Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/87

 beautiful shadow, in each case, is all that remains; but that shadow is the artist's thought."

In one of Mr. James's earlier stories we read of a young German who has heard of the population of the United States as being "a highly humorous people." The author may or may not concur in this opinion, but certainly his own vein of humour is as far removed as possible from that usually regarded as typically American, and it may be that, in crediting his countrymen with an exclusive appreciation for the exaggerated burlesque of their most popular writers, we do them the same injustice they do us who conceive of our being moved to mirth by that humour known as the "New."

Mr. James's humour is like Miss Austen's, in being so entirely a part of the texture that it is almost as difficult to detach an illustrative fragment as to cut a pattern from one of those fabrics which we are advised to "see in the piece." And, spite of what we have said of his being chiefly successful as a short—story writer, it is perhaps in one of his shorter novels, "Washington Square," that his humour is best exemplified. The character indeed of Aunt Penniman, always advising, but always ill-advised, is worthy a place beside the immortal aunts who watched over Maggie Tulliver and the thrifty Aunt Norris of "Mansfield Park." We read of Aunt Penniman that "Her manners were strange and formidable, and her mourning robes—she dressed in black for twenty years after her husband's death, and then suddenly appeared one morning with pink roses in her cap—were complicated in odd, unexpected places with buckles, bugles, and pins, which discouraged familiarity.