thing more charming or
characteristic than Gabriel Nash's final departure from the scene, it
would be impossible to find. He does not depart. He "goes up"--and
"out." He melts into thin air. He dissolves like an iridescent vapour.
He is--and then again, he is not.

I sometimes seem to see the portentous Henry James himself, with
his soft plump hands, heavy forehead and drooping-lidded eyes,
flitting to and fro through the drawing-rooms of our fantastic
civilisation, like some huge feathery-winged moth-owl, murmuring,
just as Gabriel Nash used to do, wistful and whimsical protests
against all this tiresome "business of life" which distracts people
from psychology and beauty and amiable conversation!

Alas! he too has now "passed away"; vanishing as lightly and
swiftly as this other, leaving behind him as the one drastic and
spectacular action in a life of pure aesthetic creation, his definite
renunciation of the world of his engendering and his formal
reception into the more leisured atmosphere of the traditions of his
adoption.

That he--of all men the most peaceful--should have taken such a step
in the mid-torrent of the war, is a clinching proof of the value which
he placed upon the sacred shrines of his passionate pilgrimage.

When we come to take up the actual threads of his peculiar style,
and to examine them one by one, we cannot fail to note certain
marked characteristics, which separate him entirely from other
writers of our age.

One of the most interesting of these is his way of handling those
innumerable colloquialisms and light "short-cuts" of speech,
which--especially in their use by super-refined people--have a grace and
charm quite their own. The literary value of the colloquialisms of
upper-class people has never, except here and there in the plays of
Oscar Wilde, been exploited as delightfully and effectively as in
Henry James.

Just as Charles Lamb will make use of Milton or Sir Thomas
Browne or the "Anatomy of Melancholy"; and endow his thefts with
an originality all his own, making them seem different in the
transposition, and in some mysterious way richer, so Henry James
will take the airy levities of his aristocratic youths and the little
provocative ejaculations of his well-bred maidens, and out of these
weave a filmy, evasive, delicate essence, light as a gossamer-seed
and bitter as coloquintida, which, mingled with his own graver and
mellower tones, becomes an absolutely new medium in t