Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/113

87 HENRY JAMES 87 interval, of getting as many pulsations as possible into the time." That is exactly why they are con- demned. Those pulsations are our pleasure. They give their lives indeed : they give them to us. They die that we may live more completely. Of the magnificence of the gift, of the beauty it has brought us, I mean to speak in a moment. But what must be pointed out first — it is the next length in our skein — is the absolute inevitability of this martyrdom, this strange sacrificial etiolation. And by that I do not merely mean that Mr. James is himself one of "the finer grain," and that his char- acters are the moons that reflect his own character- istic perceptions back upon us ; or that his deepest instincts (always sternly Puritan) see the world as a place where the fine souls always suffer. It is some- thing much more concrete and technical than that, and at the same time immensely more bizarre. For this fantastic fate was the result of three things — all of them aiming at the very contrary : (1) of Mr. James's respect for normality ; (2) of his respect for his reader; (3) of his deep delight in the little joys of the world, in the free treasures that strew it without number. By one of the prettiest, wickedest tricks Art ever played on a priest of hers, the very prayers that implored simplicity and sanity became the agents that invoked strangeness and fear and the flitting of questionable shapes. The way of it was this. " The novel is history. That is the only general de- scription ive may give to it." *' The air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel — the merit on tvhich all its other merits helplessly and submissively depend.'* *' The only reason for the novel's existence is that it does attempt to repre-