‘Catching the very note and trick’: James’s Browning (2024)

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Volume 74 Issue 2 April 2024
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James Lello

St Catharine’s College

,

Cambridge

,

UK

jaehl2@cam.ac.uk

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Essays in Criticism, Volume 74, Issue 2, April 2024, Pages 168–198, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgae013

Published:

19 July 2024

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ONE OF HENRY JAMES’S MOST CELEBRATED STATEMENTS occurs in ‘The Art of Fiction’: ‘Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet’.1 Critics have rightly admired this urge to ‘resist form, to respond to life’s disorder’, in Millicent Bell’s terms, this conception of the novel as capable of competing with life rather than rigidly imitating it.2 ‘Catching’ also evokes a conception of influence, one opposed to the schoolmasterly prescriptivism of Walter Besant and the ‘conventional, traditional moulds’ into which ‘life’ is typically translated (p. 58). The novelist’s infinitely retentive consciousness is figured instead as a ‘huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue’ (p. 52).

Yet another, more specific, model of influence is also at work here. The aspiration to catch the very note and trick itself catches the note and trick of Robert Browning, whose poem of lapsed reciprocities, ‘Two in the Campagna’, begins:

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