Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/89

 cannot be maintained, except by that transition from grave to gay, from gay to grave, which is the whole art of the story-teller as of the dramatist.

The peculiar humour whose sparks are struck by the clash of nationalities in European hotels and pensions has surely never been so deftly distilled as in the "Bundle of Letters." Miss Miranda Hope, of Bangor, Maine, "decorated all over with beads and bracelets and embroidered dandelions," whose travelling "for general culture" obliges her to go to a Paris theatre unattended, and who there sees "plenty of other ladies alone (mostly French);" the æsthetic youth from Boston, who talks of a real "Corot Day," and who paints "for the knowledge that leaves a trace—that leaves strange scars and stains and reveries behind in" the English girl who describes the landlady as "exceedingly foreign;" the landlady's cousin, who enjoys free board and lodging so long as he keeps "an eye on the grammatical eccentricities of the pensionnaires," are all equally typical, and yet none of them lack that touch which makes them human as well as humorous.

To sustain humour as long as he is in the mood, without once lapsing into caricature—this is what Mr. James has essayed to do, and has done admirably.

There is another side to Mr. James's genius—a side of whose existence they never reck who are content to know him merely as the social Satirist of "Daisy Miller" and "A Bundle of Letters"—a side which links him with his great compatriots Poe and Hawthorne—a way, namely, of setting his characters in an atmosphere of the supernatural with so admirable a skill as never by over-statement to impel the reader to scepticism. The little story,