Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/133

Rh the world as through a magnifying glass, darkly. It is the method of a superb optimism, but perhaps of a fatalistic optimism, a little too catholic and indiscriminate; it is magnificent, but we miss the scale of life.

Not that Mr. James doesn't know of his proclivity. Looking back here at his boyhood he does indeed identify it affectionately, and notes, too, how its development was fostered, almost feverishly, by the confrontation of his own beautiful Balzacized belief in romance with the exceptional rawness of the reality around him. "Few of the forces about us," he says (speaking of their life in gawky New England), "reached as yet the level of representation," and consequently "our care was to foster every symptom and breathe encouragement to every success, or, in other words, to read devoutly into everything, and as straight as possible, the very fullest meaning it might learn to have."

I have to reckon here [he allows again] with the trick of what I used irrepressibly to read into things; it seemed so prescribed to me, so imposed on me, to read more, as through some ever-felt claim for roundness of aspect and intensity of effect in presented matters, whatever they might be, than the conscience of the particular affair itself was perhaps developed enough to ask of it.

But though he can thus recognize, and propose to allow for, the influence on his early memories of this devoted instinct for enlargement, he cannot humanly "reckon with" the play of the same impulse now—an impulse so strengthened and elaborated by a life- time's encouragement that it is certain to magnify not only those early magnifications, but also the very act of magnifying. We ought to give an example. It is hardly possible to submit a perfect one—the very nature of the quality to be exhibited forbids it: for a really first-rate specimen would overflow the