Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/110

84 84 HENRY JAMES Once more : — The sky never was empty and never idle; the clouds were continually at play for our benefit. Over against us, from our station on the hills, we saw thein piled and dissolved, condensed and shifted, blotting the blue with sullen rai7i-spots, stretching, breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of grey, bursting into an explo- sion of light or melting into a drizzle of silver. And the task performed by the tale is indeed that of a dial — a memento — not mori — but of life ; a delicate admonitor reminding us of our '-" myriad overlooked opportunities. Watching Searle fingering with such passionate envy all the old objects — from the very carpets on the floors of our inns ('* into which the waiter in his lonely revolutions had trodden so many massive sootflakes and drops of overfloiuing beer that the gloiving looms of Smyrna tvould have failed to know them ") to our silver ceilings of *' breeze-fretted " sky, we waken to a sudden consciousness of the wonderful wealth of our home. We realize our amazing good luck. The book is an exquisite in- ventory — a catalogue, especially, of the things we have seen so often that we had forgotten they were there. Poor Searle never came into his kingdom — but he made us his heirs none the less. Worn out by the very passion that made him so perceptive, he dies, a little crazed, unadmitted. But he had done his job very beautifully. He endured the toil of the pilgrimage. We get the grail. Not an " i " need be dotted nor an angle adjusted to make that the perfect symbol of what followed. It announces Mr. James's task — it exactly illustrates the special method he invented — it even physically fore- shadows the uncanny danger that was to haunt and chill it like a ghost. The range shifts, the focus