ABSTRACT
But there is little trace of any transcendental conception of art in James. Least of all with respect to the novel. However we are to account for the strange phenomenon, the suggestion of timelessness that the Museum creates, the novel is wholly embedded in the contingent and the temporal. In the form of order that it creates, the recognition of that contingency is always ironically present. Perhaps in the wholly simplified view of the fairy tale the abandonment of any form of verisimilitude might efface that contingency, but would hardly answer to James's own sense of the novel. The effect of romance is to subordinate the contingent to the formal design, to see the created world from the outside.
