has hitherto been so boldly unconscious of itself that in any exact sense it cannot be said to have had a history at all. It has had attributes more or less happy, and no doubt the very blindness of its instinct has made for their freedom and variety; but it has never had any clear or reasoned perception, for its own purposes, of the laws which every work of art obeys, consciously or not, when its subject has received the fullest, firmest, roundest, effect possible to it. Indeed, for the most part, if our novels have been proudly conscious of anything, it has been precisely of their own lawlessness; which has been felt, characteristically enough, to be both the proof and the preservative of their vigorous condition; so difficult is it for the Anglo-Saxon mind to admit that laws are aimed in such matters at the enhancement and not at the repression of vigor. If Dickens and Charlotte Brontë wrote good books with none but the cloudiest notions of their art as an art, it is not a logical inference that that is the only way in which good books can be written. Mr. James's prefaces sweep aside all such artless conceptions and place the novel at once in a completely new light. We may imagine them offering to the jaded novelist, as he wearily casts about for fresh motives and unhackneyed situations, the sudden realization that the field of fiction, so far from being exhausted, has hardly so much as been touched. It is greatly to be hoped that these penetrating criticisms, so far-reaching in their general application, may be made more easily accessible. We want, indeed, above any criticisms, more novels from Mr. James; but will he not perhaps also find time to gather together in a volume of their own at least the main results of his work as a theorist in his art? A technical exposition such as only he could give us would be a book for which any novelist would have

reasons to be grateful in proportion to the number of dark flounderings from which it would help to save him. Flounder he no doubt will continue to do; but Mr. James has destroyed, once for all, for any story-teller who proposes to be seriously considered, that confidence in a blind and unsuspicious instinct which has so often been cherished as a positive sign of mastery. In all the bursting annals of fiction Mr. James is the first writer who has seen his art as a deliberate process of which a complete account can be given. It is, moreover, as we may happily recognize, not now necessary to point to our row of grass-green volumes as a proof that an art so apprehended is not thereby circumscribed or chilled.

Mr. James's summary achievement on behalf of the novel is that he has disengaged from a hundred misconceptions the question of form. There is

no aspect of fiction on which criticism has on the whole been more ingenuous. A shapely design has indeed been regarded as a merit in a novel, but as a merit involving particular dangers in other directions, and therefore to be pursued with caution, most wisely perhaps to be eschewed. Almost the only qualities of such shapeliness that have been distinctly enunciated have been those of which defects are artificiality and constraint. Our point for the moment, however, is not that Mr. James has named and brought into play its other properties, but rather that he has placed the whole question upon a new footing. In the old parlance "form" was only one (and not even an essential) element of the many that might go to make up a novel. It could in any case be considered apart from the others, and balanced against characterization, dialogue, description, narrative. We now at last see it, not as an ingredient, but as a condition uniformly laid upon characterization and the rest. It is the form, we find, and the form

alone, which dictates the development of the characters and directs the dialogue; these components are good and right only so far as their borders coincide with the line drawn round them in advance; it is only in relation to the whole design that we can call them rightly or wrongly worked out, that being the express standard for their measurement. This strict fusion of material with form is Mr. James's point of departure. He is in the truest sense of the word an impressionist; each of his later, more characteristic, books is planned to be looked at from a single point of view, the centre sharply in focus, the supporting framework all subsidiary and relative. The principle thus stated may not seem a very new one; even for the English reader it is not unheard of. But no one before Mr. James has deliberately adopted it with all its consequences, much less threaded the intricate question of what the consequences essentially are. The gradual solution of the problem is to be traced in his books from first to last; it may almost be said that to the reader attentive to this aspect of them each one shows the answer carried a little further than in its predecessor. The new prefaces, at any rate, impartially indicating merits and defects, enable us to reread the books with a pleasant sense of high intelligence. With the author himself, a detached and interested observer of his work, to point the way, we can see the whole process by which the easy finished lightness of "Roderick Hudson" and "The Portrait of a Lady" develops naturally and inevitably into the packed elaboration of "The Ambassadors" and "The Golden Bowl."

The first modification to be noted, one which early became marked in Mr. James's novels, is the steady suppression of narrative, the old-fashioned "telling" of the story, in favor of a design, admitting a more closely knit

unity, by which the story shall tell itself. Narrative has the inherent weakness that it relies at every point on what Mr. James calls the "writer's poor word of honor." All effects are obviously cheapened if we have to take them on trust from the author; their weight is doubled in a moment if we can see them in the act of evolving themselves. Mr. James has accordingly tended more and more to make his stories act themselves dramatically. The most complete example of this treatment is "The Awkward Age," in which drama, unaided by any other mode of presentment, bears the whole burden. We are not admitted into the mind of any of the actors; we are told what they said and how they looked, but we have to draw all the conclusions for ourselves. The action arranges itself scenically, in a series of “occasions" (the author's word), so disposed round the central theme as to throw successive lights on it from different angles. The structure of this extraordinary book (which is withal perhaps the least known of the whole series) satisfies even its author's exacting eye; he rehandles it in the preface after ten years' absence from it, turns it over and over, and genially defies the critic to find a flaw in the pattern or a loose end hanging out of the web. The critic will hardly attempt anything of the kind; but with time and space "The Awkward Age" might be made to give some pretty illustrations of literary art at its highest pitch of concentration and economy. The whole book is riddled with a hundred fine cross-references and relations, and there is not a relation, not a reference, that strays vaguely beyond the circle of the action or that fails to give a justifying account of itself. Here, then, we have a case of the firm unity of composition attainable by the complete relegation of narrative and the survey of the whole action from without. The more

flexible case of the survey of the action from within, always conditioned by the same necessity of unity, is to be seen in Mr. James's work in endless varieties of adjustment. The matter to be treated has the question put to it from the first-from the point of view of which actor do you demand to be approached, and if of more than one, where is the shift to be made? A yet further refinement occurs where the answer to this question is in favor, not of successive points of view, but of the simultaneous fusion of two. This refinement is shown with sure subtlety in "What Maisie Knew," itself a book which might be held as on the whole the most exquisite of all Mr. James's creations. Much could be said in regard to the art with which the delicious little girl's entirely childlike view of her horrible circumstances, appearing as it does to embrace the whole action, is in fact supplemented and helped out by the watchful but all unperceived author himself.

But

In Mr. James's later work drama still regulates the main lines; the skeleton, for example, of "The Golden Bowl" is its linked series of self-contained selfcomplete scenes, each one dramatically treated and speaking for itself. here, as in "The Wings of the Dove," as in "The Ambassadors," "drama” submits to what the author calls a compromise with "picture." The way is prepared in advance for each scene by innumerable touches, the air is set vibrating to the tune of what is to follow, so that when the moment arrives the significance of the scene makes itself felt immediately, and with the minimum of effort. Mr. James is indeed a past-master at this kind of preparatory enhancement of effect; it is part of his general economy that he will never waste heavy hammer-strokes when previous patient manipulation of the surface to be dealt with will enable him to drive his point in with a

single scarcely audible tap. Attention of perusal he certainly does, as he declares, everywhere postulate; but even the most searching reader must often ask himself, at the close of a conversation in which neither of the speakers has once raised his voice above the most colloquial tone, just how and where some emphatic development of the story has been imparted to him. How, for instance, in "The Wings of the Dove," is the fact of Milly's love for Densher made to loom so insistently in the air without, from beginning to end, a single direct indication of it in so many words? It is all a question, upon analysis, of the elaborate preparation of the ground before the just sufficient hint is dropped; and to search for the hint, to track it down and trace the steps which lead up to it, is to give the critical sense as fine a thrill as it can well demand. When, moreover, on occasion, in the expectant electrical atmosphere, an entirely direct and unqualified word is allowed to sound, it falls with an ominous resonance only made possible for it by the care with which it has been hoarded and kept from vulgar contacts until the moment arrives which is worthy of it. The best possible example of the reward reaped by this far-seeing thriftiness is given by the wonderful scene in "The Golden Bowl," where in the heavy summer night the Princess, from the terrace outside, watches the card party seated in the glow of the great stately room, and for once names to herself by their plain names the ugly unspoken things with which the air is filled.

The "scene," then, out of which the story emerges of its own accord, and the preparation for the scene form the ground-work of the novel as Mr. James has finally elaborated it. He is, in fact, at once the most dramatic of writers, taking the word at its strict value, and the most economical, however little the two epithets may seem

at first sight to suit the fine cloud of discriminations in which he moves, and the ample limits which he allows it, none the less, his operations are, in fact, rigidly directed at every point by the law of economy which forbids the smallest waste of words on anything unrelated to the centre. Nothing is on any pretext to be admitted which does not address itself to the business in hand, and the business in hand must demand no more in the way of development and adornment than it exactly requires to make its point. Mr. James himself confesses, with the suspicion of a chuckle, that his tendency is not in the direction of undertaking his idea; yet, exhaustive in their explorations as his characters show themselves, they never utter an aimless word, they never waste a meaningless glance. All cheap effects are forbidden them; they must not turn aside for a moment to raise a laugh or excite sympathy; they are expected to work intelligently and unremittingly for their places in the story. Mr. James will meanwhile in return work for them, and will see to it that full justice is done to their beauty or their quaintness or their charm. They certainly have small reason to complain. The cloud of discriminations, with all it does for their intelligences, does not blur their outward lines, their features and gestures, their personal grace. Their cleverness is not cold, their subtlety not colorless. It is very seldom, only at the rarest crises, that they are permitted to show in simple form the forces which agitate them; they may not crudely talk about such things; they are concerned almost entirely with their remote and indirect manifestations.

But we are not likely to forget how much is implied by the light dimpling and quivering of the ever-moving surface. If they do not become mere disembodied faculties of thought and crit

icism, there is another besetting danger which they do not, perhaps, so invariably escape. Cut off as they are from following any thread which would lead them beyond the covers of the book, bidden to revolve intently around the point prescribed, they are no doubt exposed to the risk of unconsciously drifting away from life. There is, after all, another relation, beyond their relation to the story, which they have to maintain. They are in and of the story and the story is self-contained; but the whole complete orb has its general relation to life, and it must be owned that we at times seem to see it spin on its course regardless of any other consideration whatsoever. We do not refer to the fact, in itself undeniable, that the actors in Mr. James's books appear to have the world entirely to themselves, that there is no suggestion or sense that other lives are being lived round them. Our point is rather that within their own secure circle they sometimes have a way of extending a particular line of action until all unawares it has become fantastic. A situation, say, which would normally end in a certain amount of half-humorous discomfiture we may suddenly see ending in murder and suicide, It is, of course, not by itself a valid objection to say of a story that things do not as a matter of fact happen as it shows them happening; it all depends on whether the author makes good his implied declaration that they ought to. But it would be curious, if there were space, to take certain of Mr. James's shorter stories, where the bargain always struck in any work of art between symbolical and actual truth presses hardly upon the actual, and to defend our notion that it is the symbolical which pays. Here it can but be noted that it is in this direction only that a certain divorce from life is sometimes to be felt.

We have at least indicated, it may

be hoped, that Mr. James's work cannot be approached from outside, that criticism must burrow as best it may into the foundations of the structure to find the motive of the woven color-shot beauty of the surface. For all its intensely personal manner, that beauty is also simply and broadly organic; and if the subtlety cannot be missed, the breadth and simplicity may more easily be. It is impossible to doubt that Mr. James's influence, already conspicuously marked, will more and more dominate, so thoroughly has he expounded and so deeply stamped the art of fiction. It is the more important to keep in view the distinction between what is of the substance and what of the strictly personal touch. At the same time it is, of course, this, the personal touch, that makes us turn again and again to these great, quiet, spacious books, with their controlled grace, their high composure, their perfection of tone; it is this that makes a perpetual delight of the thousand fine strokes of the language which Mr. James has had, we may say, to invent

The Times.

for himself, finding no previous vehicle nearly sensitive enough for his purpose. We commit ourselves to the rare windless atmosphere and fall in at once with the exacting standards of thought and conduct which obtain there. We shovel our old crude estimates out of sight and joyfully agree to waste no more time on the stupid or the obvious. The stupid and the obvious have small place in the long series of significant cases which Mr. James has found generated by the impact of forces crowding to meet each other, at so many different angles and with such inexhaustible effects of contrast, from the two sides of the Atlantic. That impact must lose, and perhaps has lost, its first sharp freshness. If this is so it would be hard to say which is the more fortunate-that a talent so distinguished and so penetrating should have been placed, by circumstances of time and place, in relation to such a subject, or that such a subject should have found a Henry James.

Early on Sunday morning M. Blériot, a French engineer, in a comparatively small and inexpensive aeroplane driven by an engine of low power, flew across the Channel in about half an hour. Two of his countrymen awaited him in a meadow near Dover Castle, and in spite of a breeze he managed to bring his machine, somewhat heavily it is true but with no injury to himself, within easy distance of the indicated spot. To M. Blériot thus belongs the honor of being the first to accomplish a feat which has long fired the imagination of all for whom aviation has any sort of interest. On Tuesday M. Latham, the first actually to attempt

the Channel flight, made a second effort, and again fell into the sea, this time within a mile or two of the Admiralty Pier at Dover. Other flights are foreshadowed, and one or more may have been carried out by the time these lines are in print. But already two or three essential facts have been established. The Channel has been "flown"; there is more than one type of aeroplane with which this can be done; the triumph has been achieved by private enterprise; and that enterprise, with its attendant skill, patience, perseverance, and pluck, had its origin not on this but on the further side of the "silver streak." This last circum