Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/85

 He is the least self-conscious of writers, but surely when, in "The Middle Years," he describes Duncombe as "a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style," he lets slip an autobiographical detail; and, indeed, supposing all other sources of information to be closed to us, we might construct a tolerably correct biography of Mr. James from the evidence of his works. We might detect, for instance, his American birth and education in his idiom, his Celtic blood in his satire, his sympathy with English convention in his dainty morality, his intimate knowledge of French in his lapses of Gallicism.

With provincial France, indeed, where the poplars twinkle beside the white ways, he is as familiar as are but two of our English writers, Miss Thackeray and Mr. Wedmore; and with Paris too he is acquainted, not only in those her obvious aspects which opulent but illiterate youth can learn superficially in a week or so, but also as the Paris beyond Seine that lounges in the shade of the Luxembourg chestnut-trees, that saunters through the book-lined arcades of the Odeon, that hides its dignity in the bastion-like palaces of the Faubourg Saint Germain; the Paris that displays its wealth in the Parc Monceaux, that flaunts its poverty on the Buttes Chaumont.

Occasionally Mr. James's unremitting warfare against the Obvious, whether of epithet or of incident, has misled him into artificiality. He should remember that whereas the Obvious in life is always the most easily attainable, in art, convention has so fenced it round as to place it almost out of reach, and that sometimes startling effect is best produced by perfect simplicity of phrase. We cannot recall any passage in Mr James's stories as poignant as poor wandering Clifford's cry in the "House of the Seven Gables":

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