Maggie, it will be remembered, has taken upon herself the task of dissolving the intrigue between her husband and her father's wife, and of doing so, in the strength of her entire devotion, without a single protesting or accusing word. The book is simply the record of a changing atmosphere; it begins with the light sunshine of a spring morning in London, it reaches its climax in the heavy blaze of a Kentish August. The whole situation turns upon itself, yet by gradations so fine that from moment to moment they are imperceptible. Maggie alone, sustained and borne forward by an inspiration of courage and faith, accomplishes all. She never lapses from the standard she has decreed for herself, never breaks out, never disturbs the soundless beauty of the setting of her life. Her achievement is the triumph of an entirely selfless and intelligent passion; and even at its height, when she and Charlotte are at last face to face over their common knowledge of her victory, she will not make one least movement to claim it openly. At such a point one possibly sees why Henry James more and more insisted that his own and his reader's view should never stray from the central matter in hand, till his small group of people seemed alone in an otherwise uninhabited universe. They had to distil the quintessence of a single situation; and the more securely he could isolate that situation against space, the more luminous in its intensity would be the result. In 'The Ambassadors' the field of vision is larger, covering the whole wide spring-charm of his wonderful Paris. True to his law, he gathers it in, not by loosening his method, but rather by a still stricter application of it. Strether, with the mirror of his attention triply burnished, comprehends all the scene; and it is revealed through his eyes alone.

Strether, like the earlier American, gazes on Paris, but to very different purpose. Newman had come to wonder and had stayed to suffer disillusion; his was a simple case. Strether had travelled far beyond simplicity, in spite of the ingenuous nature of his errand. He arrives in Europe as the ambassador of an imperious New England dame, who has required him, if he loves her, to rescue her son from the ensnarement of the old world. He stays to be caught himself, and finally to watch with

dismay while the young man coolly achieves his own liberation and elects, of his own accord, to relapse into the commonplace out of which Paris had lifted him. This looks a trifle conventional; Europe, then, is still the Circean enchantress, bewitching in eternal romance; for a moment Strether seems to be back in the old days, recapturing the legendary delight of the first American in the gardens of the Tuileries. Not for long, however; the full measure of his responsibility is soon perceived. Henry James accounted The Ambassadors' as on the whole his happiest work; and perhaps this was more than an artistic approval. For The Ambassadors' was the full and final expression of all that Europe had meant to himself, of all that in half a life-time, and more, it had poured into that great and noble imagination. More splendid homage has never been paid to the excellence and goodliness of life. Europe might be the symbol, but he was now not only celebrating the charm of a time or a place; he was professing a faith. He believed in the world, held it to be worth every effort a man could make, and declared that to deny or reject it was the height of treason as well as the depth of folly. The undercurrent of his tale is indeed a rueful confession of something like failure, in the tone of one who has made, discovering it too late, the great refusal. Where, in a man capable of so profound an appreciation of the gift of life, there is to be recognised any sign of failure or of divorce from life's reality, it would be hard to say. To be insensible' to no fine moment of experience, to endow each one with the richness of a broad and liberal genius-this is certainly a more substantial enjoyment of the world than is given to most. But his sense, with it all, of having failed to enter into full possession may only the more accentuate the high pride, the entire freedom from the touch of bitterness, with which he proclaimed his belief in the value, the beauty, the supremacy, of generous life.

In our age and race it seems a paradox that a man should be strongly and stoutly aware of responsibility without being a moralist; yet the contradiction was reconciled clearly enough in Henry James. His judgment was far too massively based to be content with the distinctions we habitually draw between things all alike

essential to seemly being. The fabric, moral, intellectual, æsthetic, of a traditional civilisation was, to him, one and indivisible, a princely possession to be guarded against crude violence and maintained with deliberate care. To the end of his life he showed the strength of one who was enough of a stranger, wherever he dwelt, to recognise, with a sense undulled, the gifts and the privileges which are mostly accepted without a thought by those who inherit them. Indeed, the more closely he was held by the claims and interests he found on this side of the Atlantic, the more intensely he became an American; and the slightest sketch of him, if it is to be characteristic, should emphasise this suggestion. The American Scene,' of ten years ago, was entirely misleading if, by its longdrawn irony or its serenely indulgent accents, it seemed to show that Henry James felt himself severed in the end from the land of his birth. It was not as an alien that he spread over the land, from Massachusetts to Palm Beach, that wonderful web, woven without seam, of description and fancy, nor as a detached critic that he vocalised its life, whether in the architecture of Fifth Avenue or in the blessed mildness-' ever amiably, weak' of the charm of Florida. It could not have engaged him through so many hundred pages except by virtue of a binding and unforgotten tie. And what the tie really was, in its abiding power, became clear, a few years later, in the two successive volumes which he devoted to his recollections of his own childhood. That atmosphere of desultory freedom, mental and spiritual, flashed through with high enthusiasm, that leisurely life, peopled by gay and easy youth, was all recalled in a golden light of truth and poetry, and given a lovingly perfected form, which told the whole tale of what he owed to those memorable times.

SO

Here these notes might have ended if they had fallen to be written two years ago; his work, it might have been thought, was achieved, his great gifts of heart and mind well known to the wide and still widening circle of those who honoured and loved him. It could, indeed, surprise none who knew him that he should have risen with a blaze of magnanimous passion to meet the issue which at last confronted his world. If any had thought of him

as removed, in his old age, above the struggle between the real life and the false, the creative impulse and the destructive, or as surveying the chances of men from an untroubled height, they much misunderstood the nature of his mellow wisdom. And yet even those who knew him best may hardly have been prepared for the unaging vigour and vehemence of his response to the challenge. Though at first almost physically suffocated, as it seemed, by the sudden horror of darkness, he showed neither bewilderment nor hesitation; he arose-it was impossible to miss the impression-like a prophet of old. All his love and admiration for France, which had been the country of his training and was endeared to him, first and last, by innumerable associations, was shed into his sympathy with the great vital insurgence of the French people. He taxed his strength, as he no longer could with impunity, to relieve where he might the distress of the refugees from Belgium-the smoke of their home so little below the sea-line of his own Rye. Of his feeling for England we may hardly speak; let us remember the phrase this decent and dauntless people '—which he used a short while before he affirmed, by more than words, his sense that his lot was cast with ours. Many of his fellow-citizens, proud of the title, must have looked forward in the hope that he would be with us to celebrate, as only he could have celebrated, victory and peace. So much is denied us; but it is in the knowledge of his own confident expectation of the day that our valediction now goes out to him-rare artist, profound genius, great heart.

PERCY LUBBOCK.

Art. 5.-A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY IN NORTHERN

GERMANY.*-I.

(1) THE GERMAN ADMIRALTY.

'WE are not going to take any chances with our fleet.' How often I heard that statement during the months I spent in Germany in 1915! You may listen to all the eulogies, promises, prophecies about 'Unsere wunderbare Flotte,' but you had better refrain from asking any questions about it. It may cost you your liberty if you do. Suppose you ask a German an imprudent question about the Navy, if you are lucky he will refer you to the German Admiralty; if you are unlucky, you will probably be the guest of the Government the next day, if not sooner. If you take his advice and go to the Admiralty, they usually see you coming. Oh! the many, many hours I have spent trying to reach the vitals of that palatial edifice, so symbolic of the organisation it directs. It is spick and span and brand-new, no old ramshackle building, with partitioned rooms in all sorts of corners and corridors, such as I found in the War Office on the Leipziger Strasse. The German Admiralty is a model building. On entering, you find yourself in a square marble-columned atrium which reminds one of the drawings and paintings of the portals of the old Roman baths. There are a number of waiting-rooms on both sides; and that is as far as 99 out of 100 people ever get. To advance beyond the doors leading into the 'holy of holies' is a labour that takes time, influence, and brains.

I shall not describe the devious ways and means which have to be employed in order to obtain admission to the temple of the German would-be Neptune. Suffice it to say that, after having secured an introduction to Captain Löhlein, who at the time was-and I think still is-a high official at the Admiralty, being something like their Advertising Manager, I finally passed through the inner portals of the sacred edifice.

One of the most fascinating departments of the 'Marineamt' (Admiralty) in Berlin, is 'Abteilung XVI,' where maps, plans, sketches, etc., are collected and kept.

This article was in type before the Battle of Jutland was fought on May 31.-[EDITOR.]