Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/131

105 HENRY JAMES 105 and that the book's own intrinsic beauty, its towering poop and curving quarters, often actually injures in- stead of enhancing the effect of that fortunate freight. The book, in fact, is a heavy sailer — that high poop checks its way. And since its avowed purpose, as plainly specified in the charter-party pasted on its prow (by which one only means the title on the cover), is to provide — not a triumphant exhibition of high poopery, but a safe passage home to the reader's consciousness and memory for the two noble personalities it names, then it is surely perfectly evident that if the event be judged honestly in the light of its own aims and terms we have no option but to write it down a partial failure. We will not go quite that length here — for reasons to be mentioned in a moment. But we really must dis- tinguish sternly between the vessel and the voyagers, refuse to credit the former with the latter 's charms; we must draw that elementary distinction between content and form, between the interest of the subject and the arts of the narrator, which we would never dream of observing in the case of Mr. James's (or any other artist's) novels. For we are dealing here with biography — and biography is history — and history serves as a science : it is only in the arts that manner and matter are one flesh. And actually it isn't at all a mortifying sternness ; to be frank, it immensely multiplies our gains. For to discriminate in this way between cargo and hull is to discover the presence of an extraordinary bit of con- traband — a lurking Jonah, no less, concealed in the cellarage, the unsuspected cause of all the perils and delays — but who turns out, when once extricated, to be capable of revelations and prophecies which in- stantly make him, for us, far more permanently precious than even the delayed dignitaries on deck. For this stowaway is simply Mr. James's private genie — the powerful daemon upon whose aid his imagination