Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/135

109 HENRY JAMES 109 meant in turn, prodigiously, something that would probably never be meant quite to any such tune again ; so much one positively and however absurdly said to oneself as one stood up on the high balcony, to the great insolence of the Louvre and to all the history, all the glory again, and all the imposed applause, not to say worship, and not to speak of the implied inferiority, on the part of everything else that it represented. Now, how are you going to take that? As a won- derful effort of memory, cum a marvellously impres- sionable small boy? Or as an illustration of a great artist's power of " reading in " once he is given a fragrnent of real life to focus on? It is not diffi- cult to choose. We do not even need to say it isn't veracious — what we say, indeed, on the contrary, is that we have here a revelation of the essential verity of the episode seen imaginatively "in the light of eternity." It is not " true to life " — but it is exactly true to Life ; the thrill it yields is adequate to the wonder of existence. And all that it elicits did lie dormant in the scene ; it is realism of the most absolute kind. It only becomes fallacious, it is only unreliable, if we read the book as biography. But the second you perceive its fallibility as auto- biography, how extraordinarily complete a confession it becomes ! Just because it swings aside from the course of strict self-description, it carries the writer straight into our hands ; its bias is the key to his character. For its quality of faithlessness makes it a confession of one supreme faith — and that is the best faith of all — namely, good faith. It has been by the exercise of this instinct for adoringly "reading in," for believing the best of things, making the most of things, with a gallant credulity, that he has accom- plished his amazing feats in fiction ; so that we now see that the whole golden series, and especially the last lofty group, are a succession of avowals of a belief in life's power to vindicate any trust and jus-