Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/119

93 HENRY JAMES 93 it means the breaking of an unbearable tension. The overstrung nerves of these people — stretched to catch the faintest pulsation and to proclaim its presence in music — have broken with the scream of snapped harp- strings. It is a kind of hysteria induced by the hush. Shut in with their sensations, forced forever to watch the play of impalpable motives, they have lost the boundary between the imagined and the real ; and ideas take living faces and grope dreadfully about their rooms. Almost it might seem that they, or their creator, had tampered with forbidden keys and opened the unpermitted door. ... But there is another and less darkling explanation. These grisly apparitors are essentially (I feel) the signs of sanity and rude health : messengers, not of death, but of life. They are the results of a kind of rebelliousness on the author's part — a protest against his own principles ; a sudden splendid wicked shout and heave and unregenerate roar of pure relief. It is a case of fidgets, not of phantoms — restive muscles, not weak nerves — and it joins with many another case of covert violence in these books to prove that the boy in Mr. James is still alive. For although it is never noticed or mentioned (having been most craftily screened), the air of invincible decorum presented by these books masks a tremendous amount of thorough- going melodrama. From Daisy Miller's death to the Ververs' elaborate adultery — from little Hyacinth's suicide to " the low insurance job " in The Dove ; in the lies of The Liar and the maniacal outburst of his wife ; in the case of coldly furious infanticide in The Author of Beltraffio: wherever you turn, once your eyes are awake to it, the shaggy face of violence looks out. And I like it. I find it gentle, reassuring. It is a concession claimed by the simpler side of Mr. James : his one week-day in a year of