Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/127

101 HENRY JAMES 101 Passage." And the whole book is like that. It is triple extract of boy. On every page those three layers of zest mingle — scrumptiously composite, as luscious to bite through as Ferishtah's delectable ortolans. And that solid, sensuous lusciousness is really all the answer that is needed to the possible whisper of " hallucination " — to those who would suggest that novices get nerves, that all this receptiveness is really self-deceptiveness, and that when Mr. James feels he is taking in so mighty much he is really being only taken in. There is a lot in the argument: suscepti- bility must be paid for ; that early seclusion must have tended to produce a condition specially prone to fancies and fevers ; and the supreme danger that haunts all Mr. James's art, as we know, is — not a too great paleness, an over-fineness, as is sometimes said — but a certain violence and extravagance, a sort of luridity, a way of seeing horrors and splendours in innocent places and of imputing the wildest motives to meek human nature (think of the Turn of the ScreiVf remember the unspeakable crime in The Wings of the Dove) — and it seems pretty certain that this is partly the result of that early credulity, of that awe-struck " love of horizons," and of the ingrained habit of making the most and believing the best (which is often the worst) of everything. (A credulity fostered, by the way, by another element in that early innocence — the special form in which the Small Boy first received aesthetic stimulus — a form that must seem to us now to betoken a kind of blissful infantility all round. For it was the hour of the Keans and the Keenes, of the Booths with their booths, of dioramas and melodramas and Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dickens according to Cruikshank and " Phiz " — and to feed a small monk on these things might well give him inflamed ideas about life