would be almost impossible to "dress" his figures, there is scarcely a hint of period; he renders the outside only so far as it is significant; the exterior as interior. Finally he almost abandons direct portraiture; rendering by a few lines enough, but only just enough, to keep the figure in its place, and providing everything needful for its realization from reflection only, that is from its effect upon the other characters in his canvas. Even of Mrs. Brookenham, essential as she is to the scheme of "The Awkward Age," we obtain no definite outline, only an appreciation of her prettiness, her flexibility, her flickering color, her quavering tone, her lovely silly eyes, her effect of dimly tragic innocence. She gathers meaning and shape for us not from such vague touches, but with every word she speaks, and from every word that is spoken to her. We know enough of her beauty from the way her shadow falls upon her followers, we have a tribute sufficient to that "rather tortuous" mind in their replies. She takes on a personality, as it were, with every movement; she does nothing, she approaches no one, without acquiring substantiality. Nor is hers the only presence so to acquire it. The relief of every figure in her "little sort of set" is wrought in the same wonderful manner; by which everything is constructed, one might say, from some one's point of view. How far more subtle is it that the author should give us no conception of his characters but what is indirectly communicated, as it were, by themselves, a communication individuality of each. And his diawhich also, as it is made, reveals the logue likewise is often of a supreme excellence. It renders the author's intention by the very difficulty with which his characters deliver it. You can feel in its perplexities, its indirectness, the vibration of their minds, those fluctuations of sense and of in

telligence by which speech is shaped and colored, and personality impressed, so that everything by the way of its saying tells at once the speaker's and the author's story. It is a tribute to its perfection that no extract could exhibit it; the point of each word spoken being so delicately dependent on its position in the narrative. But one cannot leave the book without quoting Mr. Longdon's reflections on Nanda and little Aggie, those two so different exponents of the awkward age.

Both the girls struck him as lambs with the great shambles of life in their future; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood.

"The Sacred Fount," which appeared in 1901, offers an impediment to criticism by its very interest. Its theme, the transference of vitality by affection, is treated with scientific exactitude, and has so much to commend it for such treatment, that it is difficult to say how seriously the author considers it, or whether it or its consequence is to be considered subordinate, but if Mr. James intends his thesis seriously, he renders its elaboration much less convincing by compressing it into a week end. The entire action of the book only occupies the hours between the afternoon of Saturday and Sunday evening, a period long enough if utilized for observation only, but too short for the mental alterations which a change of circumstance works. Granting the condition to which May Server has been reduced by officiating as the Sacred Fount, one cannot imagine any benefit arising from so brief an intermission of her office as the time affords. Her malady is quite con

ceivable, but it is very much discounted by her recovery. But towards the

finish of the book one is led occasionally to suspect that the author evades his own conclusions, and the final scene with Mrs. Brissenden closes in what reads like a hedging concession to the probable. It may be that the ironic subtlety of Mr. James's amusement becomes so evasively fine in its conclusion as to pass for something else, but in that case the subtlety seems somewhat overdone.

"The Wings of the Dove" completes at the moment the list of Mr. James's novels. If it cannot be said to mark any fresh development, it epitomizes in a manner both his excellences and defects. The portraiture is almost more wonderful than ever. Splendid Kate Croy is not drawn for us descriptively, but built up before us, like a figure from the clay, by a gradual accumulation of qualities-her fineness, her ingenuities, her responsiveness, and the exquisite invasion of them all by love. Milly Theale, on the other hand, is rendered in a manner exactly the reverse. Faint and frail, with her light hold on life, her soft appeal to love, she is never more than an entrancing shadow which melts again into the air at the first chill breath upon its soul. The story's action is of the slightest, but the moral spaces which it covers are immense, and might, with a more ardent elucidation, have been made absorbing. Between the charming Kate Croy and the woman of pitiless ambition who is ready to hand over the man she passionately loves as a temporary husband to the girl on whose millions and whose death she counts, is a distance which Mr. James does not adequately measure. The gradual corruption by those millions of what seemed an incorruptible mind, the decline of the woman's dignity to the level of that hateful bargain, the price body and spirit had to pay for

her desperate surrender, the tremors or exultation with which she first conceived it; or, if these were not, some disclosure of how that callousness, that shameless audacity took hold upon her heart, some further assistance to a problem of such provoking mystery, is required.

But the scene at Milly Theale's reception when Kate reveals to her lover the ruthless superb determination of her odious plot could not possibly be improved; nor the dexterous fashion in which we are made to feel the creeping shadow of shame which falls at last on Merton Densher's spirit from the wings of "the Dove." The first scene in the book, between Kate Croy and her unspeakable father, is also magnificently done, though really inessential. But the book suffers most from its inordinate fulness. Everything is described with what one might call a passion for the particular. There is so indiscriminate a profusion of detail, that the progress of the story is sometimes hurtfully delayed, its proportions are obliterated, its outlines blurred. Doubtless when one knows the book better, much of the embellishment which seems at a first reading to smother the action will sink into its place, but there will always remain enough to compromise the clarity of what might have been, with a wiser parsimony of material, a very notable achievement.

"The Wings of the Dove" is the latest of Mr. James's essays in the art of fiction, but in postponing the consideration of his shorter stories, one has still to discuss some of his most interesting experiments.

The complexity of his method, the profusion of his detail, his reticence, his hesitations, his very interest in his own ignorance, seem to declare any form of compression unfavorable to his genius. Yet one would be forced to include several of his tales in any list

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of his supreme successes, and he must be counted among the very few writers of English who have been able to fill with the scent of character that brief flower of incident which is the short story. He has for the most part accepted always its limitations, and has given it rather less than more of continuity than it can bear. For the short story is essentially no carefully focussed picture, but a thing of instantaneous exposure, a snapshot at life. There hangs about it the sense of arrested motion of a passing show. leaps suddenly into full light, and just as suddenly the shutter closes over it. You must make what you can of the view it gives you, of the lifted hand, the averted eye, for it can offer you no completer portraiture, no manipulated arrangement of life. Its very inadequateness is its charm, its triumph lies in the very frailty of its material, for with so little to use, the artist must see to it that he uses everything, that every movement is descriptive, and that a secret is somehow suggested by every stillness. There must be work in each word, each sentence must be shaped with intention, and yet its dim completeness, its air of distance, must arise not from what is written, but from what has been left out. Doubtless because it must be wrought so much for the imagination, the short story finds few able either to write or to read it, and precisely also for that reason, for its very elusiveness, its irresponsibility, it is fitted for subjects which would be torn to pieces by the solemn machinery of a novel. To that special fitness Mr. James has always been susceptible, and he has often realized so exactly in the short story what one may call the extensibility of his material that it would be as difficult to add a phrase to it with advantage as a feather to a bird's wing.

But though Mr. James has seldom misused the short story, only in his

latest period does he completely utilize its peculiar virtues. In his earlier years the desire to be master of his form, to achieve, at any rate, a fine proportion, may have limited the length of his work, or rather have inclined him to such subjects as could be treated with brevity. But the years which followed, the sixteen years which we have called his middle period, contain many tales which are rather shortened than short stories. "Daisy Miller" is frankly a study, but "Eugene Pickering," "An International Episode," "The Siege of London," "Lady Barbarina," "A New England Winter," "Impressions of a Cousin," "Georgina's Reasons," and "A London Life" might, any of them, have been expanded to the dignity of separate covers without any alteration of character, or even without suggestion of an undue infilation. The short stories of an inalterable completeness in those years are "Madame de Mauves," a rare and delicate piece of work, "The Madonna of the Future," "The Author of Beltraf. fio," "The Aspern Papers," and "The Patagonia." Not so completely selfcontained are "Louisa Pallant," "The Liar," and "Mrs. Temperley." What remain are studies such as "The Pension Beaurepas" in the manner of "Daisy Miller," and other shortened stories, as "Four Meetings," "Longstaffe's Marriage," which would be no better and no worse for a change of length.

But only when one has passed that landmark "The Tragic Muse," and entered the third period, can one esti. mate Mr. James's accomplishment in the short story. We have seen already that from 1891 to 1896 Mr. James did

not produce a single novel, and we have referred the absence of one to his preoccupation with the stage. But one needs another reason for the five-andtwenty short stories, containing some of his finest work, which saw the light

in those six years: and it seems not unlikely that, with the sense of possibilities still before him, which, expressed so pathetically in "The Middle Years," we have ventured to interpret personally, he was too stirred by his widened vision to undertake anything that was not in measure an experiment. It would not be easy to pick out from the five volumes which contain those experiments any that is not perfectly fitted by the form in which it has been cast, and few which do not speak to something fresh in their maker's view. Each shows so extraordinary an accordance betwen the thing done and the way of its doing, that one can with difficulty imagine its being done otherwise. Literature obtains, perhaps, as a subject, too large a share of attention, but literature is something to Mr. James of the closest intimacy with life, and he can be as dramatic with a literary theme as with any other. The shamed revelation by Henry St. George of the failure of his success, the abandonment by Peter Baron of his chance of distinction, and, in a later book, the forbidding presence of Ashton Doyne, the fine fidelity of John Delavoy's sister, what are these, warm with the passion and aglow with the splendor of being, but proof, less of a liking for literary subjects, than of an incapacity for missing under however unpromising an exterior the throb of feeling and the grip of thought?

The recurrence of one other subject in these years has been already noted. Of the stories which deal with the supernatural, nine fall within this period, and all but one of these among his short stories. So large a proportion shows incontestably an increasing tendency of thought towards spiritual affairs, which cannot be attributed to a craving for effects of contrast, since it is contrasts which he endeavors most carefully to avoid. He records indeed the reappearance of the

dead as though it were but an appearance in a new dress; and often with an easy acceptance which, if it minimize the disorder to reality which in a tale is the very mischief of the supernatural, tends rather to over-emphasize the immobility of those who can so accept it.

Of the remainder, "The Private Life," though mentioned already in its connection with the abnormal, is rather notable by its simple mastery of means, the wonderful economy in its construction; it is built, as it were, without scaffolding: a contrast to such a piece of humor as "The Coxon Fund," where the scaffolding is really of the chief interest. One must mention also "The Lesson of the Master," which expounds with such relentless lucidity the sacrifice of his satisfaction, even of his humanity, which must be made by the artist for his art's sake. But of them all, "The Altar of the Dead" is at once the most particular and the most perfect. There is nothing in it apparently but a man's melancholic oddity, who has outlived everything but his memories. Yet, into the "mountain of fire" which he has made for his dead, creep the living colors of love and hate, of implacable anger, and of forgiveness. It is most wonderfully wrought, most magically colored, rich and vague and dim as though there were rather a mist than a pigment in the painter's brush.

Here, then, closes our list for the present, the mere descriptive bibliography which has been here attempted, of work to which each addition seems to have made more difficult an assessment of its value. It is so various, yet it is so uniform; it covers so wide a space of life, and yet so narrow a space of manners; it is so communicative, and yet it is so reticent; it deals with such tremendous issues, and yet seems always to make them small. Often only the intensity of one's admi

ration makes deprecation impossible; one's wonder at his method prevents a challenge of his mind. He has done so much, so amazingly much, and yet he makes one feel so acutely his omissions. He knows so intimately the human heart, he has unravelled such a complexity of human motive, yet he has only once painted in woman an overmastering passion, and his analyses of motive have taught us chiefly how much we do not know. He has shirked no segment of the social circle, he has painted the magnificence and the pathetic meagreness of existence, yet he has scarcely drawn across one of his pages the sense of its struggle, that endless groan of labor which is the ground bass of life.

The range in his portraits of women is so wonderfully wide that it seems almost querulous to be conscious of what it does not include. And yet their very number and inclusiveness make more remarkable what has been left out. Besides Rose Armiger, there is among all his women not one who, save incidentally and retrospectively, found her heart too strong for her; and no study, even, of any profound strife between the passions and the will. His good women seem to win their triumphs too easily, the bad to accept too complacently their defeat. In the great matters of conduct our interest is scarcely ever enlisted by either, we know too well what each will do. And our knowledge comes, not from an appreciation of their moral qualities, but from a sense of their subjection or of their indifference to the social code. For the shadow of convention lies somewhat heavily on Mr. James's women; it usurps oppressively the offices of virtue and of duty. His Puritans retain the beauty, the freedom even, of an accusing conscience, but it is rather respectability than responsibility which seems to regulate the actions of the rest. It is true The Edinburgh Review.

that in giving so large a place to so low a motive, Mr. James can plead to have but followed the proportion of things as they are; yet to have followed them so constantly, to have found so little attraction in the exceptional, to have celebrated so seldom the great conflicts of the soul, must indubitably influence one's estimate of his achievement.

How great that achievement is, one is profoundly conscious after traversing, for such an article as this, the entire spread of it without any sense of satiety or of iteration. There is no more genuine proof of power, of originality, of imagination, than this unfading freshness, delicacy, and variety in remembered work, and against all that has been written of those qualities in these pages, one can but set a disinclination, perhaps a disability to handle the naked issues of emotion, and too frequent a tendency to immerse his drama in a saturated atmosphere of convention. That, however, is a defect of his qualities, a determination to contrive "an immense correspondence with life," and he has so completely succeeded as to have added a new conception of reality to the art of fiction. If he has dropped a line but rarely into the deep waters of life, his soundings have so added to our knowledge of its shallows that no student of existence can afford to ignore his charts. He has lived, as it were, in the chains with the "lead" in his hands, intent on definite knowledge of the channels and shoals of the human heart, where so many another pilot has been content to steer by the mere appearance of the surface water. And to the pleasure he has given us by his sketches of the beauty and variety of that enchanting coast must be added gratitude for such a diversity of enlightenment on its perilous approaches as he alone, of those who have studied it, seems able to supply.