Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/105

79 HENRY JAMES 79 can offer, poor things, is to patter down some single aisle — praying, as they meekly trot, that it may lead towards the centre, perhaps even (as the critics in The Figure in the Carpet hoped) to the very axis of the whole. For '* there s a particular thing in my tvork that Fve ivritten my books most fo7 It's the thing that nobody has ever perceived or mentioned, and yet ifs the very heart of the ichole." So declared (in that fable of The Figure) the much misunderstood master, Vereker the novelist, "awfully clever, awfully deep," whose own twenty books smiled enigmatically down on the agitated brows of their adorers. "It hangs there as concrete as a bird in a cage, as a bait on a hook, as a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap. It's the idea without which I wouldn't have given a straw for the whole job. It's the finest, fullest intention of the lot, and the application of it has been a triumph of patience, of ingenuity. I ought to leave that to somebody else to say ; but that nobody else does say it is precisely what we're talking about. It stretches from book to book, and everything else plays comparatively over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it." And " so," he adds, " it's naturally the thing for the critic to look for. It strikes me even as the thing for the critic to find." The hapless critic addressed (baffled being), though he i^eers and probes patiently enough, never does find it: that is the tragedy and the tale. But we, coming later, may be luckier. For there is now no manner of doubt whose those volumes really were. In the cloister Mr. James has confessed it. "If ever I was aware of ground and matter for a significant fable," he says dryly (in his preface to vol. xv), " I was aware of it here." The words send a thrill through the approaching three-thousand. They have only to discover "the bird in the cage, the bait on the hook " — and their little job is done. Sesame is only three syllables. They might surely