Notes on Life and Letters | Page 7

the modern writers. That frame of
mind is not the proper one in which to approach seriously the art of
fiction. It gives an author--goodness only knows why--an elated sense
of his own superiority. And there is nothing more dangerous than such
an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations
an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation.
To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the
world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
its being made so. If the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed
to rise superior to many moralities current amongst mankind, a novelist
who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss
the first condition of his calling. To have the gift of words is no such
great matter. A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not
become a hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a fire-arm;
many other qualities of character and temperament are necessary to
make him either one or the other. Of him from whose armoury of
phrases one in a hundred thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and
elusive mark of art I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he
should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues.
I would not have him impatient with their small failings and scornful of
their errors. I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that
humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to
depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with a large
forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the
outcome of malevolence, but depend on their education, their social
status, even their professions. The good artist should expect no
recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil
can with difficulty be appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean

anything to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of their
evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. I
would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving
observation while he grows in mental power. It is in the impartial
practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art
can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this
or that particular method of technique or conception. Let him mature
the strength of his imagination amongst the things of this earth, which
it is his business to cherish and know, and refrain from calling down his
inspiration ready-made from some heaven of perfections of which he
knows nothing. And I would not grudge him the proud illusion that will
come sometimes to a writer: the illusion that his achievement has
almost equalled the greatness of his dream. For what else could give
him the serenity and the force to hug to his breast as a thing delightful
and human, the virtue, the rectitude and sagacity of his own City,
declaring with simple eloquence through the mouth of a Conscript
Father: "I have not read this author's books, and if I have read them I
have forgotten . . ."

HENRY JAMES--AN APPRECIATION--1905

The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry
James's work. His books stand on my shelves in a place whose
accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion. But not all his
books. There is no collected edition to date, such as some of "our
masters" have been provided with; no neat rows of volumes in buckram
or half calf, putting forth a hasty claim to completeness, and conveying
to my mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate of that field in
which all these victories have been won. Nothing of the sort has been
done for Mr. Henry James's victories in England.
In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one would
not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings, had not
the fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in the case
of other men whose writing counts, (for good or evil)--had it not been, I

say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and intellectual; an accident
of--I suppose--the publishing business acquiring a symbolic meaning
from its negative nature. Because, emphatically, in the body of Mr.
Henry James's work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of
surrender, or even of probability of surrender, to his own victorious
achievement in that field where he is a master. Happily, he will never
be able to claim completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a
moment