ss gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of his
artistic apprehensiveness and scope that is of far greater value to him.
We do not mean to imply that Mr. James lacks what is called knowledge of
the world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in
him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination
ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity.
He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in
a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening
the ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line he
has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character
and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of
society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and
art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr.
James does not see things with his eyes alone. His vision is always
modified by his imaginative temperament. He is the last man we should
consult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow of
sensitive impression, and are positively better than the actual
pilgrimage. We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, but
hardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. _Et ego in
Arcadia_, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not the
name we found in our guide-book. It is always _Dichtung und Wahrheit_
(Goethe knew very well what he was about when he gave precedence to the
giddier sister)--it is always fact seen through imagination and
transfigured by it. A single example will best show what we mean. "It is
partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened
that the aqueducts are so impressive. _They seem the very source of the
solitude in which they stand_; they look like architectural spectres,
and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede
along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out
of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's
pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance
crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice,"
or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it
stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose.
But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased. Mr. James tempts us
into many
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