Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/211

Rh fainting, giggling, and shaking their curls." Much of that conduct may have been as artificial as the curls themselves, and assumed only to attract attention. Ladies used to faint on the slightest pretext, not because it was natural but because it was the fashion; when it ceased to be the fashion they abandoned the practice. Mr. Waugh's essay on "Reticence in Literature" is written more seriously, and is not intended to amuse. He defends the principle of reticence, but the only sanction that he finds for it is a temporary authority imposed by the changing taste of the age. We are consequently never sure of any permanent law that will enforce any reticence whatever. A good proof of the extreme laxity of the present taste is that Mr. Waugh himself has been able to print at length three of the most grossly sensual stanzas in Mr. Swinburne's "Dolores." Reticence, however, is not concerned only with sexual matters. There is, for instance, a flagrant want of reticence in the lower political press of France and America, and the same violent kind of writing, often going as far beyond truth as beyond decency, is beginning to be imitated in England. One rule holds good universally; all high art is reticent, e.g., in Dante's admirable way of telling the story of Francesca through her own lips.

Mr. Henry James, in "The Death of the Lion," shows his usual elegance of style, and a kind of humour which, though light enough on the surface, has its profound pathos. It is absolutely essential, in a short story, to be able to characterise people and things in a very few words. Mr. James has this talent, as for example in his description of the ducal seat at Bigwood: "very grand and frigid, all marble and precedence." We know Bigwood, after that, as if we had been there and have no desire to go. So of the Princess: "She has been told everything in the world and has never perceived anything, and the echoes of her education" etc., p. 42. The moral