Notes on Life and Letters | Page 8

of self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds
for whom such a confession naturally would be meant. It is impossible
to think of Mr. Henry James becoming "complete" otherwise than by
the brutality of our common fate whose finality is meaningless--in the
sense of its logic being of a material order, the logic of a falling stone.
I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen;
indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that his
mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual
youth. The thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you will--is not quite
hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read. To those who have
the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After some twenty years of
attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work, it grows into
absolute conviction which, all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of
happiness into one's artistic existence. If gratitude, as someone defined
it, is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to be
grateful to the author of The Ambassadors--to name the latest of his
works. The favours are sure to come; the spring of that benevolence
will never run dry. The stream of inspiration flows brimful in a
predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of drought,
untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without
languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening
new visions at every turn of its course through that richly inhabited
country its fertility has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for
our exploring. It is, in fact, a magic spring.
With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the
inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to Mr. Henry
James's inspiration, may be dropped. In its volume and force the body
of his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All creative art

is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening,
familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by
the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most
insignificant tides of reality.
Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be
compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of
wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this
snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words,
out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may
be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of
permanence in this world of relative values--the permanence of
memory. And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of
the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, "Take me out of
myself!" meaning really, out of my perishable activity into the light of
imperishable consciousness. But everything is relative, and the light of
consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things
of this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived work of our
industrious hands.
When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship
fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying
earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain,
shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of
the sun. The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain,
may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a
power of expression and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate
experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art. I
do not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments
of humanity by an ingenious tale. It would be too much to expect--
from humanity. I doubt the heroism of the hearers. As to the heroism of
the artist, no doubt is necessary. There would be on his part no heroism.
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of
demonstration) because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him,
silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group alive,
clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black
sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. It

is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who
would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-
morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic
comment, who can guess?
For my own part, from a short