ignificance; and it is this relation in all its manifestations,
great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone, that
is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist
in the only possible way in which the task can be performed: by the
independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all
the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its
inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations. That a sacrifice
must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in
the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by
the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All
adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an
act of renunciation. It is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the
most potent and effective force at our disposal on which rest the labours
of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been built
commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans. Like
a natural force which is obscured as much as illuminated by the
multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the
mass of weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and
compromises which make up the sum of our activity. But no man or woman
worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater. And
Mr. Henry James's men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits
his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities.
He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The earth
itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every sphere of
human perplexities and emotions, there are more greatnesses than one--not
counting here the greatness of the artist himself. Wherever he stands,
at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to
his passions, or his passions to his gods. That is the problem, great
enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and
knowledge.

In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr.
Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the
only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think that
the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable.
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more
than that; it stands