discrimination was singly devoted. Life in its first rawness was of small account to him; what he desired was life moulded and shaped, life toned by the sun and rain of years of history. This is the world which tells in every feature what it is and what it has been; the layers of association lie closely on it, revealing all it has achieved and endured. Henry James followed the track of this manner of life with untiring patience. The brooding analyst,' he called himself; he was absorbed by the spirit of haunted places and old time-weathered societies. He explored their drama, in Rome, in Paris, in London; and in scores of studies, longer and shorter, he recorded their charm. The 'international light' was that in which he most naturally seized it at first, but it was the deep soft background that was really the chief factor in the scene. It played its part through many pages in which sundrenched Italian hills, the silver-blue clarity of French streets and squares, or the dense rumour of our own sonorous city-to name these out of a hundred such effects-are so imagined that they appear, not described, but aroused and inspired to action.

The international light, however, as he gradually perceived, was romantic. It was the glow of his more or less ingenuous delight in Europe, a charming fancy properly indulged until it had yielded its full measure of happy effects. His strong and restless mind could not be satisfied with it for long. Embedded in the mellow picturesqueness of Europe was something richer than romance; and it can hardly be straining a point to note that, as his surrender to the old world became confirmed, so he was drawn away from the places of traditional enchantment to the more soberly tinted climate in which he presently made his home. England and London at any rate possessed him at last; and there was nothing fanciful in the spell by which they achieved it. We can be under no delusion concerning the attraction to which, through so many years of his mature and best work, Henry James was constantly faithful. We know how many 'poor sensitive gentlemen,' in his phrase, he set to confront the solid and ruthless assault of English life; with what awful assurance it ignored their scruples; how clearly it showed its intention of dealing as it chose with all such refinements and hesitations. In the two volumes

which he called 'Terminations' and 'Embarrassments' the theme is taken up at point after point; the calamity of those who fall out of the race, who are less robust than their neighbours, who desire to linger and watch, or who have simply and weakly died-if this is the drama of London, the author of 'Broken Wings,' 'The Great Good Place, The Altar of the Dead,' and a score of other packed impressions, is its master dramatist. At the same time, if it attracted him, there must have been more in it than the mere purposeless triumph of will and vigour.

There was in it precisely what he sought and what he celebrated wherever he found it-there was style. In 'The Spoils of Poynton' the terrible Mrs Gereth, with her wondrous passion for a few fine sticks of old furniture, has style in such intensity that she becomes historic. If the gestures of her character and her resolution had been a thought less free, less supple, or less perfectly timed, she and her furniture and her fixed idea would all have been uninteresting together. As it is, by the clean finish of everything she does and says and thinks, her whole wrong-headed business is lifted into distinction. So, too, Kate Croy in 'The Wings of the Dove,' and Charlotte in The Golden Bowl,' are handsome and wonderful; their friends knew it well and have no meaner words to describe them with. Yet it was only the brilliant ease with which they took their predatory way that made them into matter for such enormous argument. To people so infinitely intelligent and yet so free from mental or moral embarrassment, so composed in their acceptance of questionable means and yet so lucid in apprehending them, so hard and fine in their armature and yet so alert to the least flicker of grace-to such people the tribute at least must be paid of recognising that they give, wherever they go, direction and significance to the life around them. They need no advantages beyond the fact of being handsome and wonderful; they may even be so placed that the grand step before them, if they are to impose their will, is something that sounds as little heroic as to cheat a friend for money. Still less do they need to be vulgarly successful. Kate fails in the end, as Charlotte fails; there is a power they have not reckoned with. But both have succeeded magnificently in this, that they have created and sustained and realised a

drama. It was the success that their author demanded of them.

To say that these singular women represented a strain Which Henry James found to be peculiarly English-this is to raise a good many questions, no doubt. It must be enough to answer that, added to their native vigour, they have the effectiveness which is the result of a considerable experience of the world. They know very well how to look after themselves, as we say. But this fearless activity, in a seasoned race that has long lost the good faith of mere ignorance, may take its most exquisite colour when it is displayed, not mercilessly, but by eager and beneficent youth. Before Kate and Charlotte were heard of, Nanda and Maisie had shown what they could do. Not London only might have bred these enchanting creatures, and elsewhere, too, their blossom might perhaps have been as rudely exposed; but possibly that responsible bravery, that deft and reasonable tenderness, in meeting and dealing with situations so incongruous, may be claimed as belonging to the soil. The point need not be laboured; the main thing is, after all, that in 'The Awkward Age' and What Maisie knew' there are two of the freshest flowers of maidenhood to be found in books. Nanda appears in the midst of a society which manages to combine a queer sort of preciosity with a very practical pursuit of amusement-a most credible picture of modern manners. She who, descending from the schoolroom to the drawing-room, might have been expected to embarrass the wisdom of her elders by her young curiosity, does indeed put them to discomfiture, but by the clear-sighted instinct with which she perceives them, bends the grace of her understanding on them, and goes her way. And Maisie-if Nanda is rare, Maisie is unique. Her crystalline imagination and her wild-flower purity, in the dawning and gathering daylight of experience-this is unmatched elsewhere, except in life. She is bestowed upon parents who have the gift, if ever man and woman had, of touching nothing in the world but to make it vulgar. She is at the mercy of their loud high brilliance as well as of the lavish arts of their meanness; she is used by them, capriciously fondled or neglected, as the instrument of their mutual spite. Surrounded by this tawdry rubbish, her simplicity might have bloomed

pathetically; but Maisie is far above mere pathos. She lives and grows, not helpless, but alert with a flame of candour and good will; and at the end of her childhood her atrocious world has been able to do nothing but to make her sweetness more perfect.

All the life that went to the making of these books had a substance on which the art of fiction, as Henry James understood it, could fasten firmly. It would support the most penetrating treatment'-the word he always kept for that manner of telling a story which would entirely reveal its dramatic or pictorial value. To 'treat,' in this sense, a figure or scene or motive, had long meant to him a great deal more than to describe it. It was useless, he said, for a writer to offer us his mere poor word of honour' that things happened so or appeared thus; he must represent them, and let us see for ourselves. He accordingly became, of all novelists, the one who most completely adjusted the method of drama to the form of narrative; who finally never 'told' a story at all, but rendered it, point by point and scene by scene, in a succession of visual images. The reader sits like a spectator as they pass, receiving from each a single thread until at last the full skein is in his hand.

There is no new secret in this, of course; that a thing enacted is more vivid than a thing described is the oldest axiom in the book of the novelist. But Henry James applied it far beyond them all; he applied it, indeed, in his later work always and everywhere. This was very new- -so much so that few, it seems, would venture near it. A book like 'The Awkward Age' created, by its author's account, an unpeopled desert around it in a world of novel-readers. Yet the strangeness of that finished episode lies simply in the fact that the characters are shown, their words recorded, their accent noted, consistently from without, no other access being ever granted to their inner intention. In other words, the reader is required to do what he does every day of his life, in all his dealings with mankind-he has to judge by appearances. 'Attention of perusal I do indeed everywhere postulate,' said Henry James; but we none of us meet this demand very often in the day, least of all when we read a novel. And even the manner of 'The Awkward Age' was familiar compared with that which

he used when he dramatised, not the actions of people, but the drift of thought within a mind. For here again he would not narrate; he exhibited the shapes as they appeared. The great transitions from scene to scene, so characteristic of his latest work, are all examples of this. Kate, Milly, and Densher in 'The Wings of the Dove,' Strether in The Ambassadors,' the Prince, Adam Verver, and the Princess in The Golden Bowl'-each in turn is brooded over and watched; association, memory, premonition, are pictured as they pass across the depths of thought; except for the tell-tale tremor of the surface, not a hint is given of the stir underneath. But gradually the mood lapses and the outlook shifts. A fresh view opens, new possibilities emerge; it is time to be shown the outward expression, in word and act, of what must follow.

The structure of these novels, if that is what they are to be called, is extremely simple. The scene is prepared, displayed, gathered up and prepared afresh. A score of examples might be chosen to show how dialogue is kept waiting until the atmosphere is ready for it, so that when talk begins, its lightest tone may freely sound out. The rule is still economy-never to use a heavy stroke when, by careful forethought, a finer may be made to yield the needed effect; and the reason is still in the enhanced and deepened beauty of the impression so suggested. How Susan Stringham, on a day of autumn wind and rain in Venice, visited Densher and made her despairing appeal to him-as a detached episode this is nothing. The occasion is to both of them a climax of bewildered distress, yet it is almost true to say that not a phrase passes which might not have dropped in any casual encounter. As it is and where it is, with the thought of Milly, silent and stricken and exquisite, in her huge painted palace hard by, with the echo of Kate's fearless determination and the memory of her presence, with these and so many other admonitions diffused in the air, brimming the small darkened room and rounded by the first wild sea-storm that ends the Venetian summer -the briefest syllable has the force of a passionate and tragical outburst.

Still more ominously charged with unspoken language are the culminating scenes of The Golden Bowl.'