unified picture. The fewer facts he employs, the better. He realizes that facts, being dead truths, have no power of suggestion, or are points of departure at best. "Nine-tenths of the artist's interest in them is that of what he shall add to them and how he shall turn them." 1 Moreover, as a corollary to his avoidance of facts, we may notice how completely his art is based upon neutral tones, and this despite the fact that as a painter he is preoccupied with light rather than with line. His lines are cross-hatchings to provide contrast by shadow, and it is on contrast that he continually insists as the only legitimate means of revelation. He would have us profit by the present place and opportunity and time. "The author .. has in any case felt it quite his least stupid course to meet halfway as it were, the turn taken and the perceptions engendered by the tenor of his days. Here it is that he has never pretended to go 'behind'-which would have been for him a deplorable waste of time. The thing of profit is to have your experience to recognize and understand it, and for this almost any will do; there being surely no absolute ideal about it beyond getting from it all it has to give. The artist... 1 Works, New York edition, 1908, xii. ix. 1 has but to have his honest sense of life to find it fed at every pore even as the birds of the air are fed." So, in contrast to Balzac who drew types from all social classes to represent every passion, James believed, and rightly, that a single field of human life, if worked upon carefully, could supply the widest range necessary. As Mr. Hueffer says: "A scientist has a perfect right-nay more, it is the absolute duty of the scientist-to limit his observations to the habits of lepidoptera, or to the bacilli of cancer, if he does not feel himself adapted for enquiry into the habits of bulls, bears, elephants, or foxes." 2 His continual stress upon the value of "intelligence" is often irritating to his readers, until they realize that for him it is a convenient synonym for insight. His similar stress upon little unregarded things has been likened to the labor of an elephant picking up peas, but the truth of the matter is of course that pearls covered with dust may easily be mistaken for peas. His apparent passion for surfaces is merely a desire to remove the dust, and to permit the light to play upon the pearls once more. No man has less interest in the 1 Preface to Lady Barbarina, London edition, 1922, p. ix. 2 Henry James, 1918, p. 47. picturesque for its own sake, or in "local color." He searches rather for light, knowing that illumination will render any sight picturesque. And the illumination he would shed is designed to reveal to America Europe's finished technique of living, and to reveal to Europe America's fresh invigorating innocence in accepting life. Behind the outward ease of an accepted man of the world, to whom all doors are open and whose every curiosity has its means of complete satisfaction, we may discern a darker, but much nobler picture, in which life acts out its puppet show of tragic trivialities with a desperate and magnificent courage, even as the chief actor, while obliterating himself from the scene, may be heard to murmur with Andrew Marvell, "But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near." His tales are waking dreams, and looked at closely, escapes from a nightmare of fear concealed by a smile and by magnificent, though quiet, acting. The waking dreams themselves which his stories mirror are haunting ghost stories of the ideal. I cannot see for my part how the man's secret has escaped every eye. He is terribly afraid, yet he will not flinch. He is really living as dangerously as he can, while building a great fortress to repel the enemy. Did he not know that somehow all security was bankrupt, and that civilization was toppling? Yes, he knew it profoundly, if in part subconsciously, and he wished to leave a record of its finer moments. His sense of the past rang down the curtain of an age. He gathered all the best that it had to offer, focusing it quietly in a faultless picture with all the tenderness and pity that a man could confer upon it, and there was little recognition and no applause. The life he pictured is dead and buried now, and there can be no resurrection. But from the record he left, a course may be charted, and that course indicates the way the Western World must follow if it is to realize the hopes and ideals it once entertained. CHAPTER VIII ALDRICH, STOCKTON, BUNNER AND OTHERS WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837-1920) who was a decorous follower of Henry James, as a novelist, also published four volumes of short stories. Of these, Questionable Shapes and Between the Dark and the Daylight still have some interest. These stories are sufficiently anæmic and tenuous, to be sure, and they lead to no particular conclusion, but their subject matter faintly and a little naïvely foreshadows our present preoccupation with abnormal psychology. I dare say that Howells did not esteem them very much, and they add nothing to his somewhat undervalued art. Aldrich, Stockton, and Bunner, who represent a similar tradition, are less important than Howells in the history of American fiction, but in the short story they far surpass him. Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) for example, occupies at present a place of considerable critical esteem, from which I suspect that time will gently dislodge him. He was a child of good |