Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/114

88 sent life. "The supreme faculty of the novelist is a capacity for receiving straight impressions." He must strive to be " one of those people upon whom nothing is lost."

These are Mr. James's first principles, his Credo and credentials. He announced them thirty years ago. (They appear in an essay called The Art of Fiction—at once his profession of faith and of his faith in his profession—which he wrote as a protest against Besant's bourgeois views of it—and which drew, in its turn, A Humble Remonstrance from young Stevenson—an elegant request for gore.) They are his first principles, and his last. The new Prefaces repeat and expand them. Now watch where they logically lead. The novel is history. It is not a mere game of make-believe. From any hint of fictitiousness, accordingly, any touch that might shake the reader's confidence, the story must scrupulously refrain. There must be no Thackerayan asides (for instance), nor any of those genial betrayals of which Trollope was so fond, in which the artist owns up that the whole thing is ventriloquism and the characters merely his dolls. To take the reader into your confidence in that way is to admit that you are taking him in. It is to cancel his confidence with your own. The author in person must never intrude. The characters must live their own lives, make their explanations unaided—their ability to do so indeed being the very proof of the validity of their conception. Their reality, that is to say, depends altogether on their power to realize. If their self-consciousness is weak they will tend to grow shadowy. To give them solidity, you must screw up their awareness. And thus, so far as the Jacobean stage is concerned, this faculty for being intensely aware of their environment is their very principle of life. Now apply to this position those companion resolu-