e--somebody, as the phrase goes, "stepped
over one's grave."

How dearly one grows to love all his dainty tricks of speech! That
constant repetition of the word "wonderful"--of the word
"beautiful"--how beautifully and wonderfully he works it up into a
sort of tender chorus of little caressing cries over the astounding
tapestry woven by the invisible fates! The charming way his people
"drop" their little equivocal innocent-wicked retorts; "drop" them
and "fling them out," and "sweetly hazard" them and "wonderfully
wail" them, produces the same effect of balanced expectancy and
suspended judgment that one derives from those ambiguous "so it
might seems" of the wavering Platonic Dialogue.

The final impression left upon the mind after one closes one of these
fascinating volumes is, it must be confessed, a little sad. So much
ambiguity in human life--so much unnecessary suffering--so many
mad, blind, wilful misunderstandings! A little sad--and yet, on the
other hand, we remain fortified and sustained with a certain interior
detachment.

After all, it is soon over--the whole motley farce--and, while it lasts,
nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough to
disturb our amusement, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothing
matters so very greatly. And yet everything--each of us, as we try to
make our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our hidden souls,
and each of these meanings themselves as we stammer them forth to
one another--matters so "wonderfully," so "beautifully"!

The tangled thread of our days may be knotted and twisted; but,
after all, if we have the magnanimity to let off lightly those "who
trespass against us" we have not learnt our aesthetic lesson of
regarding the whole business of life as a complicated Henry James
story, altogether in vain.

We have come to regard the world as a more or less amusing
Spectacle, without forgetting to be decently considerate of the other
shadows in the gilt-framed mirror!

Perhaps, in our final estimate of him, what emerges most definitely
as Henry James' _doctrine_ is the height and depth and breadth of
the gulf which separates those who have taste and sensitiveness
from those who have none. That is the "motif" of the "Spoils of
Poynton," and I do not know any one of all his books more instinct
with his peculiar spiritual essence.

Below every other controversy and struggle in the world is the
controversy between those who possess this sec