Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/130

104 104 HENRY JAMES I always left him in a state of intimate excitement, with a feeling that all sorts of valuable things had been suggested to me ; the condition in which a man swings his cane as he walks, leaps lightly over gutters, and then stops, for no reason at all, to look, with an air of being struck, into a shop window where he sees nothing." It is not in'this book, indeed, that Mr. James says that — it is in an old essay of his upon Turgenieff — but the quotation has a double right to creep in here. For it is both another illustration of his charmed childishness and a perfect definition of its results ; we, too, may feel that " intimate excitement," as though we had been supping essential wisdom. And if, to receive that sense, as well as to render it, you have also to become as one of these little ones — well, there are worse ways of inducing Life to admit you to her treasures than by making it plain that you don't in the least mind being taken in ? Manchester Gua/rdicm^ May 1913. Ill Dare to be a Canute ! Will nobody take arms against this sea — this tide — of yeasty gush that has come swilling up the beaches, among the legs of us readers, simply because another volume of Mr. James's reminiscences has dropped anchor in Critical Bay ? ^ Of course the book is beautiful, and tremendously beautiful, in its spacious, handsome, high-pooped, gold- scrolled way ; but it really ought to be recognized that much of the beauty which has set criticism lapping like this belongs by right to the passengers aboard her, to the real-life cargo which she carries — to Henry James, sen., and the late William James and the shining baggage of their brave and brilliant lives and letters ;
 * Notes of a Son and Brother. By Henry James (MaGmillan).