Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/106

80 80 HENRY JAMES manage to write that between them. The hobbling old verger who couldn't conceivably sketch you the smallest scrap of his cathedral can still manage to carry its key. And verily — loitering for a last time between aisle and ambulatory, straying anew through these charged, beloved books — something (it seemed to me) did suddenly sing out, and go ringing and winging from entrance to altar, up to clerestory from choir, leaving in its wake a string of lasting echoes, like a bird kindling tiny points of flame. It sounds absurd — but that was the sensation. There in an instant the essential design flashed up simplified — a lucid pattern piercing all the traceries — as plain as the plan of a house. And it kindled the place doubly : it gave it the queerest air of home. For this common chord and impulse, running through everything, was nothing less than a happy humility : — it was of Mr. James's simplicity — of his innocence, eagerness, honesty — of his monkish love (above all) for things lowly and neglected, that the bright responses spoke as they sprang. It might not be his "finest, fullest intention" — but it was full enough, and immensely it was fine ; — and it did " govern every line " as Vereker vowed it would — it had "chosen every comma, every word." The staggering thing was one's failure to perceive it long before — that, and one's perception that still, outside the walls, all such talk of reverence, innocence^ eagerness would seem the mere self-conscious capers of cheap cleverness. " Henry James simple ? " — it sounds such a two-a-penny paradox. "Henry James humble?" — worse and worse. Recondite — fastidious — super-subtle — exquisite — ' ' awfully clever and awfully deep" — these are so clearly the qualities reflected in all the mirrors that hold his reputation : qualities pointed to complacently by the superior, gruffly resented by the gross. How came this dis-