Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/126

100 100 HENRY JAMES far or near; yet if I didn't somehow "subtly" feel it, why am I now so convinced that I must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of the great Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier, or any other then contemporary projector of Monsieur Prudhomme, the timorous Philistine in a world of dangers, with whom I was later to make acquaintance ? I put myself the question, of scant importance though it may seem ; but there is a reflection perhaps more timely than any answer to it. I catch myself in the act of seeing poor anonymous "Dear" (as Cousin Helen confined herself, her life long, to calling him) in the light of an image arrested by the French genius — and this in truth opens up vistas. I scarce know what it doesn't suggest for the fact of sharpness, of intensity of type ; which, in fact, leads my imagination almost any dance, making me ask myself quite most of all whether a person so marked by it mustn't really have been a highly finished figure. It comes over me therefore that he testified — and perhaps quite beautifully ; I remember his voice and his speech, which were not those of that New York at all, and with the echo, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of where he could possibly have picked such things up. To brood on this the least bit is verily to open up vistas — out of the depths of one of which fairly glimmers the queerest of questions. Mayn't we have been, the rest of us, all wrong, and the dim little gentleman the only one among us who was right? May not his truth to type have been a matter that, as mostly typeless ourselves, we neither perceived nor appreciated ? — so that if, as is conceivable, he felt and measured the situation and simply chose to be bland and quiet and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero without the laurel as well as a martyr without the crown? The light of which possibility is, however, too fierce — I turn it off — I tear myself from the view. . . . You see? First of all the happiness of hide-and- seek, of fumbling for the long-lost negative. Then the pleasure of developing it, of feeling (as he says himself — and note the plash of the nursery in the image) "the stored secretions flow as I squeeze the sponge of memory." And finally the excitement of seeing, as the plate clears in the bath, evidence the small photographer never noticed — evidence so gloriously grisly in this case that he has to destroy it with a crash — exactly like the horror-stricken doctor who breaks the camera in Kipling's "End of the