Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/92

, lives to see his wife prefer their only child should die rather than live to read his father's works. This last story, by the way, is one of those in which the author has so far stepped aside to avoid the Obvious as to stray into the Abnormal. But be the stories what they may (and to our thinking two of them are among Mr. James's best), they have afforded the author so many incidental opportunities for self-revelation as to be exceptionally interesting to the student of his work. Listen for instance to Mark Ambient's address to his young disciple:

"Polishing one's plate—that is, the torment of execution, the effort to arrive at a surface—if you think a surface necessary—some people don't, happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream of—as compared with the one with which I have to content myself. Life is really too short for art—one hasn't time to make one's shell ideally hard. Firm and bright—firm and bright!—the devilish thing has a way sometimes of being bright without being firm there are horrible little flabby spots where I have taken the second-best word, because I couldn't for the life of me think of the best."

Flaubert lay awake, the guilt of a double genitive lying heavy upon his conscience. We can imagine Mr. James haunted by the fear of an epithet misplaced. For to this longing for perfection of form, there is also constant reference in "The Lesson of the Master." "The sense of having done the best," says St. George, "the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played."

"In every son of woman," says Mr. James, in one of his early stories, "there are two men—the practical man and the dreamer. We live for our dreams—but meanwhile we live by our