vulgarity comes from the disorder really introduced into values, as I have called them; from the vitiation suffered—that we should have to record so mean an accident—by taste, impeccable taste, itself. The truth of this would come out fully in copious examples, now impossible; but it is not too much to say, I think, that in every principal situation presented the fundamental weakness causes the particular interest to be inordinately compromised.

I must not, I know, make too much of “Il Piacere”—one of those works of promising youth with which criticism is always easy—and I should indeed say nothing of it if it were also a work of less ability. It really, however, to my mind, quite gives us the key, all in the morning early, to our author’s general misadventure. Andrea Sperelli is the key; Donna Maria is another key of a slightly different shape. They have neither of them the esthetic importance, any more than the moral, that their narrator claims for them and in his elaborate insistence on which he has so hopelessly lost his way. If they were important—by which I mean if they showed in any other light than that of their particular erotic exercise—they would justify the claim made for them with such superior art. They have no general history, since their history is only, and immediately and extravagantly, that of their too cheap and too easy romance. Why should the career of the young man be offered as a sample of pathetic, of tragic, of edifying corruption?—in which case it might indeed be matter for earnest exhibition. The march of corruption, the insidious influence of propinquity, opportunity, example, the ravage of false estimates and the drama of sterilising passion—all this is a thinkable theme, thinkable especially in the light of a great talent. But for Andrea Sperelli there is not only no march, no drama, there is not even a weakness to give him the semblance of dramatic, of plastic material; he is solidly, invariably, vulgarly strong, and not a bit more corrupt at the end of his disorders than at the beginning. His erudition, his intellectual accomplishments and elevation, are too easily spoken for; no view of him is given in which we can feel or taste them. Donna Maria is scarcely less signal an instance of the apparent desire on the author’s part to impute a “value” defeated by his apparently not knowing what a value is. She is apparently an immense value for the occasions on which the couple secretly meet, but how is she otherwise one? and what becomes therefore of the beauty, the interest, the pathos, the struggle, or whatever else, of her relation—relation of character, of judgment, even of mere taste—to her own collapse? The immediate physical sensibility that surrenders in her is, as throughout, exquisitely painted; but since nothing operates for her, one way or the other, but that familiar faculty, we are left casting about us almost as much for what else she has to give as for what, in any case, she may wish to keep.

The author’s view of the whole matter of durations and dates, in these connections, gives the scale of “distinction” by itself a marked downward tilt; it confounds all differences between the trivial and the grave. Giuliana, in “L’Innocente,” is interesting because she has had a misadventure, and she is exquisite in her delineator’s view because she has repented of it. But the misadventure, it appears, was a matter but of a minute; so that we oddly see this particular romance attenuated on the ground of its brevity. Given the claims of the exquisite, the attenuation should surely be sought in the very opposite quarter; since, where these remarkable affections are concerned, how otherwise than by the element of comparative duration do we obtain the element of comparative good faith, on which we depend for the element, in turn, of comparative dignity? Andrea Sperelli becomes in the course of a few weeks in Rome the lover of some twenty or thirty women of fashion—the number scarce matters; but to make this possible his connection with each has but to last a day or two; and the effect of that in its order is to reduce to nothing, by vulgarity, by frank grotesqueness of association, the romantic capacity in him on which his chronicler’s whole appeal to us is based. The association rising before us more nearly than any other is that of the manners observable in the most mimetic department of any great menagerie.

The most serious relation depicted—in the sense of being in some degree the least suggestive of mere zoological sociability—is that of the lovers in “Il Fuoco,” as we also take this pair for their creator’s sanest and most responsible spirits. It is a question between them of an heroic affection, and yet the affection appears to make good for itself no place worth speaking of in their lives. It holds but for a scant few weeks; the autumn already reigns when the connection begins, and the connection is played out (or if it be not the ado is about nothing) with the first flush of the early Italian spring. It suddenly, on our hands, becomes trivial, with all our own estimate of reasons and realities and congruities falsified. The Foscarina has, on professional business, to “go away,” and the young poet has to do the same; but such a separation, so easily bridged over by such great people, makes a beggarly climax for an intercourse on behalf of which all the forces of poetry and tragedy have been set in motion. Where then we ask ourselves is the weakness?—as we ask it, very much in the same way, in respect to the vulgarised aspect of the tragedy of Giorgio Aurispa. The pang of pity, the pang that springs from a conceivable community in doom, is in this latter case altogether wanting. Directly we lift a little the embroidered mantle of that gift for appearances which plays, on Signor D’Annunzio’s part, such tricks upon us, we find ourselves put off, as the phrase is, with an inferior article. The inferior article is the hero’s poverty of life, which cuts him down for pathetic interest just as the same limitation in “Il Piacere” cuts down Donna Maria. Presented each as victims of another rapacious person who has got the better of them, there is no process, no complexity, no suspense in their story; and thereby, we submit, there is no esthetic beauty. Why shouldn’t Giorgio Aurispa go mad? Why shouldn’t Stelio Effrena go away? We make the inquiry as disconcerted spectators, not feeling in the former case that we have had any communication with the wretched youth’s sanity, and not seeing in the latter why the tie of all the passion that has been made so admirably vivid for us should not be able to weather change.