Notes on Novelists, with Some Other NotesJames, Henry
History
Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes
James, Henry
Fiction -- History and criticism; Novelists
A huge
and in its way a varied aggregation, without traceable lines, divinable
direction, effect of composition, the mere number of its pieces, the
great dump of its material, together with the fact that here and there
in the miscellany, as with the value of bits of marble or porphyry, fine
elements shine out, it keeps us standing and waiting to the end—and
largely just because it keeps us wondering. We surely wonder more what
it may all propose to mean than any equal appearance of preparation to
relieve us of that strain, any so founded and grounded a postponement of
the disclosure of a sense in store, has for a long time called upon us
to do in a like connection. A great thing it is assuredly that _while_
we wait and wonder we are amused—were it not for that, truly, our
situation would be thankless enough; we may ask ourselves, as has
already been noted, why on such ambiguous terms we should consent to be,
and why the practice doesn’t at a given moment break down; and our
answer brings us back to that many-fingered grasp of the orange that the
author squeezes. This particular orange is of the largest and most
rotund, and his trust in the consequent flow is of its nature
communicative. Such is the case always, and most naturally, with that
air in a person who has something, who at the very least has much to
tell us: we _like_ so to be affected by it, we meet it half way and lend
ourselves, sinking in up to the chin. Up to the chin only indeed, beyond
doubt; we even then feel our head emerge, for judgment and articulate
question, and it is from that position that we remind ourselves how the
real reward of our patience is still to come—the reward attending not
at all the immediate sense of immersion, but reserved for the
after-sense, which is a very different matter, whether in the form of a
glow or of a chill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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