Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/121

95 HENRY JAMES 95 marrying is prose of a superb strength and suppleness, a prose probably unsurpassed since Shakespeare's — and able, at its highest moments of passion, when it is aflame with a beauty greater than even that borne by most self-avowed poetry, to maintain the serene carriage of the estate to which it belongs, and depre- cate any suggestion of a ceremony. Bookman, March 1913. II Somebody somewhere recently wrote an article called " The Humility of Henry James " — an article which strained to show the world (with the most irre- verent cheeriness) that the graver of The Golden Bowl was but a blessed ingenu — that the essence of that lordly and elaborate art of his is just a sunny, a saintly simplicity, a beautiful boyish credulity and sweet zest. Well, that impudent essayist (for so the faithful must have felt him) has now, it is feared, to be forgiven — if not for the deed itself directly, then obliquely, ct rebourSj for clutching this latest James and triumphantly claiming it as his complete excul- pation. For A Small Boy and Others ^ is Mr. James's very earliest scenes of his life — and, really, by reason both of the special character of those scenes (so pure and demure, so hushed, simple, and spare) and then of the accent of ravished wonder that describes them, we do become conscious, as never before, of a deep element of innocence in the character of this wise creature — a certain Blake-like rapture and glad amazement, a primitive glee, the very source of his so civilizing wisdom. Quaintly cloistral, at any rate, those early years must appear to us, charming with a sort of chubby meditativeness : the gentle clan of
 * ' Prseterita," a loving and lingering evocation of the
 * A Swall Boy and Others. By Henry James (Macmillan).