ievance was against fate,
not against himself.

"It had taken too much of his life to produce too little of his art The
art had come, but it had come after everything else. 'Ah, for another
go!--ah, for a better chance.'... 'A second chance--that's the delusion.
There never was to be but one. We work in the dark--we do what we
can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is
our task. The rest is the madness of art.'"

The scene of Dencombe's death is one of the most deeply-beautiful things
ever done by Mr. James. It is so beautiful as to be hardly sad; it rises
and glows and gladdens. It is more exquisite than anything in THE MIDDLE
YEARS. No, I will not say that. Mr. James's art can always carry to us
the conviction that his characters' books are as fine as his own.

I crave--it may be a foolish whim, but I do crave--ocular evidence for
my belief that those books were written and were published. I want to
see them all ranged along goodly shelves. A few days ago I sat in one
of those libraries which seem to be doorless. Nowhere, to the eye,
was broken the array of serried volumes. Each door was flush with the
surrounding shelves; across each the edges of the shelves were mimicked;
and in the spaces between these edges the backs of books were pasted
congruously with the whole effect. Some of these backs had been taken
from actual books, others had been made specially and were stamped with
facetious titles that rather depressed me. 'Here,' thought I, 'are the
shelves on which Dencombe's works ought to be made manifest. And Neil
Paraday's too, and Vereker's.' Not Henry St. George's, of course: he
would not himself have wished it, poor fellow! I would have nothing
of his except SHADOWMERE. But Ray Limbert!--I would have all of his,
including a first edition of THE MAJOR KEY, 'that fiery-hearted rose as
to which we watched in private the formation of petal after petal, and
flame after flame'; and also THE HIDDEN HEART, 'the shortest of his
novels, but perhaps the loveliest,' as Mr. James and I have always
thought.... How my fingers would hover along these shelves, always just
going to alight, but never, lest the spell were broken, alighting!

How well they would look there, those treasures of mine! And, most of
them having been issued in the seemly old three-volume form, how many
shelves they would fill! But I should find a place certainly for
a certain small brown book adorned with a gilt griffin b