Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/132

106 106 HENRY JAMES is dependent, without whose support the novels would never have been written ; and to lay hands on it is therefore not only to learn how to allow for the bias of this particular book — it is also to become possessed of the perfect guide and interpreter to all the kingdoms of Mr. James's art. For what makes this book sag and yaw so, dipping so deeply that it often obscures what it conveys ? Simply the constant play and presence of a spirit of noble credulity, the overpowering influence of a prodigious faculty for wonder. There is no doubt about this. The tiniest scrap of reality — be it letter, episode, or mild scene — has no sooner been laid on the page than the pen of the Master, pursuing a habit by now deeply ingrained, begins to enrich it adoringly, to weave attributions, to dower it with imputations that fondly deepen and spread, until at length the first quiet fact, the actual historical picture, is as unde- cipherably overlaid as though it had been but a sketch on a canvas meant for embroidery. In fiction, of course, the bare fact is just such a sketch — the real subject is the ultimate blossoming wonder; but in biography it is the original item, not the last flowered result, that forms the true stuff of the tale — it is for facts, not interpretations, that we turn greedily to history ; we like to do the transforming ourselves. It was only the other day that Mr. James, very courteously, was complaining that his juniors seemed to have ceased to " select," but it is actually in his own work that one has often of late felt the pressure of that kind of confusion most bewilderingly. Serenely confident by now of the power of imagination and faith to discover infinity behind the smallest fact, he has come almost to ignore the mere surface fluctua- tions and to rank all things as equally worthy of him endless beauty, and so face values and distinctions cease to rule him. With the result that we look on
 * treatment." Any subject serves his purpose, yields