Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/86

 And yet Hawthorne worked within far narrower limits than does the author of "Washington Square."

Mr. James's descriptive passages are as vividly impressionist as his characters are subtly analytical, and it is perhaps for this reason that they best exhibit the charm of his style. It is no mere word—painting. This cant-phrase but ill expresses the magic of words able to convey not merely colour but the scent and sound and movement which, welded together, form one idea. Who that knows Paris will not testify to the accuracy of observation displayed in this description of a characteristic scene at the Comedie Française?

"The foyer was not crowded; only a dozen groups were scattered over the polished floor, several others having passed out to the balcony which overhangs the square of the Palais Royal. The windows were open, the brilliant lights of Paris made the dull summer evening look like an anniversary or a revolution; a murmur of voices seemed to come up from the streets, and even in the foyer one heard the slow click of the horses and the rumble of the crookedly-driven fiacres on the hard, smooth asphalt."

But Mr. James has another manner, of which the following is a sample. Surely Gautier himself never wrote more gracefully of travel:

"In so far as beauty of structure is beauty of line and curve, balance and harmony of masses and dimensions, I have seldom relished it as deeply as on the grassy nave of some crumbling church, before lonely columns and empty windows, where the wild flowers were a cornice and the sailing clouds a roof. The arts certainly have a common element. These hoary relics of Glastonbury reminded me in their broken eloquence of one of the other great ruins of the world—the Last Supper of Leonardo. A beautiful